flora
Flora’s smile pulls crookedly across her lips when Colt says she’d defend her friends just as thoroughly, and for all that the expression is small, there’s nothing false about it. She believes that; it's one of the things she had liked about Colt almost immediately, the shape of that loyalty, the hard-edged certainty of it, the sense that if you stood in the right place beside her, she would become very difficult to move. Which had made the supposed betrayal sting all the more, of course, because Flora had been so sure Colt wasn’t that kind of person until she had been just as sure that she was. Turns out, annoyingly, horribly, she had been right the first time and wrong the second.
Spice, obliging under the weight of Colt’s politeness and perhaps more importantly the renewed attention of a task, leans forward to breathe another precise gust of frost over the fresh pours. The cold blooms up the glass again, making lacework of the champagne flutes and Flora’s highball, and Flora watches it happen without argument, as if the tiny ritual gives her something safer to do with her eyes. When she takes a healthy sip, the bubbles burst brightly over her tongue, cold and sharp and expensive enough to feel like it should mean something better than this. It doesn't taste like celebration, but she swallows anyway.
Exhaling softly, Flora nods, her fingers turning the glass once against the bar. "No, I’m sure she didn’t," she says, and despite everything newly rearranged between them, there is no immediate leap in her toward imagining Sohalia had set the whole thing up maliciously. Flora has been wrong, yes, and Soh had clearly made the situation sound like something it wasn’t, but that doesn’t suddenly make her best friend a villain tucked prettily behind soft eyes and a crown of sunlight. It does, however, make the whole thing more complicated than Flora wants it to be, and the little crease between her brows says as much.
When Colt continues, Flora gives her head a slight shake before huffing out a little laugh, the sound dry around the edges but not cruel. "Well, she’s pregnant, so in the long run I doubt she’d have stayed even if she did originally want to go." Her shoulders lift in a small shrug, though the thought catches somewhere uncomfortable beneath it. Maybe that explains some of it, the strange choice of words, the need to make the decision feel easier by making the offer feel worse. Maybe it explains nothing at all and Flora is just trying to find a path through the wreckage that doesn’t immediately require her to be upset and confused at someone else she loves.
For a moment she isn’t sure whether she owes Colt another apology, cleaner this time and less tangled up in the shock of realizing she’d been wrong, or whether what they both need is space enough for the first one to actually settle. The champagne bottle is still more than half full, though, and Colt has chosen a stool instead of the door, so she lets one finger trail through a melting patch of frost on her glass, casual in the way all calculated things try to look casual, and raises her aqua eyes back toward Colt with a careful tilt of her head. "Sooo," she says, testing the new ground beneath them with the cautious elegance of someone stepping onto a dock she isn’t entirely sure has been nailed down properly, "how are things going up there?" Her brows lift, the corner of her mouth threatening something almost like her usual brightness, though it remains gentler for the moment. "Easier in Deepfrost, I imagine."
Spice, obliging under the weight of Colt’s politeness and perhaps more importantly the renewed attention of a task, leans forward to breathe another precise gust of frost over the fresh pours. The cold blooms up the glass again, making lacework of the champagne flutes and Flora’s highball, and Flora watches it happen without argument, as if the tiny ritual gives her something safer to do with her eyes. When she takes a healthy sip, the bubbles burst brightly over her tongue, cold and sharp and expensive enough to feel like it should mean something better than this. It doesn't taste like celebration, but she swallows anyway.
Exhaling softly, Flora nods, her fingers turning the glass once against the bar. "No, I’m sure she didn’t," she says, and despite everything newly rearranged between them, there is no immediate leap in her toward imagining Sohalia had set the whole thing up maliciously. Flora has been wrong, yes, and Soh had clearly made the situation sound like something it wasn’t, but that doesn’t suddenly make her best friend a villain tucked prettily behind soft eyes and a crown of sunlight. It does, however, make the whole thing more complicated than Flora wants it to be, and the little crease between her brows says as much.
When Colt continues, Flora gives her head a slight shake before huffing out a little laugh, the sound dry around the edges but not cruel. "Well, she’s pregnant, so in the long run I doubt she’d have stayed even if she did originally want to go." Her shoulders lift in a small shrug, though the thought catches somewhere uncomfortable beneath it. Maybe that explains some of it, the strange choice of words, the need to make the decision feel easier by making the offer feel worse. Maybe it explains nothing at all and Flora is just trying to find a path through the wreckage that doesn’t immediately require her to be upset and confused at someone else she loves.
For a moment she isn’t sure whether she owes Colt another apology, cleaner this time and less tangled up in the shock of realizing she’d been wrong, or whether what they both need is space enough for the first one to actually settle. The champagne bottle is still more than half full, though, and Colt has chosen a stool instead of the door, so she lets one finger trail through a melting patch of frost on her glass, casual in the way all calculated things try to look casual, and raises her aqua eyes back toward Colt with a careful tilt of her head. "Sooo," she says, testing the new ground beneath them with the cautious elegance of someone stepping onto a dock she isn’t entirely sure has been nailed down properly, "how are things going up there?" Her brows lift, the corner of her mouth threatening something almost like her usual brightness, though it remains gentler for the moment. "Easier in Deepfrost, I imagine."
My house of stone, your ivy grows
And now I'm covered in you
And now I'm covered in you
