i could be the reason you can't sleep at night
Flora snickers softly beneath her breath at that, her eyes following Deimos’s back toward the boys with a look that’s far too fond to carry any real complaint. From here, with the sea and sand swallowing up the smaller details of whatever Carlo and Calan have decided constitutes a perfectly reasonable afternoon, they look almost angelic. Which, frankly, is how they get you.
"That’s an understatement," she says, warmth curling through the words before she lifts one shoulder in a faint, knowing shrug. "But be careful what you wish for. He might come home with a new set of skills and several words added to his vocabulary." Her mouth quirks as she looks back at Deimos, though the amusement softens almost immediately. For all the twins’ shenanigans—and there are, somehow, always shenanigans—they do seem to be good boys at their core. Or maybe it’s too early to tell.
She’s about to shake her head and tell him there isn’t much that needs doing when movement farther down the beach catches at the corner of her eye. The thing rolling up from the sand is wrong enough to pull the rest of her attention away at once: shells clicking together beneath its tangle of sticks and bone, pieces of it shifting and catching in the light as though the shore has gathered every sharp, discarded thing it could find and decided to make a problem out of them.
Frowning, Flora pulls one of her daggers free and sends it straight into the mess of sand and shells. The throw is quick and clean, the blade disappearing somewhere amid the tangled body before she lifts her hand to call it back. It returns to her palm obediently enough, but the creature barely seems to notice the interruption, still dragging itself forward in that awful, scraping roll. With a huff, Flora glances sideways at Deimos, the frown giving way to a grin that’s suddenly mischievous. "Think you can do any better?"
"That’s an understatement," she says, warmth curling through the words before she lifts one shoulder in a faint, knowing shrug. "But be careful what you wish for. He might come home with a new set of skills and several words added to his vocabulary." Her mouth quirks as she looks back at Deimos, though the amusement softens almost immediately. For all the twins’ shenanigans—and there are, somehow, always shenanigans—they do seem to be good boys at their core. Or maybe it’s too early to tell.
She’s about to shake her head and tell him there isn’t much that needs doing when movement farther down the beach catches at the corner of her eye. The thing rolling up from the sand is wrong enough to pull the rest of her attention away at once: shells clicking together beneath its tangle of sticks and bone, pieces of it shifting and catching in the light as though the shore has gathered every sharp, discarded thing it could find and decided to make a problem out of them.
Frowning, Flora pulls one of her daggers free and sends it straight into the mess of sand and shells. The throw is quick and clean, the blade disappearing somewhere amid the tangled body before she lifts her hand to call it back. It returns to her palm obediently enough, but the creature barely seems to notice the interruption, still dragging itself forward in that awful, scraping roll. With a huff, Flora glances sideways at Deimos, the frown giving way to a grin that’s suddenly mischievous. "Think you can do any better?"
