and love in some ways is just a rogue wave

marked me like a bloodstain

Her smile nearly outruns her face, a smug little thing that blooms despite the shadows pressed in close around them. She tries to bite it back, but the effort is half-hearted at best. It clings to her mouth like a secret, smug and flickering, made all the brighter for the heavy night they’re still sinking through. She doesn’t rise to his retort—not with words, anyway—but there’s a tilt to her chin, a light in her lashes, that answers just fine.

Their feet slip apart as she shifts forward again, careful not to brush too close, even if every part of her wants to lean back into the heat of him. Anyone walking in would see something absurd—two people trying too hard not to touch, tangled in toe taps and unspoken things—but to her, it feels like one of the most intimate moments they’ve ever managed for how much it means to her. Silly, sweet, tentative. Like trying to whisper a love song in a war zone.

She keeps her hands in her lap—folded tight, like restraint might keep them from wandering to his legs. She doesn’t trust them. Doesn’t trust her mouth, either, especially with his hands moving across her back again, gentle and familiar and achingly careful. The lotion is cool against her skin, but it’s the warmth of his fingers she feels most keenly, and she stares straight ahead, as if the walls might keep her grounded if she just looks hard enough.

"Thanks for the flowers," she murmurs eventually, the words slipping out so soft they nearly disappear into the quiet. She hadn’t said it when he arrived—hadn’t managed anything at all, too caught in the breathless tumble of seeing him again, and then in the everything that had come after.

I'm not giving up, kicking off the rust

It's not as if he's already used to them, or that they don't still stand out as terrible markers for all the hell she's endured, but the tears along her skin seem a little more familiar now. Something about tracing each of them, like he’s relearning the shape of her—adjusting the dream of her to fit the new terrain—it helps. Some of the distance eases because of it. Not the literal kind, like the moat she's drawn around herself, the contact between them kept limited to just the drawbridge of his fingertips. It's the sort that he feels every time his thoughts drift against her name, her image, her memory. He'd become so practiced with the buffer he layered carefully over the years that he knew where to stand without losing her. Now, with it stripped away by the heat of an unforgettable night, he's left with a surface between them that feels like foam. If he's not careful he'll sink in faster than he means to when he presses on it, but it also fills up all the space so fast sometimes he can barely see her. He just wants to hold on without breaking anything.

He reluctantly finishes the last swipe of cream to her back, drawing his hands back towards his knees. He glances up at the point between her shoulders, where a few stray strands of her hair have started to spill back into place. It'd be so easy to just, reach out and shift them to the side, to roll her tension under his thumb once again, to—

He loudly closes the ointment back up and wiggles back away from her, dumping more air into the moat. "I figured you might want a part of your home with you," he says with a small smile as he gathers himself back to his feet, tossing the jar back into the basket. Although, maybe it being the place where the Family haunted her time and time again made it less comforting than he realized. For him, home had always been safe place and a memory worth tugging on time and time again, and to be honest he would appreciate a brick from the walkways he once knew so well just to ground him here in all the strangeness of this new 'home'.

"You should rest," he advises, glancing back towards her. It took a lot of exhausting rocket science level calculations to draw that conclusion. Although he'd prefer not to leave her at all, he's trusting less and less the strength of foam to hold up under the weight of concern, and he's more certain than he was earlier that she'll heal from this. Maybe she won't be unmarked, but she's alive, and just as willing to put up a fight as ever, even if she's defending guilt she doesn't deserve. "I'll tell them to send in your dinner, and I'll be close, if you need me. I'll swing by in the morning, for breakfast." If she has any refusals, he simply won't be hearing them.

He grabs for his boots and socks, stuffing them under one arm and slipping out the door with a wave. "Try to get some beauty sleep Flo-ro, you look like hell," a laugh breaks just before the door clicks shut behind him. He leans against it as it seals, the last edges of humor fading into a haggard sigh.

-

He books the nearest available room to hers for the night. When he steps inside, he drops his wet shoes and socks by the door, careless as the worry catches up all at once. Slowly he trudges toward the bed, and as he moves the space starts to fold itself into the cluttered chaos of the Sugar Tide. He’s sure he’s missing half the details—Flora’s got too much shit to keep track of—but it’s a faithful recreation, drenched in moonlight and lilac. He flops into the overly large bed and tugs one of the pillows into his arms. The sound of water lapping against an imaginary hull rocks him into uneasy sleep.

[FIN]

Kaisel

I keep acting tough but maybe I'm not good enough