From strangers and nameless to damn you got dangerous

COLT

I used to shine bright like gold
Now I'm all indigo
My colors are darker and cold

She doesn't muster up enough energy to respond back that it's not his feelings that are bullshit, just the reason behind them, which in her mind is still all because of a stupid kiss with a girl that she doesn't think should matter this much. Instead, she meets his ice with all her growing heat, the combination providing enough rising steam that she can shelter behind the obscurity. She's not about to let him make her feel like shit when he'd ripped into her first with zero regard for the snare of each twisted word. "Seems we're even then." Clearly how she feels doesn't mean a damn to him if this is how he wants to talk through something.

If she thought the bite of his first explanation about the channel had been bad, this one proves cruel. In this moment at least, she can't believe there's any honesty to it, not when he's already been hurtling accusations like she's little more than a dart board he uses to bang up whatever truth he needs in order to sleep at night. "Used you?" The words are strangled out of her throat with such breathless incredulity she can barely get her lungs working again afterwards. She takes another staggering step back, as if the blame he just placed down requires even more room in this divide between them and it shoulders her out of the way to find the space. She's so stunned for a moment all she can do is gape and find a measure of balance through this massive upheaval.

What she'd considered proof—that they actually had something real, that despite distance, time, and everything still unspoken there's a connection between them—he's completely shredded apart. That had been the day she decided she wouldn't wait and wonder anymore, that she'd go and grab hold of him, risks be damned, because he'd be worth it to at least try. He'd done that not because he helped her get off, but because he'd jumped to her urgent need, filling the rift of his absence for as long as he could, knowing it wasn't much but still offering everything while he could manage it. Among every small moment he'd built up for her, that one had been the tipping point, and now he's tipped it right back over on her until it's holding her underwater with the weight of it. "I didn't use you, I—" missed you, wanted to see you, needed you, loved you.

Tears spill unwelcome and she cuts off whatever else she might have said because it clearly doesn't matter any more. None of this appears to.

Leaning into the hurt and the anger, she lets the familiarity of those dependable embraces take her the rest of the way through whatever this sorry thing has become. He tuns to leave, and she doesn't have anything left in her to stop him this time. "You and me both," she agrees quietly, stepping back with one last lingering glance before she turns away too. In her pack, there's still a chance to feel nothing, and she'd very much like that to take her away now.

I gave up a piece of my heart
Then I turned to run
My head's in the clouds
But I don't feel close to the sun

a cold shoulder at closin' time

Vesper could argue. Every part of him strains toward it for a moment, pulled by the instinct to drag the truth out of the wreckage between them and lay it bare, to tell her yes, used me, because that is how it felt to be torn out of himself and hurled into her need with no warning and then dropped back into silence sharp enough to cut. He could tell her how the six seconds she’d clutched him in passing had been so fucking insufficient he’d felt the absence like a cracked rib every time he breathed. He could tell her how he’d searched the crowd only for her, how his mind had already been fraying from too much wanting, and how watching her kiss someone else—that someone else—had taken whatever thread he’d been hanging on by and snapped it.

He could confess that something in him had shattered that night, something he’d never known was fragile until it lay jagged inside him, shifting every time he moved. He might have said every one of those thing, except it's then her thoughts surge, unguarded, bright, devastating, and his telepathy doesn’t allow him the mercy of ignorance. It lands inside him with too much force to brace for, a quiet confession she doesn’t speak aloud, the words she stops herself from saying curling through the centre of his mind with a clarity that robs him of breath.

I loved you.

His eyes widen, not much, just enough for the world to tilt in the space of a heartbeat. His inhale is soft but abrupt, a hitch like he’s taken a blow straight to the sternum. For a moment, he stands suspended in the weight of it, in the way the truth rings through her thoughts without hesitation, without calculation, without any idea he can hear it. It settles under his ribs like a brand, and the ache that follows is too vast and too sharp to hide from.

And gods, he knows he could fix this. He could walk straight into that confession and build something out of the ruin. With her mind laid open by accident, he has every tool he needs to thread his way through this disaster and reach her, to soothe every cut he’s made, to pull them both out of this downward spiral. He could do it—even now—as long as he’s willing to do it with borrowed knowledge, with her most private truth held in his hands without permission.

But at what cost?

He has every reason he did before, every fear about the weight of her emotions pressing into him through the gift he never asked for, every warning he’s tried to give her about who he is and what he can’t be. And even if the way she feels isn’t love—if it’s confusion, or intensity, or the kind of longing that feels like love until it’s examined under real light—he hears it exactly the way she feels it, raw and terrifyingly honest. That alone gives him more reason than he’s ever had to stop everything here, before he hurts her even worse by trying to be the man she thinks she’s naming in her thoughts.

Something deep in him cracks, the soundless kind of shatter that leaves a body upright and breathing but somehow not entirely whole. He feels the break in full, but he doesn’t turn, doesn’t let any of it show, because if she sees that fracture she’ll step into it, and he’ll let her, and it will destroy them both. So he does the only thing he can: he makes himself into something she can hate.

With no change in his stride, no backward glance, no sign of hesitation, he begins to whistle as he walks away—soft, tuneless, careless—like none of this mattered, like she hadn’t ripped him open with a thought she never meant him to hear, like he isn’t leaving behind the one person who ever came close to knowing him. It’s the cruelty of a farmer driving off a faithful dog with shouted insults so it runs far enough not to come back in an effort to keep it safe; except Vesper doesn’t raise his voice. He just crafts a lie of indifference in the simple, casual lilt of a whistle, hoping she’ll latch onto it with enough fury to burn the last of her feelings clean. He keeps walking, each step steady, each note easy, while something inside him breaks and keeps breaking in the silence in between. 

~FIN

you were beggin' me to stay 'til the sun rose

Code 100% taken from the queeeeeeen herself, Sky <3