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endangered-liaison · 4 months

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The Knight Before Starlight

The kiseru twists this way and that between Max’s fingers. She’d seen it in the markets, and Starlight was coming up, so…she’d bought it. It was only once she made back to the apartment she and Gloria were sharing that she realised the person she’d bought it for was near-impossible to contact.

How do you find a wandering cowgirl? Especially one who left to find herself in the first place? That’s too much finding for her tastes, and she sucks at it. Give her prey to track and she’ll follow them across half the world. Give her a friend to follow and…well. There’s a reason she came to Othard. Sometimes you need to go somewhere where you won’t be followed. Sometimes people follow anyroad. Sometimes you need help.

But Laelia doesn’t need help. She needs space. Room to think. Max, of all people, can understand that. She never expected to understand it, but she does.

“That’s quite a fine pipe!” a voice pipes (hah) up from right in front of her, and Max jumps like a startled opossum. She’s either getting too rusty or too relaxed because somehow Ser Basile Bellerose, The Least Sneaky Man In Any Given Room, has managed to surprise her. He stands before her in the theatre, hands on his spandex-clad hips and cowboy hat perched daintily on a head slightly too large to it. “But I was under the impression you couldn’t smoke?”

Max opens her mouth to respond, but evidently the man’s thought processes are still going strong as his mouth falls open in some realisation and he continues.

“Have you found some sort of tobacco or moko which doesn’t harm your lungs?” he asks. Then: “Magic and botany are both equally impressive in my books, and either one could offer you the experience of finally being able to smoke as your image suggests you should!!”

He’s right about her image. Every ilm of her screams that she’s some sort of troublemaking layabout smoking cigarettes and threatening to put them out on the nearest intimidatable person. But that’s never been her fate. She speaks up before he has a chance to take his enthusiastic thought processes even further in something that feels vaguely like trying to derail the phantom train. “Nah. I saw it in the markets - got it for Lee.”

That causes the light behind his eyes to do a strange series of things. It dims, brightens, dims again, then brightens once more to an almost zealous enthusiasm. “Laelia! Of course, I’m sure she’d love to receive such a thoughtful gift, and to know she’s in your thoughts! I’m sure she’d also like that smokeless tobacco as well!” Evidently, after being derailed, the train somehow managed to find a second set of tracks, mount on to them, then perform some complicated technique of multi-track drifting.

Max feels out of her depth, and she was a semi-professional sapper. The man’s enthusiasm is truly dizzying, in that after speaking to him Max isn’t sure what way is up and kind of feels like hurling. In the nicest possible way. “Yeah. Figured she’d like it, but…you have any idea how to get somethin’ to her? Girl makes off-grid look like a tourist trap.” If anyone knows, it’s going to be the man wearing her hat.

He crosses his arms over his barrel chest, pacing this way and that while looking deep in thought. Ten seconds pass. Fifteen. Twenty five.

“Not a clue! Shall we go?”

What. “Huh?”

Basile beams, sparkling teeth and wit. “We know she’s in Ilsabard. We know she has a large dog with her, and we know exactly the sort of heroics that she would get up to! If you have a starlight gift for her then by Halone, I think we should deliver it!”

Max blinks.

This man truly is insane.

“...Alright.”

Two weeks later, the two find themselves once more wearing their winter clothes and once more in the cold of Ilsabard. Max’s teeth chatter. She’d forgotten how much the cold sucked.

Basile has not so much ‘swapped out’ his cowboy hat as he has ‘perched a starlight hat on top of it’. It seems to be holding on through the Garlean winter winds by force-of-will, force-of-personality, or him tugging it over the hat like pulling on a tight pair of socks. It’s genuinely impressive watching the little white bobble blow in the wind from his position on the sidecar of Max’s motorbike.

They’ve been searching for a week. Three towns and a survivor settlement down and all they have to go on is a vague rumour about an oversized dog (which turned out to be a bear), talk of someone riding a horse through the wastes and helping everyone she came across (which turned out to be a strange miqo’te with what looked like an even stranger unicorn), and some rabble-rousing nonsense about the XXVIIth Legion returning to bring them to a new glorious age and to crush the Eorzeans once more. Garlemald doesn’t even have a twenty-seventh legion.

“This was dumb,” Max says, and gets a mouth full of snow to thank for it.

They’ve just stopped for the evening in some old, abandoned town, and she doesn’t know how much longer they can keep this search going. There’s a whole continent Laelia could be in, and that’s assuming she’s even still in Ilsabard.

No. She’d have sent a message if she’d left. She would’ve.

“Perhaps so! But in my experience, the difference between dumb things and brilliant things is simply a matter of perseverance!” Somehow, Basile’s spirit remains utterly undaunted as he dismounts from the sidecar, unfolding his limbs from it and beginning his routine of stretching that he’s done every day since they started riding together. “We shall find her, whether by force of will or Starlight Miracle.”

Max lifts their camping equipment from the back of the motorbike, giving Basile a Look. She’s been giving him more and more Looks recently, but somehow he never seems to notice them.

One more week. One more week, then they’ll turn back.

They don’t have a week.

Max awakes the next morning to the sound of gunfire in the warehouse they’d camped out in. By the time she rolls out of her tent, pistol in one hand and knife in the other, it’s risen to a cacophony of clashing blades and cannonfire.

She’s greeted by the sight of Basile fighting a half-dozen Warmachina. Quite where they’d come from, Max has no idea. Did they pass by an obscura last night? Are they here to give her a speeding ticket? She doesn’t know, and she isn’t much in the mood for asking as she raises her pistol and blasts one of the bladed, skittering ones apart.

Basile throws her a thumbs up and a cheerful “My thanks!” before swinging his gunblade once more, carving a wheeled nightmare like a starlight turkey.

Debris litters the warehouse, and it’s clear he’s already dealt with the worst of them. But it’s equally clear that he’s getting tired, and Max fires off four rounds at the biggest baddest of them all - a Colossus - before joining the fray with her blade.

The Colossus barely seems to care about such petty gunfire, and Max finds herself wishing she’d taken the time to grab her grenades from the tent. But life isn’t for regrets and she’ll have plenty of time to wish she’d made better choices if it cuts her in half. Basile blasts apart the last of the chaff, then turns to face the metal beast. His gunblade roars as it cleaves into the thing’s leg, and Max uses the opportunity to clamber aboard it, ramming her knife into the space between two armour plates and twisting until she hears servos whine. She pulls the knife free, climbing further up its frame before she’s grabbed by the Colossus’s free hand. It squeezes tight enough for her ribs to creak then tosses her halfway across the room. She lands with a dull thud but the ringing in her ears drowns it out.

She watches in dull horror as the Colossus raises its enormous sword, aiming directly at her. It’s ignoring Basile completely, focused on eliminating one target at a time. Starting with the weakest link.

It swings.

Max closes her eyes.

There’s an almighty clash of metal.

When she opens her eyes, Basile is in front of her, his own sword blocking the Colossus’s. It’s heroic. It’s magnificent. It feels like some sort of badass music should be playing in the background.

But he’s struggling. Max doesn’t need to be a mage to see his strength fluctuate. His posture shifts, and his leg bends. He falls to one knee, gritting his teeth. “Max! Run!”

She climbs to her feet, unsteady. She has to do something to help. There has to be something she can do to help.

But before she even has a chance to move, the warehouse echoes once more with the sound of a gunshot. The Colossus’s head snaps back, a bullet piercing clean through its armoured chassis. It slumps, falling to one side. Defeated.

Basile rests his weight on his sword, gasping for breath and clutching his chest. Max stumbles over towards him, dizzy and barely standing.

They both look towards the source of the gunshot.

Laelia Belisar lowers the rifle in her hands, barrel smoking and faintly glowing from whatever round she used. Beside her, Brutus chews on the leg of a piece of magitek like an oversized bone. “Um.” She smiles, and offers an awkward wave. “Hey guys.”

Basile is the first to recover. He rushes over to Laelia, regaling her with tales of Starlight Miracles, starlight hat bobbling away and the brightness of his eyes even brighter than normal. He practically seems to be glowing and, after a few moments of shock, Laelia relaxes into it like a familiar campfire. She smiles, and laughs, and offers him a hug.

“It’s good to see you both,” she says, genuinely, and it’s like fresh kindling on the flames of Basile’s enthusiasm.

He insists on hearing everything about Laelia’s time since they last spoke, nodding rapidly to everything she says while he plays with Brutus. He hears of frontiers and homesteads, of talk about expeditions to the New World. Of people lost. Of people found.

“So, there was this one town where some chick calling herself The Razor had set up shop. She said she’d broken out of prison in Thanalan or something, and she was trying to start up some new Garlean movement. With a name like that, I dunno what she was aiming for.” She’s got a starlight hat on by now, cheeks red from the alcohol Max had been carrying in their supplies and the campfire they’d made to fight off the cold.

Even Max has put a hat on, a grin on her face as they sit close to one another.

“So…time for the million gil question.” Laelia interrupts her own storytime to ask it. “Much as I’m happy to see you both, what’s brought you out here? We just finished with one apocalypse, and if you’ve shown up to tell me about another one I swear I’m going to kick you out into the cold and steal the rest of this booze–”

That has Max’s smile fading a little, and she runs her fingers through her hair self-consciously. It’s been getting long, recently. She doesn’t mind it. It used to bother her, but those times are long since passed. “Nah,” she says. “The World’s goin’ fine. I just…missed you.”

There’s a few seconds of silence as Laelia seems to be trying to work out how to reply to that. Max and Basile came out here, a week into the colds of Ilsabard, because Max missed her? “Bull! Shit!” Lee shoves Max’s shoulder, laughing. “Come on. Seriously now, Sawyer. I know you too well, and I know you came out here for a reason. Apocalypse and family are the only things that could drag you this far north without handcuffs.”

The fire crackles.

The camp is quiet, save for the sound of Brutus attempting to eat Basile’s entire arm.

“Well, you ain’t wrong about that,” Max finally concedes. She reaches into her pack and withdraws a parcel. It’s wrapped in brown paper, with a rough bow tied on it with twine. She hands it over to Laelia. “Family’s the only thing that could drag me this far, kickin’ and screamin’. Happy Starlight, Lee.”

Laelia stares at Max for a long time. She looks at Basile, and Brutus. She looks at the package in her hands.

She leans forwards, and wraps Max in a hug. “Thank you. I…thank you.”

Max buries her face against Lee’s shoulder, gripping the leather of the woman’s jacket as she returns the hug fiercely. “You ain’t even opened it yet.”

“Shut up, Sawyer.”

Across the fire, Basile watches the two with a smile, and wraps his own mighty arm around Brutus to give him a fine hug. “A Starlight Miracle, my friend. Or sheer, stubborn force of will!”

Brutus boofs approvingly, and the knight rubs his ear.

“But I prefer to trust in a little magic.”

((Featuring @snowbird-down 's Laelia, and @autochthonousone 's Basile!))

#max sawyer #Laelia Belisar #Basile Bellerose #This was my christmas gift for Lee and Basile's players!#And with their kind permission I now share it with you all

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endangered-liaison · 4 months

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hello!

#garlemald #tanya

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endangered-liaison · 5 months

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Tales from the Frost

Stories following the conclusion of the RP Arc, TOWER.

Stories: 1 2 [3] 4

Dear Zelimir

Dear Zelimir,

We’re coming. Sorry it took almost three decades. Life’s stranger than fiction nowadays and there’s a lot for us to catch up on. Like how I ended up traveling with your murderer to find your resting place, for starters.

Civil war burned Garlemald to cinders, but we survived. Something incomprehensible possessed the world and turned the sky red, but we survived that, too. You always said I was tenacious, but I don’t think you meant it’d be enough to weather two apocalypses.

Somewhere in the middle, we (the Tappers. Sofi misses you too, you know) stumbled on a weird town of magitek, complete with a freaky Overseer, robot farmers, and who knows what else. Was just us at first. Bunch of Garleans joined later. Some of them were the sorriest looking bastards I’d ever seen but some of them were just bastards, so much so that they tried to reestablish Garlemald, shackles and all.

Zelimir, I think you’d be proud to hear that we’re living side by side with many of these bastards now. You shouldn’t be, though. If the Final Days didn’t happen, we’d still be at each other's throats, but we (all of us) lived through some very horrific things. Didn’t know if the next day would be our last, didn’t have the spoons to care about fucking beans when literal depression monsters were hunting us down. Stranger than fiction, again.

I knew Marcellus killed you. I thought about it every day. I thought about it when I led our ragtag band of soldiers to defend our freaky magitek home against even freakier blasphemies, and I threw him into less than favorable fights because of it. You know me. I would’ve killed all the bastards if I had the chance, but...things happened. Hands were tied at the time. I’m bitter about you though, so I had hoped, and figured if he died in combat, well. That’s just war. But being in the trenches changes a man so, yes. He killed you, but he saved me too. Saved Sofi. We saved each other so that we could live another day like cockroaches. That was our new normal, insanity and violence and all.

The Final Days eventually ended, after more wars, more kidnappings, and more shit that flew straight over my head. Giant...spaceship at one point. Man. I don’t even know. Sometimes I want to believe it was all collective madness, but then, I’ll wake up and the signs will still be there. I half expect the skies to turn red again honestly. Peace feels like it could be taken away at any second.

Anyway, Marcellus confessed. Almost three decades later, when there’s practically nothing left of you except for memories, he confessed. Said you didn’t crack and reveal any of the other members of the underground. I hated hearing about it but it’s closure, still. And your body is long rotten and lost, your records wiped and destroyed, but we’re coming anyway, to the place you passed away. So I can say goodbye and Marcellus can...apologize.

You shouldn’t forgive him. He’s an ass. Terrible pokerface, awful taste in beer, his mustache sucks. Thinnest hair I’ve seen on a lip. I haven’t forgiven him and neither should you, but he’s trying, and he needs to live with this. No amount of justice will bring you back, so I guess I’m settling for second best.

These days, I’m restless wondering if this is enough. If this peace is enough, if evil got punished enough, if they’re repentant enough, if I’ll ever be satisfied. There are holes in me where you fit. Where all the good Tappers who died under the Empire fit. Is it fair that your murderer lives? Is it fair that he has a second chance? I don’t think so, but now, he’s a part of me too. There’s a hole where Marcellus would leave, too, and the trenches change a man. They leave you riddled with bullet holes.

I know you had hopes for me and I’ve always tried to live up to them but, Zelimir, maybe the reason I lived and you didn’t is because I’m not good. I want people to suffer as I have. I would’ve executed someone I now care about and been none the wiser. My pain, our pain. It’ll be forgotten one day...maybe recorded in words, but the distance will grow. One day, there won’t be anyone left that knows you personally. Is this a good thing? Is this just the way life is? That we live, just to be forgotten?

I don’t know. Maybe you can tell me.

Sincerely,

Vanya Kvetasch

#h m m #Vanya Bas Kvetasch #Tales from the Frost #Thank you so much #Your stories inspired me

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endangered-liaison · 5 months

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Tales from the Frost

Stories following the conclusion of the RP Arc, TOWER.

Stories: 1 [2] 3 4

You were my Best Friend

Witless oaf, Minerva thinks. That he assumes flowers and a pathetic smile can even begin to address his mistakes. She sits on the park bench, radiating infinite poise and chill, and irritably wonders where this puts her, then. Because while he’s a fool who doesn’t deserve a second of her time, she’s the one waiting.

“Min--”

“Don’t. Only my friends can call me that,” she cuts him off.

The corner of Rainer’s mouth tugs back. He sheepishly hovers around her with a gap stretched taut between them, insurmountable and widening like a fissure. She narrows her eyes at him.

“Out with it. What did you come here to say?”

“...Ah. Well.” Rainer fidgets until the stems of his bouquet are bruised. “Well, Min.”

Minerva’s eyebrow twitches. She inhales and holds it in.

“We were friends, once,” he says quietly. His voice dwindles further, spiraling like a plane with a shot-off wing. “Best friends, even.”

“Were.”

“Were,” Rainer agrees. He looks at Minerva’s boots. “We were a lot of things.”

“And we’re not anymore,” Minerva enunciates.

“No. We’re not.”

Minerva doesn’t move. She barely even breathes. Over twenty years of her life have been spent doing damage control for Rainer’s impulsive, unthoughtful actions and now he’s here, talking about what they were before he slept with a terrorist and flaunted a bastard son in her face. She’s been so busy filling in for his inadequacies that she hasn’t processed it much. The hurt’s nearly as sharp as it was on the day she found out.

“You need to leave,” she tells him.

“I will.” Rainer breathes in deeply. “I will, but not before saying I’m sorry.”

“It’s too late.”

“I know, but I’m sorry.” Rainer glances up and meets her eyes. Her unflinching judgment. “I should have told you.”

“What? You should have told me that you were cheating on me?” Minerva scoffs. “It would have changed nothing.”

“Even if you don’t understand why I did it, you deserved to know. I shouldn’t have hid so much from you,” Rainer confesses. He pauses, wets his lip, and swallows before continuing. “It would have changed nothing but, maybe, it could have.”

Minerva rolls her eyes but beneath her fury is a bone deep exhaustion. She’s stood alone for so long and despite the hurt and betrayal, she remembers simpler times. Tainted, yes, but nostalgia, fondness, and yearning regardless.

“But you didn’t tell me. You didn’t choose me.” Minerva’s eyes flick to the earring dangling on Rainer’s ear. “And even now, you’re still warming the bed for someone long gone...Was it worth it, Rainer? Was love worth it?”

Rainer stands straighter.

“Love makes you come alive, like you’re full of fire and stars, free and finally whole,” he says. “And I want that for you, too. I really do.”

“What is this, pity?” Minerva murmurs. “Pity for an old crone?”

“No, it’s just--” Rainer combs a hand through his hair. “It’s just, you were never going to get that from me, and I’m sorry! I’m sorry, and there’s not a day where I wish it didn’t all fall onto your shoulders, but maybe that burden -- maybe it shouldn’t have existed from the start. Maybe if we weren’t caught in systems that groomed and expected so much of us, then maybe, maybe we could have been...been.....”

“Been what? Friends?” Minerva says in disbelief. “Best friends? Us?”

Guilt and frustration grounds Rainer into momentary silence. He exhales hotly. “Yes, friends. We could’ve been normal friends! We could’ve been what we wanted to be instead of, oh, I don’t know. Arranged everything. Bullcrap.” Unfiltered honesty spills freely from Rainer as he speaks, anguish building toward a crescendo. “But Min, those systems are gone. Those systems are gone and now it's just us. Everyone is dead. Everyone is dead and I...”

Rainer swallows again. Both of them hear his words before he speaks them; the sentence completes in their heads.

“I can’t lose you too.”

Neither of them have anything to say after that and neither of them look away. Like two rangers locked in a quick draw duel, Rainer and Minerva remain frozen in each other’s presence, hurt, aching, and wanting. Minerva eventually breaks the standoff by tucking a strand of loose hair behind her ear. She closes her eyes and breathes out.

“...Let’s try this again.”

#THIS IS SO SWEET #Minerva Dus Celsus #Rainer Oen Celsus #Tales from the Frost

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endangered-liaison · 5 months

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Tales from the Frost

Stories following the conclusion of the RP Arc, TOWER.

Stories: 1 2 3 [4]

Henceforth We Shall Walk

“Hey, are you sure you don’t want some more?”

The way N runs from point A to point B is like she’s riding on a wooden roller coaster. Her messy hair bounces, her cloak flutters, and she’s nothing but jittery sunshine and smiles. She pushes an empty teacup into my face.

<< it was pretty nasty the first time, so i think i’m good. >>

“Yeah, why do they put salt in it instead of sugar? Yucky!” N sticks out her tongue but, despite her disgust, she grins soon after. “I’m gonna ask for seconds. B-R-B!”

N leaves as quickly as she had come. She splits the vast and endless plains of the Azim Steppe with its blue skies, its colorful tents, and it’s warm here, warmer than anywhere we’ve ever been. With the sun on our backs, I watch her go. I watch her slip into a tent and I sit cross legged for her to return.

And there, I wonder if I deserve this small happiness.

I failed to protect the people I was designed to protect. I abandoned them to fight for others like me, but they’re on their own now too. I’m here and they’re still stuck in Garlemald, silicon souls slaving under the yoke of their biological creators, aware or unaware of their lot in life. Whichever it is, it doesn’t matter. I’m the one a million miles away.

But maybe it shouldn’t have been me? And maybe, fault also lies with the godmaker and not just his newborn gods? Because while history grounds us, it does not excuse us. There’s blood on our hands despite our trauma, intentions, and mistakes. I rest my palm on my knee and feel the wind blow through where my other arm used to be.

When I stopped fighting, did I abandon my kind or did I save them? I don’t know and I never will, but maybe, that decision was never mine to make in the first place. Life will cycle, we’ll suffer, and then we’ll forget, but that doesn’t mean the pain we feel right now doesn’t matter. It matters the most of all, in fact.

N pops out of a tent and waves enthusiastically for me to come. I wave back and stand up, the grass rustling as my cloak brushes past. The smell of dirt is sharply present but, if I focus hard enough, then I can catch hints from a distant cooking fire, from lazing yaks, and from fields of wildflowers. I breathe in deeply and exhale.

What starts as a walk becomes a jog becomes a sprint, because like always, I can’t wait to be back at your side. For I have lived a thousand thousand lives and the one that matters most is the one we have right now, salty tea and all. Maybe these demons will haunt me forever, but together, we’ll carry on. We’ll carry on and live our lives until they end, sweetly, violently, or silently.

~ Thank you for participating in TOWER. To greener pastures, and beyond!

#pleadingface emoji #Twelves and N #Tales from the Frost

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endangered-liaison · 5 months

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Tales from the Frost

Stories following the conclusion of the RP Arc, TOWER.

Stories: [1] 2 3 4

Live your Todays

Sitting on Alvarium’s walls is a girl and standing behind that girl is a man. They’re only three years apart but that’s what it feels like to Gloria, sometimes. Everyone’s got jobs, hooked up, had kids, and croaked while she remained stuck in some mental, teenage purgatory of rebellion, discovery, and petty angst. Gloria pulls her coat tighter around herself and shivers from the cold.

“Fuck. You’ve always been skinny but now, you’re like a skeleton,” Florus says. He rests his hands on her shoulders and gives her a comforting squeeze. “…Stiff like one, too.”

“Piss off. Like you’re one to talk,” Gloria pouts.

“Hey, what’s worse? Sticking to meal replacements or doing whatever the hell fad you’re onto now?” Florus says. “Paleo, keto, activated charcoal. Wasn’t there a month where you only ate kale?”

“Kale is good! Not that you’d know, you tasteless prick.”

“Oh, fuck. Really got me there.”

Gloria snorts. Get stung enough times and you learn to ignore it. Besides, if Florus wasn’t being a little shit, then it’d be even more off putting at this point. Bantering like this reminds her of the old days; years of living normal lives, having normal wants, worrying about normal things. It’s behind them like a memory now, locked away by the horrors they survived and the loss they carry. Maybe she would have rather stayed in her middling, small-minded purgatory for a little while longer. It wasn’t so bad in hindsight. Gloria sniffs and hugs herself even tighter.

“Hey. I, uh.” Florus kneels down and takes a seat next to her. He keeps one arm wrapped around her shoulder. “You good?”

Gloria sends Florus a simmering glare because, like, of course not?! So why’s he even asking? As if anyone could be good after being barfed out of Final Days (and more)! Florus sucks in his lips and nods awkwardly to himself.

“I mean, yeah. Sorry. I know you’re not good. You’ve got literal roots tangled in your nerves and flowers coming out of your lungs and —“ Florus stops with a cringe. “…yeah. Sorry. Not good.”

“God, you suck at comforting people,” Gloria groans. “Where’s Ollie when you need him?”

“I don’t know. Dead, I guess?”

“Florus.”

“Sorry. I’m...” coping. He doesn’t say it.

Florus shifts uncomfortably in place and decides not to mention that his hallucination of Ollie is shaking his head no at him. He pulls Gloria closer and tensely breathes out.

“I’m sorry. Of all the people who should’ve lived, it should’ve been him,” he admits in a whisper.

“...What? And you shouldn’t have?!”

“Gloria, I’m not -- No. I don’t know what to tell you.”

“Well, figure it out or shut the fuck up! You think I can handle you dying too?” Grief balloons in her chest, hot and near bursting. “God, I don’t even know how much time I have left. What the hell am I supposed to do? Where’s all this supposed to go?”

Florus swallows. It’s like his heart’s tied in a double knot and he can’t get anything out, can’t do anything right, but Gloria’s crying and he feels like crying, too. He tucks her face into the crux of his neck and presses his lips into the crown of her head.

“I don’t know, Gloria. I really don’t,” he mutters.

Gloria huffs grumpily.

“But nobody knows how much time they have left. You could get hit by a car and then, it doesn’t matter that you have some fucked up, plant cancer.”

“Great. Wow! I feel so much better.”

“Ugh, okay. Look. It’s not like you can pause life until everything is perfect. We’re living right now, so we have to live right -fucking- now, because we don’t know if we have it good or if things will get worse again.” Florus inhales deeply. “...But you’re alive. And I’m alive. And...yeah. It’s not over for us yet.”

There’s another heavy silence. Eventually, Gloria shuffles deeper into Florus’s arms and groans tiredly into his chest.

“You became such a sap while you were away, Flo.”

“You’re welcome.”

They laugh quietly. Gloria tries to fix her runny makeup, but no amount of fussing can undo tears. This is just how she looks now.

“...God, I really thought you were dead,” she mumbles.

“Me too.”

“Mm.”

And then, a dull absence. Florus and Gloria are both waiting for a third voice to chime in. The snow comes down hard; he can barely see the distant mountains now. Canyons, like scars, like rips in the landscape, in himself and in Gloria. There’s a hole where their friend should be. A hole, and a grave.

Florus wipes a streak of running mascara off of Gloria’s cheek.

“Let’s visit Ollie one day.”

#Gloria Jen Gallus #Florus Jen Celsus #Tales from the Frost #FRIEND I LOVE THIS SO MUCH

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