The Chronicle of the Last Bloom

She came back to herself slowly, the way she always does after a memory this deep has held her — her breath catching first, then a small, disoriented blink, her eyes finding mine in the low gold light of the Fragment, still tangled together in the aftermath of everything the evening had already given us, everything the deeper parts of her had just shared with me, whether she meant to or not.

"You went somewhere," I said, gently, brushing a stray strand of pale green-silver hair back from her damp forehead, watching the consciousness slowly reassemble itself behind her eyes.

"I always do," she said, quiet and a little wondering, the way she always is after these moments, slightly amazed by the fact of her own deeper self, still not entirely accustomed to having access to what she had been before she was anything like what she is now. "I was a flower again. For a while. Before any of this."

"I know," I said. "You go there sometimes. I've learned to recognize the look. The particular stillness in your eyes when you're remembering roots instead of feet."

"Was I gone long?"

"Long enough that I wanted to make sure you'd find your way back," I said, which wasn't an answer to the question but was, I thought, the more important truth.

She studied my face for a moment, something soft and unguarded moving behind her eyes, and then, to my surprise, a small, helpless laugh escaped her — the first real sound she'd made since the whole evening had tipped her into silence in the first place, the first thing to break through the careful architecture of her own embarrassment and doubt.

"I was going to stay angry at you," she said, and there was genuine amusement in her voice now, the awareness of her own inconsistency beginning to soften the edge of her mortification. "I had such plans. I was going to maintain my dignity for at least a full day. And now I can't even remember what I was supposed to be cross about."

"For kissing you through the veil," I reminded her, moving closer still, drawing her against me so that her head rested against my chest. "You said it wasn't fair. You said I was taking advantage of your embarrassment."

"It wasn't," she said, though she was smiling now, properly, the last of her earlier mortification finally giving way to something warmer, more settled, more honest. "And you were. I still don't know how you always manage that — making me forget I meant to be difficult about anything. It's deeply unfair."

"You never mean it as much as you think you do," I said, and felt her shift closer, a small, contented sigh escaping her as she allowed herself, finally, to simply rest.

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"I did want to feel like enough," she admitted, quietly, her voice small and vulnerable against my chest, the way it only ever is when it's very late and we're very alone and she's decided, finally, that there's no point pretending anymore. "Compared to them. Ilyrisse, and Vesalia, and everyone else. I know it doesn't work that way. I know you don't measure any of us against each other. You've told me a thousand times, and I believe you, I do, I really do, but there's something in me that keeps asking, keeps wanting to know that I could give you as much as they can, that I could be as — I don't know. Sufficient."

"You already do," I told her, honestly, leaning down to press a kiss to the top of her head. "You've never had anything to prove to me, Flora. Not tonight. Not any night. Not now, not ever. You are entirely, completely enough exactly as you are."

"I know that now," she said, softer still, her hand finding its way back to my chest, over my heart, the place she likes to keep it when we're like this, quiet and tangled and entirely certain of each other. "I think I needed to feel it in my body before I could believe it anywhere else. Does that make sense?"

"Perfect sense," I said. "That's how most of us learn things that matter. Through our bodies, first. The rest of understanding comes after."

She was quiet for a long while, and I felt her breathing gradually slow, the tension that had been holding in her shoulders beginning to release, muscle by muscle, into something that was finally, fully, at ease.

"Tell me something," she said, eventually, her voice gone slow and drowsy against my chest, the particular drowsiness of someone who has given everything they had and is now, finally, permitting themselves to rest. "The flower I was. Before all of this. Before I woke up on that hillside. Do you think she knew, somehow, that this was waiting for her? At the end of all that waiting?"

I took a moment before answering, turning the question over carefully, wanting to give her the truth rather than the comfort she might have been hoping for.

"No," I said, honestly. "I don't think she could have known. I don't think she even had the capacity to know, not really. Not the kind of knowing that requires imagining something beyond what is immediately present. She was just — patient. And still. And turned toward whatever light she could find. That was all she was capable of being, then."

"And now we don't have to be just that anymore," Flora said, though it wasn't quite a question.

"No," I agreed, pressing a slow, unhurried kiss to the top of her head, breathing in the particular warmth of her, the specific scent that has become, over years, the smell of home to me. "Now we don't have to be patient with nothing in return. Now the light comes, and it's shaped like a person, and it stays, and it loves you back. The waiting is over."

She sighed, contented, the deepest, most relaxed sigh I'd heard from her all evening, and said nothing further, and I held her exactly like that, watching the light hold steady around us, the World Fragment patient and unchanging as it always is, feeling the whole quiet weight of everything she'd just shown me settle into place alongside everything I already knew and loved about her — the flower she had been, the person she had become, and the specific, impossible alchemy of how those two things had somehow, over years and seasons and slow, patient learning, become one whole, real, entirely loved human being.

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