#anyway i love flora and helia hcs gimme more asks

[redemptionarcsucker]

I couldn’t help but think about the line in ‘Retired’ where Helia thinks, “You’ve never trusted anyone anyway. You never will, you’re incapable of love.”

Does this mean he has a hard time loving people around him? It takes a lot for him to trust someone, but with Flora, in ‘Falling’ he says he fell in love with her. Do you have any headcanons on how or why he fell in love with her and if he struggled to come to terms with it?

Ahh thank you for the question! My literature major brain is screamingg

Just as a disclaimer, a lot of what I am going to say is based on the backstory I've sort of constructed from him, and may clash with the other ways that people have interpreted his character

You've made an extremely interesting observation by pointing out the demarcation of love and trust (which I didn't even notice whilst writing the stories), and I think that's actually the key to really understanding Helia's struggle when it comes to relationships. When Helia and Flora met for the first time, it's undeniable that both of them were immediately intrigued by each other. Flora, I think, figured out that she had feelings for him pretty quickly. She was flustered around him, asked Aisha to snoop around, and wrote that letter, and so on.

To me, Helia seems to have had a lot more difficulty really understanding what was happening in his head. The glimpse you get of his past in 'Retired' is sort of reflective of why - the man hardly had the time or space to be a normal kid or even a normal human, with friendships and relationships like other people his age. This is partly why Flora confessed first, because I think he was still struggling to understand his own feelings. For all the "sensitive artist" qualities people assign to him, Helia with a lot of his interactions, especially in the earlier seasons, seems to be extremely guarded and somewhat unsure of how to respond to things. (That's also why it's super cute that he shows Flora he loves her by giving her little presents all the time, because he does seem to slightly struggle with social and romantic conventions otherwise). Helia may have even been in denial about his own feelings to a large extent, which would be kind of ironic because as much as he wants Flora to respond positively to his mild (mostly awkward) flirting, he may have also felt a bit of relief that she did not.

But yeah, I think meeting Flora would have shattered his own self-perception until that point, though once in a while, like in 'Retired', he reverts quite strongly to that state of mind. It checks out that he's so hard on himself all the time, it would make sense that he's constantly anxious about screwing things up in his relationship as well.

So yes, I do think he has a hard time loving people, and an even harder time expressing his love. As I mentioned, gifting people things and giving them compliments to show affection is super interesting in that regard. I would think that Helia kissing Flora for the first time was a sort of reconciliation with himself as well, and (this is once again entirely me just making things angsty), with the lines he says in the 4kids version, something about moving on from the past and focusing on the future, it feels like he's talking about something even bigger than their current situation.

Now in terms of trust, I would think that it wouldn't completely align with his journey of recognising his love for Flora and ultimately realising that he was head-over-heels for her. Helia probably would not trust everyone he loves. Funnily enough, there's a line I wrote in a wip fic where he says that he doesn't trust anyone, but for the time being, he chooses to believe in them instead.

I think it would take him a long time to trust Flora, so long that it might frustrate her sometimes. Helia is the kind to dip out of a place when he's going through something, and as patient as she is with him, it would make sense that she struggles with the fact that he hardly seems to trust her with his feelings or pain, even when it takes a toll on their relationship. Helia is probably extremely aware of this, and that puts even more of a strain on both of them to try to make the other feel comfortable. I would think that this also makes him (over)think about whether he loves her in the first place, since it is disturbingly easy for him to leave everything behind, including her.

That's why I think Helia thinks himself incapable of loving someone, and undeserving of loving him. In 'Falling', Helia calls Flora the warmest person he knows, and I think that is why he fell in love with her, and what is so symmetrical about their relationship. Helia largely aligns himself with his darkness, but Flora represents the light that he could find with the future, the light he could find within himself.