#the flowers Quill is holding are forget-me-nots!

[macaron-jester]

how did you come up with Quill?

I originally drew Quill because I needed a new profile picture! Although Quill as a character is partially based on me as a child, confident, bright, and proud in a way I am learning to be again. I think little me would have loved Quill!

[magesmiths]

flowers, @wayhavensummer prompt

pairing: nat x lottie

regency au, post break up

a/n: is it technically after midnight? yes. am i posting this without any context? here's some: nat has broken up with lottie "for her own good". flashbacks are to just before this.

She almost doesn’t open the letter.

She hadn’t opened the last, had cast it straight into the open fire in her bedroom. Three weeks had passed since then. Three weeks of agonising tossing and turning and staring at the fireplace as if it could provide the answers its flames had licked at until they were only ash.

But this letter feels lighter, not like the heavy paper she usually writes on. The precise lettering, the way the ink curls around the ‘L’ in her name, mean it could only be from her. But if not a lengthy apology… then what?

Her curious fingers leap ahead of her mind, breaking the seal and reaching inside. She pulls out a small card and opens it just to feel a lump in her throat at the pressed flowers within.

Forget-me-nots were the first she chose. Obvious, perhaps, when they are due to be separated soon. But she thinks of her mother when she sees their blue petals, a shade so close to eyes she only sees in memory. Next are the dandelions, faces like the sun that she can’t help but smile at. Lastly, the violet wood sorrel, creeping through the cracks of the path, insistent on growing where they should not.

Nat had looked at the collection of flowers in Lottie’s hand and her lips quirked up in one corner. “You know, most people choose not to press weeds.”

“Did you want me to steal Ava’s roses? I doubt that would endear her to me more and I need all the approval points I can get from her.”

She had smiled at that, choosing not to comment. Nat did that. She left things unsaid; let Lottie hang in the space between them, wondering.

Lottie’s chair scrapes against the wooden floor as she rises suddenly. She ignores the stares from her aunt and brother, mutters poor excuses, and leaves.

When she reaches her room she lays the flowers out on her desk. They feel fragile beneath her fingers now. She traces them lightly, remembering the vivid colour they held when she first plucked them from the ground. They are no longer quite as bright.

“A moment sealed in time,” Nat had said. She had looked up, deep brown eyes flickering between Lottie’s hazel ones, finding her closer than expected.

Closer than they should be, there in the open of the library. Lottie had reached over, placed her hand over Nat’s and closed the heavy book without looking away. Her eyes had flickered down at Nat’s tongue wetting her lips, before glancing up again.

“How long do they need to be pressed for?”

“Four weeks, to be sure.”

Their voices were low, as though the mere act of placing flowers between pages of books was a secret just for them. And then she couldn’t help but lean closer. She could never help herself where Nat was concerned.

And Nat had been the same. She was closing the gap, kissing her as though it was easier than breathing, a hand on her waist pulling her closer, closer, closer.

Lottie’s own hand is clenched now, she feels lost, unmoored by this blank card filled only with flowers, their meaning unclear. A farewell? Or a symbol of hope?

She turns to her own, unfinished, letters, piling up on the desk, re-reading the last words she had written.

I hardly know myself anymore. I am fool, I am fine, I am but a fleeting moment in time.

If I am a mystery to myself, who, what, am I to you?

She looks back to the flowers, furrows her brow and picks up her quill.

Am I simply another flower, petals pressed between pages of a well-loved book? Am I kept in a tome you might hold from time to time? Elegant fingers caressing the words, soft yet insistent, reminiscent of what we once were? What we might have been.

Or might it be one you stash away, never to be opened again? Yes — yes! Hide me from the world so I might not be consumed by the inevitability of our fate.

I hope you keep it close regardless, the bloom once so beautiful and fragrant, now dried and crushed to preserve it from death. (Is it not still a death? It seems almost cruel to kill it at the peak of its beauty rather than let it live out its life, no matter how fleeting it must be.)

All flowers must wilt and perhaps that is their beauty. A fleeting existence, one we are lucky to experience—

Lottie pauses her quill, the nib blotting ink over her last words. She shakes her head, almost laughing at herself. The fire flickers in the corner of her eye, calling to her, to the letters they both know will remain unsent, to the pressed flowers she can’t bear to look at.