it’s called fibrodysplasia, he thinks. the calcification of internal organs.
what a thing to remember, when a friend, your best friend, ( the almost love of your life, he thinks. ) dies before your eyes. he spends his life trying to take control of situations, trying to mold everything to the shape that he wants it, but flint stands there, his face impassive as he watches jay die before his very eyes. he wants to salvage it, he wants to know what he could do to help, give up a kidney, a lung, a heart, so the doctors could just fix him and they could return to normal, but---
( third degree burns from a anti-clair related attack, and we barely got the other kid out, sir. sir, please, control yourself. )
he’s always known that he’s stony, that his resilience always brought him back from the brink of any and every disaster that came his way. every stock crash has a solution, and every scandal had a way to turn it around, if you were smart enough. and if it couldn’t, well--there was always damage control.
is this what this was? damage control? some sort of self-preservation, turning his heart to elegant and unforgiving marble, when it only just learned to beat in a staccato rhythm? if it was, it was some sort of fucked up, because what good was preserving yourself when the people that you care about ( cared about ) die?
flint wants to cry, to scream, to holler at the ( soon to be ) corpse, but he knows that jay isn’t coming out of this alive. hell, he’s already picking out the goddamn flowers for the funeral. he knows which plot of land to buy and how to tell forest what exactly happened. there’s contingency plans that he thinks on the fly, and how he’s going to spin this into a godforsaken story about hope and resilience to public relations to boost stock and attract investors. he has everything he could need to make this a better situation for him to come out on top again.
( so thank god for his stony heart, thank god for caring less about other people if he never has to feel like this ever again. jayesh rai, you may have been the worst person that flint had ever come across, but you were just the right type of wrong to make his heart beat again, and he will never forgive you for it. )
