send me a 👀 and i’ll post a snippet of art/writing that i never got around to finishing this year (r.i.p)
Cole’s expression falls, a shadow crossing his face.
“Cold,” he says, his voice haunted. “It was cold. Like…like ghost cold.”
Lloyd shudders. He’d felt the cold of the fog as well, though not to the extent Cole had suffered it.
But he knows ghost cold all too well.
“I’m sorry,” Lloyd says. “I wish I’d — I could’ve been there, I could’ve—“
“What, thrown yourself from the deck after me?” Cole smiles wryly at him. “I remember what you did with….her. You’ve got a terrible habit there.”
Lloyd grimaces. “One time,” he says. “That was one time. And you — you would’ve been worth it. She — was not.”
“Can’t exactly disagree with you there,” Cole says, but there’s a happy sort of expression on his face when Lloyd tells him he’d be worth it, and something in Lloyd’s chest twists. As if Cole could ever not be worth it. Lloyd would jump off a hundred ship decks into a cloud of spiraling darkness for Cole. He’s opening his mouth to tell him so when Cole’s expression drops, his eyes darkening.
“Besides, I don’t have a lot of room to talk,” he says, his tone downcast. “You aren’t the only one turning what-if’s over in your head.”
Lloyd blinks. He gets why he’s struggling with that, but Cole? What does he have to be second-guessing himself over tonight?
“I could’ve caught the rafters,” Cole says, quietly. “Before they fell on you.”
It takes Lloyd a second to make the connection. Oh. Right. He’d almost forgotten that there’d been an actual cause of…death, his grandfather hadn’t just whisked him away. He shakes the thought off, snorting. “In the middle of a tornado?” Lloyd says. “Yeah, sure.”
Besides, Lloyd’s pretty sure the rafters weren’t what took him out, anyways.
