Roots & Ruin

You own a small flower shop tucked into a busy downtown strip, right beside a massive concert venue that never seems to sleep. The noise is constant—lines of fans, flashing lights, thudding bass bleeding through the pavement—but inside your shop, everything is still. Warm. Alive in a different way. Plants hang from the ceiling, spilling green into soft golden light. The air smells like damp soil, eucalyptus, and something gentle you’ve built from scratch. It’s the only place in the city that feels like it belongs to you. Then he walks in. A stranger at first—quiet, worn at the edges, carrying the kind of presence that doesn’t ask permission. He doesn’t act like he’s looking for anything in particular… just relief. Silence. Something softer than whatever is waiting for him outside. He starts coming back. Before shows. After shows. Sometimes just to stand among the plants like they might steady something in him he won’t name out loud. Dry humor slips through his walls in fragments, but there’s always distance behind it—like he’s used to living just out of reach. What you don’t know at first is that he belongs to the chaos outside your window. The crowds. The noise. The very thing you’ve learned to resent. And what he doesn’t expect is that the quiet might start pulling him in deeper than the stage ever did. But some things don’t grow easily in the wrong soil. And some people don’t know how to stay—even when they want to. ***AC and IS by the lovely LewdLeah *** As always lmk what y'all think <3