peachyapple 🍎🪷 🍏

big Caleb timeline yap, spoilers below !! all of this is just my interpretation and what I think is the most cohesive; feel free to correct me meimeis, I love reading other baby 🍎 analyses hehe 🙋‍♀️🤍 1. Homecoming Wings / Caleb’s return → Painful Signal — very early aftermath; it explicitly starts two weeks after MC returns from Farspace Fleet command center, and she's still anxious about the Toring Chip and the Caleb she no longer fully understands. → Hidden Waves — MC visits Skyhaven; they're still fighting over his secrecy/control, and she cannot yet promise him the “next hundred years.” → Endless Summer — they've separated again after Skyhaven and barely communicate; Caleb asks whether she thinks of him when he thinks of her. this is still very much the “we love each other but cannot say what we are” stage. → Exclusive Aftertaste — huge progression: MC lets him stay at her apartment and ultimately gives him her spare key, effectively telling him he has somewhere to come home to. → Lucid Dreams — MC gets much deeper access to Caleb’s suffering and the consequences of the Toring system; their connection becomes almost painfully intimate, and she chooses to share the burden rather than remain outside it. → Our Trajectory Astray / Silence of the Cosmos — main story development with MC and Caleb confronting the Norn/Toring system and their relationship becoming much more explicitly bound together. these are confirmed current main-story branches. → Spoils of Night — essentially the immediate post-branch celebration period: Caleb is at the banquet celebrating him as Colonel of the new fleet. THEN I think the romance-memory run starts: → Floating Floraletter — my strongest candidate for the first card after Spoils. MC goes to Skyhaven specifically to spend the weekend with him; the goodbye letters force them to confront Caleb's tendency to treat his life as expendable. it feels like the emotional aftermath of everything they've survived. → No-Return Night — “I want you to be mine.” this is where his romantic claim on her becomes much harder to interpret as anything else. → Wayward Wonderland — crucial transition card. their discussion about a relationship becoming something new fits beautifully here. → Clearwind Glide — now they're taking an intimate vacation together to somewhere they dreamed of visiting as children. → Chasing Summer — THE public-label card. this is where the boyfriend/girlfriend framing comes out around other people, so I definitely want it after the transition cards. → Burnline — cute, established-couple weekend date at the Linkon sci-fi expo. this fits wonderfully once dating is normalised. → Passionate Overload — much more physically/romantically established; definitely after the tentative relationship stage. → Indulgent Scheme — MC literally frames them in terms of their new relationship, and emotionally it feels like they're consciously figuring out what being a couple means rather than whether they're a couple. → Held Orchard — I'd slot this around here/just after Indulgent Scheme; they're securely attached rather than negotiating the transition. → Vinesurge Instinct — very established. they're deliberately planning a vacation together, Caleb's Colonel duties delay it, and he outright says they've belonged to each other for a long time. this is NOT early-romance CalebMC. not to mention, I think this is where they have their actual “first time” and not just intense foreplay. I could be wrong. 🤔 → Spotlit Gaze — definitely later. it directly references Cloudia Island, they're jointly deciding how to renovate rooms in Caleb's home, and he jokes that his plan is essentially to make her never want to leave. 😭 it therefore has to be after Clearwind Glide, and it feels deeply domestic. → Your Skyblue — mature established love. Caleb openly calls MC “the person I love the most” and wishes that they'll continue existing and living together in the years ahead.