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[P] you were running through me like water [michael] - Printable Version

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you were running through me like water [michael] - Elena - 01-19-2020

every day it feels like I’m holding back an ocean


When she and her cousin had been young, they would often tuck themselves into a world of their own. Lilli would build their grand castles with its moats and fortified walls (though the drawbridge always dropped for anyone in need.) And Elena would conjure up dragons for them to battle, there was hardly a need for knights, for Sir Elena would battle the scaled beast. Sometimes, just before she awakens, her dreams find this place of imagination once more, but then it is all over as eyelashes flutter open and she is alone once more, not a castle or dragon in sight. 

Elena finds comfort in the sunset. She isn't sure why, especially when she knows night is coming.

Winter.

There was something vastly lonely about the winter months in a land. There were no colors outside of the simple white of the snow, the blue of the sky, and the green of the coniferous forests. The dull browns, the blackness of night, it could make an entire land look depressingly bleak. Especially when that winter had come, the first winter without either of her parents, the first winter in Beyond. it had been even more depressing still when she would catch them watching her. Marcelo, Aletta, Malachi, even Ori occasionally. They had handled her with kid gloves, desperate for answers but scared to ask the questions. It would have been enough to drive a single person mad, desperate for someone, anyone to be rude to her, to get angry, to show her anything but that sympathetic smile and quiet look of pity. 

When spring had come though, Elena had found friendship in her cousin, Lilli, the crimson girl that Elena still aches to see. And with the coming of spring had meant her godfather had returned to her, and the healer that had been present at Elena’s birth. It had almost been like the family was once again reunited. With the exception of her parents that had weighed on her shoulders and ached her young heart. 

Now, Elena has been alive longer than her parents had lived, she was older than her parents. The feeling was—strange, to say the least. Elena wonders if she had even been given a chance to really get to know her parents. Their faults, their strengths, their trails, instead of having perpetually looked at them through rose tinted glasses. Valerio had told her stories of when her father had first come to Paraiso as a testosterone filled two year old stallion, and how he had rebelled against Valerio’s kind nature. Elena had known none of this, her father never having gotten around to telling her the story, it would seem. When she returned to Windskeep years later, she learned things about her mother that she had never known. These stories, while they warmed her soul, caused her to bite her lip in sorrow. Elena realized how little she knew about her own parent. The more she learned, the more she felt as though she had been living with complete strangers. 

The golden girl finds herself in a place she has rarely ever found herself before. Standing there and watching with a glacial gaze the swell of the ocean as it arches and crashes against the shore. If she closes her eyes she can almost hear the sound of Paraiso’s waterfall, Aletta and Brynn talking, Lilli laughing. And that alone is what holds Elena still.

Maybe, she still has a bit of that imagination after all. Maybe it hasn't quite run out.



* e l e n a
in the dark I’ll pray for the return of the light
the sunflower daughter of benjamin and beylani
of dusk.


@Michael


RE: you were running through me like water [michael] - Michael - 01-20-2020

“A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river but then he’s still left with the river. A man takes his sadness and throws it away but then he’s still left with his hands.”


Michael cannot remember the last time he went to the ocean.

(He does. There had been rocks against his ankles that had turned to dandelion seeds which drowned in the water. There had been endless grief and limitless hope and a queen and her dragon and he had said will you come home? and she had.

They had gone home to a deeper grief, to the city on fire. And it had not been the first or last time that Michael had run from Denocte when it needed him most. He remembers with the clarity of a hawk in the hunt.

But his guilt is the only thing louder than his fear - and so he does not remember, if he can help it.)

He comes to the ocean now as a child, small and lost, tugging at her coatsleeves. If the sea turns her face on him, he thinks, maybe she will give him the answers. Maybe she will rise up from her prodigious basin and take him by the hand, ring her church bells and declare his path as she takes his hand and leads him toward it.

If only it were that easy. He is ankle-deep in the incoming tide, wet sand stuck to the dirty white of his feathers, numbed by the tooth-shattering chill of the late winter sea. He is thinking nothing, just the blissful black void of a mind that has turned a blind eye to itself until it is dizzy from going in circles. The sea does not rise up from the sand and she does not lay his shaking hands in hers and Michael is blue-lipped and suffocating, wordlessly begging for--something.

He closes his eyes, tight enough that their corners crease, and turns to go. The thick white curtain of his mane follows him through the surf toward land, where it drips and drips and drips until the scarf around his neck is soaked through and his shoulders hurt from shivering. It is somehow still better than anything else.

This is when he sees her. Its like looking in a mirror: the dull gold of her coat in gray winter light, the sharp blue of her eyes. It makes him feel strange in some distant way, like waking up from a bad dream. He smiles like the sun in the dead of winter, bleak and grim.

"I know that look," he grins mirthlessly. It is either a curse or a compulsion, whatever drives Michael to speak when he sees her. He has not quite decided which. "What are you thinking of?"


@Elena


RE: you were running through me like water [michael] - Elena - 01-20-2020

every day it feels like I’m holding back an ocean


Elena’s life is not a series of chapters that flow one to the next, but they are different books entirely. Each with a painstakingly drawn cover, where details are etched so delicately they look like they can come off the page. You run your hand over the cover gently, as if too hard of a touch could ruin it. Excitedly, the book is held in your hands as you eagerly flip it over to find out what this book could possibly be about, but the back is vacant, no words, no drawings, nothing. You are nervous now. Well, maybe you will just open the book, sneak a quick peek at what the book could possibly be about.Looking inside, there are no words written, you flip through the pages more than once, more than twice. You are handed a pen, but you want a pencil, with an eraser sitting at the top, but a pen is all you are given. With shaking hands you begin to write…

She still isn't sure why she left. Maybe she should have thought of this before she pledged herself to the Dusk Court and their goddess, Vespara, before she took up the role of a medic and began collecting herbs and training in healing methods. She has not met enough faces to feel connected to this place yet and every evening as Elena sleeps under the stars (ever since Tunnel, Elena has been unable to sleep beneath trees any more) she thinks, in the morning, I will go back (back where Elena, Hyaline? Paraiso? Windskeep? Woodlands?), but then morning comes and her beloved sun have replaced the mysterious stars she knows so little about. One more day, she thinks, I will stay one more day. There was no point in traveling in Winter anyway, it fogs her mind. With Spring will come clarity, or so she believes.

Marcelo, she thinks when she sees him, or Ori. But for the first time her mother is not the first one to come to mind and her heart breaks a little.

She does not flinch from his company, when perhaps she should. Strangers have given Elena more grief than they have happiness. But maybe it is that smile he offers her, or the smell of foreign waters on his skin, or having someone to talk to on a bleak winter day, Elena welcomes his company.

“Is it wrong to say too many things?” She laughs, only a simple huff of a thing (there is remnants of that old childhood giggle in there yet, but it is sparse) at her own words. “Sorry, that is a terrible answer.” And she truly is apologetic as she turns to look at him with those eyes like early morning frost. “Sometimes I have a thousand thoughts before I open my eyes.” Her head shakes as the eye contact is broken, like waves against the shore before being pulled back out to sea, only to return once more.

“I guess lately I have been thinking about my family, they live far from here, in a land that sometimes I forget is real.” She thinks she has done it again, said too much when she should have only said a little. She bites her bottom lip in silent apology, she has been talking too much.

“What are you doing out here?” She asks, because she thought she would be the only one alone with her thoughts today, trying to drown them. Figuratively, not literally. Elena has not yet reached that point, and when she looks out at the wild waves she cannot fathom the feeling of water drenching her throat and filling her lungs as she paddles uselessly against the water.

Her eyes find him once more. “You look cold.” Blue eyes see the dripping mane, the shivers under his skin. “I’m Elena,” she says, as if her name could offer him some warmth, when she has so little give.  



* e l e n a
in the dark I’ll pray for the return of the light
the sunflower daughter of benjamin and beylani
of dusk.




RE: you were running through me like water [michael] - Michael - 02-04-2020

“A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river but then he’s still left with the river. A man takes his sadness and throws it away but then he’s still left with his hands.”


Perhaps it is wrong, to say too much.

Perhaps there is some deep-set and subtle sin in opening yourself, in ripping your seems and letting out all the moths. Catharsis is not the justification Michael believes in when he opens his mouth and pours himself into everyone else's empty spaces as if he is not also just a house of rooms that echo each word he says until he is dizzy from hearing it.

Michael does not say this--as Michael does not say most things, whether they should be left unsaid or not. Instead he watches her, blue on baby blue, as she turns from him to the sea, gray-green and rolling in the heavy winter light.

Something settles in him that he doesn't like, something like the remnants of a nightmare, the way it sits in the gut for hours after waking. Michael does not know what it is, just that it rises in his chest like the sun when she mentions her family.

What he doesn't realize is that it is a kind of mourning - and a thing that's lived for centuries can be forgiven for forgetting how to love a thing that can die in any way that touches him - but the ferocity with which it hits him makes it hard to breathe.

"That must be hard," he says, swallowing around the rock in his throat. Grief fills him and then passes through and out of him as if it were never there at all. He thanks the sea, silently. He thanks Elena, silently, when she changes the subject.

You look cold, she says, and Michael gives her this smile that is so much warmer than he has ever felt, just a gentle tucking in of the corner of his mouth. It looks out of place around the tangled, dripping mess of his mane. "Don't worry, I am very cold." He says. "I'm just--"

Michael pauses, and his smile outlives itself, rotting as it shines.
Why is he here?

Because he is afraid? Because he has never been so afraid or so lost in his hundreds of years of life? Because he is full of some indefinite, cringing sadness that he cannot place or name or even necessarily see, but it is so heavy that it is always right there where he feels it the most? Because he cannot quite see who he is through the fog?

There are many reasons.
What are you doing out here? he echoes back to himself. Michael looks out at the waves and he thinks, drowning.

"Just visiting," he decides, "haven't been in a while. My name is Michael."


@Elena


RE: you were running through me like water [michael] - Elena - 02-07-2020

every day it feels like I’m holding back an ocean


She was once a slate, and what had been written on her was the joys of childhood, the love of her family, their names etched within her soul. Their stories, their scriptures, it is a story still seen in the heart upon her brow, in the way she smiles when the flowers bloom for the first time in spring.

She was once a slate, a blank paper, an empty canvas. Drawn across her was grief and agony, some recalled, some buried too deep, skeletons locked in a closet.

Now, she is not so empty. She has her stories, and she has others too.

(That tree is a story. The sun goddess, the blue man, everything that came after. The love and loss and family and his touch. It is a story, a foundation, and it is one that hurts to tell.)

Now she holds in her hand the pen, the paintbrush.

Now her heart, the fire, it thrums in her veins and she can hear Michael breathing in the silence as her gaze is cast outwards looking to the sea. She does not know the way her words bite into him, how they raise a feeling within him, but maybe, maybe if he had, Elena would have moved to his side and rested her head against a stranger’s shoulder and began to hum as her mother had done so often for her. She would have sought to soothe his hardship and cull his mourning. Elena would reach into the very depth of Michael’s pain and taken it from her to place upon herself, if she could. But she knows none of this and so she keeps staring seawards with those heartbreakingly blue eyes of hers.

She hardly responds to him, just a simple nod of her head, perhaps considering her earlier thought and not wishing to say too much more. But then why do her lips part like everything wants to come rushing out and into Michael’s hands for him to hold? Elena steadies her tongue and blinks twice until her words fade entirely on the matter.

His smile is anything but unnoticed by the golden girl and she cannot help but that old familiar feeling of warmth and compassion fly loose on the upturned corners of her lips. “You see,” she begins, her voice lilts with gentle teasing. “That is exactly the kind of thing that does make me worry,” she says. And Elena, who has no shy bone in her body, who would probably smile at the boogey man if she thought it was what he needed, she moves close to Michael, until her own body heat can finds its way to him, and she feels the bite of his cold skin against her own.

She can read his thoughts, she thinks, not because she has some telepathic ability, but because the look on his face as his eyes find water is a look she has seen before reflected from the crystal clear river of Beqanna just before she left. And suddenly there is such an urge to save him that Elena lets her blue eyes find his own as she reaches out with both hands to pull his head above the water. “Well, I am glad you stopped by for a visit, Michael,” she says, a desperate attempt to revive him, to expel the water from his lungs.

She tries again.

“Tell me something about you I don't know,” she says, icy blue eyes on him now, an echo of words once said before, though they were never her own until now, she does not realize how history has written itself across her lips.



* e l e n a
in the dark I’ll pray for the return of the light
the sunflower daughter of benjamin and beylani
medic of dusk.



@Michael


RE: you were running through me like water [michael] - Michael - 02-08-2020

“A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river but then he’s still left with the river. A man takes his sadness and throws it away but then he’s still left with his hands.”


She reminds him of Eleven.

The thought hits him like an arrow, running him through before he can draw his own. It's there in the worried crease of her brow, in the light cast off the wet sand that lands at an angle on the curve of her jaw and the arch of her ribs. 

He aches this as she nods, creaking like old ships. Elena's face is set in some indefinite, effortless patience with an undercurrent of defiance. It is a look he knows well. It is a look he has dreamed all his life, long as it is--and to see it again feels both holy and empty in a way he cannot bring himself to consider, let alone speak.

He breathes: in, then out. The feeling passes through him like sand. It is an ache a few lifetimes removed. It slips through his fingers like broken glass. Michael doesn't look at his hands, bleeding and bleeding and bleeding.

She turns back to him, teasing, and Michael ducks his head.
"You really shouldn't," he tries, offering her a grim smile. "worry, I mean. I think I'm tougher than I look."

When he looks up his face is buried in the wet, white mess of his mane but he meets her eyes from beneath it. Michael is not surprised to see her full of motherly affection, the kind of open-armed desperation that he seems to invite everywhere he goes. He thinks it is the beautiful droop of his eyes or the dull gold of his coat but it never is.

It is the same look Isra turns on him when he smiles like he is looking at her from across the yawning jaws of a canyon. It is the same look that Moira has never turned on him, not once--and maybe this is why Moira's face settles in him, now, with the quiet reminder that you are leaving her.

Elena is trying. She is trying so hard. He appreciates the gesture, vain as it is.
She says, tell me something about you that I don't know. It should strike him as odd--it's the kind of question he would ask someone. They are perfect strangers. He shivers against her side, and laughs, like apple cider and all bright, warm things.

His head breaks the surface. He bobs. Fine.
Everything is fine.

"So, what?" he chuckles. "Everything? Do you have that kind of time?"

@Elena


RE: you were running through me like water [michael] - Elena - 02-09-2020

every day it feels like I’m holding back an ocean


Elena was born of love. It was the kind of love Shakespeare wrote his sonnets about. The kind of love that moved the heavens and rearranged the cosmos. The kind that was whispered about for years, for decades, for centuries to come. She knew it. It was the very thing that made up her very being, and yet, yet, the love that beats in her heart is a different thing entirely. Wild, raging thing, both platonic and romantic and everything in between. It is a wild river that courses through her and consumes everything around her. She doesn't now how to control it, contain it, if it were even possible to cage such a thing. Therefore she falls in love again and again with everyone she meets.

Perhaps, one day, she will learn to anchor it.

Though she is just as likely to spend her days adrift at sea

The golden girl knows that she will always long for it (she has searched for love in the darkest of souls), will always cherish it (had she not so painstakingly traced Aerwir’s cheek underneath the moonlight?), will always worship it in a way (she still dreams of all of them). She will never have what her parents had (that rare and beautiful thing.) But she cannot imagine her life without it.

She has given it to those who are fierce, to those who are beautiful, to those who are cruel, to those who are soft.
She has given it to those who loved it and those who ruined it.

But, Elena still gives it all the same, she could never be so selfish to keep her heart only to herself.

Cream hair reflects the light that reaches her, it is like snow upon the ground standing there against her own golden skin. He ducks his head and there is that reflex in her heart that throws itself to catch him, but outwardly, she is still, content to stand by his side and feel the outward and inward motion of his breathing. “I wouldn't doubt it,” she says, looking to his blue eyes, the same color as Lilli’s, her mother, Valerio, and now her own. There was strength in that color of early morning frost, of this she is sure. “I cant seem to help it though.” She says and she furrows her brow as if trying to figure it out, why she couldn't stop herself from throwing herself in harms way for every single person she met. She thinks back to Litotes and how she had thrown herself in front of him to keep him from running off a cliff. He had been a total stranger, but it had been second nature to Elena.

She was a fire blanket, willing to burn to put out the flames for another.

‘I’m an orphan,’ that had been her answer when he had asked Elena the same question she poses to Michael now. But in the same breath she had wondered, does someone stop being an orphan once they grow up? Or would this be Elena forever? The girl with no parents.

No, that isn't right.
She has parents, they just aren't here, they are too busy living six feet under.

He shivers against her and she is brought back into the moment. He laughs and Elena traces the lines of it through the cool air. She laughs then too and the sound is clear and melodious, her quick smile is tilted higher. “I pride myself on being a know-it-all,” she says in that same teasing voice that is gentle like low tide and the starfish that cling to stones run smooth by water. “And I cant very well be a know-it-all if I don't know everything now can I?” She asks with a raised eyebrow and humor. “I can go first if you’d like,” she offers, a simple thing. Elena does not quite make the same confession as she has before, she had learned her lesson.

Maybe.
Not really.

“I was once blind,” she says, a secret she holds close. She had been born with sight, it was taken away, and then it was gifted back to her. That face adorned with a heart upon her brow looks to Michael now with something like childish excitement, the same flicker that sits atop birthday candles on cake. “Now, it’s your turn,” she says, and the past is forgotten as the future draws itself on the curve of Michael’s cheek and writes itself across his tongue.



* e l e n a
in the dark I’ll pray for the return of the light
the sunflower daughter of benjamin and beylani
medic of dusk.


@Michael


RE: you were running through me like water [michael] - Michael - 04-04-2020

“A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river but then he’s still left with the river. A man takes his sadness and throws it away but then he’s still left with his hands.”


I wouldn't doubt it, she says, and Michael wonders-- should she? When he claims to be strong, to be steady, to be anything at all but a coward buried up to his neck in the soil of his fear and his grief and his guilt, does it matter? Should she believe Michael? Michael who lies, Michael who hopes, Michael who closes his mouth and smiles around unspoken things that cut his gums like glass?

Should anyone believe him?

Elena looks at him and in him, digging and peeling and picking and Michael knows what it is to look at himself, the curious, dull shine of his own eyes when he takes hold of a person and pulls and pulls and pulls until he can hold each reel of film up to the light and see their faces change, frame by frame. He thinks he doesn't much like it. He says none of this, as usual.

"I'm sorry to hear that," he offers. He is shoving back thoughts as he speaks, some far-off memory of blood in the sand an an old woman's eyes when she said I don't know where your father is the way a vulture might have, and Eleven, always Eleven, who had touched her shoulder on his and promised death could not touch him in any way that counts.

And now he is here, Novus, and he is also trying not to think that death has found him, finally, spun the long, long story of his life to a few more short chapters, and how, from time to time, he feels its teeth on his ankles when he closes his eyes.

He doesn't much know if he likes Elena. She opens herself and Michael cracks in turn, shedding shell after shell that he had forgotten he had. This must be how Toro had felt.

He reminds himself to apologize and then forgets the thought altogether.

Elena teases, the soft cream of her face creased with a smile, and says to him: I can go first, if you'd like. Michael takes a step back to see her better and bows his head in invitation. He does not need to say, be my guest, it is there in the tilt of his head, the wet blue of his scarf as it slaps his neck, the small smirk that grows and grows until he is smiling in a way that looks so right on his face it is a wonder it happens so rarely.

"I'm sorry for that, too," he says, "I have--had? a granddaughter that is--was blind. But I last saw her centuries ago, so..." and he shrugs, like it never mattered, like it is a life so far-removed from him that it isn't real, just another film strip rimmed in black, burning away in the fire.

Michael gives her no time to respond, instead tucks his chin to his chest in thought before saying, "I'm afraid of snakes. And most lizards." His smile thins. "I don't like how still they can be."

@Elena


RE: you were running through me like water [michael] - Elena - 04-07-2020

every day it feels like I’m holding back an ocean


She had not been certain why she had followed her father out to the lake so late at night, except had had asked and she had never been the daughter to turn down such things. She was a quiet girl back then, content to walk amongst the tulips and learn the beauty of Windskeep, but she had never wanted for more. She had never desired any kind of power of attention outside the gentle love of her family. Never wanted for more.

Still, she loves her father and respects him perhaps more than anyone she has ever known.

So when he had asked, she had followed.

She had walked silently beside him in the cool night air, careening her neck back to look at him with amber eyes, facing forward with a roll of her shoulders. She startles then when her father asks her a question. “What do you want to be, Elena?” He had asked her that night.

That same night Elena had no answer to give.

She could live a hundred nights and not feel the way she did now.

Life thrilled through her, raced through her veins,

Elena is foolish, without a doubt, it goes hand in hand with her brazenness.

And oh Michael, how she believes you. You could tell her the sky was falling and she would scurry for cover without glancing up. She looks at him offering him everything she can in this moment. ‘I don't know you,’ she thinks and for once it is a beautiful thing to not know. She decides in that moment she doesn't want to know, to know him other than the blonde man that had gone to the sea on a cold day.

And yet—
‘This cant be the last time I see you,’ she thinks in the same breath, in the same heartbeat. “Don’t say that,” she says because she cant bare to hear something like pity in his voice. That cant be how she knows him today, tonight.

Michael doesn't know if he likes Elena, but the sunshine child has already given herself to him and promised to make him her friend because he had risen from the sea just as her parents had so long ago. He smells like salt and mystery and her heart races comfortably in her golden breast.

‘You don't seem old enough for a granddaughter…or for centuries.’ Is what she thinks but has no time to say. The mystery of Michael moves further down her spine.

“They say a serpent tricked Eve into biting the apple and in doing so doomed us all and that is why we fear them.” She says with a story-telling smile. ‘Is that what you fear, Michael, do you fear we are all doomed here?’ But she doesn't ask this this. ‘Do you think we were supposed to be here at all, Michael? Or was it just an accident, a mistake that cant be corrected?’ She bites her tongue instead of speaking. Instead those longing blue eyes reach out to beyond the ocean. “Do you think there is a place out there? Beyond this? How do we know here is where we are supposed to be? And not there?” There. The ever wondrous place Elena never seems quite able to reach. “Would you go there, if you could?”

Would you?
Would she?

Would you?

Michael,

Would you?



* e l e n a
in the dark I’ll pray for the return of the light
the sunflower daughter of benjamin and beylani
medic of dusk.



@Michael


RE: you were running through me like water [michael] - Michael - 04-20-2020

“A man takes his sadness down to the river and throws it in the river but then he’s still left with the river. A man takes his sadness and throws it away but then he’s still left with his hands.”


There are always people, asking him--begging him--to stay or to go.
Eleven asks him to stay. Asks him to flay himself open and show her all the parts of him that hurt, each raw and aching wound. She asks him to stay even when she does not. She asks and she asks and she asks until Michael is sand, falling in wet clumps out of her hand, breaks apart as he plummets.

Inwe asks him to leave, because he had had tried to be a good king instead of a good father and in the end he was neither, with nothing to show for it - so here he is, king of nothing. Father of no one. Another name washed away by the surf.

Isra asks him to stay, and he can't. Isra asks him to stay with her heart black as a burned out tree and a hungry god inside of her--or she is the hungry god, but he can't tell. Isra asks him to stay and Michael's heart fills with helium, beats faster and faster until it is a pair of wings carrying him away. He is so tired of running but he runs and he runs and he runs.

Isra then asks him to leave, with her, with her family, to do-- something. And Michael says yes, yes, anything for you, yes, because he could never say no. Not again. Not after the last time. And he is so tired of running.

“They say a serpent tricked Eve into biting the apple and in doing so doomed us all," Elena says, "and that is why we fear them," Elena says. For a second Michael just stares at her, trying to find something to say. He does not know how to say that he fears anything that hides so it can't be seen. He does not know how to say that the snake is not there until it is rattling and flashing its fangs. He does not know how to tell her that his life has been snake after snake, curled up in the sun, waiting and waiting until he gets too close.
at he doesn't look, and that's why he gets bitten. He doesn't want to look. He'd never want to look.

Michael follows her eyes back out to the sea, tracking a wave as it crests and then rolls in to meet them. It grabs at his ankles and the wet sheet of his smane and says tell her but he either can't, or won't, so he doesn't.

"I think it's a lot to ask, to belong anywhere." he begins, watching a crab scurry out of the surf to bury itself under a rock. "I think some places want you, and some don't, but I don't know that a person ever belongs." Michael wonders when he became so cynical. Michael wonders many things about him self and none of them are good.

Would you go?
Elena asks him to go, asks him where, asks him eh, and Michael thinks of the journey ahead with a heart heavy enough to think their ship. He thinks of the sea, and the sky, and gulls keening into the setting sun.

He thinks of Elena, and her eyes that beg, and her heart so big and so wide it could swallow him whole.
"Yes." he says. "But not alone."

@Elena