elena

I've hidden memories in boxes inside my head before. Sometimes it's the only way to deal with things.

Nothing good will come of this, she had thought dancing by the fires, but that part of her had flittered up and into the stars with the rest of the smoke. He baptized her first with fire and smoke. Again with salty kisses and ocean spray. And once more with lake water and starlight. 

The roar of the ocean is still in her ears. She smells like salt and wildflowers. Glacier blue eyes blink against the bleary light as she walks. Despite the nights she spends in Denocte with Elli and Azrael, she is a Terrastellan girl through and through. There is lavender imprinted in her skin, eyes blue like the sky over the swamp, and the walls around her heart are as high as the cliffs. 

She dances as she walks the streets of Denocte. Elena doesn't belong here, and there is something that feels so freeing with this knowledge. She walks over cobblestones the way Azrael had shown Elli to skip stones across water. But she still cannot help the way her blue eyes delicately trace the Night Court streets as if he may materialize before her. He wont, she insists, he has yet to, she has either avoided him, or he has kept away from her. She is not entirely sure which is more heartbreaking in all reality. 

It is only when she reaches the monastery that her chest starts to tremble. If she were to ever see him it would be here, but Elena has a duty (“what would you choose? Duty? Or love?” She had asked Lilli. Lilli had asked her the same. She never answered, only said “Love is fickle, duty is reliable.”) Duty is reliable, as reliable as Elena in her skills of healing that she would come here of all places. ‘This way Lady Elena,’ a monk greets her. She is led to the one who lays ill in bed. Inspects his illness, asks him questions, she forgets about the monk, about everything that came after, because love was fickle. She instead thinks about the high fever, the way his limbs have grown weary, and the pounding headache behind his eyes because duty was reliable.

But where love is warm—
Duty can be so lonely. She had forgotten that part. She has also forgotten that cliff dancers never live for what is so reliable. (Where was the thrill?) 

“I think,” she begins, watching him sweat, shake, fight whatever it was attacking his system. “He may need to be transported to Terrastella, so I can watch him, if it is feasible.” Elena blinks blue eyes at the monk. “I can talk to Morr about arrangements between our Courts,” she offers. There would be no conflict that she could think of. One of her soldiers is sick, Terrastella would care for him, and he would be returned, strong and as fit as ever. And hopefully, Denocte could return the favor another time, in another form. Morrighan was hardly the type to owe a debt. ‘The Regent is on his way, you can speak to him,’ one of the monks says and Elena’s eyes widen slightly and ears flitter forwards in her tangle of blonde hair. So Morrighan had picked a new Regent? She was surprised, but then again, nothing about the fire walker was slow, because who ever knew fire to spread with ease and leisure? ‘If you have the time,’ they offer her respectfully. She smiles and nods and she wonders—do they know? What happened between her and one of their own? Do they know what they created? She wants to ask them, if love was so forbidden, why would her daughter be graced with Caligo’s marking? But she doesn't ask, they don’t want to know…and neither does she. 

‘Follow us,’ they say and the blonde girl of sunshine walks out of the room and into the spacious hall. ‘He is just up ahead, we will leave you now,’ they say and walk away as Elena walks ahead. There is the echo of feet on the ground, no longer the skipping of a pebble across a lake, thrown by her daughter, but it sounds like the crackle of fire when Elli was only a twinkle in the eyes of sunlight and shadows. 

She was not expecting anything she realizes only when she sees it is him. Elena realizes she had no expectations, no visions, and she thinks it is because it was him all along, and maybe deep down she knew it was him, that it would be him that she saw today. She should have filled herself with an idea, with a presumption, a conjecture. Something. Because it is when she is least expecting that he comes to her, always. Be it a festival, a cliff side, a hospital, a lake, shadows, an ocean. They will find each other still when they are both six feet under and dance upon each other’s graves. (With rolling hips, rocking shoulders, and roving steps.) They are built from the bones of unassuming dance partners. 

Maybe she shouldn't be surprised that it is now that she finds him, when she has forgotten that she was even looking for anything to begin with. 

Because she has looked for him.
Everywhere she has gone.
Perhaps she should be ashamed of how desperately she has looked for him, when she was the one who told him to stay away. The one who was so frightened of him finding out about his daughter. She could still be nothing more than that foolish teenager with the boy too old for her, hoping to get caught sneaking back from rendezvous she should have never had.

She thought of him more than she should have.

She dreamed of the quiet moments in their story together. She dreamed so much that she almost does not believe it is him. Blue eyes brush downwards, as if not seeing him means it is not real and he is not really standing before her. She grows still, her eyes hesitant as they finally sweep up and then hungrily study his face. Trying to memorize every detail of him and commit it to memory, trying to force herself to remember it all and trying to ignore the ache that spreads in her with the want to reach out and touch him—just for a moment.

Perhaps she notices the changes in him right away.
Perhaps she doesn’t.
Perhaps she’s too distracted by the way her heart beats differently just by being around him. And maybe she would never admit it but he has reoriented her pulse, she can feel how the rhythm has changed from the little girl who thought if she ran fast enough, she would fly. She tries to not feel the cold of the distance between them and she fights against the marrow-deep need to close it, but she does not trust the way that her head swims. Steady, steady, like balancing a book atop her head. She would break this.

She would break this like she breaks everything in her life.

He is similar enough to the ghost the haunts her that it nearly wrecks her.

It nearly unravels her until she’s flung wide, the thread coming undone at such a fast pace, she cant sew herself back up before that single string is dragging at her feet. 

He is here before her so quickly that she cant breathe. 

She cant stop to process. 

That look on his face is so similar a one he had when they first met, except those eyes, she cannot see his eyes, that her heart breaks. It shatters in her chest completely. There is the sound of her banging and clanging against her ribs, the rattle of a thousand broken pieces shifting in her flayed open chest, that let her know she is not the girl she pretends to be. She is not larger than life, but still oh so very tiny, like golden sunlight drops on a puddle left behind by spring rainfall. 

She feels her heart turn to dust in her chest.

She is not the same girl he had left behind. Her heart, although it aches for him, no longer belongs to him and even standing here, with the smell of him, and his shoulder adorned with the same marking her daughter has that brings a tidal wave of emotion crashing over her, part of her is gone.

That part of her is curled up against a stallion made of stars with bright eyes and a gentle touch. She is standing with her cheek against his strong shoulder, feeling the echoes of home and love in his pulse. She is not innocent anymore, the last of her blissful innocence is at the bottom of a lake far, far away from here. But with him, with her star, she is at least, happy. 

Tenebrae left her and he tore a hole right through her.

Azrael came to her and he filled it.

She wants to be, or a part of her does, wants to be a volcano. She wants to be an earthquake, and tear the world at its seams into halves. She wants to be as strong as she sounds when she said ‘Don’t come back,’ but all of her resolve so quickly turns to poison in her gut. It splits her in a bigger way than Tenebrae ever did. It splits her in a bigger way than anything ever has.

Would the constellations spell out her regret?

She wants to speak, but she cannot because there aren’t words that exist inside of her to say what she needs to say, because there aren’t words existing like that at all.

She wants to ask him what happened, but she knows it can be dangerous to ask a question when the answer is already known. Her voice is steady despite it all, despite the shivers that send earthquakes down her spine. She quirks a brow he cannot see, but there is a smile in her voice that she deliberately places there so he will hear it. “Missed me?”