[EXP] my tomorrow longs to be unknown

[Elena]

take this burden away from me
and bury it before it buries me

The time between night and morning, the place between sleeping and awake, this is where we find Elena at her sea side home. She dreams of her family again. 

It is her father and her mother, but they do not stand at the edge of the lake in Windskeep, but Paraiso. Her father is young, no older than two, her mother the same. Elena knows it is her mother, the blue in her eyes tell her all she needs. “Hello,” she says, sweet, honey, lavender, her voice holds a melody as if she were singing while she speaks. “Such a beautiful day isn’t it?” She asks him. “My name is Beylani. What do they call you?” It is in that moment realizes, she is seeing the day her mother and father first met. Magic. Elena knows this is the culprit the moment her father introduces himself as Benjamin. But why would magic bring her here? It is only when they move into the lake, swimming in unision, that Elena feels it. The overwhelming emotion that can only be described as attraction. It radiates from her mother and she knows that it is for her obsidian father. Young love. Puppy love. Whatever you call it, but it was that first blossoming of love all the same.

Elena awakes with a start. The images she had seen had been so crisp, the emotion had been so real. She blinks the sleep from her eyes, staring around her room with a racing heart. She rises from her bed and steps out into the fresh air of her sea side home. It is then another image hits her, falling over her blue eyes with such ferocity that she knows it is not a dream.

Marcelo. The man who had been a boy when he had volunteered to help raise Elena, the little orphan that she was. “It’s them! They are here!” He yells as she races forwards, sliding to a halt before Valerio, Lovelace, and Ruth—his mother. His mother was back. “Mommy.” He wraps himself around her, tears spill from his eyes as mother and son reunite. Elena knows the emotion before Marcelo’s own washes over her. Joy. Such joy. She knows because had she the opportunity to see her parents once more, her emotion would be much the same.

Blue eyes blink away the vision away. Why had this memory come to her? This memory, it was not her own, Elena had no right to see it, to experience, to feel it, like she had. It is then she realizes she has traveled outside of her home and is standing beside the sea. How did she get out here? The cold water hits against her legs and Elena spirals into another vision, as unrelenting as the previous. 

Longing. Despair. Anguish. All for a lover who had left. “No, no, no.” Elena is surprised to see the silver form of Aletta, heavy with child as she settles herself down. Elena can see it now, this child is coming, and she doesn't wish for it to. This before Elena arrived in Murmuring Rivers, Elena would be born this very afternoon in fact, just hours after Lilli on the birthday that they shared. She did not want this child to come, not without Valerio, not without her love. Elena’s chest only further tightens with Aletta’s heartbreak when she looks with silver mare into the blue eyes of Lilli, Valerio’s eyes, legacy eyes. And how they both yearn to see them again. Aletta in Valerio, and Elena in Lilli.

Her chest feels like it is crumbling inside her. Elena, during that time period, had never realized how much Aletta had ached for the man the golden girl considered her godfather. Aletta had been a good leader, more than a good leader, but Elena had been so wrapped up in her own grief of losing her parents, of being forced from the only home she has known, had not realized the atlas upon Aletta’s shoulders. Elena knows that feeling now, of losing love, and her awe for the silver queen only grows. The sunshine girl is soaking wet, but no longer in the water, instead she stands on the grassy plains. The shadows of the trees hit her, but it is another memory, another emotion that blinds her. 

Valerio stands there tall and proud, looking into the hazel eyes of the alabaster Snow Prince. Elena knows this scene well, she had lived it. The day Frostbane had come to claim her. The day he had failed. His words are sharp, and that is when she feels it. Anger. She had felt it too that day, but hers had been juvenile, hurt and grief. Valerio’s was protective, defensive, and Elena understood it, it was the same she felt when someone had threatened Lilli. “You will leave. Now. This will be the last time you shall step upon the lands of my family and leave unscathed. That is my promise to you.”

She remembers that day. The day Frostbane had come to claim her. She remembers Valerio had come to save the day as he always does. Elena had seen the winter in Valerio’s eyes that day, the first time she had ever seen such chill. And perhaps this is where Elena had learned to harness such a cold fire as that, as was within his eyes. She finds that she has traveled further, onto the outskirts of the capital. Her eyes are tired, her head throbs. No more, she wants to say, no more. She isn't sure what the purpose of all this magic is, she just pays to Vespera that this is enough. Though, her prayers are not so strong. 

It is that same scene, but she feels not the rage from Valerio, but the fear from Frostbane. It is seen int he way he takes a half step back, the slight widening of his eyes, but it is what ripples off her skin and under her own that Elena is all to aware of what he felt like when the Guardian returned home, always showing up to protect Elena when she needed him most. “Well, well. If it isn't Valerio, the war hero of Windskeep.” Elena narrows her eyes. He speaks strongly, but she knows what he is, has always known, now she only has the proof. He was a coward.

Elena doesn't have any concept of time anymore, has no idea that this has been happening the entire day, an entire day lost in memories and emotions. The sun is setting and another vision falls over her eyes.

She knows this one, because it is as much a memory as it is a vision. Her small, golden body is unhinged with fear. ‘Run, Elena, run!’ her father yellows to her as he turns around to fight. He know he is going to die, he cannot beat Frostbane a third time. Elena cannot look. Blue eyes close and she turns away. The feeling that comes to her though is not fear, but bravery. 

There is at last some reprieve (it is only fitting that the image of her father brings it) as she climbs up the cliffs she has landed beside. The bonfires send signals into the night air. It is comforting, not be alone in the dark. She stands there for how long, Elena isn't sure, it could have been only seconds, could have been minutes, hours even. It is long enough that crowds are beginning to leave, a few stragglers left behind. She should throw something into the fire. She realizes this is not the first time she has thrown worries onto flames, just the last light she had placed them inside had been the fire of her cousin’s heart. 

This one hits her harder than the rest, until she is thrusted backwards knocking her off balance and is suddenly sent careening over a shallow cliff side with a devastating splash below. The cold water hits her but she can feel nothing but one singular emotion: love. 

Lilli refusing to leave her side when the Snow Prince threatens them both.
Lilli and she in their clubhouse within a tree, talking about future plans and future adventures. 
Lilli racing to her in the meadow, promising they would always be best friends forever. 
Lilli snuggling beside her in Culloden, refusing to leave her side. 
Lilli finding her in Hyaline underneath a starry sky.
Lilli crying for her when she left.
Lilli bringing them together with magic. 
Lilli wishing her well. 
Lilli, it had always been her cousin that had loved her most, when her parents left, all that they had felt had been poured into the girl who was more akin to be her crimson sister.

Love. 

Elena is drowning in it. It fights its way towards her lungs, cleansing her body from the inside out. 

Breathe, Elena! Breathe! A voice screams inside her, and the red haired image of Lilliana appears. 

Elena smiles inside her watery dreamland.

so take away this apathy
bury it before it buries me

@Tenebrae <3

[Tenebrae]

T  E  N  E  B  R  A  E

---

On my body, the grace of shadows
and in my heart: all Hells

 

Don’t come back to Terrastella.


Tenebrae would like to honour her words (that haunt him at every turn). But he has become a less than honourable man. 


He can still see the way her lips tipped down, the way hurt crossed her face raw and heartbreaking. There is no part of the Disciple that does not still ache with it.


The sky is smudged with gold. He watches Praistigia’s festivities from a small island just offshore. Denocte is silent behind him, little more than a shadow, low on the horizon. His court seems to sleep, though the monk knows well that he only need to swim toward her shores and the sounds of her festival would reach his ears too.


But it is not Denocte that calls him this night. His body is slick and wet with swimming. The ocean still coos to him. It begs the monk back in. He does not know what to. He fears it, honestly. There is a crimson girl who swims in its depths with teeth his body knows so intimately well. He yearns for her as he yearns for the golden girl who banished him from Terrastella. It is safer here, where indecision and guilt can consume him whole. Where two girls can pull him apart and feast upon the remnants of his bones. He is ruining them. He is ruining himself. He is becoming godless - because soon, he is sure, Caligo will forsake him.


Still, the autumn wind blows in with warm breath that dries the salt-water from his skin. The sea ripples inky black. Atop the cliffs of Praistigia he can see dark shapes moving.


The whimsical breeze throws down words for his ears to catch. Their syllables drift like feathers, slowly, slowly, gentlly as they land.Tenebrae breathes in the smoke that drifts out across the sea.


There is a twist in the monk’s gut, something deep and yearning. He realises that he is not merely watching, but searching. A dismissive breath blows past his lips and his shadows stir like smoke. The Disciple is about to turn when a figure tumbles from the steep cliff’s edge. He watches them tumble down, down and the water rise up, up to meet them. It is all too swift, too violent in the way the water catches them.


With a splash they disappear and the waves roll over the sight of their fall.. The sea drinks them in and tugs them down. There is no recognition upon the cliffs, no sign that anyone saw the shadow slip off the edge of the world. The tide pushes and pulls, in towards land, out into the deep. The figure does not surface. The ocean has already forgotten them.


Tenebrae is in the water, swimming before he has even thought what he might do. The water rumbles in his ears, salt pressing into his lashes. The tide pushes the monk on and on faster, faster. 


It seems to be age until he reaches the point where the horse disappeared. His lungs are constricting but all the water remains unbroken by a surfaced body. They still sink, they still fall into the blue.


He gasps air in and dives, down, down, down. His star-bright eyes illuminate the darkness. There is a glint of gold. It strikes something deep within his chest. He swims down harder, further, deeper. The glint of butter-soft light glows brighter, bigger the deeper he descends. It calls to him, a siren’s song. That small, pale light grows and grows and grows. Tenebrae’s fear matches it, until it blows his heart wide open. Panic clutches at his throat. Deeper and deeper he pushes and it is not as fast as Boudika’s grasp. For a moment he regrets that she did not turn him, that he did not bite back. Was this the cost of saying no?


Elena floats in a halo of flaxen hair. It unsettles the monk to know how readily he recognises her lifeless body. Already he knows her curves, the fan of her lashes, the hue of her hair, the delicate contours of her face, her limbs. The black water of the midnight sea paints her gold darker and darker still. It cradles her. There is an elegance in her quiet descent into the deep. Elena is beautiful in a terrible, awful way.  It takes only a moment for Tenebrae’s magic to reach for her. Darkness clutches at her body.  grasps her, pulling her up, up, up. 


Tenebrae raises her from the depths of the ocean. They ascend until the water’s surface breaks across their faces. His fae-girl is limp, her lashes jeweled with salt-water. He does not rest until there is beneath his feet and the sea does not reach her. Only then does the monk realise he has pulled her to the island. Still he obeys her. Still he has not returned to Terrastella - maybe he is more honourable than he first thought. 


The monk sweeps the wet ropes of her hair from her face (no longer does each fine strand frame her like rays of sunlight). There is no inch of her that seems to waken. She lies still, fragile as flotsam washed up upon the beach. “Elena.” Tenebrae breathes where he knees, his muzzle close to hers to catch the too-shallow, too-soft breaths that escape her. They are weak across his lips, his nose. Sand lies as gold dust in her lashes and across her body. Oh she is too still.


So terribly still.


“Elena!” Her name breaks with his voice. Though it is only the sound of her name that shatters upon the rocks, he knows there is something else falling apart within him.

@Elena - aaargh <3
 ~   ~   ~   ~   ~

[Elena]

take this burden away from me
and bury it before it buries me

Their dance had always been fatal, Elena had no idea just how so. And maybe it is her fate to be damned— born of romantics of the worst kind (heartsick, both fated for each other in the ways of poets, in the ways of love too-consuming exist), of course such feelings would then exist in her own veins. Elena was her own demise at the end of the day. She has put every scar on her body, has asked for every bruise that sits behind her blue eyes.

Elena had never imagined that one day the sadness would swallow her whole.

She had never imagined that this world she loves so much, this world she had adored, would care fissures that run through her skin, canyons placed there by death, grief, forsaken love, and greed. Dragging their fingers through her flesh—leaving her hollowed out.

Her skies that had once been so blue (like a summer’s day, illuminated by the sun.) And they had turned stormy and Elena, with all her grace, had turned to face it and she was swallowed by the hurricane, whipped by the winds, and battered by the driving rain. The tsunami had drenched her. And she had looked at him, his shadows among the bonfire that summer night, and the seed of desire had been planted in her. It had turned something pure within her and morphed it into something she did not recognize. It had turned into something she could not understand or name or, more often than not, even confess.

It left her blue eyes peering into the shadows more times than she cared to admit. Looking for the blue sheen of his eyes and the glow of his skin.

How fitting it would be those same eyes that find her now, the same skin that she rests up as she takes her from the water. She breathes in, shallow, ragged, water logged. She breathes in his fear and it mutates in her mouth, transforms in her lungs.

They are on the shore. Her lips are clamped tightly together—like lips pressed into a kiss. It smells of salt, and she can feel the thin layer that is sticking to her, the sand that clings like children to their mothers. There is the feeling of water drenched hair being swept aside, revealing the heart shaped marking that sits beneath flaxen hair.

Elena.

It is faint. She thinks it is another vision, and she wants to cry, if she could open her eyes perhaps she would weep right there in the sand with the sea lapping against her legs. Elena! His nearness, his voice suddenly brightens something within her and the sound of his heartbeat is enough to drive her mad with the fever of her desire, but she bites back at it as she suddenly opens her eyes and stares up at him.

I told you not to come.
I don’t want to see you again.
Leave me alone, please.

The list of words, sentences breathed is endless, but Elena offers him nothing but a blue eyed gaze as she looks up at him, the dying bonfires still offering them light as it reflect against the ocean water. She breathes in confessions she doesn't wish to say to him. Her golden sides heave then as she brings deep breaths of air into her lungs, drinking int he autumn air, the silver of the moon washing her with milky light. She does not know how she ended up here. She does not know who she is or what she is doing anymore. She cannot dip her fingers into her chest and find a heart that she recognizes. 

She is lost, and she has no idea how to go about finding herself again.

And so she reaches out to the first thing she sees, in her watery haze it is so easy to confuse salvation and sin that she is reaching out towards him like he might offer her the earlier. Her head presses against his own as she breathes. His own desires fill her and she can feel his own need sinking beneath her skin. His emotions cloud her own judgment and Elena’s emotions, the words of fire that had hinged on her lips are lost in the shuffle. “Tenebrae,” she practically whispers. Said so differently than that day at the hospital, where there was once disdain there is now relief. Where there was once anger there is thrill. “Tenebrae,” she says again, those blue eyes searching his face for all the familiarity she has coveted. “Why?” She asks him, and it is only when the water clears her mind that her voice begins to inch towards those flames again. Why did he save her? Why did he press such sweet emotions into her chest only to reach for them back? Why did he have to split his heart in so many ways (duty, faith, a mermaid, a fae.)

“Why did you do this?” And it takes all her strength to ask. She lets her body collapse against him, clutching so tightly so a rope she knows will never have the strength to hold her.

so take away this apathy
bury it before it buries me

@Tenebrae <3

[Tenebrae]

T  E  N  E  B  R  A  E

---

On my body, the grace of shadows
and in my heart: all Hells

 


She is soft and limp within his grasp. He shatters at the sight of her. Sharp shards of obsidian glass slice deep into him. The monk bleeds a cacophony of emotions, each one more potent, more consuming than the other. They each steal the breath from his lungs, he has known what it is to sink to the bottom of the sea and yet this drowning, this swallowing grief kills him more slowly, more awfully than he ever thought possible.


Elena is everywhere. Before him, within him, twining herself into his heart. Yet he is shattering, for it all seems too late. A hatred blooms deeply within him. It is dark and fetid and ugly. It seeps into the weakest parts of him, manipulating, twisting his insecurities with its gnarled fingers.


Tenebrae.


That is what she whispers after she looks at him for so long that the world falls still and deathly silent. The monk can no longer hear the sound of the tide that had rolled up the beach and lapped at her limp body. It calls Elena back into its watery depths but Tenebrae had already lost one girl to its deep. He is loath to lose another, no matter how the sea-water already gleams in Elena’s bright blue eyes. 


Her bright blue eyes. Oh.


They are darker than when she first opened them. His fae girl’s gaze turns to murky midnight. Her eyes become pearlescent (as the vast galaxies above) when moonlight descends and softly limn the edges of them. 


Elena rouses more with every moment and yet it does not ease the clawing in his chest and in his soul. But Tenebrae was ever the fool to think that he might find calm so close to this Terrastellan girl. His remorse still spirals, even as she lies still and small upon the beach. Though the earth now holds her, Tenebrae knows they are both still drowning.


There is nothing else for him to watch when her gaze is riveted to his. With every passing moment that he seals his gaze tighter to hers, he watches the way a maelstrom builds behind her eyes. 


The air tastes of magic, commanded by the mystery that swirls within her gaze. It is sweet upon his lips, tasting of stars and crimson-gold sunsets. Her lashes are dark and he counts each one, even where they cling together, still wet from the sea. The ground him, yet she is pulling him in and his grasp is failing until Tenebrae is falling into her.


She rises suddenly to press her brow to his. He groans a strangled and desperate sound. Elena’s touch is salvation and a living, thriving life that sears its way through his being. It reaches the cords of divine shadow magic that hold together his existence. Her fire twines through the darkness and moonlight at the very essence of him. With her brow she blots out the half moon sigil atop his. 


Elena extinguishes every part of Tenebrae that he thinks matters, until it is only her, her, her. 


And even that is not enough for it is not just her magic that lays itself across his lips. The taste of her skin is there, sweet as caramel. She is within him and without. The girl is a drug. The monk sees it now. The way she is in his blood, his heart, his soul, the way her eyes echo all the emotions that brew terrible and jumbled within him. She steals them all, along with his heart, his breath, his holy vows. 


Now his name upon her lips. Tenebrae. He looks to where her mouth cradles it. His eyes close against her every intrusion into his being. Yet he cannot blot her out because she is still there, reaching deep into her chest as well at his. Does she find his heart there? Trembling and fearful of what she does to him? It clings tightly to a god, a god, a god… What was her name?


“I did not catch you.” The strangled confession is sour upon his tongue. He breathes the confession across her face and the shadows press it into her cheeks, her throat, her chest. “I was too far away and when I saw it was you… You were so deep, Elena, I thought you were dead.” The monk presses a kiss against the groove of her throat. Now it is not just her taste upon his lips but the feeling of her life pumping vibrant and alive, alive, alive. 

Why? his fae-girl asks and he can feel the way the word reverberates through her slim body. Her magic has pulled from him every last piece of truth he has tried to hide. Elena exposes him as she whispers, 


Why did you do this?


Though his shadows curl against her against him. He has nothing with which to hide himself. Not any more. 

"Do what?" The monk asks, needing to hear it, needing her to ask what he has avoided asking himself: Why a monk is in love? And why with a kelpie and a fae-girl?

"You are magic now." He feels the way she exposes him, the way his emotions seep from him to her. Tenebrae watches the way they settle within the deep pool of her gaze - that pool in which he still finds himself, drowning. He brushes his lips over her eyelids, the windows to her magic - a magic he cannot hide from.

"I did not mean to fall in love with you," the Disciple breathes in apologetic sorrow against her skin where they cling to each other upon the beach, across the sea that reaches to the bottom of the cliff. 

The cliff from which he did not catch her as she fell. 

@Elena - o.o;
 ~   ~   ~   ~   ~

[Elena]

take this burden away from me
and bury it before it buries me

“Tenebrae.”

Her words are a whisper of sound, the keening of a wounded heart, but they sound so sweet when they take the shape of his name. She looks into him with a long gaze as if she might turn up answers beneath his shadows. And she tilts her head in a way that is so deeply reminiscent of her mother that Beylani’s breath would hitch if she could see her. She is her mother’s daughter, and that is why she floods with forgiveness that wants to spill over and drown his heart, but Elena is so resistant to do so. Even when she feels the remorse leap off him like fireflies by the river, dancing through grace.

(Like a girl of sunshine and boy of shadows dancing through bonfire embers.)

There are pieces of them that are one in the same. Practically written across their foreheads, their histories, their childhoods dragged down to their marrow. And maybe this is why he had found her that night because Elena has never had a parent to cling to, and so when she look over her shoulder, it was Tenebrae who walked from the shadows, not her parents. The silence thunders against her eardrums, watching him carefully. They are fire and gasoline. They are so wrong for each other and yet, Elena thrives on moments like this. Her eyelids drift shut as a lungful of air is drawn through her body. She can nearly taste him (and the other woman who has pressed her body against him.)

She presses her brow to his and there is a flutter in her heart, a feeling she had forgotten since she had last stood at the edge of cliff, taunting danger as she danced along its edges. She closes her eyes as colors behind dark lashes. A faint pattern takes place before her, realizing the fatal attraction of the type of men that have taken a starring role in her life. Underworld, Aerwir, Tunnel…Tenebrae. All men that have fallen from grace, all men that have looked upon Elena with hunger in their eyes and palms sweaty with need. They all have found something within the golden girl that brought them to her again and again. Elena never had a chance. “I would ask if you missed me,” she says boldly and her voice trails off for a moment as she glances out towards the water. “But it seems like an obvious answer.” She says quietly, guileless, and helpless beneath the his touch.

They pull away.

(They always pulls away.)

The wind is a gentle caress that plays through the long strands of her hair, entangling them with his as he stands so close to her. The beating of her heart thrumming steadily but quickly within her golden breast as the blue of her eyes consume him, memorizing the hard lines of his face. It’s so hard to not consider the possibilities of him, what it would be like to curl up against the broadness of his massive figure, to feel the volcano within him consume her. Once she had been all fire and brimstone, what would it be like if she could feel that again? Those thoughts are swiftly followed by the other possibility. That the bed he would build next to her would be warm for the summer, the autumn, but grow cold in the snow of winter.

If only he were wholly hers.

Trembling without realizing it, blue sky eyes are filled with ghosts as she is haunted by her own personal demons. Quickly, she bats her lashes as she looks to the black sea, the little sparkle of moonlight that hits the curve of calm waves as he tells, speaks, confesses. For a moment the fierceness of her is slightly softened, biting for a moment at her lower lip. For just a moment she feels a brick come loose in the crusting mortar. “I would have been,” she says, pressing the secret into his hands and folding his fingers over it as if it were a butterfly with gentle wings and soft flutters. But she doesn't tell him about the faces she saw, faces she hasn't seen in so long. Emotions that she felt deep in her chest, so heavy it was the anchor that tried to send her to the bottom of the sea.

Why, she asked him. She thinks, with water still fogging her brain (and her heart still drown, though not with ocean water) maybe she should have never asked it at all. “We are wrong for each other,” she whimpers, constellations exploding in her chest as she goes blind with her desire. Her mouth reaches over and touches his skin, against his jaw, down his neck. But it doesn’t help. Her mind practically fractures with the reality and fiction, he dances in her vision as she trembles against him. She moves closer because she knows she is supposed to move away, she is scared, so scared, that when her head clears—that she will do just that. So, for now, she huddles closer to him, descending into what is wrong, as chaotic and as beautiful as she had tumbled off the cliff side.

She looks up at him, tilting that golden head up as blue eyes spark realization. “I can feel you,” she admits, and it flurries inside because if she was summer and the sun, then he was winter and its moon. She knows what he is going to say, can feel it as the same visions that had caused to dance into the ocean water in a twirl of despair.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

A rush of courage, a blaze in those summer sky eyes darkened to midnight, thinking of brazenly pressing her lips to his. And she realizes that she is no longer thinking it before she is there. Because so many have taken and taken and taken from—it was time for her to take from them. Elena snatches his sin from his lips onto her own. She pulls away from him, half hoping he would follow her, half wishing he wouldn’t. It is only then she grows steely, her eyes glaze over like ocean storms that gather out on open water. There is a tsunami in her chest and it builds and builds. Destruction sits waiting on her tongue. “But you did it anyway.”

And the tidal wave hits the shore.

so take away this apathy
bury it before it buries me

@Tenebrae <3

[Tenebrae]

T  E  N  E  B  R  A  E

---

On my body, the grace of shadows
and in my heart: all Hells

 
Elena is sunlight spilled across the beach. The waves of her hair, its ringlets, are twined with Solis’ light. Even raised from the murky deep-sea depths she glows, resplendent. The monk looks at her and hungers. All of him is famished. His desire has harrowed his soul. The shadows know. They gather about him, holding him together.


The crystal in her eyes is a deep blue that ushers him in. Tenebrae looks away. He feels her as if she is a reckoning tsunami. He cannot handle the force of Elena, the way she watches him, drowns him, sinks herself as water into his body. 


Their foreheads are pressed together, so tightly that no light can penetrate. Yet she might be all the light he needs. The Stallion sighs, he groans.


Her words are chimes, the shattering of light across the glassy sea. The air is filled with the song of her. This night is his, yet she commands it. She commands him, owning him when she suggests asking if he has missed her. Elena does not wait for an answer for she already knows it. The truth tumbles from her lips. It is lyrical and yet each note is a hammer fall upon the monk. Tenebrae says nothing. The silence speaks instead. It caws out its ominous, lonesome call across the sea. He thinks it might be his soul, splitting, failing, fleeing from Elena’s unremitting truth: Tenebrae has missed her.


I would have been.


Dead.


Forever she will be emblazoned in his mind, sinking angelic into the sea, her hair a halo of gilded light, her limbs elegant, her body dying. Death drips saltwater-slick from her body. It falls from her and Tenebrae will not relinquish her until the last piece of the sea has left Elena.


It is a blessing that his magic is the command of darkness and not that he can feel her emotions as she feels his. His own wants, his own desires are enough as they rip apart a lifetime of self control. His religion is a storm-ravaged flag. It is in threads.


Her lips press up to his cheek, his jaw. They trail down his throat. She draws near, even as she tells him how terrible they are for each other. Her body burns him. He turns to smoke, mere darkness tangled into radiant light, Desperate to touch, to love.


Tenebrae holds her, pretending as if darkness knows how to hold light. Another of her truths fill the spaces between darkness and light. It is atoms and energy. It creates and it destroys. It came like an arrow, poisoned and broken from cupid’s bow; a misstrike, a mistake. They were not right for each other.


She is soft, sweet, dangerous when she steals the kiss from his lips. Fire presses along the curve of their mouths, it threatens to turn wild, to become all consuming, turning all to ash and chaos. Tenebrae feels her now, the soft of her skin, the curves of her body. The monk does not even begin to imagine that the magic he tastes upon her lips, metallic and unearthly, is empathy. Elena fills herself up on more than the taste of their kiss. Everything spills through their connection, their kiss, remorse and love, regret and desire.


Just when he begins to think to end their kiss, Elena is already gone. She darkens like a storm. I can feel you. He does not imagine that his emotions are a sword within her as much as him. He does not know how he is as open as a book within her palm. Tenebrae longs to reach for her and he would have, but for her words: but you did it anyway. The moon soaked beach is soft as it drowns his sorrow in silver despair. Guilt is an obsidian blade opening his veins. He bleeds starlight out across the sands. It is as bright as his gaze that watches her.


The monk reaches for her, confessing his sin in a dark breath across her lips, ‘I did’ His words are a guilty plea. Tenebrae’s penance is Elena’s to decide. Yet he has always been a foolish man, impulsive and uncontainable. The holy man does not shield his eyes from her wicked storm, from the tidalwave she sends to break him apart like a ship. “Do you love me, Elena?” The man asks, his voice rough as coal, warm as embers. They are daring words. He knows they will not stand the tsunami. He knows that in the sea, somewhere, Boudika might be watching him, hating him. She should. Elena should. Tenebrae already hates himself.


The fae-girl’s answer will break him even if she does, even if she does not. Yes and he will loathe how he has condemned her too. No and, oh, it will be a little easier for at least only then it will be his heart shattering. Like a fool upon the shore that dives into the ocean even as he watches the tongues of fire lick across the crest of the tsunami, Tenebrae steals their second kiss from her lips. Finally taking, as she has from him, finally greedy, he condemns himself.

@Elena - o.o;
 ~   ~   ~   ~   ~

[Elena]

take this burden away from me
and bury it before it buries me

It had started sweet—it had started innocent.

He had been bonfires burning on a summer’s night, the edges of him bright, casting dancing shadows in the light of it.

He had simply been there, and it had been easy to trick herself into thinking that the stirring in her belly was nothing. It was easy to trick herself into thinking that this was different—that she was different.

But sweetness has an edge.

He turns away from her. Her heart swells painfully in her breast, emotions far too fresh for the years that have past sweeping through her—leaving her with an aching nostalgia, a bitter anguish, and an entirely new yearning that curls in her belly. She is raw in her pain and yet endlessly hopeful, and although she knows better than to give herself over to this fresh hurt, she has no way to guard herself from it.

She cannot tell him that her heart is a malleable thing. She cannot tell him that what may be hunger and fervor for him, could forever change her. She cannot tell him that another sits waiting for her, that she cuts into his heart just as he cuts into hers. She cannot tell him.

So she doesn’t.

She keeps such secrets tucked away and instead closes her blue eyes on a sigh.

Her heart clutches. She could shatter at any moment. All those fractured, broken pieces she holds together coming undone at the seams, falling away to leave something jagged and unfamiliar behind. “Tenebrae,” she can’t help but to say his name again like it will take away her thoughts of what may have happened.

“Tenebrae,” she breathes his name against him as their foreheads touch, a name she had wanted for so long to grace her lips, and the first time she had spoken it had been with such spite, when she knows all along it was supposed to be spoken with the tenderness that is so wholly Elena. Not that it sits poised in such sentimentality, the golden sunshine girl cannot stop herself from repeating it over and over. She doesn’t realize there’s a smile on her lips now, soft and gentle and reaching for her eyes. Doesn’t realize until it’s blossomed into something visible for just a heartbeat, until she pushes it away. Her body trembles without her permission, a hundred invisible ripples as though he has tossed a stone into the ocean of her dark and bottomless blue.

Each time her lips press against him (how he tastes like salt water, like shadows, like embers, and desire) she feels her chest burn with desire, his desire. It seems selfish somehow, selfish to sit in his embrace and pretend that she is okay with this, even if it is for a few heartbeats under the cover of night. It is more selfish still as she steals that kiss from him. More than just sin passes from their lips. His desire becomes hers (it is electric down her spine for the new empath). His emotions hit her like beads of water and Elena is reminded all at once what it is like to be alive. She wants more from him, to know every emotion he harbors in his heart and just what each of them taste like on his lips, and how each of them either settle with weight in her heart, or fly wildly in her chest.

And then her lips are gone from his, with he abruptness of the sun falling behind a passing raincloud. She could smile at him, right now, but it surely make her teeth ache. Her breath shudders, trembles, and her heart feels too tight in her chest, her bones too tight beneath her skin. There are no tears on her face though, no sobs catching like burrs in her throat. Instead, she is quiet beside him, fighting the way her bruised blue eyes always seem to drift back to that face. Her chest is in turmoil, humming and thrumming and aching for a closeness that seems only just barely out of reach. She know it is possible, it is shown in the way her lips still feel the shadow of his, however phantom they may be. She cannot help but glance up at him with soft, wounded blue eyes because he must know, he must know how easily he is unraveling that treacherous heart in her golden breast. And then his guilt hits her, it slides like sludge down her throat. She swallows it and lets it sit heavy in her belly. Somehow, this feels more real than all the rest.

Do you love me, Elena?

A pause and she looks away, flinching at the knot that ties and unties itself in the pit of her stomach.

Her eyes drift back to him again, they are not the cold blue of winter, but that first blue sky at the beginning of spring, quiet even as they explore the lines and angles of his face. Then, softly, and against the muted mumbling of her instincts, “You know the answer,” she says. “But I’m not ready to hear it right now.” She is a coward, terrified of her own emotions even when she is lost in the sea of others.

Falling into the sea wasn't drowning.

This is.

His kiss fills her like water in her lungs. It is no longer his desire she feels, but her own. It burns underneath her and fire glazes her tongue as she strikes a match. “You’ve taken enough from me, Tenebrae, let me keep my answer a while longer,” she says as she rests against him with the effort of holding back everything she wanted to give him. “Please, Denocte.”

so take away this apathy
bury it before it buries me

@Tenebrae <3

[Tenebrae]

T  E  N  E  B  R  A  E

---

On my body, the grace of shadows
and in my heart: all Hells

 

Do you love me? The monk asked Elena. 


He does not hurt as she looks away. At least, not as badly as he might have feared. He sees the way she twinges, as if bitten. Her answer was not so simple. 


You know the answer .


She does not say she loves him back. Yet he does not stir with distress. Tenebrae does not pull himself away from where his body is pressed to Elena’s. Rejection does not burn him.


He knows the answer. It is written across her face. It is in the need of their shared kisses.


If anything, a mixture of relief and delight mixes with his rising guilt, and slips, serpentine through his veins. To not hear it is to hope that maybe she doesn’t - that it is only him. It is easier then, to return to the monastery a jilted man than one to turn away from a lover. Yet he does not think her silence is born of her lack of love. Dread and delight war within him as Elena trembles against his body. She holds in their love, as if it is a secret. He can see it, how it twists within her.


Her pain, her reluctance speaks to something within him that is echoing, shattering out. Elena and Boudika have changed him irrevocably. The golden girl beside him keeps her reply hidden behind her lips, her teeth, her tongue. But she is right. Tenebrae does know her answer.


Tenebrae sighs softly. He drinks in the satin of her skin. His lips trailing a path of fire and shadow along her cheek. It is an innocent gesture, so much less heated than their shared kisses. Kisses that still ghost his mouth. “It’s okay.” He breathes against her gold-leaf cheek, as the moon frees herself from the clouds, “I am not ready to hear it yet either.” To not hear her say she loves him is some kind of sweet relief, like rain after a storm. Yet Tenebrae is filled up with guilt and it weighs upon her, upon him. 


She says he has taken from her, enough. He laughs low, low, low whispers that tickle along the gold threads of her hair. “As you have from me. I am scared of how you have changed me with your taking.” He does not kiss her, not any more. Not when he is still drunk on all the kisses that have come before. “Will you stay with me? It is peaceful here and you are alive. I do not wish to return home yet.” And then lower, words pressed into the curve of her ear, “Stay with me.”


And he will stay with her until the dawn chorus comes and the day splits their embrace with sunlight.


@Elena  Ending here. Whilst Ten is with Elena still the thread is ended. Ten 'out'. <3

@Elena - o.o;
 ~   ~   ~   ~   ~

[Elena]

take this burden away from me
and bury it before it buries me

Old wounds break open. All of the different ways that he could destroy her. All of the ways she could break along his fault lines.

All of the ways that she would let him. 

That battered piece of hope glows warm in her golden chest, small but threatening to grow if given time. She doesn’t let him see that, keeping her face as mask like as possible but unable to fight off the shadows. Unable to keep the ghosts from her eyes. She can still feel the heat on her lips, the taste of him, she feels phantom lips pressed to her own in remembrance. Her lungs burn, her face burns, her skin burns and she finds she has to turn away from him, just for a moment, until her heart stops its treacherous struggling and she can remember how to breathe again. Those blue eyes that turn back to look at him are so ghostly pale, they are neither winter ice nor summer sky.

“Thank you,” she finally says because she cannot say what else lingers in her heart—not yet. She cannot allow herself to feel it, to admit to it, to cave to its strength like an oak tree before the storm.

All the words he speaks are like bombs, detonating in her mind, until all of their air is sucked out of her lungs and her head is light. Because it was what she had been wanting to hear. And yet. It wasn’t enough. She wasn’t enough.

Heartbeat.

Breath.

Heartbeat.

“I wish I was enough,” she finally whispers, the words broken on an equally shattered tongue, her blue eyes closing against the weight of everything. She could die here, she thinks. She could just sink into the earth until it swallowed her whole, until she was nothing but a seed and she was growing, growing into something new, something more beautiful, something eternal. She could die happy with his mouth on her and his scent in her and his words ringing in her ears. If only. If only it was that simple—that easy.

If there wasn't another, that settles in the sea of his heart. If he wasn't meant to follow so devout to his faith. If when he left she wasn't entirely sure if she would ever see him again. (Find me again, she wants to scream. Fight for me. But she buries the words in her selfish heart.) She had asked him to leave, to not return to Terrastella, and here she is cradled in his arms, those words hidden beneath her tongue as if she had never spoken them.

Her mouth find his cheek. She leaves one final kiss there. Her lips quirk just a little in the corner and a frown chases her eyes.

This was enough, she thinks. 

It has to be.

Even if she was not.

“Until the morning.” A promise. For several long moments she watches the stars. They appear to bob and float across the ocean, as if skimming the water like lost fireflies. Then, looking back at him with the hint of a smile etched carefully into the shy of her mouth, she thinks about all the ways he could utterly ruin her.

And oh—how beautiful such a tragedy would be.

so take away this apathy
bury it before it buries me

@Tenebrae