hese last several days without Azrael had been harder than she had expected. Her side suddenly felt cold and empty without him there to warm her. This, she is aware, was the reality of living in two different Courts and both holding too much responsibility to leave. But she is with him now, slumbering, although fitfully beside him. Elliana is with her GiGi, probably still up, painting and drinking tea. Everything is perfect, as it should be, fairytale. But she cannot deny the way her heart is stammering in her chest. Elena knows the cause of it, she just hates to admit it.
She leaves his side and travels down the mountains until the cold air of a spring night touches her face as it blows off the lake. The lake. This lake.
The lake holds painful memories. She is not sure why she has come here, except that sometimes the thrill of the pain has become a draw. When she begins to feel his memory fade, when his face bleeds away in the back of her mind, she feels a panic crawl up her throat. She is no longer certain whether it is worse to forget him entirely or to live days in agony, the reminder of him a ghost along her mind's edges.
Tonight, she chooses the agony, walking along the shore of the lake with bruised eyes, the blue of them glacial with memories, they freeze and crack and fall into the water. Her empathy reaches out to those around that slumber lakeside, but she keeps it mostly pulled into herself, the magic selfishly curling into her as if she could change the very emotions that stir in her golden breast, as if it could do any good by keeping it tucked away in her mind. It was a foolish maneuver, a hopeless one, but she could not help but try.
And suddenly she is turning from that lake, the lake, this lake, and running back to the mountains, to the stars, to him. She pauses only when she sees him there, sleeping, she watches his gentle glowing, watches his face, as if memorizing it, as if it may be taken away from her at any moment. How could she ever explain to him how he became the reason for it all? How could she ever explain to him how columns within her shifted during that first meeting and he became the center of her gravity? How there is no rhyme or reason for it, but that the molecules of her life have rearranged around him?
She can’t and so she just exhales.
“Azrael,” she says when she breathes. She waits until his eyes open and places her golden head near his own. “Let’s go on an adventure, tonight,” she says like a child. “Don’t think, just say yes.” She says, laughs, because she wants to go before she changes her mind, before she feels her heart way her down too much until she can no longer soar beside him.
Azrael feels her toss beside him, and he wants to turn to her, to wrap her in the warmth of his embrace. But the shed-star knows that only she can fight the demons in her mind. Only she can move past her fears or her worries. If he could, the stallion would have taken the burdens from her, worn the scars on her heart if only to leave her feeling whole again. But time was the only true healer here, and so the best he can do is stay, listen, and love. He knows too when she leaves him, cold and curious, and his turquoise eyes blink open slowly, watching her go.
He does not chase her as she steps into the night, as she works her way down to the lake. He cannot know how she aches, for though Elena had all the empathy in the world, she still had not opened her bruised soul for him to heal – not entirely. There were still shadows in her eyes when she stared at him, lingering as she gazed past him, at times seemingly searching for something… no, for someone, who would never come. And though he sees, Azrael is helpless to do anything, knowing that his love would be enough in time. (Or at least holding out hope that it would.)
His eyes flutter closed again, as he turns to sleep once more to clear his mind, losing himself in dreams. And when she comes to him, her breath hot against his cheek as she whispers with longing, Azrael blinks himself awake once more, focusing on her face and offering a daydream smile. “Elena,” he whispers her name like a prayer, and she is there, real and warm as he reaches for her, drawing her close. Let’s go on an adventure, tonight… don’t think, just say yes. He needs no more suggestion, rising like a sailor to a siren’s song, following her lead blindly into the night.
Show me the stars.
She drags him under with the intoxicating scent of her, and like a drowning man, Azrael gasps for air… for when Elena was near, his breath seemed to tumble over his stuttering heart. “Elena,” he says again, her name warm like whiskey on his lips as he rests his head against her cheek before lifting her chin softly, guiding it toward the sky.
“Did you know that Spring is the best time to see the stars? Even the galaxies are visible now – like there…” he gestures to a fuzzy glow in the darkness. “Andromeda galaxy is said to contain 300 billion stars… can you imagine?” Their own lives and issues seemed so inconsequential in comparison, the sheer scope of the heavens incomprehensible and wonderous.
For a while, they gazed from one cluster of stars to the next, Azrael sharing anecdotal stories as they went, his touch warm against her even as the night grew longer and the wind grew colder. “See there, the Virgo cluster… they are the heavenly form for the virgin goddess of justice. She is said to have once dwelt upon the earth, when the gods lived among men. As humanity grew sinful, the gods began to leave them one by one. Astraea was the last to go, taking her place in the heavens with the scales of justice in hand.” The astromancer turns to Elena, watching the way she looks to him with such confliction in her gaze. “But tonight, there is more on your mind than the stars… tell me what troubles you?” For though he can guess at the reason, Azrael cannot know all she hid behind her crystal-blue eyes, bottled up like a caged bird fighting for release.
hat he doesn’t realize, as he opens his eyes to her, is that he has given her everything. More than she could have been bold enough to hope for. For every one the twinkling stars, he gave a different light inside her. He changed her, he filled her, he made her light even in the dark.
She once knew nothing of the stars. Nothing of their unthinkable size or their striking impermanence. They had been distant, too distant. They had played audience to her family’s evening gatherings, but she had not called them friends. They were poetic, mysterious works, but they had lay so beyond her realm of intellect—conceptual at best. She wishes that one would come down to her, to stay beside her so she may study its glow.
And now she has one.
Elena realizes she had not know she had been longing for this. Some sense of stability that Dusk Court, her home, offered her. Something so steady that when her entire world was sent shaking, the ground would not shudder and crumble beneath her feet. And Azrael is there to hold her, to keep her from crying out in fear.
Her lips quirk into a smile when he says her name. Will he see it is the same smile Elli so often wears when he wakes her in the mornings? He rises with her words, and were Elena a power hungry woman, she might have preened herself on her ability to beckon men with only her voice like a siren. But Elena is far from such and it only causes her heart to flutter inside her golden chest with appreciation for him. He holds all the power here, and she would gladly give it to him.
It is so easy to be lonely, so effortless even as it breaks her. But then he is touching her, bringing her to the stars and how can she be lonely when he surrounds her with lightness of a clear night? She sinks into him, drinks in the moment, feeling the warmth of him seep through her.
She would follow him to the ends of the earth. She would walk barefoot through the fire to trail in his wake. “You’re my light,” she whispers into his cheek, a place she has planted kisses as fleeting as butterflies on flowers on different nights, under the same stars, the same stars that sheltered them as they pressed the secrets of their hearts into each other’s palms and trusted the other to care for it. “I should like to go there some day, maybe,” she says, though her words bare no weight.
She sits beside him in comfortable silence. She should ask him questions, she thinks. She is so hungry for everything that he has to say and everything he thinks, but for some reason, she cannot find the questions to point to him. She cannot find the words for everything that she needs to ask him—everything that she wants to learn about him.
So she lets the silence fill between them.
She thinks about how often she bares her soul to him. How she has so carelessly dropped his heart in an effort to hold her own out to man who would sooner shatter it than protect it.
How she cannot find it in herself to truly regret it.
Not when it brought them closer.
Not when it brought them Elliana.
“The last to go—she must have been brave,” Elena comments, staring at the stars pointedly. She keeps staring at them when he speaks again, blue eyes transfixed, captured entirely by starlight, as if she knew it would hurt too much to look at him now. “I don’t know,” she confesses, and her voice wavers, as if she is about to cry. Frustration and exhaustion and fear, all heavy as cement, because there is something in her that bites away at her, that chips off pieces of her, and she knows so little of it, of what it is, or why.
The last to go—she must have been brave. He thinks about it for a moment, quiet as he wonders, before responding, “Or maybe she loved the earth, and those who walked upon it, too much to let them go. Perhaps she saw the best in humanity, where the others saw only lost causes.” He wished to think of the gods in such a way, warm and accepting of mortals with all their flaws. Maybe it was only a way to reassure himself, but there was something in the idea of forgiveness that struck a chord in the shed-star, even as he looked to the constellation with a quick pang of sadness, wondering how it must have hurt the goddess to turn and walk away.
He asks Elena what troubles her, and brings her closer when she admits she does not know. For whether she knew or not, he could feel the restlessness in her. It was evident in the way her heart stumbled in her chest, beating more rapidly as she tossed and turned in her sleep. It was evident in the way she looked at him, at times appearing to almost look through him, as if expecting to see a ghost or a flicker of darkness to chase away her happiness. Whatever the reason, he knew she needed to let him in more, so his light might begin to heal the shadows in her eyes. So Azrael can only offer her comfort as they lay together beneath the stars.
“So much has changed…” He muses with her head tucked beneath his chin. “But look how far we’ve come…” The statement is reassuring as much for him as for her, as Azrael reminds himself for the hundredth time that she chose him. Some days, it was still hard for the shed-star to believe, still a marvel and a wonder. But then, he reminds himself that it is he who wakes up beside Elena. That it is he who kisses her to sleep. With every heartbeat, he is reminded… and yet even while she stands so close, she seems so far away.
“Where else would we go,” he asks her, looking back at the stars. “Once we’ve seen the galaxies and the wonders they hold? If you could see anywhere, do anything?” If they imagined it, perhaps the two could go there, left to ride on the wonder and possibility of their dreams. “I would like to see the ocean, for the three of us to set sail on a boat, to push off into the unknown… Can you imagine the worlds which lie beyond our understanding – beyond Novus?”
His mind wandered once more, to the cottage by the sea where their daughter lay sleeping peacefully, quiet and unknowing of the conflict which surrounded her. The secrets which Elena kept had to be eating at her, for Azrael’s recent meeting with Tenebrae had shown him that he remained under the illusion that Elliana was his child. Only his blindness would keep him from knowing the truth – for others had begun to wonder aloud at the child, who looked so clearly like her monk father and not the shed-star who claimed her. Time would shatter the illusion, he knew, if Elena didn’t do so first.
Somewhere else, they might have been able to start over. If he could, Azrael would have run away with the both of them, shielded them from the world’s prying eyes and wagging tongues, if only to keep them safe and happy. “You’ve done well with Elli,” he whispers, suddenly shifting the conversation to one of reassurance as he reaches to groom his teeth against the gold of her neck. “She grows brighter by the day, with all your radiance and kindness.” There was a darkness to the child, he knew, but Elena’s influence matched Tenebrae’s shadows too. “You shouldn’t worry… everything will be alright, Elena. I’m here, for as long as you’ll have me. Elli is safe and loved. All is well...” But even as he reassures her, Azrael has to wonder if the peace is true or simply an illusion that they had built together, as fleeting as the stars which soon would melt to dawn.
ind me again, she had told him once, and find her he had.
Again and again.
So much time has passed, many sunrises and sunsets, all with her beneath them, living as best as she could, for herself, her family, her court.
She knows that feeling he speaks of. Was it not the reason she did not bow to the mist as so much of her family had. How she three herself threw it as if it were smoke and not vapor, as if she would burn alive with regret if she stayed for a moment longer. In this case, Elena was not the last to stay, but the first to leave. Is that still brave? Could she still be brave? The strange ache she feels in her chest quiets when she looks into the familiar safe of his eyes. Her golden lips reach out to skim along the curve of his neck, the curve of his jaw, and she wonders if she would ever get enough of him. If she would ever feel sated again. It’s been so long since they have had a quiet moment like this—time to themselves. “Would you have stayed?” she asks in a voice that first rings in the past before echoing into the present, and later she will find it ringing in the future too. “I have heard a captain goes down with the ship, but I wonder if there is courage in the one who swims into the sea to help those terrified souls,” she says. The same souls that trusted that same captain to keep that ship from going down. “I am much less attached to places than I am to people,” she says, even if it is obvious. Ground is ground, flowers bloom anywhere you turn, but Elena so adores the gardens that only hearts can grow.
One glance and he is her undoing.
If only she could breathe around him.
If only she could figure out the way to make her lungs pump so that she could more easily draw in air—so that she could at least see straight. So that she could find the solid footing beneath her and know that she was going to make it through this. But she hasn’t been able to find her center of gravity since the first time that she saw him, since the first time he looked at her.
Her world has fractured around him; rebuilt itself as stone pillars around her heart. She should not rely on him as her foundation, she has made this mistake before, but even now, she builds a home over the steadiness of his ground.
There is a light in her eyes that is entirely her own, pieces of her that shine through the body that she wears. She has come to realize that the people who do nothing are just as dangerous at those who do something. So she might as well build that home in the confines of his heart, if he has the room, if he has the love for her.
“I have seen so many worlds,” she says and leans against him, gazing out across the lake. “Would we go till we reached the end?” She doesn’t know why she asked it.
The question had alighted on her tongue and plunged itself into the charged air between them before she’d even had a chance to think it.
Should it have been edged in hope?
Should she have asked it with some kind of glimmer in her eye?
All is well. He says.
“Nights like this feel like a secret to be shared,” she tells him. “Do you remember? The secret I shared with you the night I told you that?” She asks him, remembering the island, when Azrael became Elli’s father. The tears that gather in her blue eyes are as much for her as they are for him. Because they have been or still are, lost and broken, and maybe, being here, with each other, like this, is not the solution that it should be. But it is the solution all the same. Love has never been simple for Elena, and it is so very clear as she sits here next to him. “What secrets do you have to share with me this evening?”
I am much less attached to places than I am to people Her words ring through his mind, troubled as it is. As he gazes to the stars, he tries to let the easy comfort of her company push away his worry and his doubts, but his thoughts are too cluttered with worry and with grief. Every corner of Denocte was a reminder now, of the life that might have been. He mourns for Morrighan, and seems to be the only one who does, and moreso for Maeve, the child who was just beginning her life… to be taken from this world was just unfair, a thought he couldn’t seem to come to grips with.
He shivered in the night, pressing her closer as he murmurs quietly to her question of whether or not he could have stayed, for it is a question which plagues him even now. He didn’t know how he could stay in Denocte… not now, not when there were so many ghosts and unfamiliar faces. It pained him to think of it, for Caligo’s realm had always been his home. It had been his home long ago, though the place where the shed-stars had lived bore a different name. It had still been under the same sky though, the same stars. He had still worshiped the same goddess.
“I do not know…” he says at last, clearly conflicted in his response. For it was an existential question which she begged of him, one without a right answer. How could Virgo go, and leave those who roamed the earth behind? The same way that he would go, turning his back on Denocte and following Elena into the light, even if it pained him some to do so. He would follow her anywhere though, and Denocte wasn’t home anymore… not after all which had come to pass. Caligo would understand.
Elena was home, now.
“We will go until we are home.” His voice is barely a whisper, pained as he glances at the sky he loved so, knowing that this was goodbye. Azrael shifts his attention to her secret, a soft smile hinting at his lips. “Our secret… How can I forget.” For that night had given him the greatest gift, for even if the child wore Tenebrae’s sigil, she was his. She was theirs.
Her voice is soothing, like a summer rain after months of drought, soothing his troubled mind as he sighs into the gold of her neck. For his secret was nothing of light, but betrayed a creeping darkness within him. “I cannot stay here, in Denocte… not after all that has happened.” He steps away from her, pacing a bt as he offers her a broken and pained glance. “I cannot fathom how the rest of Caligo’s people can simply move on like nothing has happened… they’re gone Elena – Morrighan, Maeve, others too… Dead.” It sounded so final and hollow, breaking him all over again. “I dream of them… the same dreams, again and again. They call to me for help, but try as I might, I cannot reach them…”
lena is no stranger to grief, never will be. They are not friends, but rather it is the ever present shadow hanging over her life.
She can remember that day, she had hated him, hated how much he knew. Hated the fact that Marcelo had said it to her, that Marcelo had brought it forward with such determination in his voice. She hated that he had been right. Pretending wouldn't make the pain go away, because although she fought hard to keep it from being written across her face, it was still there, making her heart bleed and her insides crawl. “What if-“ she had began, but she had gotten no further, the words had caught in her throat, and she had suddenly been thirsty.
So thirsty.
What if I feel this way forever?
She had wanted to say.
She hadn't been able to bare the thought of it, having that constant pain in her chest and never quite feeling whole again. Time, many people say, time heals all manner of wounds. But, you cant fix a broken mirror, you can only replace the glass of where it used to be.
She wonders if she could continue. They love to tell her how you can find the greatest joys when you emerge from those dark hours, but such things seems trite. Because she knows the weight of pain and she knows that some of her darkest hours did not end with such joy.
Some hours were just dark.
Some things just hurt.
And it is hurt and worry now that she feels with him. She folds into him, as if she can caress the pain away. She presses into the caverns of his body and finds that they are familiar, they are home, and she exhales as if she has been holding her breath for months—and maybe she has. “Az,” she exhales slowly, purposefully, feeling the way that the earth feels so right when she is next to him like this, when his mouth is against her and she can feel his breath.She wishes it was easier to tell him about all of the different ways her life has built around itself around him, how she needs him. How she has become completely and totally reoriented by his presence in her life.
He holds her close and she thinks that she has never wanted more than this.
Could never want anything other than this.
Her own heart is a mangled, tortured thing - one she guards fiercely, terrified of the agony of heartbreak but all too aware of the pain of loss. With him, her resolve is weakened, and the hefty walls built to surround her aching heart fall away, leaving her bare and exposed in a way that she has never known before. Still, she conceals it. She hides her weakness away, knowing too well how she can destroy things that she holds most precious. He speaks then, and the edges of his voice are sharp and it tears at her skin. His words plunge knives into her chest. “I love you,” she says to him then.
Before it’s too late.
Because if she never had a chance to say it—
“I love you and I ask you, come to Terrastella, be with me, forever,” she says. “Think about it,” she tells him before her eyes turn skywards. “In the mean time, I don’t want to think. Count the stars until we fall asleep?”
code by rallidae
picture by cannon
@Azrael
Aaaaaand fin <3
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