[P] you were running through me like water [michael]

[Elena]

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