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

[Elena]

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