[P] while we're dying inside [toulouse]

[Elena]

every day it feels like I’m holding back an ocean

The things we do for love.

And what has Elena done? She has lied (“No, he doesn't hurt me”), she has destroyed herself, and she has destroyed the hearts of other. But through fire and shipwrecks and every disaster one could name, she still hands her heart out to those who need it.
Still, she is alone.

Elena finds her heart to be most comfortable in the hands of others. When it sits there in her golden chest, it wriggles, it cries, it aches. Elena holds it on her own, hands shaking and fumbling until she thrusts it into the grip of the first decent face she meets. So desperate to give it away because while she knows, deep down she knows, they will only crush it within their own grasp, at least she wouldn't be the one hurting herself.

Sometimes it is easier, a relief, to simply blame another for the dull thud inside her breast instead of waxing and waning over all the choices that have led her here.

She had sat there as Tunnel had devoured her heart as he took away all matter, the moment she had offered it to him with that first fearful skip of it. The dark stranger had taken it and Elena had sat idly by, chest vacant just as she wished. He had sent that shiver up her spine that had become all too familiar, one she felt with Aerwir, with the demon of black and white. It similar even to Frostbane. Monsters all in their own way. Oh and how Elena knows monsters, how she knows them so well. She had not been so naive not to recognize the looks on their faces, she just willing crawled inside their bed to lie in their terror and horror.

She feels that familiar chill even as sunlight cresses across her golden hide. But Elena knows, she knows that daylight cannot keep out the boogeyman, because not all monsters hide under the bed.

And then she is no longer alone.

That look. What look? Elena wants to retort towards him for the briefest moments, some of that fire in her heart that snaps and crackles before it calms to a smolder. Instead she smiles like smoke. “Well, I cant very well turn you away now,” she says, her pacing halted, lines in the sand drawn with nervous energy and insecurity of being in this place that still feels new no matter how hard she attempts to bury roots in the sand. 

The breeze rolls by and for a moment it feels like his breath on her skin and Elena visibly shakes for just a moment. Maybe it would be mistaken for cold, but Elena feels it rattle her bones, like the serpent with its tail. Her morbid fascination for others has never served her well. It had been terror, she had wanted to leave.

Maybe she should leave now.

But the smile she offers him says anything but. “I’m Elena.” Pause. “Are you offering me your company because you wish for some too?”



* 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.

@toulouse