[P] For I am a Sinner, Not a Saint

[Elena]

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


There was nothing that made Elena great or wonderful, or even unique aside from her wild past. She was a mass of tortured beauty, thinking she would do better to live a life of solitude, but never finding it, never succumbing. She has heart ache, battered dreams, and beautiful friends and family.

Elena briefly wonders what happened to Altair, and if Lilli was safe. She wondered if Aerwir was still in Woodlands or if he had moved on, she wondered what happened to Soren and if he missed Beylani still as much as she did. She thinks of Kensa and if she still ruled Hyaline, and her thoughts find Tunnel before she quickly abandons them (if only it were that easy).

She is content for now in her loneliness. She is a quiet thing, as tough as stone, but she has her chips, the scars on her heart. Her parents’ deaths, being hunted down like property, being ripped from her home, multiple homes. Yet, there is that piece of her, that good piece, that remains unshaken in her faithful determination that the world is a good place. Elena is unoriginal, but there is a strangeness to her still.

Elena is the lone stranger here in a sea of old friends in this new land.

She smiles, such a beautiful smile at the stranger she has found, and it breaks her heart in ways she doesn't know or understand that her parents are not here to see it. She is happy, and she doesn't know why, but she decides that she will be her friend. She counteracts that frown with grace and beauty as she had been taught.

“It would seem I have,” she says with a little bout of laughter at her own discovery. So unaware of what thoughts the stranger harbors behind that brooding exterior. (It is more brooding, Elena should know this.) And she does, but this is what drags the sunflower child closer. Her expression, the tilt of her lips, the narrowness of her eyes, and unfriendly nature, it reminds her of someone and Elena cannot help but think of Alvaro in this moment. Her heart surges in her chest with love for her older male cousin and the sense of familiarity she finds with a complete stranger. The more she pushes, the more Elena pulls towards her, like inadequate magnets.

She misses her stoic cousin in these moments, how she would sit for hours beside him, not saying a word as she placed flowers into his mane. He would sit painfully quiet, tolerating his younger cousin’s quiet touches and girlish giggles. But there were moments too, in the stillness, in the solitude, that she would spot the angles of his lips twitch upwards into something of smiling before giving to gravity once more and falling flat against his dark face. And that is when Elena would bury that tiny golden face of hers into his shoulder, her silent promise to keep the secret of the afternoons when Alvaro would smile.

Foolish in her joy, in her own memories, Elena so believes she can do the same for this woman too. She is foolish, but at least Elena remains kind-hearted. But so often aren't the foolish full of good intentions?

“I could use some company on a walk,” she says then, blue eyes falling beneath dark lashes before opening once more. “I’d love for you to join me.” She hardly leaves room for opposition.



* 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.

@Dalmatia