[AW] tell him the fire's out

[Elena]

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

There is a part of her that looks at death like it could be a lover.

How else could she look upon it? For grief wells in her like blood, filling every vein and organ. Grief has even drowned the fear inside her, so she walks now, instead of runs.

She should be used to losing them, everyone. She knows the pattern, the cycle she has crafted for herself over the years. Leaving, returning, leaving returning. Always coming back.

She is tired still, though she has swam and since dried off, she still feels liquefied. Like her limbs are loose and strange, ghost-things attached to her and moving on their own accord. She feels like a ghost, herself, disassociated and not-there. Her throat aches, like she’s spent days screaming. And maybe she has. She doesn’t know how much time may have passed, it has not been that long since Elena was trapped in the dark behind her eyes.

The apple is sweet, delicious, it rolls against her tongue and Elena cannot remember the last time she had something quite so sweet between her lips.

(Perhaps it was that stolen kiss.)
(Or the heartfelt ‘I love you’ that he didn't give back to her.)

“But you were the one who did,” Elena says, so resistant to let her gratitude simply be brushed off, toppling from her shoulder of where Elena had so carefully planted it. She was not born here, the golden sunflower is comfort by the thought that she too was once a stranger, a castaway. “And where were you born?” Elena, bold Elena as Lilli so often said, she is curious and asks. “Was it a place of magic?” She adds. Elena had been born in ancient lands where magic hummed beneath the surface and yelled in the thundering falls, and whispered through the breeze of the meadows.

She is quiet for a moment. “Did you make the right choice? Choosing Dusk?” She hates the way the question hangs from her lips, doubt dripping from its edges. But she asks the question all the same. Elena had learned to stop trusting in her own choices, so she does what she so often does. She lets herself leap blindly, faithfully, on the words and promises of strangers.

“Everywhere,” she laughs with her simple answer. “Most recently, a land called Beqanna. Though, I was born in the ancient land of my ancestors.” The ones who wielded the wind, but then why does her blood burn like flames hot against her nerves?



* 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.

@Anandi