[P] I dream in blue [tenebrae]

[Elena]

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

Days did not last for long. 

Or maybe they lasted too long.

It was hard to tell anymore. 

The days all blended together, one bleeding into the next. She slept, but it was thin and fitful, his image haunting her most every night. She awoke with his breath on her cheek. It had all been wrong. Warning bells had sounded in her head, but she had remained rooted to the spot, mind reeling with the rush he provided her. Even as he grew rougher, she did not run, she did not cry, refusing to give him the things he craved so easily. She had willed herself to know, to believe there was something deeper in him.

‘I do not deserve to be saved.’

A pause.

‘But maybe you do.’

And it is the warm breeze that feels like his breath that pushes that golden face to meet his own. But it is his eyes that hold her there. He is no sinner in her eyes, but a man. ‘Men only lead to trouble,’ Rishiri had sat with a flick of a raven tail, and little Elena should have listened then, but she had been too busy watching a swallow fly by.

There is kindness to him, but also a stoic nature, and she finds the combination both confusing and familiar, the edges of him warping as they talk. She tries to note the subtle differences, the tiny shift, but she inevitably gives up, throwing her proverbial hands in the air and just enjoying the difference of his demeanor, the darkness and light that wisps over his body and toys in those bright eyes. He was not Underworld with his ghosts nor Tunnel with his demons. He was refreshing.

At his own laugh, she joins in, the sound welcomed in her throat after so much time of silence. ‘Everyone can dance.’ Comes the voice of her uncle so clear in her mind as he draws her away from the water’s edge and into the easy steps of a dance he knew so well. “And what other things may those be?” She asks a little breathy, the joy of simply being here enough to buy her into an ocean of happiness and grace. Elena has always had a sweet and kind heart, but it has been battered by the world that is more beautiful than mountains and waterfalls and wildflowers by oceans.

Please.

She can feel the music like water seeping over her body, it rings like thunder and it is bright like lightning. It is a perfect storm. Elena looks like her mother, although no one in Novus will ever know. She looks like her mother who so often danced, there is the same rhythm in her hips, the rock of her shoulders, and the grace in her steps. The stars peek out from a blanket of navy blue as if to see if it were truly Elena beginning to move or if Beylani had risen from the grave to dance with death as if she had never left this world at all.

Elena would laugh if she knew him to be thinking about her as a faerie. Although it isn't hard to believe as starlight catches in her hair and her steps leave the ground as if she had wings. Those painstaking hours spent building faerie houses and waiting for them to come, when, in the eyes of the man before her she had been what she had sought all along.

He watches her with her eyes and Elena cannot see his gaze as anything other that excitement, intoxicated on the festival, on the sights, the sounds, and scents. He looks to her and she wants to ask him what he found, what secrets he managed to pull from her skin with such a look on his face. He breathes darkness, but all Elena can see is starlight and moon songs. He speaks, a confirmation to join her weaved in his words like ribbons in a child’s hair. When his eyes reach hers, that is all she needs, Elena turns to face him, his dark face filling the vision of her blue eyes. “Don’t worry,” she says, her voice is like summer and rain, like sunshine caught in the beads of dew. “It’s easier than you think,” she says, a promise that she presses into his hand before turning those blue eyes away from him.

She carries shards of glass inside her that she could not rid herself of. With each breath, she felt them digging in deeper, her breath painful, her lungs constricting. ‘Tonight, tonight would be everything she needed,’ she lies to herself as she motions for him to move closer, towards the dancers, to the music that makes her sway and dip and flow. She is an ocean, autumn leaves strung on a breeze, the sun rising and falling in the sky. 


Elena moves her body close to him one more and breathes a single word into him. “Move,” she says, there is a smile and she lifts her feet in place, watching his own to do the same. Once more she pulls close. “And move again,” she says, she feels the night wash over her and it feels wrong somehow, wrong enough to be just right. A girl of the sun and of warmth has no place being out int he starlight, but she is there all the same. She is illuminated by smoke and fire and Elena no longer knows if she is burning or if it is the world blazing into ash and smoke. She moves beside him, the tough against him innocent enough and she moves her hips towards his. “Do this, whenever you move, just feel it,” she instructs gently, there is a twinkle in those blue eyes of hers. Quickly she assembles herself in front of him. “Move forward when I step back,” she says starting the motion. “You are the man,” she says to him, peering up and him beneath those long, dark lashes. “You have to lead, tell me where to go,” she says, dares, and she begins moving those feet, pretending for a moment she belongs not to Terrastella, not to Hyaline, nor Paraiso or Woodlands, but to the dance, and the dance alone. She is not Elena, for she has yet placed her name on her tongue. She is bright and burning fire, blazing into the night with flickering embers lighting the way.



* 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.

@Tenebrae