[P] Winters end

[Elena]

take this burden away from me
and bury it before it buries me

Her entire life she has always felt like either not enough, or too much. Not enough softness, not enough kindness; too intense, too brash. She has fooled herself into thinking she doesn’t care, that no one else mattered. She could be alone, she could leave behind anything and anyone, and she would be fine. She didn't need a lover, she tells herself, a useless chant that she tries desperately to carve into her heart where forgiveness had once been written. And all she had was herself, just as it should have been, just as she should have kept it.

And little by little she can feel parts of that foolhardy strength beginning to wear away. Every time she is wronged, every time her already fragile trust in someone is cast carelessly aside, she loses a little bit more of her resolve. But she doesn’t know how to completely fall apart. She only knows how to steel herself, and how to dig deep beneath the hurt and the sorrow and pull all the remainders of happiness, her smiles, her kindness to the surface for others to use when she can no longer use it on herself.

But, sometimes, she is just so tired. “Maybe,” she offers the mare and for just a moment she looks older than she should before that face turns youthful once more.“I have found that far more souls have traveled to Novus than have been born on its soil,” she comments. Herself, Luvena, Michael, Anandi, the list goes on, all once strangers, all now inhabitants. “You are still young Luvena,” she says to the mare only because she had seen the lines on Valerio and Aletta’s faces. Lines her parents would never have because the good died young. “And what do you find enjoyment in?” She asks, curious, what brings a smile to another’s face and maybe if it can bring one to Elena’s too.

Elena follows the simple and sweet suggestion, laying the herbs down upon the hospital floor. She moves beside her. The golden girl wears grief well and happiness better. In truth, Elena has made leaving at art form, the comforting embraces, the sorrow filled goodbyes, the gentle promises to see each other again. Elena is elegant in her partings and cruel in her departures. “I cant go back,” she simply says with a shake of her head. She cant go back, not there and not there either.

“I am pretty sure it is not in the stars for me,” she says with an admission. Twins, beautiful twins, children. “I tend to enjoy the company of monsters. It’s one of the few failings of my character.” There is just enough seriousness in this reply to acknowledge the truth that it happens to be. Still she lets a smile flicker across her mouth, willing to jest in the face of another truth. Delicate things that had gone astray in the woods to fall beneath Tunnel’s caress until they shattered.

“Cavalier,” she says letting the name rest on her tongue of her companion’s friend. “Was that your one?” She asks, your one love. Elena sometimes she thinks she missed it the morning on a mountainside after a night spent together. (“Can I see you again?” “No.”)

Glacial eyes blink at Luvena’s words with a compassionate sweep of long, dark lashes. “It hurts, to see another in pain.” Elena, forever the empath. “I can offer you no more than my company—I hope that is enough for now,” Elena gives to her with a smile.

Her question (such a simple one) is almost enough to drag out the ghosts, but she refuses them entry—refuses to give them access to such a precious, soft moment with a newfound companion. “I come from an ancient land, Windskeep it was called, a place of wind makers. They were at war with another land when I was born.” She had known the bitter taste of war and wears the weight of it still. “I was the only child of both my parents, they died when I was still quite young,” she says. “I went to another place then, Murmuring Rivers, to be raised by my cousin,” she says, intentionally leaving out the part where she had no choice, where she had a price on her head and her father had been killed when they were trying to escape. “Since then I have traveled quite a good deal, until coming here that is,” she sighs. “I hope this is the end.” She says it with some sort of resounding hope. And as she lays silently then beside Luvena, there is a moment, a fleeting moment where she pretends it would be true. Her heart beat slows and she finds those blue eyes going hazy with the afternoon warmth of the winter sun.

There is a voice though that stays in the back of her mind, that tells her, the love, the pain, the ache is far from over. It bares its teeth before it slinks into the shadows, allowing Elena a moment to rest—for now.

so take away this apathy
bury it before it buries me

@Luvena :)