[P] you're my rain [fall]

[Elena]

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

She is with Lilli when the world ends, watching the colors of the sun bleed across the blue sky, swallowing it whole. It is subtle at first when the earth trembles, when it rises and falls like a chest beneath their feet. Subtle, until the rocks from the peaks of the mountains of their ancestral home loosen and rain down against the peaceful valley below. The trees, their great trees, their weeping willows sway with no wind, and snap and crack. 

It is subtle until it isn’t.
Until the world is stolen from beneath their feet on the guardian’s ledge, and they fall, they fall, they fall. 

There isn’t enough time to say anything, not enough time to see if the fearr that etches across her face is reflected in the crimson curve of her cousin’s. There is just enough time for Elena to reach for Lilli as she falls, trying to bury herself within her once last time, feel her against her, press her brow into hers. But she cannot reach, and Elena feels nothing. She doesn't even feel like she is falling through the air, through the world, to the end. There is just enough time to wish too, that Lilli would grow wings and fly away before the dark leaps up to take her. 

She wakes on the floor of her home and she is alone. It takes roughly the length of a heartbeat to notice that she is safe, in Terrastella, in her cottage beside the sea. This was the first time she has dreamed of Lilli since seeing her in Taiga when she had pulled there by a magician. Elena cannot help then the way her stomach sinks, and she thinks something might be wrong. 

A sound is at her window and Elena turns blue eyes. “Noctura?” She questions the familiar creature. A letter awaits her, accepting the proposal Elena had sent not so long ago. She had tried to resist, tried as hard as she could, but she put pen to paper, and put that paper to the leg of a white dove and sent a letter to the man of stars that has so illuminated her. 

Dear Azrael,

Delumine is holding a festival. Meet me by the carvings in the garden. 

Warmly,

Elena


And that had been where she had struggled. She had written: Love, Elena countless times, only realizing what she had written after she had traced the l and the o and the v-e for endless moments, and realizing she needed to start over. 

His response arrives and there is a sigh caught in her chest, a longing that buries its fingers in the pit of her belly. She will never know about how he dreamed of her. And how in the dream, she had walked beside him, and he had looked at her, and she had looked at him. She had smiled, without burdens. And then she had gone, into the stars.

“Stars are guides to bring you home,” Aletta had once told her. There are no stars against the blue skies and so Elena makes friends with the sun. In some ways, this is better, the daylight, as far away from Denocte as she could be. It loosens those shaking fingers in her chest so that she can remember how to breath evenly again. So that this time when she exhales, the sigh spills like water from her lips.

There is a part of her that says maybe she shouldn't do this, that this is more dancing along cliff edges, but here she invites an innocent partner into her dance, but Elena has never been able to resist going headfirst into anything. She was told this brazen personality came from her father, her godfather had always said he was a bit “against the grain”, while that grace in which she took on the world was entirely her mother’s. 

She finds him, waiting for her in the garden and relief floods through her. He was as perfect in the daylight as he was the night. The golden girl walks towards him, the air tastes like fall and Elena for a moment forgets that all this is real. “Have you learned anything new from the stars or dreams since I last saw you?” She asks him, so ready to run into his arms because the distance between them feels like the distance between lonely stars. But she disciplines herself enough to slowly move towards him, sunshine skipping across water. She realizes only when she closes the distance between them that the ache in her chest is soothed. Her nose brushes against his shoulder. (So easily, Azrael always so easy to touch). “I have heard that is where all our secrets hide.”

so take away this apathy
bury it before it buries me

@Azrael