[P] errant

[Elena]

Elena

let us live like flowers
drenched in sunlight

E

lena wouldn’t be here if the war was going well.” She had once heard Aletta say to Brynn in the confines of Murmuring Rivers. She had been sitting with Lilli, listening while the adults talked, when they should have been in bed with their respective family. Lilli with her family with an absentee father, and Elena living with her cousins, not a parent in sight.

She had known that her arrival into Murmuring Rivers had caused a disturbance. Valerio had been gone for a year, Ruth had been gone for a year, everyone had been gone for a year, everyone had been getting settled. The ‘new normal’ was becoming established. And then Elena arrived, Marcelo brought her into the ancient land and asked Aletta to speak in private while Elena was fussed over by Ori. She had known they were talking about her, talking about how she came here from Windskeep, about her dead parents. She saw questions on all of their faces, asking ‘how was the war going?’ ‘Would they be back soon?’ ‘Was anyone—?” They didn't need to ask the rest. And then the culmination of it all, of what it really meant for her to be there. “Elena wouldn’t be here if the war was going well.”

No, she wouldn't be.

She has been in Novus nearly a year. It is a long time, not the longest she has lived in a place, but long enough, long enough to form friendships, long enough to form a career of healing those in not just one court, but two, long enough to fall in love more than once, long enough to have her heart broken. And long enough that there is a child, her child, on its way. So not the longest she has lived in a place, no, but long enough—long enough.

For once, Elena has found more promise in isolation than in conversation. The emotions of everyone, the emotions of herself, it has started to become too much, and so she decides to spend the day near her seaside cottage, wandering over the cliffs. She knows it would be easier in a crowd, to drown herself out, but she cant do it. She cannot bring herself to do it. This pain she feels, it is the only thing that is keeping her from going numb. And something, something, anything, any ache, any agony, any grief, it is better than the nothing she has felt before. Still—

It was difficult to not imagine the what ifs.

It was impossible to not wonder about the possibilities, of the things that they could have been, would have been. If everything would have aligned. It was impossible to not think about these things, the almosts, so soft and so impossible as they clung to them, seeping into their very flesh. It was almost beautiful. It was almost perfect. They could have been almost forever—almost constellations.

The stars had almost been theirs to hold.

She knows she still has a heart. It’s in pieces, little bits of shredded and tattered paper that lies in a cavity of her chest. But it’s there, beating feebly. It squeezes painfully in her chest, but she does her best to think around it. Does her best to breathe around it. She takes the steps down the beach, silver blue eyes carefully watching her feet as she places them on the wet rocks. She is careful, graceful despite her pregnancy. Elena the Round, could perhaps be her name if she were a knight. She laughs at the thought. The palomino is a honey-gold drop of sunlight—beautiful and vibrant.

Like the girl, Elena too is fascinated by the ocean. It could be destiny, that she was always intended to feel this way towards it. After all, her parents had gone into the ocean and fallen in love there. They had gone into the ocean, under the sun and they had no idea they would create their own sunshine. They loved the ocean so much, that when Elena lost her own eyes, they gave her new eyes with the ocean reflected in them. And so Elena feels it was fate that she should love it so.

She will always love her mountains, whether it be Paraiso or Hyaline. She will always love her fields of flowers, whether it be Windskeep’s tulips or Murmuring Rivers’ lavender. And she will always love her trees, whether it be the pines of Beyond or the giants of Taiga. But Elena has only felt her heart rock and sway placidly in her chest when she watches the light, sunlight, starlight, skip across the water into the edge of forever, the ocean its own immortal being.

She feels her before she sees her. She feels that sudden surprise, that shock, even if she is not sure what it is towards. Elena turns blue eyes, looking around her, thinking she was alone, the sudden flutter of emotions was unexpected and if not a little unwelcome. But she finds the girl sitting and staring at the little creature before her. And Elena whose golden skin was once bristling suddenly offers a tentative smile. “That is his way of saying, ‘get back,” she says with a laugh, coming closer to the girl. There is no recognition, and she believes she would have remembered someone who looks like her, different, and so young too. “I would listen to him if I were you,” she says, blue eyes falling down to the tiny sand creature. She thinks of the time Liam got a crab stuck on his nose, his blue eyes had been so wide, and there had been only a moment of silence before he screamed. It may have been the first time she had seen Brielle laugh. She wonders if he still has the scar from it. But she remembers in the same breath that she would probably never see Liam again.

“Not too many find this little area, are you lost?” Elena asks, still smiling, that unwelcoming thought turns into something warmer in her eyes, and summer skies are found in autumn. “What’s your name?”

Someone asked her if this world was worth saving. At the time, she didn't know, didn't know if it was, for all the pain and agony it harvests, a glutton for despair. But now, as she knows what rests inside her, eager to appear, Elena think that maybe it is.

code by rallidae
picture by cannon
@Nicnevin