[P] pretend I'm burning bright

[Elena]

Elena

let us live like flowers
drenched in sunlight

T

here are ghosts in her and sorrow wedged like a stone in her chest as she tries to remain steadfast against him.  she tries to focus on her own breathing, on the rapid tremble of her heart and the flutter of her pulse shaking in her veins. Her eyes close, just for a moment, a heartbeat in time, and she exhales shakily. That breath, her breath, it hitches in her throat as if stuck on a mountain, and she drops her eyes, tucking her chin close to the curve of her small chest so as to hide the pain that gathers there. She doesn't know why she does this, why she hides it, no one if here. Still, there was something about it that felt private. “Tenebrae,” she says, despite the fact that he is miles and miles away from her, maybe still standing against those ruins, holding pieces of her heart she left behind, lodging themselves within him like pieces of glass.

Remember me? She had asked him.

She has always been such a fool.

Stars sit above her, like sunken ships or fireflies, she cant decide. Too sad, too hopeful, they haven't made a word for the in between. That is what the stars are. The fact that they keep twinkling in their skies as if nothing has ever happened. Like no one has ever died, as if no hearts have ever broken, as if no one has ever had to raise a child alone. Maybe there are as much a fool as her. Or it could be that ignorance is bliss. But if that is the case, why did they have to shine so bright?

When the stallion finds her, she is still lost in her agony, drifting, sinking. She thinks the waves will pull it out, until it gets lost on the horizon. She doesn't turn when his eyes first find her. Doesn't turn when she can hear him walking. He is there in seemingly the time between two heartbeats. Elena was never one for needing comfort. She was meant to provide it, not demand it from others. She was meant to soothe wounds, not require that her own be stitched up. So she puts on a brave face when she looks back at him from her ocean podium she stands upon.

There is a sound on her lips, a hum, a whimper, not quite his name – though she had intended it to be. She’s wild and unsure and so confused, so confused it hurts to breathe because it can’t possibly be true. It can’t. Why did he have to be the one to find her? Anyone else but him, Moira, Lyr, Po, someone.

She’s so, so soft not, that the snow that will surely fall tonight is louder than what she can be right now.

“Torin,” She says it this time, can say it this time, so soft and quiet, in a voice like shattered silver despite the way she tries to be brave. A glance is stolen once more back at him, like she keeps expecting him to leave. She wants him to, she doesn’t, like sunken ships and fireflies.

“I hurt me,” she says. It hurts to say it out loud, feels like glass in her chest, in her throat, in her mouth and she is choking on it. “And now I need to fix it,” she says and turns away from him, back out the sea, she forgets that she stands in. Her body feels like frost, it is something at least. She cant be Elena right now, doesn't feel like Elena. She can be frost instead. “I cant fix it,” she says, it is so quiet, like she doesn't want to hear it all. Eyes with blue that was stolen from a winter ocean turn to look at him. “And who are you today?” A small sniffle. “The wolf or the lion?”

Elena watches him, wondering if she looks more like the fawn or the lamb. Because in this moment—

She is no wolf.

She is no lion.

code by rallidae
picture by cannon
@Vercingtorix