Maybe if she lived like him, without the voices in her ear, without the chilling feeling she always gets when she sees the flowers wilt. Maybe if she lived like him she would paint pictures of knights and princesses, even dragons and other villains. But she paints silhouettes that have no faces. She paints voices, paints the tears that fall from their eyes, lonely heart, and battered bodies.
Maybe if she lived like him she would paint things that all little girls should paint.
And maybe not paint so many things that little girls should not.
Her serious lips tilting into the shadow of a smile. As she concentrates. The brush strokes are not as smooth as they usually are on a canvas. But she this is not a painting she would be taking home. It is a painting of a lady—a lady with a bent neck.
Her mother would never approve.
But Elliana thinks—no it is just hopes, empty hopes, but hopes all the same, that when she puts color to her, paints her, gives her a shape in the day, then maybe by night she would be too enraptured in seeing herself to ever come and find her.
She doesn't hear him. Or chooses not to listen, it is one or the other. She is mixing colors, grey and blues and blacks. She thinks the lady may have more color, but she has only ever seen her at night, only the moon able to illuminate her, though she still says framed by shadows. Her brush does not lift from the stone when he comes to her.
“Painting,” she says. She wants him to both stay and to leave. She cant decide. Ultimately though, she is her mother’s daughter and so she puts down her brush and looks at the boy with a face she doesn't recognize if only because it is not one of the faces that haunt her. “I am Elliana, Elli if you don't mind,” she says with a smile, so unaware it is nearly the same words her godmother said time and time again.
As much as she is her mother’s daughter.
She is not.
She lacks that warmth her mother always so readily provides, that confidence in conversations she has. Her mother a social butterfly, a honey bee greeting all who come by, so bewildered by her wallflower daughter. Her mother says she needs friends. Elliana says the only friends she needs are a paintbrush and a canvas. So she says something she doesn't think a friend would say. “I don't know if I would like having wings very much.” She says, staring at him with blue eyes, one looks like winter—and one like summer.
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