[P] pretend I'm burning bright

[Elena]

Elena

let us live like flowers
drenched in sunlight

E

ven in her worst nightmares, Elena does not hurt the ones she loves.

She heals them, she helps them, sometimes they are hurt and she cannot get to them, sometimes they are killed again and again, murder, illness, it doesn't matter anymore. Sometimes the world caves in on them, but never had Elena been the cause of pain, never had Elena been the one to bring the physical blow to them.

The golden girl wonders if outside of her dream world if she is also so free of such sins.

Tell me you love me,’ she had said to him.

And he did it, he did it.

He never should have.

Gods he never should have.

She is crumbling here beside the sea, her body is breaking into sand until she is nothing left, able to be pulled and pushed by the ocean, drowning. But can you drown if you don't exist? Elena wonders if you can still feel pain, if are just grains of sand, if you can still remember how much life had hurt, or if you only live by the tides and the waves. The tides and the waves. What a way to live.

It is true, she never heard the end of the fable. Because in the end, the fawn had kissed the wold, and the lamb had lay with the lion. “And what do you do to the saved fawn and the found lamb?” She asks him and there is a tightness in her throat and tears that balance on eyelashes as she tries to smile faintly in response. “What do you do with me now?” She has to know.

She cannot bear to say what happened. Almost chokes on the thought of it. Elena breathes, breathes, and she breathes, except there is only water in her lungs and shadows battering down all the wall she had tried to build. She just shakes her head as her throat runs ragged with effort to keep from breaking down entirely in front of him.

Out here it smells like black tea, salt air, cold, snow.

If it were possible, would the stallion think less of her if he knew just how difficult it was to keep breathing?

Poor sad, pathetic Elena. Broken again.

She chokes back a sob that threatens to claw up her throat when she thinks of how many times she has been found like this—broken and battered. How many times can she fall apart before it becomes her fault? How many times can she crumble to dust before it’s her own hand that has done the damage?

She doesn’t have the answers. Doesn’t want to figure out the answers. She wants to sink into memories. She wants to be young again, hopeful again. She can feel it now. Sleeping beside her parents, her mother wrapped around her.

Tenebrae creeps into her mind for just a moment, again. His lips feverish and his eyes full of passion and her heart erupting in her chest. It is a hint of warmth that burns the edges, nearly breathes life into her, but she drops the memory—watches as it flows, as it sinks, further and further down until it is gone again.

“Okay,” is all she finally says, although she isn’t even sure what she is responding to.

She turns her head and looks at him with those too blue eyes, doing her best to focus on breathing, despite the cold rising up her legs.

“Okay.”

No more tears fall, and she can’t decide if that’s better or worse.

But she can say it.

She can say it for the first time.

And it is now, only now that it becomes real.

“I’m pregnant.”

code by rallidae
picture by cannon
@Vercingtorix