[P] A dream once lost among sorrow and songs

[Elena]

Elena

let us live like flowers
drenched in sunlight

S

he dreams of electricity.

She dreams of blackness.

Perhaps she had known that she walked straight into a trap, into a cage that would shut swiftly behind her. Maybe she had welcomed the bars, the way they made long, straight shadows on her golden face. There could be a part of her the rattled the cage door and watched it swing open, standing there, without moving, the song bird so preferring her cage where she can be admired for her singing, than out in the skies where no one may ever hear her.

She dreams of sunshine.

She dreams of oceans.

They are trapped, running in circles, within this moment that is at once impossible in its strength as it is in its fragility. She smiles back at him, a dimple in return that presses into her cheeks as that blue eyed gaze closes underneath the feel of his lips against her skin. She closes her eyes and focuses on her breathes, inhaling him in deeply and exhaling slowly. She feels vulnerable every moment between he is not pressed against her. Her breathing skitters, uneven and suddenly hard to hold onto, like catching air between impossible fingers.

It is a good thing that Elena cannot read minds because his thoughts would break her. She is already dangerously close to the edge, held together with nothing but strength of will and the barest of threads—the barest hold on sanity. She can feel him, feel something waiting in his thoughts, but she tries to ignore it, to think of anything but. He clings close to her and Elena can almost let this moment become perfect. It has to be perfect. She reaches over to leave a kid in the soft hollow behind the corner of his mouth. This is not a kiss of hunger nor desire, not like the lake, not like that night of wishes. It is just a kiss, simple and true.

And in some ways, that makes what is about to happen so—so much worse.

His darkness, something she was once feared, is now something that brings her only comfort. She had seen his shadows, had seen his face within them and she had kissed them away. Elena knows his shadows are not the only thing that rest against his skin, there feverish kisses she planted there, there is ash from bonfires, and there is glistening lake water from dancing in water that would have been better used for a baptism. But maybe the golden girl would think differently if she knew how the shadows leeched the sunlight off her body until she may lose all her light.

But even when she will grow dull, that little firefly inside her grows and sings and dances. It glows, and will keep glowing until it gives Elena back her light and back her fire.

No matter how Tenebrae’s shadows destroy it, suffocate it, try to erase that light, put out that fire. Not when these shadows had a hand in making that little piece of light, it cannot destroy itself.

She runs, oh she runs. She runs and the autumn air goes right through her, like silk, like ocean water that had rushed into her lungs. Elena hardly realizes that she has stopped running, even when her legs slow and her lungs are enflamed. It is only when she starts laughing that she notices the stillness around her. The monk’s emotions creep towards her like wicked shadows, arching and reaching, but she thinks if she can keep laughing maybe they will never find her.

And then he says it.

It’s so simple, her name.
Three syllables is all it is.
But it’s enough to knock the wind out of her when it forms in his mouth.

Because no one in her life has come as close as him, has known her body like him, his taken and given as much as he has. Something inside her, instinct, spits and hisses in the darkness of doubt in her heart. But in the corners of her mouth, it quivers into a smile.

One golden leg decorated with white lifted as if to follow him, to close the space, but she slowly pulled it back to the ground, listening to him, ears tipped forward. She stilled, not following him yet.Something inside her wilts in uncertainty, something pewter and fragile. Elena then steps headfirst into her fate, following the shadow stallion through the door.

“What is this?” she questioned, her voice a touch lower, an unusual husk seeping into its fog, darkening it in her mouth. It twisted around her innocence, the curiosity that peered out form her blue eyes, the desire to know, to understand him. And whether she means this place or each other, Elena refuses to elaborate, let her, let them, pretend a while longer. She breathes, stopping right behind him, her head dipping towards his flesh, but pausing, hovering, desperate for just one more touch. But here, it feels wrong some how. (Elena will think about this almost touch later in her life, and she will wonder what would have happened if it wasn't an almost touch, what would have happened.)

“Tenebrae.” A single shiver raced up her spine as she opened her wide winter eyes, caught his gaze. His emotions flitter onto her subconscious not with the softness of rose petals, but like the prickling of its thorns. “Why do I feel like you are frightened of me?” She says, even though she is the one who feels like she is terrified. Her eyes look to the carvings, to the statues. It was such a declaration of faith, such a declaration of all that he stands for. Elena no longer feels the chill of shadows, but there is a fire burning underneath her skin.

No, not fire—a sun.

“You're an impossible man,” she swore at him, in a whisper, as if her voice could send this cave crumbling, still pushing a subtle sharpness in her voice in a pathetic attempt not to feel anything too deeply. 

Impossible. Just like any future for her.

code by rallidae
picture by cannon
@Tenebrae