[P] you're my rain [fall]

[Elena]

Elena

let us live like flowers
drenched in sunlight

H

is laugh. It is what stands out most to her. Maybe because it is the thing Tenebrae does so little of and when he does, it is encased in darkness, not like Azrael’s, not like the twinkling of starlight and the glisten of the moon. His laughter is so utterly perfect that she remembers how much she just does not deserve him, and how she is hurting him the longer she holds onto a secret. She is so scared of losing him, so, so selfishly scared. She hangs onto his laughter, cups it in her hands like it is a firefly, peeking a blue eye inside to see it glow, cherishing the remembrance of it when summer closes and winter comes.

What’s wrong, Elena?

Yes, Elena.
What’s wrong?

Everything.

No, not everything—
Just you.

You are what’s wrong.

Something creeps into the happiness of the moment, something darker and sadder and she cannot shake it. She feels the very edges of it and does her best to ignore it, to turn her face to the sun and pretend that there is not an undercurrent of sorrow of betrayal.

She closes her eyes and feels the familiar saltwater on her cheek. Everyone of his emotions is read like a sad book to the empath. “He doesn't want to know—he is a monk,” she says, as if this answers the entire question. He doesn't want to know what he does not know. Elena can offer that man little else now and so she gives him the bliss of ignorance. Why she could not offer Azrael the same thing only reminds her of how much she cares for the starry man.

“We did,” she pleads with him, She turns her face away, it hurts too much to stare at her reflection in his eyes. Her heart explodes a thousand times over again in her chest and she can hardly look at him, can feel her jaw tremble with tension at the way she forces it to be still even as she’s falling apart. His words bury themselves likes hooks beneath her skin and she turns back to stare up at him, not entirely composed but also no longer falling apart by the weight of their sheer proximity. “We did,” She says again in a voice that is dangerously quiet, dangerously low. The moment is almost too much—almost more than she can bear.It rises in her throat. Splinters along her bones. She stops herself from stepping forward for a moment, he wasn't hers to touch.

Cared for her, he says and that hits most of all. He changes it, patches up the words he has said, but that single addition to the word that could change it so much stays with her like a fish hook in her belly. “Azrael,” she says and then she is silent, as if she did not deserve to speak anymore to him, but his name is sweet on her tongue regardless of the ache in her heart and she steps forward, because Elena cannot stand the rules, even the ones she places for herself, even the ones she has so constructed. She is too bold, she is too selfish. She reaches out and gently touches the strands of man that collected up his neck. It’s his right to ignore her, to push her away from him, to push her out of his life, to focus on everything else within it. 

She pulls back, doing her best to keep the pain from her soft eyes and she breathes, heart simultaneously wrenching in her chest as it softens for him. She should be angry, Elena had never told him she was his, but she knows she had in quiet ways, in smaller ways. In the way she crept into his dreams and he into hers, in the touches against his strong shoulder, in the smiles she offered to him and him alone.

In the way she would breathe his name across galaxies.

“It was always enough, I just—” and she doesn't remember how to form the words that come so easily to her in dreams, how easily they were said in the light of a lantern by a lake.

How can he not see the way she lies dismantled at his feet?

It sears across her belly—his presence and his distance each cleaving into her breast with a sharpness that causes her to suck in her breath between her teeth, the ache spreading through her bones.

He wont walk away, she realizes, and this is the last shred of hope that sits ignited on her skin like flames. And so she gives a silent promise to him, by taking the first step. “Find me again,” she begs, no prays to him like he were a god. “Find me again,” she repeats. People are meant to find stars, not the other way around and so she knows what she asks of him, it is too much, but she asks all the same—before she goes.

There is a great and tragic love story on her skin. It tells of a man of shadows, of a bonfire, of a lake. It is a story that has been written, the book has been closed.

It opens again.

It tells of a man of starlight, of mountain air, of a garden. It is a story that has been written, ripped apart, scribbled out, but Elena cannot close it.

code by rallidae
picture by cannon
@Azrael