[P] pretend I'm burning bright

[Elena]

Elena

let us live like flowers
drenched in sunlight

O

nce upon a time, once upon a night, Elena had fallen for him. Tumbled head first into the madness of love and feelings that set her heart skywards. She had tried to take hold of those shadows, wrapping it in her hands even when it disappeared as easily as smoke. She had never known it was possible for a heart to break in half, but she is learning. She tries to hold that heart of hers in one piece, but it just keeps shattering in her tired hands.

She is a shell, she thinks. She was once full of love and laughter—a depthless well. She has found the bottom.

“You are in my soul.” He told her.

And then he pushed her away.

Elena learned that you can live without your soul.

More than anyone right now, she wants her mom. It is a childish want, to return home and let her mother make it better, to soothe her aches, and tell her that everything will be okay. That she will be okay. She doesn't want him, doesn't want the horned boy and his scars and the way he looks at her like an injured animal, doesn't want his listening ears. She wants someone who will wrap her inside them and keep out all of the shadows. All of them. Every single one.

The pain that splits across her chest is intolerable. It feels like fire, and drowning, all at once, and she isn’t sure what she’s supposed to do with it. She had gone from feeling so full and calm, to whatever turmoil this is, a temple of confusion an hurt. Whatever they had had with each other, she had held onto it like a rope pulling her to salvation. She only realized it was barbed wire once it was ripped from her hands, leaving them ragged and bloody.

Her pulse trips, her heart stammers, and she is, miraculously, able to keep her expression neutral. “It’s okay,” she whispers, although it’s not. None of this is okay.

She finds his gaze, and holds it. Tries to anyway.

And why does this hurt her?

She feels a blade buried in her belly and it causes agony to spread through her even further as a mother’s rage builds in her throat. It’s enough for her to tremble with her anger, blue eyes growing wide, they ice over like the first winter’s day.

She wants to sink into this anguish. She wants to cradle this hurt and let it seep into her breast, but she forces herself to stand instead of crumble. Despite the way it is like a punch to the gut and she feels dizzy with the disappointment, with the regret, with the pained way that her heart threatens to punch clean through her chest.

Finally, she does the only thing she knows how: she builds a wall around her agony.

“I lost…” She chokes down his name; stops herself from calling it out.

She feels the earth spin under her and she just waits for his name to pass from her lips and back inside her heart. “Yes, I lost someone.” She says like a prayer, as if admitting it could bring him back. “I cant tell him, he has his faith,” she says. “And now I have his child,” she admits. “I told him I would keep his secrets, I promised.” She is looking at him with those blue eyes, still refusing to leave that cold water because maybe it will freeze her heart solid. “I really hate promises, you know.”

And it is that admission that is enough to push her from the water. Elena goes close to him, closer than she ever has before. Her head presses into his shoulder, tucking a final tear in the crease of it. “Let’s never promise each other anything,” she says to him, isn't looking at him anymore, is pressed into his skin that somehow feels warm if only maybe because she is so cold. “Okay?” She wants to say promise me, but she is so tired of them. “You can lie to me,” she says and she is surprised by how easy it is to say it, to want it. “Just never promise me anything—and I will do the same.”

She is so tired of promises.

code by rallidae
picture by cannon
@Vercingtorix