[P] lets light this house on fire

[Elena]

It's always a matter, isn't it, of waiting for the world to come unraveled? When things hold together, it's always only temporary

S

he would never regret Elliana, never. She loves her wholeheartedly. When she had been born, she had cried into her fuzzy neck, and never regretted her. She was a bright spot of joy.  Beautiful and adventurous and so undeniably perfect.

So it has not crossed her mind that she would regret it. Even when she was alive with pain from the missing of him—the massive hole that he had left in the very center of her. “My little wildflower.” She had called her, and gathered her up, and cared for her, watched her little girl starting to bloom and loved her more and more and more. “By blood,” she had said kissing the top of her head. “And by bond,” she kissed her cheek. “We are bound.” 

They go to the ocean today. Away from Terrastella, away from it all. “Nic and I are going to look at the tide pools, we are going to look for crabs,” Elliana says to her mother excitedly. Elena smiles and nods her way, a silent confirmation. There is always a twinge of worry when Elliana strays from her side, a little burr of sharp uncertainty when she wanders too close to the deep shadows beneath trees just out of her reach. She know of the things that live in the dark - not soft, beautiful things like Azrael, bathed in stars, sewn together by dreams. It is usually the broken that the dark is filled with. Those who find solace in an hour where unease creeps.

But she doesn't stray too far from her, not far enough that she couldn't reacher her daughter should something happen, and Nic was with her. So her expression stays soft and gentle, a tired smile stretched in velvet white across her lips. She is changing though, a weight in her expression that never used to be there - a weariness she felt in her bones. She feels like a slow wave as she walks down the beach, blue bruises in her eyes. 

Here is the part of the story where Elena tells herself she is getting better—and she is starting to believe it. If only because it has yet to be tested.

She feels directionless, unsure of where to move to next. “Come on, Lilli,” she says. “Give me a sign.” Be my light in the dark. 

Elena is still haunted by him, try as she may to forget. She is haunted. 

By everything about him.

The way they danced when they first met, when he first touched her, so tenderly, and then so hungry later. How he had pressed promises into her skin and dreams into her heart. How she had built her hopes around him, somehow finding it in the shadows of the stallion. 

She is haunted by his love. By the way that her world crashed around her when he left her, when truths came out. When truths stayed hidden. 

She is haunted by his absence.

By his presence.

She is forever marked by his time in her life, forever changed.

So perhaps that is why mindless wandering took her here today. Perhaps the ghost of his scent dragged her to the edge of the ocean. Her stomach had grown and grown every day, when she left him, turning her normally lean figure round with the child she would never regret, would never take back. And now she look so much like that old Elena, slim once more, the pregnancy feels like a distant if not still pleasant memory. She looks different too, despite that same Elena smile. She wears motherhood well, it cannot be denied. She thinks this was all worth it, she never needed to see him again. A whole season had passed without word of him or Boudika for that matter. She had Elliana, she did not need Tenebrae. 

Such thoughts break when she sees him.

Her face falls open, cracked wide with surprise and then grief and then a wave of emotion she cannot bear to confess. She almost staggers beneath the weight of it, but manages to stay upright.

The intimacy of it, the way she knows how he moves, the curve of his body, the wrapping of his shadows. 

She doesn’t move but his name escapes her mouth, split apart with everything that rises in her, “Tenebrae.” Her throat closes and her velvet lips press shut, and she wonders at how after all this time the mere presence of him nearly manages to undo her. Her heart is a hammer tapping holes into her chest, her pulse the drum-beat to a song she has never heard before. Her eyes ache to settle against that beautiful shadow strewn face, ache to lose themselves in every hollow and angle and ridge of elegant bone, but she denies them for fear of what he might find in her eyes. She just blinks those too-blue eyes. 

She is always the first to break before him. 

She is always the first to crumble. 

Maybe, in time, she will learn to live with it and not hate the way that her body betrays her, a slender golden leg  lifting and threatening to carry herself closer to him before she firmly plants it again. But, for now, she only hates herself for the weakness that blossoms like a flower in her chest when she catches his eyes as she stands before him. The way that she immediately begins to tremble as the faultlines split her open. 

So she swallows and tries again, desperately grabbing for any kind of strength. For any kind of armor. 

She cannot survive him again, she thinks. 

Not if she is vulnerable. 

“Tenebrae.” This time she is able to feign almost indifference, almost able to pretend that she barely remembers the name. Like she hadn’t spent nights recreating the shape and feel of him. But she feels a fissure open up in her, threatening to tear her apart, and she knows that she can’t give in. She can’t be so weak in front of him again. She can’t. She can’t. 

So she straightens, pulled on her mask, her features smooth and cold, her eyes glittering. 

“I didn’t expect to see you here.”

A truth, one wrapped in a blanket of apathy. Her mask slips for just a second as she studies him, as she feels that dark and painful ache that grabs at her chest, but she pulls it on again, rolling a shoulder. 

“I hope that you have been well. I was not aware there were monasteries on the beach.” While the apathy is rampant, there sits too, a measured ounce of animosity weighted in her words. “Must be a pleasant experience to both pray and sunbathe.”

@tag
Code by rallidae
picture by cannon
@Tenebrae