[P] he would not ascend; he learned his lesson | party

[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 had watched her father walk out onto the battlefield, and she had watched when he came back to her. Not all children were so lucky, and eventually, she became one of those unlucky ones too. But when he left her, she knew he chose it not from duty, but from love. Elena can remember a conversation she had with Lilli in a time that feels long enough ago, under a Hyaline sky. Love is fickle, duty is reliable. But one warms your bed and the other is a cold shoulder. Love will turn back for you, duty pushes ahead.

He says he has a son, and Elena still cannot picture him as a father. “That’s a good name,” she says. “A shame, but in the end, unimportant,” she says because people say all the time how much Elliana looks like her, but she can still see so many pieces of her father, and that aches, but children are not just a combination of parents, but of entire pasts stretched far, far, far back. Elliana has no idea how much she looks like her great-great-grandmother, Fawn, and how it frightens Elena, because sometime Elli wakes in the night screaming she cannot breathe, she cannot breathe beneath the water. And she tells her ‘Granny Fawn sounds scared. Is it true we cant breathe under water? What happens then?’

His anger feels not like fire, but ice, and it imbeds itself in her heart and grows, leaving nothing but that cold in the place of other emotions. “Yes,” she admits. “It is how I know he will not do it again.” She concludes. Tenebrae had chosen her, for one night, her, over everything, everyone else, and he had not loved her enough to keep her as his choice. It would have been better if they could live in the what could have been, then to ever have pretended it could be in the first place. “That is a poor excuse, and you know it, and your child knows it,” she whispers to him.

“And maybe you should have been raised as a girl,” she says with tension. Elena is tired of him, he is exhausting. “And learn that duty extends to more than just battles and wars,” she finishes. “Though I have seen women just as eager as men to don their armor and head off into the fight,” she says, remembering Ruth, and remembering the way Marcelo still ached for his mother despite the crown that her and Val’s absence placed on his head. “You do not tell me how to parent my child, when you neither parented your own, nor are you part of her life.” She says, believing her daughter and this man would never meet, when all she does is drive them closer to the day Elliana will stare up at him, with eyes like her mother, and say her name, as if he did not already know so much about her. 

@Vercingtorix
Code by rallidae
picture by cannon