[P] sweet like cinnamon

[Elena]

The months, the years, have not been kind to Elena.

She can feel it—the way that they have all accumulated on the shores of her heart. She can feel the bruises and the lacerations. She can feel the way that it has eaten away at the core of her, leaving her hollowed out, her very bones turning to dust beneath the pressure of it.

She felt pieces of herself falling away, crumbling each day.

Elliana is her saving grace, and Elena worries she puts too much weight on the child. She would never know what to do if something happened to her. She knew the knot in her stomach would stay there forever, that it was what it meant to love and be in love, to care about something so much that you would spare nothing to protect them.

It was the most beautiful burden.

She comes from the waters, and Elena can taste the sea on the air. There is a part of Elena that beats like wild wings against her chest.

There is part of her that wants nothing more than to throw herself out into the wild wind that is the sea and ship life and live for years. She wants to lose herself into the winds and the seas and then discover who she is in the crossfire. She cannot find the source of it within her anymore. There is something lost, something forever changed. There’s something that has melted and reformed and left her alone—alone. Looking at Boudika now, she can almost feel it. She can barely brush her fingers against the edges of it and taste the normalcy of it. When she was just a girl, so assuming, just an orphan, play beside a glistening lake, with towering oak trees and tender willows. Before she swallowed galaxies and was lit afire. Even all of the drama and complexity, even all of that was simple.

So simple compared to this. “Tenebrae,” she repeats, mulling it over in that detached voice of hers, letting her eyes wander to the horizon and beyond. “I do know a man named Tenebrae,” she admits. “Quite well in fact.” And she doesn't know why she says this. No, she knows, she does know, she just hates to admit it, it is far easier to feign ignorance. “The wolves are not away as much as in Denocte.”

She can smell salt on her skin, and feel the way she is the feral, feels the recklessness inside Boudika. Elena feels jealousy and want and a wild, persistent longing. Tragedy looks beautiful in the blue bruises of Elena’s eyes. She can feel it then, the power she has that Elena had not been sensitive enough to notice before. Shape shifter, skin walker, face changer. It was all the same. And Elena did not trust it, did not understand how Tenebrae had been able to. Aletta said it all came back to the basic law of Magic: that if something was taken, something had to be given. If they took so many shapes, what was left?

Elena looks at her with pale blue eyes and she wonders, what is left of Boudika?

And then she feels like she is on fire and blue eyes ice over to be as sharp as winter.

She should not blame her for any of this, she should blame Tenebrae, she does blame Tenebrae. But she is the woman, not even the other, she is the woman, (Elena is the other) and Elena imagines that Boudika could drag the monk away from her with a single glance, with a roll of her shoulders. Her tongue silver, her words like honey.

“Boudika.” The Champion of Community breathes, in between something sweet and feral. She would be lying if she said she had not thought about this moment, had not considered it, but playing scenarios and walking into them are two entirely different things. And she isn't sure what she should say. “Why are you on the shores of Terrastella?” She asks, planting those feet firmly in the sand beneath her feet. This was her soil, her home, her love. And it is in this moment that she no longer thinks of herself as Elena, the girl from Hyaline, the girl from Windskeep, from Paraiso. She is of Terrastella, from Terrastella. She is Dusk. And it gives her a sense of pride she may not deserve, that she may not have earned, but pride all the same. “What duty could Night Court’s Champion of Community possibly have here?”

picture by cannon <3
@Boudika