[P] sweet like cinnamon

[Elena]

“I think it's a lot to ask, to belong anywhere." Michael had told her before a crab scurried across the shore. ”I think some places want you, and some don't, but I don't know that a person ever belongs.”

Some places want you. Terrastella wants her, Elena reminds herself. She can tell in the way the people here smile at her, can see it in the way even the smallest residents ask for her at the hospital to fix the cut on their knee. She can tell in the way she has not felt so happy in a place in so long. Terrastella, from the hospital, to the swamp, to the sea, to the grassland, it wanted her.

And some don’t. She can feel every inch of Boudika, every emotion passing over her, under her, beside her, through her. It is emotions she herself has felt, and it tastes (burns) like a white hot iron down her throat as she can no longer tell where Boudika’s emotions end and hers begin. When the knife strikes against her, Boudika, as sharp as only truth can be, it may as well be Elena’s heart it stabs against.

There is a song through the sea, a discordant and disharmonious melody of corrupted static and white noise that rises in pitch like a scream… that pierces the very waves and depths, that stretches across the foamy shores and all the grains of sand. Bubbles in the blackness begin to rise and like boiling waters it grows and grows until all the sea is raging and stirred. Waves ebb and flow and pound against the stone and sand: against rock and boulder alike.

There is a song through the sea.

It sings like a warning, like a bullet, cutting into the woman on the shore.

Did you know? She asks.
And suddenly it is that day in the hospital all over.

She struggles to breathe—to find the ground beneath her. She feels a rare anger that is cleansing. It is so white hot that she can tell herself that it is pure. It burns through the paper thin gossamer of the old her, the old old her. Even in this new life, with so much of her sealed away, so many secrets, she feels that sorrow and grief that feels like fury in her mouth. It leaves the normally calm, steady woman vulnerable to a turbulent fire within her breast.

There is too many sicknesses in Elena for her to count—too many diseases both natural born and earned that crawl up her throat and clog her mouth. They are cotton on her tongue and sludge in her veins, and yet she finds that she does not mind. She makes her home amongst the monsters of the world and sings her love; she picks up the shattered pieces of glass and holds them to her chest even as her fingers bleed.

To be anything but a woman. Elena’s answer would so mirror something from her childhood. A tree, to touch both above her and below her. She would have no need for men and their shadows and their secrets. Of course, she would still have Elli. Whatever she may be, a permanent flower growing on a branch far above her.

Was it worth it?

Had any of this been worth it? She thinks about her answer, if she had been asked the night where she had fallen to pieces, she might have said no, but ask her any night after Elliana was born and Elena would say it was. All of it was worth it for her child, her beautiful, perfect, sweet, intelligent, creative daughter. Whose face passes Tenebrae’s shadows across it, whose shoulder is marked with Caligo’s marking even if she is Dusk’s child. “Boudika,” her voice is steady and she punctuates the sentence with a nearly clipped version of the name. Was it worth it? She would plunge a knife into her own heart time and time again if it meant she could keep Elli, would endure all the agony for entirety like her own wretched purgatory if it meant she always ended up in the same fate where she woke to see Elliana’s bright blue eyes every morning.

The fury that fills Elena when she stands there and listens to Boudika is holy and direct and it slices fire hot through her as she narrows winter blue eyes at the Denocte girl. Envy ricochets around the women on the beach, kicking up sand, startling oceans, and darting like sea birds. Jealousy has always been a poor look on Elena, she has never worn green well.

What did she have to do with Caligo’s monks?
And then again, did she know?

She wants to be cold. She wants to be able to remain closed off and frigid, but she remembers something, something that turns her blood hot with shame and sorrow.

She was never enough.

Not enough to share everything with.

Not enough to view as a partner in life.

Never enough.

Still, she doesn't want to show this weakness, not to Boudika, not to her. So she wipes the sadness from her gaze, instead gulping in air as she breaches the ocean of her thoughts. “It doesn’t matter if it was worth it,” she lies, because she wants it to not matter. She wants to not feel so much pain at the memory of it. “If I loved him, if I kept him, my child, my daughter, would be his, but she isn’t.”

Such a lie.

But she wants to tell it because she thinks it means she has moved on, and she leaves both Tenebrae and Boudika behind, as the tide rises. (In truth though, Elena is not so far ahead of them, she is drowning in the undertow.)

“He had me fooled,” this time a truth exchanged, her heart rattling in her chest. The words come crawling up her throat. “I knew there was another—but I did not know who,” she slips a further truth onto her tongue. “I thought maybe I could be enough to pull him away.” Like she pulled him into the dance of the fire, like she pulled him into the ocean, and like how they were both pulled into the lake, into sin, into love—into Elliana.

picture by cannon <3
@Boudika