[P] seek me out

[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

E

lena no longer knows what anything means anymore.

She has nightmares of being left alone. Of being lost forever.

In the end, it’s what it always comes back to.

That feeling of overwhelming darkness.

She had dreamt a different dream last night. One of flowers, bird song, warmth. It had felt good to remember a time of happiness, a time of peace, when she was with her family. She wants her life to be this bright again. And, in a way, it has gotten brighter. She can recall having to slow her steps in the snow, as her daughter followed behind her, and the way she delighted in how her feet would sink below the surface, out of sight. She walked next to her, and the sunlight grew stronger just for them (or so will she say until the end of forever).

Let’s go. Suddenly she is her mother’s daughter. Standing close to someone so many would shy from, but she does it not because she is bold, but because she cannot seem him as frightening, intimidating, but just as he is. Nothing more, nothing less.

She can almost feel the waves of his fear, fear for the same thing she feels, washing over her.

It is a disconnected thing—just the pressure of it, the sonic boom of it. It starts as an earthquake in him but it is nothing but a mere rumble when it reaches her shores.

She presses the sensation of calm into him—to whatever extent he will accept it. He can choose to let it, or reject it completely. She does not control emotions, only suggests them.

Elena is close to him, his warmth is comforting, the touch is easy, and suddenly she felt so very old, and he along with her. And they are not just two who do not make promises, but they have seen time pass and countless others break countless promises made, and they sit back and smile like secrets they have learned. She hugs tighter to him still.

Because no matter how she tries, she cannot shake the cold fear for him that wedges between her shoulders, the concern that snakes up her spine, the worry that now pulls her lips downward in thought. A chaos that leaves her ears ringing, her pulse racing.

Her daughter once told her that the shadows were breathing. Elena told her that shadows, objects, cannot breathe. She thinks, as she stares at the walls pressing in on them, that she may have been lying. And then they feel like shadows themselves, walking through the streets.

It was always shadows.

“Love does not hurt. It kills,” she suddenly says. “You hope that the pain will stop and it doesn’t. you wait in hope and it kills,” and she curses this place of making her say it, even as she practically falls to her knees at his feet to thank him for the same.

He says her name and suddenly her world becomes so very small. Elena is suddenly terrified that they are the only ones left. “I have neither killed nor destroyed,” she asserts, and it says so much about her that she feels she needs to admit this. Because the next thing she says, she knows makes her a cowardly monster, but a monster all the same. “I leave, Torrin,” she says with finality,  but she holds no guilt, though it may be just because she covers it with fight.

“Tell me something about you I don't know,” she says, and not for the first time, history kisses her lips, and they are no longer in the center. Elena keeps her blue eyes on his own, wiling herself to keep from looking at the castle that stands before her—the fortress she has tried so hard to build around her heart—before her.

@Vercingtorix
Code by rallidae
picture by cannon