[P] pale laughter in the empty room.

[Elena]

“Lilli, tell me a secret,” she had asked of her cousin one night. “Like a real secret,” she had pressed. And they sat there together, giggling into the night, passing secrets back and forth. And then they grew, and so too did those secrets they shared. Secrets about love, about lust, about not being good enough, about wondering if they could change the past and would they if they could. In the end they told too many secrets, perhaps, but Elena always knew that her secrets were safer with Lilli than they were inside her own heart. Her chestnut cousin wore Elena’s burdens better than she did herself.

What secrets do you hide, Adonai? And what places do you keep them?

She notes the way he sits up, wondering how slumped over he must have been before she entered into the room. How weak was he truly without placing the brave mask over his pale face. Elena hides the questions and the shock at seeing him. Buries it underneath her own mask, one of the practiced doctor. She watches the curtains blow through a breeze in the cracked window. She wonders if he grows hot with the air of the desert.

Yet, he is smiling at her. He is handsome enough, he is a prince after all. Elena smiles back at him, feminine, enchanting, but by no means as charming as his own. That sort of thing takes practice, practice of things Elena has so little interest in. But he coughs and the illusion is broken. He is still a prince, yes, but he is also her patient. She takes his greeting as an invitation to move closer. “Not at all, it is not my first time traipsing into the the desert,” she says, in fact the first was when she came to meet Orestes, a request to be a medic at the tournament. “You look as if you had made the journey rather than myself,” the empath says, resisting the urge to sit by his bedside, hold his head and stroke his hair. “Please, do not tire yourself, I am sure you were planning something elaborate for my welcoming? Shawls of gold, rare flowers and rubies perhaps?” She jests with him. She has a hard time finding his emotions with her empathy, hidden beneath sickness and twists inside his head.

“Adonai,” she says when she moves to the cushioned seat. “You know why I am here,” she is determined, the previous doctor mentioned he could be a more—difficult patient. “So I believe it is best we get started. You said you are having a bad spell—tell me more.”

picture by cannon <3
@Adonai