prayed to keep my soul
J
ust accidents, Aeneas,” she assures him once more. Accidents. “Do not blame yourself, blame the world if you must blame someone, but not yourself,” she offers. She sounds too wise and too foolish all at the same time. But then he is smiling and joking and she cannot help that a laugh escapes her like sunshine. It is bright and warm and all of the features on her turn to a light golden glow. She looks like the grandmother she will meet one evening when the moon glows bright and Elliana invites the dead things into her domain. Her laugh is small, like so much of the rest of her, except those blue, blue eyes that take up so much of her face (“you will grow into them, her mother tells her.”) But the smile in the corner of her mouth is such a tiny thing. Even her inflections are subtle, and when she tips her head up to look at him, her glacier blue eyes are soft and kind and just a little struck with wonder. His own eyes look like the cliff side rocks of her home, she can almost see the ocean spraying up behind them, and the sunshine spilling over onto them. Does he know he harbors both the warmth of the sun and the wildness of the ocean in his gaze? She thinks perhaps he does not because most people do not notice such things or wonder them.
But Elliana is not most.
Most cannot speak to the dead.
“Maybe,” she says with a tilt of her head for just a moment. “I don't think I want to very much,” she decides, lands on.
Maybe next time, don’t hide? He asks her with a smile. She thinks, staring at the planes of his face, no longer with the focus of a painter, but rather the innocence of a girl. “Okay, but you have to promise me,” she says her silvery voice is light and low, “that if you cant find me, you never ever stop looking, forever.”
Forever.
She has no real concept of it, even with immorality slipping through her bloodstream, but she knows that it is long enough that her family would miss her (and she would miss her family). She would miss camping trips with her dad, or watching flowers bloom with her mom. Or just balancing on the cliffs while the ocean crashes down below her.
But she doesn’t share these secrets of her heart. Instead, she just tucks it away, like a folded note she does not have the courage to send.
She brushes past his shoulder then, starting in the direction to leave the garden, leaving her painting behind for the garden to keep (Elli never considers her art her own, but she borrows it from places and things.) “How about, next time, I find you, okay?” She closes blue eyes to blink and she is gone and leaving before they open again.
@Aeneas elliana speaks
elliana
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