prayed to keep my soul
S
he has no defense against someone like him. Someone who can so easily bury himself within her skin, someone she can slip so easily towards, not with the sudden abrasiveness of magnets clanging together, but rather the subtle ease of the moon pulling the tides. He is the moon (for how can he be anything else with those wings that can take him so far away?) And she is the ocean, swelling to reach him, to grasp the ends of his lunar glow. She likes to think, maybe, when he got tired of his place in the sky, he might just fall into the sea.
She wonders if he knows just how magnificent he is. He is like a flower in full bloom, like the sunflowers outside of their home, and the correlation brings a smile to her gentle mouth—turning the corners of her lips upward. Elli tucks away the joy and lets it bank like a fire in the pit of her belly.
It warms her as she continues to watch him quietly from her place below his window, studying the angles of his face and the unique tattoos and the way that the heavens seem painted on him. (Maybe he truly is the moon.)
Elliana he calls her. She frowns at this, twisting up to look at him, her blue eyes thoughtful. “Elli, I told you to call me Elli,” Her lashes sweep down and her teeth find her lip as she rolls her shoulders. Elliana always felt too big, like it was never supposed to be her name in the first place. And in truth, it is not entirely her own. It will always belong to her godmother, and she will spend her whole life trying to be big enough to fit into it. But Elli, now Elli fits her just right. She looks over her shoulder as if frightened her mother would appear to drag her home, but those doubtful parts are gone the moment he lands next to her. “I want to show you something,” she says and her face brightens with a smile. “Follow me,” she says and the only thing bright in the dark is those too-blue eyes and the heart upon her brow, a crescent moon on her shoulder.
She weaves in and out of the city, staying silent for fear of waking someone, anyone. It is only when they get to the fields that she exhales. And this is when it starts, surrounded by the shadows of the night. It starts, the humming and whispering of voices.
And the god awful buzzing.
It chatters her teeth and makes her jaw ache.
It feels like some small miracle that she can even hear herself think. “Let me just be in the ground. Let me just be in the ground and go to sleep.” She hears a ghost whisper to her. But then she finds Aeneas in the dark and presses her shoulder into him. The ocean rising to meet its moon. “Want to see a secret?” She asks him with a grin so wild and reckless it is almost unrecognizable when it settles itself across her lips. She leads him to a tree with brambles and shrubs covering the trunk. “Trust me,” she says and leads him through a wall of foliage and through the trunk of the tree to a secret meadow.
A secret meadow illuminated in the night, but hundreds, no thousands, of dancing lights. “They are butterflies, I think, but with light dancing inside them,” she says and settles back against him comfortably. “Aren’ they beautiful?”
@Aeneas elliana speaks
elliana
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