[P] but what of his love?

[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

S

he tries not to think of her dreams. Because in dreams, things work, planets align. In dreams, everyone stays together. In dreams there is no ice, no broken hearts, no secrets, no lies.
She tries not think of her dreams because they so easily turn to nightmares, where she is weeping for her mother, where her father is yelling at her to run, where she is screaming and crying to tell them to come back, come back for me, but it is not enough.

But it is so hard not to think of them in this moment, under the toxins that beats behind her eyes like hummingbird wings.

‘Tag, you’re it, Cherish!’ She squeals to her aunt as she runs through her birth land. She runs, runs as fast as young, sunshine legs can take her. Cherish laughs behind her until Elena abruptly turns a corner. ‘No, Elena, don’t go that way!’ She cries, but it is too late, there is her father, covered in icy, bloodied, vacant. A hollow body of a man she once loved.

A frown creases her lips when she realizes she has ran out of flowers to place in her dark cousin’s mane. ‘It’s okay, Elena,’ he sighs in that way that is so essentially Alvaro that Elena cannot help but giggle back. ‘I know where we can find more,’ he says and leads her into Paraiso’s forest. They come to a hole in the ground, and Alvaro stops, and looks at her, she thinks she sees blood dripping from his eyes instead of tears. ‘Are the flowers down there?’ She asks, suddenly terrified. He doesn't say anything and she knows she has to look even if she doesn't want to. Peering over the edge, she sees her laying there, cream hair splayed out, her body twisted at all the wrong angles. This was no garden, she realizes, but a graveyard.

It is a Hyaline night sky, and she takes comfort in having Lilli’s crimson form wrapped around her, they cradle each other close. ‘Tell me a secret,’ Lilli asks. ‘You are my best friend.’ It is not really a secret, but Elena feels the need to tell her anyway. ‘Tell me a secret,’ Elena asks in return. ‘How about I show you one?’ Lilli asks and Elena, smiling, obliges. But she turns and it is no longer the gentle red of Lilli, but the vibrant, crimson of Boudika, horns sprouted atop her head, venom on her breath as she sinks her poison beneath Elena’s veins. ‘You wanted his love, well, this is what it does to you.’ She says as she watches Elena squirm in agony upon the floor that is no longer Hyaline, but Denocte.

And then there is a bonfire. Ash. Smoke. Flames. Embers. Elena watches it all from a distance, and she turns away because she knows how this dream ends, it was a nightmare from the beginning just like the rest, and just like the rest, she was too foolish to see it.

She breathes, rattled and shaking as she stands there, burdened by his emotions, but so entirely gleeful and happy all at the same time. She hears him exhale and she wonders how did he steal the breath from her lungs like that? Because this air no longer feels like her own.

Elena watches him still, hinging on her question, waiting for him to finish it. And then he says it: ‘nothing.’

“I have to give it back now,” she says, and tears form in her eyes as she slowly reels out the emotions and they seek to find purchase within their host once more. Slowly, slowly, she releases them, it may feel just like a tickle at first, but in time, by morning, it will consume him once more. She wonders if he can already feel it suffocating him. Elena blocks his emotions from herself because she cannot stand to find out right now, not when she knows this time, this time she causes it, if only because she could not keep it. “You can sleep here tonight, wait out the storm,” she says, blue eyes glancing out the window as rain continues to pelt against the glass as if wishing to break it. “You will leave in the morning, before my daughter and her father return,” she says, and though it reads like a command, the breath of it, the melody, is an apology. Elena retires to her room, bites her lip as she sobs in silence. And for the first time, she is not the fawn, but the maiden who places a crown of roses on the hunter’s head. And she is not the lamb, but the girl who wraps the Shepard in a shawl of wool.

I have to give it back now, she thinks as she slumbers. I have to give it back.

@Vercingtorix
Code by rallidae
picture by cannon