prayed to keep my soul
S
he did a painting once, in the middle of the night when she knew no one would be up and watching her. No mother, no Nic even. She was not sure why she felt like this, it is only when the paint touched the canvas that she realized it was because none of her art had ever before been a secret. She drew herself on Terrastella cliffs. No, not on the cliffs, she was above them. Elli had grown wings and the first thing she did was leave Dusk all behind. Elli will realize one day that it is not the wings she so desires, but the ease of escape they would provide her.
Maybe Aeneas was never her very own Peter Pan.
Maybe he was her Wendy.
His wings were just their pixie dust.
She will never be a girl who needs his smiles. She will come to love his smiles, to admire them, to know them just as well as she does her mother’s or Nic’s, but she will never need them. Instead, she will need the steady glow of his markings, that are far more comforting than any night light. She will the steel of his gaze catching the blue of her own in moments they are both sharing the same thought. She will need him to keep finding her, even if she hides far, far away.
She doesn’t mean to, but she sighs.
It leaves her before she can stop it.
It leaves her before she’s even fully registered what he’s said.
“There is magic in the movement,” she says, the one weakness of her art, what it could never be. It could never live and breathe, no matter if she painted the hearts and the lungs of moments. She does not mean to discount his words, but she does not take them back either.
He wishes too. She decides, in that instant, that he could do absolutely anything and she would forgive him for it. This is a gift she has not yet bestowed on anyone. He has his eyes closed, he is thinking, and she watches him. Her attention is only stolen when the world before them stirs with magic. She feels that familiar chill of someone, something was going to cross over. “Aeneas,” she says to him as the lion is brought to life through magic and light. It is beautiful, and she knows that because of that, it will be fleeting.
She breathes as the chill exits her body and the lion disappears into the sky. “I don’t know, Aeneas,” she says, attempting to pull his gaze to her own. His eyes remind her of the storm clouds she saw right before the blizzard. She looks out at the shadows with his question, as if worried they might hear. She has never before confessed this in the night. “I do,” she says, and it is the first time she acknowledges that what she can do is truly magic. “I can hear the shadows talk,” she says, and they whisper behind her. “Did you know that they can breathe?” The question is asked in much the same way she would ask if he knew that if you mixed blue and yellow paint together, you get green.
She knows he is great, she has known it for some time now and the way she looks at him now, how can he not see it reflected in her eyes? They were as blue as a glacial lake, should they not be as reflective? That knowing look of hers burns. She has a way of watching people with such an intensity that she is able to burn right through them, through the smoothness of their bones, over the curve of their ribs, and right through their heart. “I don’t know if we can create something beautiful without something ugly coming to exist, but I think if anyone should try—maybe it should be you.”
@Aeneas elliana speaks
elliana
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