[P] lets light this house on fire

[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

H

ow should this have gone? Is there a world where this tale ends differently?

She thinks about the first time they met often—perhaps too often. She thinks about the way he had managed to stir life into her. It only increased the more times they met. She had been alive for the first time in months, those times with him. He had made her feel the entire spectrum of her emotions. From rage to helplessness to sorrow to heat.

He had made her want.

He had made her need.

Perhaps most dangerously of all, he had made her hope.

The memory of it is something she carries with her often, tucked against her breast. She remembers all the ways she had come apart. How she had beat fists against his chest and hunted for purchase on the granite walls of him. How he had finally melted into liquid heat and the way that he had lit her on fire—how he had showed her everything she had known existed but never found.

That heat is always with her now, simmering just below the surface, but she is too focused on the way that the pain rises to notice it now. She shivers, her skin flinching. His question digs into her and she thinks about all of the answers she could give him. She could tell him that she’s haunted by his daughter that he doesn’t know about. That she’s haunted by the look on Azrael’s face when she had talked about Tenebrae.

How she had known it was too late for her to change course.

How the only option seemed to be swallowing the poison alone.

When she tries to think about them, it is too much. It is overwhelming, to ponder what she’s done, what has been done to her. That somewhere in between every lake shore and bonfire they created something, a kind of sickening romance – love, but more than that.
What they had consumed like a wildfire, leaving them blackened and burnt.
What they had is a virus, destroyed them from the inside out until their bones rattled to dust.
What they had spawned a shadow golden girl who talks to ghosts and wanders with spirits, a girl who should not exist.
They are quantum physics – strange and unnerving and indescribable.

She longs for Lilli desperately, longs for the emerald carpet of Paraiso and the thundering falls she had so foolishly left behind—for the world she knows, the home she loves.

What a fool she has been to run from it.

But in the same breath, Elli comes to mind and she knows she would change nothing. There does not exist a world in Elena’s mind without Elliana in it.

The shadows comes to rest against and she thinks, she could hate him. She could loathe him for dragging her into this, for igniting this fire in her life that has nearly razed her clean. Those white-hot flames that have incinerated that life she had, that life she had known. But staring at him as he turns away, studying him, she can’t find it. She can only feel love, can only feel grateful for every moment.

She could have gone her entire life without knowing passion, and yet here it was. This exquisite pain was everything—it brought clarity, sharpness, joy. For every painful moment, there is a counterweight. For every memory she has of him running from her, she has one of him cradling her. For every barbed word or weighty silence, there is his voice, the way he cradles her name as if it is something precious.

So, no, she cannot bring herself to hate him.

She never could.

He laughs and she thinks should she be angry? But the way it sounds, she knows that feeling well. For a moment, her empathy reaches out to him, sings through his veins, before she pulls it back and coils it in her chest. It is the lightest of touches, the only way she has of reaching out to him without him seeing, without him knowing, the only way she has of testing the waters. And suddenly he is closing in on her.

“Me too.” Her voice is small, almost apologetic, but she doesn’t waver. In truth she is not sorry, she cannot be, not when she has a daughter, a perfect, perfect daughter. She presses back into him, like she is not a liar. There are tears that shudder behind her eyes, hot and fierce. But she hides them well, hides them carefully.

She breathes in deep and feels the way her throat burns.

She is such a stupid, stupid girl.

But a part of me wishes she was mine, he says and she hears it so loud and clear that it pounds into her chest.

She will fall asleep to the sound of it.

She will wake to it.

She tries to hide the creaking sound of her heart shattering in her chest.

He steps back. “Tenebrae.” His name is easy to say and she hates herself for that. She could do it now. Tell him. Be brave. More than anything, Elena has always longed to be brave.

“Mom! Come look at the seashells we found!” It is the voice of her daughter that causes Elena to freeze. Did Tenebrae hear it too? Did it sing to him in much the same way it did for Elena? She eyes him for a moment with something like warmth, like shared pride and joy for the daughter they created, before blinking, and the summer from her eyes is gone—winter frost is left in its stead. “I need to go,” she says and turns to do so. “My daughter needs me.” My daughter and mine alone, she thinks. There are echoes in her head, things she has said before. ‘Don’t come back to Terrastella.’ ‘Don’t come back to me.’ She begins walking away. “Don’t follow me, Tenebrae,” she says, and she covers her fear of the truth with piles and piles of sand that is hot with anger. “Don’t come looking for us.”

She shouldn't do what she does next.
It is this and this alone that spells her demise.

“Elliana, her name is Elliana,” she says, though she shouldn’t. She softens then, forgetting the anger for a moment. “And she is beautiful, perfect, and— she’s everything, Ten.” And with her daughter’s image in mind, Elena leaves the monk alone on the beach. She wonders, but does not listen for the answer, what does he do alone on the beach? Does he pray for guidance, does he laugh with relief, or does he grieve for a child lost?

@Tenebrae
Code by rallidae
picture by cannon