Elli was a lucky, lucky girl. But she isn't thinking this as Jack clings to her shoulders and she flitters from flower to flower. She has no idea that her father, her blood father, has been blinded, that her mother’s heart aches inside her chest for two men. That her father through bond has to look at her mother and know she once loved another man before him, during him. She does not know about all her mother’s suffering, the good, the great, the terrible, the anguish. She knows so relatively little about her mother’s life.
She knows, in some secret part of herself, that she must have had such loves—that she lived and loved and fought and dreamed. But, for much of her golden mother, it is a mystery. A grand mystery if only because she may never know the truth of it.
There is delight dancing on every corner of her pristine face, as Jack settles against her mane. He turns back to look at Azrael, perhaps the only other one in Elliana’s life that Jack has accepted to readily. As if he knew the shed-star was Elli’s protecter, her guiding light. Her guiding light more than Elli’s mother could ever be. So difficult to follow the sun as it stretches across the sky, it was too large to be so direct, it’s light shining too brightly too stare at. But the North star, such a steady presence, the same place, always waiting for her. Bright enough to find, but serene enough to follow. No one in Elliana’s mind will ever be quite as incredible as her father is.
She sees her mother up ahead, leading a group on a tour of the flowers. She sends a wink in Elli’s direction of those blue eyes and Elli suddenly feels like there are wildflowers caught in her throat as her mother’s blue gaze turns briefly to Azrael. She is too young to know what those fleeting glances mean, how much weight is held within them, and how much it means to be able to smile so easily. She is too young to know and too innocent to appreciate the ease that exists between her parents, too young too to know how much they have been striving to build that ease. That ease, it was not won without a valiant effort. Effort that she knows little of because the way she sees it, everything is as it should be.
Hundreds of different thoughts erupt from every possible corner of her mind with the question, and she conjures up a kind of breathless smile, tilting her fine head a fraction, watching him. “How high did you count?” She says and the smile slips from her face like the sigh of the waves back into the sea. It seems like an important question.
Her and Jack weave more flowers, one after another, pulling them together into a half of a crown. “I met a prince,” she tells him with a half smile. “Though he doesn't seem very princely to me.”
@Azrael aka super dad <3
