[P] one more night in navy blue

[Elena]

Elena Daray

let us live like flowers
drenched in sunlight

W

hat he doesn’t realize, as he opens his eyes to her, is that he has given her everything. More than she could have been bold enough to hope for. For every one the twinkling stars, he gave a different light inside her. He changed her, he filled her, he made her light even in the dark.

She once knew nothing of the stars. Nothing of their unthinkable size or their striking impermanence. They had been distant, too distant. They had played audience to her family’s evening gatherings, but she had not called them friends. They were poetic, mysterious works, but they had lay so beyond her realm of intellect—conceptual at best. She wishes that one would come down to her, to stay beside her so she may study its glow.

And now she has one.

Elena realizes she had not know she had been longing for this. Some sense of stability that Dusk Court, her home, offered her. Something so steady that when her entire world was sent shaking, the ground would not shudder and crumble beneath her feet. And Azrael is there to hold her, to keep her from crying out in fear.

Her lips quirk into a smile when he says her name. Will he see it is the same smile Elli so often wears when he wakes her in the mornings? He rises with her words, and were Elena a power hungry woman, she might have preened herself on her ability to beckon men with only her voice like a siren. But Elena is far from such and it only causes her heart to flutter inside her golden chest with appreciation for him. He holds all the power here, and she would gladly give it to him.

It is so easy to be lonely, so effortless even as it breaks her. But then he is touching her, bringing her to the stars and how can she be lonely when he surrounds her with lightness of a clear night? She sinks into him, drinks in the moment, feeling the warmth of him seep through her.

She would follow him to the ends of the earth. She would walk barefoot through the fire to trail in his wake. “You’re my light,” she whispers into his cheek, a place she has planted kisses as fleeting as butterflies on flowers on different nights, under the same stars, the same stars that sheltered them as they pressed the secrets of their hearts into each other’s palms and trusted the other to care for it. “I should like to go there some day, maybe,” she says, though her words bare no weight.

She sits beside him in comfortable silence. She should ask him questions, she thinks. She is so hungry for everything that he has to say and everything he thinks, but for some reason, she cannot find the questions to point to him. She cannot find the words for everything that she needs to ask him—everything that she wants to learn about him.

So she lets the silence fill between them.

She thinks about how often she bares her soul to him. How she has so carelessly dropped his heart in an effort to hold her own out to man who would sooner shatter it than protect it.

How she cannot find it in herself to truly regret it.

Not when it brought them closer.

Not when it brought them Elliana.

“The last to go—she must have been brave,” Elena comments, staring at the stars pointedly. She keeps staring at them when he speaks again, blue eyes transfixed, captured entirely by starlight, as if she knew it would hurt too much to look at him now. “I don’t know,” she confesses, and her voice wavers, as if she is about to cry. Frustration and exhaustion and fear, all heavy as cement, because there is something in her that bites away at her, that chips off pieces of her, and she knows so little of it, of what it is, or why.

code by rallidae
picture by cannon
@Azrael