[P] whom the gods love die young

[Elena]

elena

I've hidden memories in boxes inside my head before. Sometimes it's the only way to deal with things.

In the beginning, life was simple - she with her youth and the world with its endless possibilities. Elena had been bright-eyed and happy as a child, and those memories of her time as a filly were held close to her heart. Her parents had filled her life with happiness and never ending love. A simple, if not overly large family, and loving. The memories of her parents, cousins, and many aunts and uncles were fond.

It had been simple.

“This is something my father, you know the tales of Ichiro the fierce, told me, and now I am telling you,” Cherish told her one day as they sat at the banks of Windskeep on one of Elena’s returns there. She was no longer that little girl Cherish knew, on the outside, but inside, she still watched her with something akin to awe. "Trust your heart, Elena. For even though the winds will change, as will the world around you, your heart will always carry you to where you are destined to be. If you listen to your heart, know that you cannot fail.” Such a simple thing, easier said, much easier said, then done, Elena would argue if she saw Cherish again.

She has changed.

Like the earth after a massive quake or a valley after a millennia of river running through and carving out its sides. She has changed—evolved, devolved, perhaps—and she is not the same. But the walls of her are the same. The cliffside of her heart remains steady, despite the battered and bruised nature of it under it all. She can still feel love, despite all of it, maybe because of him, her shed-star, and him alone. (‘I am yours for as long as you will have me.’ Her shed-star said.)

Though some things have stayed the same. Elena is a compassionate girl, through and through, so compassionate that she is reckless. Elena has never never burned for constellations beyond her grasp; had not ached for worlds she could not see. She was more pragmatic, focused on the hurts of the world before her, her mind turning toward the bruises that flourish on the horizon, on the cries of the injured. There was too much to do here, too much to consume her mind, for her to think of anything else. Elena goes where she is needed, and Terrastella, Novus, her friends here, they need her.

Marisol needs her. (And it nearly kills Elena to know this.)
Elena, for all her bravery, finds, she fears this.

Marisol has always been unlike anyone Elena has ever met. Her company was always heavy, weighted, but rich, as if it had and endless bounty within it. “A leader is revealed through the love of their people.” Brynn once told Elena on a lazy afternoon in Murmuring Rivers. “The people here, they love Aletta. That is what makes her a queen, not the title—but the love.” And the people here, in Dusk, gods they love her. Elena loves her. Marisol is everything that a leader embodies, brave, strong, beautiful, though stoic, she was caring, passionate. Marisol is the image you find when you think of a kingdom charging into battle, at the front of the line. When she thinks of Dusk, it is not long till her mind finds Marisol at the center of it.

It had been simple.
Painfully, simple.

And now the golden girl cannot help but wonder when everything had gotten so complicated in her life. Still, she plunges herself headfirst into what is asked of her, despite the way Alvaro’s voice still rises from the background. (“Slow down, Elena. Stop. Think.”)

Everything must rise and fall. It is the way of things. Aletta told her once. And it is what she had thought when she saw Marisol fall to her knees, until she felt herself biting back at those words with the gritted teeth of a warrior and the steady hands of a healer. ‘Not Marisol,’ she thought, ‘you cannot fall when there is so much love ready to catch you.’

There is a feeling inside her, like ancient cities crumbling. Pompeii once felt a rumbling, once witnessed a sky turning black and the air turning to ash. Buildings collapsed and walls fall to pieces.

She is ancient. She is collapsing.

She is supposed to be a structured thing, and there is never supposed to be a rumbling or a sky turned black. She is supposed to keep cities up and skies clear. Her mother would have wanted her daughter to do as much.

But Elena cannot do it, cannot do it.

She lets the things crumble. Lets the world end. Because maybe it was always supposed to be this way. She stitches up wounds, mends broken wings, all because she cannot stop the world from plunging into destruction, and she can fall with it screaming ‘I tried, I tried,’ all while choking on ash.

Elena thinks for a heartbeat, was it ash? Piling up now? Why else would she be coughing? No, she realizes, it is not her who is coughing, and Elena springs awake, as blue meets grey. Clear summer skies meet a stormy autumn, and the changing of the seasons in that moment is so beautiful that hearts of winter and spring shatter. “Someone’s eyes are the closest you will ever be to seeing inside them, Elena.” Cherish told her once. ”Marisol,” she says, and it is not so much a sound as it is an exhale, as it is all the life escaping through her lips in the shape of her name. She is dabbing the corners of her mouth with a clean rag, wiping away the blood. Elena wonders if this is more for her than for Marisol, that blood looks too crimson on her lips, and Elena, she hates it.

“Shhh, shhh,” she says to comfort Marisol, to comfort herself. She says it over and over, the only thing that keeps herself from crying in this moment. (Her grandmother used to say that if you don't let the tears out of you—that they can turn to poison behind your eyes.)

(And Elena takes that poison and swallows it down—is this what it means to be brave?)

Just as Marisol slips once more.

She catches her head before it hits the floor and Elena holds her there, the same way she has held Elliana when she woke up with nightmares, kisses the top of her head and brushes back her dark hair, saying ‘I’m here, I’m here.’ “Tea, please, peppermint, with a touch of poppy,” she says to one of the hospital creatures, and they are quick to bring her some, and she sets it beside Marisol as the steam rises. And like the steam, Elena sends Marisol feelings of strength, courage, and wakefulness. “Blessed be the fight, Marisol,” she says with another kiss atop her head. “Because without you, how can we keep that fight going?”

« r » | @Marisol <3