[P] A dream once lost among sorrow and songs

[Elena]

Elena Daray

let us live like flowers
drenched in sunlight

T

hey once talked about the power of names, but Elena wonders if they lose that over time. If her name to him, one that once carried weight, will become covered in dust. She wants to cry to him, remember me, but the words die on her lips, broken and brittle and turned to the very dust she so fears her name becoming.

His eyes find hers and it takes all of her willpower not to look away, to keep them from flitting out of reach, jumping through the night like flickering blue sparks. Her brow furrows and her jaw tightens when she looks at him, and though it isn’t hatred, never hatred, that changes her face, it is something dark, something devastating.

She pauses for a heartbeat.

Moments with him feel like eternity. They feel like no time at all.

She could be suspended here, hung between the spaces between his every breath or it could pass in a blur, moving so quickly that she doesn’t even have a chance to catch her breath. It is part of that strange wonder of him, she thinks. Part of that strange otherness that somehow has her on its tenterhooks.

He doesn’t say anything and she thinks for a second that he won’t. That he will not tell her.

But before she can move away (although she does take a step, reluctant and pained), his voice catches her and she stops. Her vision goes slightly blurry and then focuses as she looks at the ground, nothing but a frown pinching her mouth as she tries to catch her breath and remember that she can survive this. As her heart flung itself against her chest like a trapped bird

She can’t imaging touching anyone else. She can’t imagine letting anyone else touch her. That one night has ruined her, and she isn’t sure that she will ever recover. She isn’t sure that she will ever be the same.

But these things go unspoken and live in the bunched muscles and tightness of her body.

They settle in there and she just swallows hard before shaking her head.

Maybe the problem is that she doesn’t understand him.

And how could she?

“Boudika,” she spits with the familiarity of it, feeling the way that the cruelty wraps itself around her throat, letting it linger on her tongue. This stings her more than it would him—the sound of her name aloud, voiced into the air, it echoes around the underground temple.

She swallows it down easily with the rest of her pain.

“If you leave me, Tenebrae, I will stop loving you the moment you do,” she lies and wishes it wasn’t so obvious, wishes that the tears on her cheeks would go away and she could be cold—as cold as him. “I will stop here and now.” She says with venom on her tongue. Her ears flip back into a flaxen mane and she takes a step toward him instead of the direction she should be  heading. Her anger is such a volatile thing and it is easier for her to grasp onto it then feel the full depth of her pain, her longing. It is worse, now, looking at him than it had been when she did not know where he was.

It is worse to be so close and yet still feel that chasm yawning open.

So she grows angry. She lets it settle onto her like armor and she lifts her chin defiantly.

His voice almost sucks the anger out of her in a gut punch but she keeps going because the only way through the fog of misery is to burn it down. And if Elena knows anything well, it is how to be a fire, blazing out of control.

A strange desire for violence blossoms like a bloodstain across her chest. She almost doesn’t recognize it at first, but the seductive darkness presses fire under her skin and she finds herself craving the way it, for a moment, makes the pain dull to background noise. But when she feels phantom movement in her belly, the fire suffocates within her veins.

She finds herself railing against him though, still—coming undone and showing all the ugliest parts of her.

Hatred and a painful ache beat bruises into her chest.

She wants to tell him not to leave, to stay with her, that she can protect him, that they are having a child, and they can raise them together. That they will be the parents they each wish they had. She still has tears in her eyes. They fall hot to her cheeks. The truth burns the back of her throat, so ready for her to spit it out. She closes her blue eyes and swallows, wishing she could wipe these tears from her face.

When she opens her eyes again, they glitter with her pain.

“You won’t,” her voice catches in her throat and she has to swallow again, the knives of it burying deep.

She laughs then (it cracks like a sob), tears still on her cheeks as he leaves.

“Congratulations, Tenebrae. You and your goddess win.”

She shakes her delicate head and takes a step back, something like panic rising in her as she realizes how much she has told him. How much she has not, about the child that sits there now. She realizes how vulnerable she has become, in more ways than just one—and how it was all her doing. Always hers.

She swallows hard, and she can’t stop the tears that quietly slip down her cheeks, the tracks they make down across her golden face. She can’t help the flood of emotion as it beats against her chest, her pulse hammering.

“Tenebrae,” a prayer, again, her voice like broken glass. As if saying his name could break through whatever walls he was building and bring him back to her. As if saying his name could erase all of what was wrong about them. As if it could make it like it never happened at all—that they danced and they loved. And the empath leaves him with a parting gift. She gathers all the love in her heart and in an empathetic push, casts it against his skin of shadows. She wanted him to feel all the love she has for him, and let him break underneath it. Break just like she was.

And inside the temple, a statue gains a crack inside its heart. If you look closely enough, you can see a piece of sunlight, and shadows, you cannot tell who devours who, just that it lives inside something broken.

code by rallidae
picture by cannon
@Tenebrae