[P] one more night in navy blue

[Elena]

Elena Daray

let us live like flowers
drenched in sunlight

T

hese last several days without Azrael had been harder than she had expected. Her side suddenly felt cold and empty without him there to warm her. This, she is aware, was the reality of living in two different Courts and both holding too much responsibility to leave. But she is with him now, slumbering, although fitfully beside him. Elliana is with her GiGi, probably still up, painting and drinking tea. Everything is perfect, as it should be, fairytale. But she cannot deny the way her heart is stammering in her chest. Elena knows the cause of it, she just hates to admit it. 

She leaves his side and travels down the mountains until the cold air of a spring night touches her face as it blows off the lake. The lake. This lake. 

The lake holds painful memories. She is not sure why she has come here, except that sometimes the thrill of the pain has become a draw. When she begins to feel his memory fade, when his face bleeds away in the back of her mind, she feels a panic crawl up her throat. She is no longer certain whether it is worse to forget him entirely or to live days in agony, the reminder of him a ghost along her mind's edges.

Tonight, she chooses the agony, walking along the shore of the lake with bruised eyes, the blue of them glacial with memories, they freeze and crack and fall into the water. Her empathy reaches out to those around that slumber lakeside, but she keeps it mostly pulled into herself, the magic selfishly curling into her as if she could change the very emotions that stir in her golden breast, as if it could do any good by keeping it tucked away in her mind. It was a foolish maneuver, a hopeless one, but she could not help but try.

And suddenly she is turning from that lake, the lake, this lake, and running back to the mountains, to the stars, to him. She pauses only when she sees him there, sleeping, she watches his gentle glowing, watches his face, as if memorizing it, as if it may be taken away from her at any moment. How could she ever explain to him how he became the reason for it all? How could she ever explain to him how columns within her shifted during that first meeting and he became the center of her gravity? How there is no rhyme or reason for it, but that the molecules of her life have rearranged around him?

She can’t and so she just exhales.

“Azrael,” she says when she breathes. She waits until his eyes open and places her golden head near his own. “Let’s go on an adventure, tonight,” she says like a child. “Don’t think, just say yes.” She says, laughs, because she wants to go before she changes her mind, before she feels her heart way her down too much until she can no longer soar beside him. 

“Show me the stars.”

Somewhere, a wolf howls in the distant.

And she wonders if she will ever escape her own.

code by rallidae
picture by cannon
@Azrael <3