[P] one more night in navy blue

[Elena]

Elena Daray

let us live like flowers
drenched in sunlight

F

ind me again, she had told him once, and find her he had.

Again and again.

So much time has passed, many sunrises and sunsets, all with her beneath them, living as best as she could, for herself, her family, her court.

She knows that feeling he speaks of. Was it not the reason she did not bow to the mist as so much of her family had. How she three herself threw it as if it were smoke and not vapor, as if she would burn alive with regret if she stayed for a moment longer. In this case, Elena was not the last to stay, but the first to leave. Is that still brave? Could she still be brave? The strange ache she feels in her chest quiets when she looks into the familiar safe of his eyes. Her golden lips reach out to skim along the curve of his neck, the curve of his jaw, and she wonders if she would ever get enough of him. If she would ever feel sated again. It’s been so long since they have had a quiet moment like this—time to themselves. “Would you have stayed?” she asks in a voice that first rings in the past before echoing into the present, and later she will find it ringing in the future too. “I have heard a captain goes down with the ship, but I wonder if there is courage in the one who swims into the sea to help those terrified souls,” she says. The same souls that trusted that same captain to keep that ship from going down. “I am much less attached to places than I am to people,” she says, even if it is obvious. Ground is ground, flowers bloom anywhere you turn, but Elena so adores the gardens that only hearts can grow.

One glance and he is her undoing.

If only she could breathe around him.

If only she could figure out the way to make her lungs pump so that she could more easily draw in air—so that she could at least see straight. So that she could find the solid footing beneath her and know that she was going to make it through this. But she hasn’t been able to find her center of gravity since the first time that she saw him, since the first time he looked at her.

Her world has fractured around him; rebuilt itself as stone pillars around her heart. She should not rely on him as her foundation, she has made this mistake before, but even now, she builds a home over the steadiness of his ground.

There is a light in her eyes that is entirely her own, pieces of her that shine through the body that she wears. She has come to realize that the people who do nothing are just as dangerous at those who do something. So she might as well build that home in the confines of his heart, if he has the room, if he has the love for her.

“I have seen so many worlds,” she says and leans against him, gazing out across the lake. “Would we go till we reached the end?” She doesn’t know why she asked it.
The question had alighted on her tongue and plunged itself into the charged air between them before she’d even had a chance to think it.
Should it have been edged in hope?
Should she have asked it with some kind of glimmer in her eye?

All is well. He says.

“Nights like this feel like a secret to be shared,” she tells him. “Do you remember? The secret I shared with you the night I told you that?” She asks him, remembering the island, when Azrael became Elli’s father. The tears that gather in her blue eyes are as much for her as they are for him. Because they have been or still are, lost and broken, and maybe, being here, with each other, like this, is not the solution that it should be. But it is the solution all the same. Love has never been simple for Elena, and it is so very clear as she sits here next  to him. “What secrets do you have to share with me this evening?”

code by rallidae
picture by cannon
@Azrael