[private] stranger than your sympathy;

[Elaina]

she's a wild wild woman

Maybe, it all would be easier if she forgot them, all of them, but they tether Elaina with colorful ribbons tied with bows at the ends. She thinks about them each as she drags them through her hand, the same silky smoothness can be found on each and every one. She has held Marcelo’s in her grasp, and tied her her hair back with Alvaro’s. She has wrapped Ori’s around her wrist, and draped Aletta’s on her shoulder. She can sit there for ages, letting her fingers run through them, not even realizing it, but she will not let them go.

They are simple things and they might be far more precious to her than they are to many others, but they are hers to love and cherish, and that she does.

Maybe it is these same ribbons that crawl over her blue eyes and make her blind to the reality of the world and instead those colors, those vibrant colors, send her into a dream that feels entirely too real only because she cannot see anything else in front of her.

There has not been as many orphans as lucky as Elaina. So many sit with a broken kite devoid of any colors, as Elaina races by, those radiant hues streaming out behind her. She can almost forget that she was so very close to never being able to fly in the first place.

It’s easy to breathe with Lilli beside her, well easier than she has found in quite some time. (She thinks her breath may have caught on that cliff side with that boy of shadows and it never returned to her.)

‘We will burn brighter still.’ Elena and she had said.

Brighter and brighter.

Burn, burn, burn.

“From the ashes grew a new world,” comes silver words. It is a sentence stolen out of a story her mother told her once. “And everything was beautiful, and only tears of joy were wept so that the flames should never return.” The bruises of her eyes trail softly across her crimson face. “You’ll stay with me tonight?” She asks her, in such a way that makes Elaina seem small, impossibly young. “The dark has frightened me lately,” she admits. The same dark she has flirted with, has danced with, has thought about kissing on those sinful lips. “But never when I am with you.”

Elaina; there's a voice calling me back
tried to keep her quiet, but she's screaming inside me