i don't have a choice, but i'd still choose you. || hawke

[Ellyse]

your mouth is poison, your mouth is wine. i don't love you, but i always will.

    The rage does not cease; in fact - it magnifies, filling every crevice within her hardened, aching soul. Her hardened, defined lines of muscle grow rigid with a tension that nearly penetrates the very marrow of her bone, as a self-loathing begins to descend upon her weary and tired mind. She had known better, she had known better - a thought that only serves to stoke the scalding, burning flames of her own fury. Emotion had always been too complicated for her; a heavy distraction from what she longed for most. She had done all she could in her youth to suffocate, drown, and mangle any semblance of amity, maintaining alliances and seeking nothing else from any forged relationship. She took little, and gave nothing, or so she had always intended. Yet somehow, somewhere along the way, there had been a misstep.

  Her heart was not a delicate thing – wrapped in proverbial barbed wire, course and callous, it cared for very little. The lives of her children were precious to her, consuming the entirety of her soul, and yet still she struggled to connect with either one of them. Affection was not given generously (a quiet, gentle preening at dusk and the occasional encouraging nudge), but she would wholeheartedly give her own life, her entire existence to protect and guard each one. Canaan, with his kind smile and free spirited soul, reminded her too much of the gentler side of his father (and perhaps, a younger version of him, as well – before life had destroyed him, tearing him apart piece by piece, leaving little of his spirit in the aftermath). Hawke, with her wild and brave heart, reminded her of what she could have been - what she should have been, but the weight of war, of bloodshed and carnage had tarnished her spirit, leaving her pitiless, unfeeling and hardhearted.

  It was her children that had been her undoing, leaving her heart vulnerable to loss, to fear, to a ravenous yearning for something more than violence and combat. Yet she was impossible to love – a bitter thought she could hardly swallow; a truth she had always known. There was nothing to love about her. A fierce wit, a sharp tongue, and a cold heart. She had little to offer and nothing to give, aside from skill in conflict and an innate ability to stir discontent. She had been a fool to let herself feel, to allow herself to savor those bittersweet stolen moments tucked away beneath the stars.

  Tears trickle down her cheek, white hot and angry, traveling along the length of her jawline and staining the golden hair. Suddenly, a voice - a voice she knew too well, and it elicits a gasp from her throat. Her hazel eyes close tightly, purging the tears that linger along the lower lid, and she tucks her cheek away – willing the hot summer heat to dry any sign of weakness away. The voice comes closer, echoing, Mother, until it is only a whisper, followed by a delicate touch along her shoulder. A shiver climbs along the vertebrae of her spine, and she acquiesces, unable to turn her daughter away.

  I’ve missed you, and oh, how she had missed her too. A lump began to form in her throat, swollen and hard to swallow, emotion welling up behind it.

  I haven’t seen you around much.
  At last, her eyes, which burn from the unshed tears, meet with hers, and quietly she observes the gentle curve of her smile, and the warmth of her eyes – hazel, like her own. The faintest ghost of a smile tugs slightly at the corner of her own whiskered lips, though it soon wanes. Embarrassment and frustration lingers inside of her exhausted mind, knowing her daughter had likely seen her outburst, yet altogether grateful she had ignored it – she’d sooner brush it aside, and let it be forgotten.

  ”You have grown so much,” she murmurs, her voice strained and raw from the emotion that had stripped it of its strength. ”and you are more beautiful with each day. You should adventure. You should see all that the world has to offer you,” a pause. ”I cannot and will not fault you for that. I was the very same way when I was a girl.”

  Her youth felt as if it had been so long ago.
  The delicate glimmer of Hawke’s golden skin reminds her of her own father, Elysium.
  She missed him so. She wondered where he was; where he had been.

  Her heart aches suddenly.

  ”I have missed you too, Hawke,” she confesses, words she could only share with her one and only daughter.

Ellyse

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