Bound for trouble from the start [Open/Any]

[Ellyse]

Ellyse

Better beware, I go bump in the night.
devil-may-care with a lust for life.

  ”Go,” she whispers then, her pale, bloodied lips brushing across the tuft of her son’s forelock, brushing it away with a breath of a kiss – a kiss she yearned to lay a thousand more of across his forehead, having feared she would never see him again. ”find your brother and your sister – I will come for you, I will find you.”

  And then her cheek is turned, as the heavy armor that had so suddenly and so carefully sheathed her worn and aching body in its crystalline, shimmering splendor fades away (the only thing beautiful about her – she is broken, frayed and worn along the edges; devastated by a God that had ravished and ravaged her with a twisted smile settled on his pale lips and crooked teeth).

  She is left, then, bare and exposed before him, as broken as he – though her pride dare not allow her to crumble as he does, as the anguish and agony of his own despair falls away to the sea as the tide rises to the hearth of his bleeding chest. Her single eye roves across the wound that lay there, over a heart that is no longer - she does not know what has been taken from him; only what she assumed lay broken beneath - and her stomach does writhe and turn with nausea at the symbolism of it. Of the symbolism of the claw marks that had so deeply damaged her eye; of the beast that had nearly stolen it away from her and from the God that had plucked it out with a tendril of care.

  Still, her anger is roiling beneath the surface. Simmering as if it were a hot flame, festering and burning hotly within her chest, but she is too worn and too tired. His laughter is wry, and it drives the proverbial knife deeper within her chest – she is reminded of how easily he had left her to die, of how certain and steady his gaze had been upon her then, laced with the same burning hatred she yearned to feel as her own single, golden-flecked eye bore into his.

  But she cannot.
  Try as she might, as the anger, the resentment, the betrayal threatens to consume her –

  She cannot hate him.

  Every fervent kiss, burning embrace, and whispered sweet nothing had led to the inevitable demise of a love she had thought relentless and true – his heat and heart had consumed her, swallowed her whole, but there had always been a shadow of doubt harbored deep within her splintered heart. She had drawn away from him in her fear, longing to seize his heart and to keep it as her own, but with each fading sunset, her doubt and dread had begun to feast upon her, devouring her hopeful reverie and leaving her feeling insignificant, empty, and hollow.

  The intensity of his exclamation stirs her from the darkest recesses of her mind, as the salty brine of an unshed tear slowly mixes with the dried, coagulated blood that lay across her gilded cheek. She had sought Dahmer in a moment of weakness (he was the closest she had ever grasped of friendship - he soothed the disquiet of her wayward mind, and anchored her to the shoreline of her own reality), in a moment in which the doubt of her mind had become too much, when she became too fearful that all she had come to know with Ledger would fall apart – would shatter, like fragile glass, and leave her heart bleeding and broken yet again.

  It was not Ledger that had destroyed her happiness –
  It was her, her fear that none of it could ever be, that she meant nothing to him – her self-preservation had become her own downfall, and the realization is enough to nearly buckle her to her already too-tired, too-weak knees, as her spent heart thuds tirelessly within her chest. She is drawn from her own despair only long enough to see him cry out in anguish, crumble away to the sea, amid seafoam and sand particles seeping into his gaping, open wounds.

  ”I’m sorry,” she gasps, but it is strangled, remorse and regret sinking into the tender marrow of her bones and drowning out her delicate pride – too little, too late, her realization is a heavy burden, threatening to bury her within the tumultuous sea of her own mind. Ledger lay bleeding and broken before her, as she, herself, is ruined – she knows not where Dahmer is, or whether there is even still a beating heart in his chest – and it was her fault. Her doing.

  The memory of words once spoken to her by Magnus, in the very place where Ledger lay bathing in the dark ocean tide, echoes in her mind then – a confession she had not understood then rife with despair as he looked upon the sea that had taken his life before:

  The place that sometimes calls to me the most, that pulls at me the hardest, is right here.

  And she weeps. For all that had been lost, for all she had caused –
  Gently, so gently –

  She can feel the sea pull for her, too.