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.

  The grinding scream of sharpened claws raking over glistening diamond is nearly enough to send a shiver along the slope of her spine, but she is too far removed to flinch at the mere shudder of piercing friction – her sanity clinging precariously along the precipice. She cannot marvel at the way her bloodstained flesh is sheathed in an impenetrable armor, nor can she admire the way it overlaps in heavy sheets across the rapidly rising hearth of her chest as her thundering heart (broken, beaten) pounds beneath it. Her wing is not as fortunate as her skin – and a cluster of feathers fall away to the soft and fertile ground beneath her, leaving her aching bones bare – and beneath the weight of his impact, a bone is crushed, splintered by the sheer force.

  She does not cry out in anguish – the agony is vertiginous, but not unbearable – no more unbearable than the heartache and loss she had already endured beneath a cold and unforgiving presence draped in celestial mythos and malevolence. Her breath is heavy, lurching from her shallow, shaken lungs as her chest heaves. Every movement is difficult for her. She is tired and weary and worn but she does not waver, not as her son lay trembling behind an outstretched wing as his assailant – the once keeper of her fragmented, heavily damaged heart – flinches and recoils into himself, words falling away from his parted, cracked lips where the sharp teeth of a carnivorous creature still lie in wait.

  His utterances are broken and splintered at the core – he cannot see reality from the carefully woven lie spun by a God so cruel, and the heavy, daunting despair lingering in his single eye is not lost upon her. Yet still, the anguish of his betrayal is not dulled by his condition. The glowering glare that he had left her with, laced with hatred and a loathing so deep and unshakable she hardly recognized him – it still haunted her, it settled deeply into the hollow of her aching bones and she is unable to see beyond it, even as he sway to and fro before her, as broken as she.

  Your son of love.
  Love.

  Her heart aches with remorse – she did love Dahmer; she had come to love his humor and his wit – the gentle way in which he encouraged the life that had been created between them by a fleeting encounter; the love and devotion tucked away within his piercing gaze whenever Smoak tucked himself away within the darkened hearth of his chest or beneath his wing. She had come to love him deeply, and wholly – she could not deny the truth of it.

  And yet, it is so different from the deeply passionate, destructive love that had swept her closer to Ledger, that had churned her heart into a frenzy and lit her entire world in a flame.

  He had set her world on fire, and he had left her to burn.

  ”Ledger, you have lost your mind,” she breathes, with no edge of accusation tracing her words – she is certain of it, as he mutters incessantly before her. ”our son and daughter do exist –“ and her sunken belly is growling yet again, reminding her once more of the deep and devastating hunger her newborn colt and filly must feel without her sustenance to fill them to the brim.

  ”You never had a heart,” she lashes out with venom lacing her tongue yet again, her single hazel eye narrowed and steady upon him as he becomes as tumultuous and as unsteady as the roiling sea that hungrily touches the shoreline. ”if you had, you wouldn’t have left me for dead. Say what you will – I know what happened between Dahmer and I,” she hisses to him, even as he wavers unsteadily before her – there is a lurch of regret (her young son did not need to know of such things, of the way his father and mother had shared one small moment of quiet intimacy before the world had come crashing down in fire and ash – it gave too much promise) – but it is fleeting. ”you never trusted me; you never tried.”

  It wasn’t real.
  It never was.

  Had she loved him at all?
  Had he loved her?

  It seemed so long ago, so distant –
  The gentle ache of her fatigued and ruined heart said he had, that she did.

  A lie. All of it had been a lie.
  She had been a fool.

  ”Come, Smoak,” she murmurs softly to him, her pale lips brushing across his bone-plated shoulder, exposing her barren eye socket to him with uncertainty carried in the other, nudging him to go while watching the shadow of what once was with a wary eye - watching the frothing seafoam wash away the blood and the sin that linger on his skin.