exley takes her drink as a shot, though it comes in a champagne glass.
It burns going down. It’s something strong, a deep amber color and so viciously carbonated it stings her nostrils as much as her throat; she has to shake her head as it goes down, both to quell the prickle of pain in her eyes and the noise of surprise that threatens to escape her. (She’s lost her edge. Whatever happened to her for all those months—it made her soft. When she looks in the mirror the only sharp thing left is the line of her cheekbones. Even the jagged line of her car seems sort of… muted.)
(Who is this girl?)
The servant who passed her the glass watches in mute surprise, his green eyes blown comically wide. Bexley realizes it’s not just horror, though, at her lack of manners: he doesn’t recognize her.
Somehow the embarrassment of that is far worse. She grits her teeth and sends him off.
The party is in full swing now. The vast majority of attendees are Solterran nobles, dressed in richly-colored silks and chains of pure gold; but the crowd is broken up in some places by a Benevolent here, a shed-star there, their blues and purples an awkward velvet of the night against the sand and the sun. Music floats overhead. It’s some previously-unheard violin suite seeping in from the courtyard, at once danceable and melancholic. (The combination, she thinks, seems inherently Solterran).
Properly buzzed now, electric-edged, Bexley raises her head above the crowd from her spot at the bar and watches over it.
She sees the girl coming toward her before she really arrives: gold, and white, with a star on her forehead.
In her dreams, she dreams of her crimson cousin. Of afternoons spent lazing by the lake and curled next to each other, placing flowers in their manes. She dreams too of her daughter. The beautiful blue eyed girl with her grandmother’s smile and a birthmark like her mother. Her bright eyes and curious mind and beautiful grace that she is already moving through life. She dreams of Azrael, and the way her heart both raced and stilled around him, his quiet strength always just below the surface, of the happiness he had brought into her life. And, of course, she dreams of Tenebrae. Of everything they almost had, of the almosts and the ifs and the possibility that had once lived between them.
She says their names now, soft whispers as they float in her mind like clouds over blue sky.
Lilli.
Elliana.
Azrael.
Tenebrae.
She stirs if only barely when she feels her daughter’s lips press against her cheek. Her eyes remain closed, her mind still trapped beneath the net of her exhaustion, and she murmurs incoherently. She shifts, and she aches for all that lies within her breast. “Mom, come on,” she says.
And that is how it begins.
And it ends, at the party.
She is looking for her daughter. She had sent her to play with her friend when they arrived to keep her from knowing him. Elena did not know why Torix was a secret—but he felt like one. She looks for her now though, not trusting her daughter with all that wanderlust hot in her blood to stay where she ought to. She doesn't know where this love to wander comes from, to pull her roots from the ground whenever she felt them evening beginning to touch.There are other things about Elliana that remind Elena of herself. It is in the softness of her smile, the blue of her eyes, sometimes Elliana tilts her head in such an achingly familiar way that Elena thinks she might have seen it in a reflection a time or two. The problem with looking for herself in her daughter though is thought she undoubtedly finds Tenebrae as well. Something that makes her heart wrench.
She wanders to the bar, knowing Elliana has a way of ending up where she is not supposed to. There is someone there then, over her shoulder.
A look.
A second look.
An apology, and a smile, an Elena smile.
“Sorry, you just..” she says staring at the blonde woman with blue eyes. Blonde and blue eyes. Blonde. Blue eyes. “Sorry,” she says shaking her head and turning away before looking back at her from underneath dark ashes. Maybe it was selfish of her, to think this woman looks like her. But Elena cannot help but think how much they truly look alike at even first glance. Is her heart breaking too? Are those blue eyes just as tired as her own? Has her golden skin also been touched and then left more times than she can count? Elena pushes past the reflection that she sees in the woman and tries to see only Bexley before her. “You haven't seen a little girl running around have you?” She asks almost guiltily. Elena, so new to motherhood, has no idea what she is doing. “She said she was going to find her friend, but some how—I get the feeling she wasn't entirely honest.” Elena says looking away once more. “I am still learning how to be a mother.” Not a good mother, not a great mother, just learning how to be a mother. She has accepted she will never be good, will never be great. But she can be a mother—something more than she ever had.
his girl in the crowd is like a dream. Bexley sees her moving through the sea of bodies and thinks of the first time she met Michael: how for that first, brief heartbeat, she thought she had finally gone crazy.
That she was seeing things. That this stranger looked so much like her it had to be an illusion—was that not the only reasonable explanation? It was her magic playing tricks on her, spiraling out of control in the light of the afternoon. And seeing this girl for the first time, she feels the same sense of unsettlement. Her stomach turns. Her chest grows tight, then lets itself out, and the rush of oxygen that comes in is enough to make her briefly dizzy.
Part of it must be the surprise. Part of it is that this girl is beautiful, the star on her forehead perfectly clear, her hair white as snow, her skin closer to bright sunlight than beaten gold.
The next part of it, then, must be that Bexley feels vaguely threatened. Right now her beauty might be all she has. If someone else looks just as beautiful—beautiful in the same exact way, even—then she must be a threat.
(Sometimes I dream of kissing myself. In the mirror my mouth is cold and soft. I wish this were real. If I loved myself I could never leave—)
Bexley’s mouth burns with the taste and scent of alcohol. Her nose wrinkles. When she turns over her shoulder to look at the stranger, her gaze is narrow and fierce; the blue of them sparkles like embers, smoldering from under thick, dark lashes. It is not a friendly expression. But neither is it an expression of hostility. Just deep, flame-bright interest.
“I haven’t,” the Solterran remarks. Her voice is low, dark and warm; it rasps against itself with all the juicy, luxurious grittiness of a pomegranate’s seeds tumbling against one another in a golden bowl.
There is not much space between them. The air is warm and thick, and it rests against Bexley’s skin like a silk sheet. She searches Elena’s face, not remotely embarrassed of just how long she stares: working over every inch of the stranger’s expression, noting the sadness in her blue eyes, her ducked head, the slight turn of surprise in her mouth.
She stares and stares and stares, cool, intense.
Some part of her winces at the mention of motherhood. Some part of her cringes when she realizes just how long it’s been since she’s seen her own daughter—just how old O is, now, and how old that makes her. Bexley lets out a little sigh; she banishes those thoughts from her head, and turns them all toward the girl. The girl and how breakable she looks.
(Sometimes I dream of kissing myself. Sometimes it feels better to break the mirror.)
“You’re not from here,” Bexley purrs, shifting a little closer, “are you?”
Fire will cleanse, she once heard in a dream. And she saw Lilli’s Taiga forest on fire. The flames burned it all, all the way to Dusk Court, to the cliffs, to the swamp, the hospital. And Lilli and Elena were brought together once more, this time laying against each other in not fields of gold, but piles of ash. They wept and they wept as if their tears could build back forests and erect cities.
But she should know by now that old memories are not reborn in fire.
Only new ones.
If she knew that the other golden girl also thought of Michael, Elena might just say of course. Michael, blonde, blue-eyed beautiful Michael. Who left an impression on Elena from the first time they met. Elena can feel her unsettlement when she approaches, and she wonders what causes it. Elena can sense the emotions, but not the reason behind it. She is left to guess, as clueless as anyone else in the room.
There is something in her blue eyes that dares Elena, just like that striking cliff side’s so often do. ‘Cliff dancer.’ She has been called. Elena watches the sparking embers, wonders if just for a moment she should step back (that dream of fire growing more and more real). It is only her response that calms the fire that grows between golden skin and blue eyes. “She is quite good at evading,” she says, admits the defeat that she cannot even keep track of her own daughter.
It is a strange sensation to be viewed by something that looks like one’s own being. Elena too takes the time to admire the Solterran girl. She wonders, if she had joined Solterra instead of Terrastella, if this may be the expression she wears. Or would she still be herself? Elena can no longer tell how much her surroundings influence her and how much is her own creation. “No, though I have been to meet with the King, and once to heal a prince,” she says. “Solterra is nearly entirely foreign to me,” she says, thinks she should be going, to find her daughter, but she cannot quite pull herself away. “You are though,” Elena says, closer. “I can tell.”
To be sure, she stiffens a little as Elena comes up to her. Her head rises; her shoulders tighten, pulling back until her body is configured into the senseless grace of a statue. She glances at the Terrastellan with a sideways gaze, and the blue of her eyes is less ocean and more flame as she wonders, her expression almost caustic, what this ghost-girl wants from her. (If Bexley has learned anything from her time in Novus, it is that everyone wants something. And whatever a stranger wants from you—that’s usually the biggest ask.)
But this is her element. This, all of it—the hot breeze of the desert blowing in through the windows; the inherent suggestiveness of the night, dripping in through the walls like ink; more than anything, the loud, charming elegance of this party—filled with girls she’s kissed, men she’s tried to kill, the nobles that have populated her life for half a decade.
Somehow, Bexley remains relaxed. The world is hers. And everything (she’s convinced herself) is just how it used to be.
She is quite good at evading, the woman says. Bexley can’t help wondering how old her child is; they seem about the same age, and yet she gets the sense that O is significantly older than the little girl that’s being asked about. Still, they sound alike—she remembers chasing O down at the Night Court’s masquerade, so long ago it seems like a dream now, and wondering how someone so young could already be so practiced at slipping away. (Her disappearing act, since then, has only improved.)
“I suppose,” Bexley muses. “I mean, I was raised somewhere else. But I’ve lived here half my life, so I guess—“
The distance between them folds in half. She regards the stranger’s lean-in with an expression not of surprise, but self-satisfaction: wearing a little smirk, one brow half-raised. Something in her almost burns at the acknowledgement of her magnetism, which has gone so long unused.
Home isn't where the heart is. It's wherever the wind feels right.
E
lena would have loved the Bexley of another time, another Novus it would seem. She would have loved hearing her stories, the tales of adventure. She would have admired Bexley’s bravery, would have thought that she reminded her of another girl who was brave and just the right amount of beautiful reckless to make her irresistible. ‘You remind me of someone,’ she would have said. ‘Who?’ Bexley may have asked. ‘An old friend, an old leader.’ Elena would have smiled. ‘You either would have hated her or fallen in love with her.’ Elena might have said if she was brave to speak of Kensa in such a way. She would wonder then, if Bexley was much the same.
The empath can sense the stiffening even if she does not notice it. So she tries to smile a little wider as her gaze meets Bexley’s own, a gaze of blue eyes that are so achingly familiar. She wonders, if finding Bexley beautiful makes her vain, because there are so many similarities. But there is something in the golden face of Bexley that is bright, more beautiful than Elena could ever hold. Elena is not light and bright, she is not raw aching beauty, nor is she important in any way. But she does burn. If she is like the sun, then she is a red giant burning everything she can reach, everything that comes too close. She does not mean to, but again and again the world seemed to fracture around her.
But Bexley is this all powerful flame that Elena can feel as clear as sand over the dunes. Controlled, calculated, a planned burning. She wonders what sparked the fire.
“That makes two of us,” she says with a soft laugh that is warm and gentle, almost like a song. Is it easy to tell that Novu’s waters were not the first she has bathed in, nor the second or third? “Where were you before this?” She is bold enough to ask. She has asked Anandi, and if she can ask the kelpie woman, than she can ask the blue flame that is Bexley. She watches the smirk on her golden face appear. “I’m Elena.” Is her only response to it.
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