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It was familiar, but so different. It was change in inches until it’s a mile wide gorge, a cliff she could never again cross even with all her bargained magic and power.
It started when they were younger, when the only worries in their minds were classes, playing, and each other. Elira always made fun of how clumsily she handled her spells – Millie would whine and pretend cry and fall all over her, laughing when the other girl tried to shove her off. It was a familiar song and dance worn into their small town’s streets, summer days chasing each other down the creek as Elira clumsily flapped just off the ground and Millie laughed at her through the small tsunamis she clumsily called with her little hands. Shrieking laughter rings clearest in her memories – the way the young solar dragon cackled as she evaded each hit, and her screams as she finally got hit and went down. Millie would always pounce on her then, and they’d wrestle right in the shallow water, soaked with a kind of innocence and joy Millie could never remember at any other occasion.
They went to the big city once, just before they each had to move away. McDonald’s was no royal feast, but it was the biggest (and in some ways, fanciest) meal the two little village babies had ever had. Millie had handed Elira a napkin, then – “wives forever” – hastily doodled with all the casual weight of a child’s unfiltered love.
(And she learned, later, that Elira kept it. All these centuries. It took her several days before she could look the dragon in the eyes again without collapsing under her own -)
And then the village happened, the final resting place of her grandmother, her childhood, some part (all) of her soul. The first few years with Lucie were hellish – ironically not because of the underworld (it was actually pretty nice in some places). Every day, her hollowed heart ached for the radiant smile, the one part of her past that didn’t – couldn’t – turn to ashes. But Elira was gone now, gone somewhere even all her demonic power couldn’t reach no matter how hard she tried – and tried she did, with claw and blood and magic that made even her new companion curl and hiss.
It was honestly a miracle that Enna found her, or even bothered with her at all – at some point, she was barely more alive than the obsessive ghosts that haunted those caverns.
(Elira went to check on her once, twice, gods know how many times – she visited that burnt village yearly. She never stopped looking, Selen told her, and Millie wasn’t sure if she wanted to cry, strangle herself, strangle Selen, or -).
And now here they were, only a few years back together. Millie’s changed, yet not at the same time – the mask of bravado she throws on was scavenged from her old heart, stapled and taped together into some semblance of stability. Elira, though…Elira was brighter than ever. Not in the head, certainly (and she was so glad at least one of their old jokes still held true), but in every other way possible. She was always there, cheering loudly in game nights or talking a mile a minute while drunk off her ass or curling quietly against Millie in those all too often moments where everything’s constricting and it’s hard to breathe and nothing feels real except for warm feathers and gentle humming – she’s always there in her mind, that smile that laugh those gentle hands that stupid stupidly warm stupidly welcoming –
She was there, then she wasn’t, and now she was again, except things were different. Before, she was always on Millie’s mind. Now Millie can’t stop thinking about her. And that’s dangerous – that’s asking for another burning, to dust and ash one of the final good things in this life of hers.
So she bites her tongue and curls her lips and throws the worst pick up lines she could at her groaning sunshine, in some vain attempt to ease the pain in her heart.