Stolen Voices ✓

October 18th

I love you. It sucks.

- lots of people

October 18th:

Elias's mom had called him earlier to tell him they are going to Nana Ioanna's for a thanksgiving feast. Unlike last time, when Elias went to his room and broke down in pain, he sucks in a breath of air. Pinching his eyes shut, he forces them open to stare at himself in the mirror, nodding his head softly as a smile takes over his face.

He had told her okay, with no trace of sadness in his speech. Though his stomach twisted slightly at the idea of seeing those hazel-eyes that looked so much like his aunts, Elias will survive. He knows this as he clasps the sides of the sink, his fingertips turning white as his smile stretched in the reflection.

He will be okay. This is the first time he realizes it and believes it. Elias has been getting a lot better in the time he's met Mara, even in the time he's been at college. The nightmares have diminished to quick flashbacks that he easily breathes through. Even the thought of seeing Luella, his once best friend, doesn't send him into hyperventilation.

Though his innocent cousin is not his attacker, she looks so similar to her mother that it is almost impossible for him not to reminisce. He'd isolated himself from her without any intimation, and he knows he owes her an explanation. Not that he can outright come and tell her what happened to him. He still has to figure out how to break the news to his parents that he was assaulted when he was fifteen by his mother's sister.

Her eyes so green, like a cat, her hair the color of ravens. His aunt had been mentally insane. It was discovered after she killed herself a month later. She had borderline personality disorder. At least that's what the doctors had said, that her actions weren't her fault, she would seemingly have not even retained what happened. 

But they didn't know the extent of her actions. Only Elias was riddled with that darkness. A part of him felt derelict, despising what she did to him when she didn't even know what was happening at the moment, her tears on his face. The other part of him felt enraged because Elias never got that reassurance. He never got to confront her because she was dead.

He will never get that, and his aunt took that from him as well. She took a lot from him, his innocence for one, and he will never get it back.

Standing over her grave while the unrelenting rain soaks your suit and tie, worn because you need to look formal. Sobbing into the bracing wind didn't ease any of the pain that had become him.

What did ease the pain in his fortitude?

Having Mara hold him in the middle of the night and tell him it will all be alright, that she will be there for him always. She was the first person he let in, let get anywhere close to him. He didn't flinch around her touch and even savored their kisses as they were his. His skin on her skin, their warmth, tangling into whatever friction they'd devised. So, of course, upon finding out the news he would have to see Luella and not breaking down, he called her.

He called her when maybe he shouldn't have because he said space. He called her in the middle of the night like their phone calls shared over the past few weeks. He wakes her because the first thing he thinks of after talking with his mother is Mara. And that has to mean something.

---

"So our late-night calls have moved to late-night drives, huh?" Mara snorts, opening the passenger side door to his car. It is Will's, actually, but Elias borrows it for the evening.