"No, I didn’t.”
Lilliana closes her eyes and smiles (though she remembers, still hears those words that echoed through Elaina earlier: 'The child wouldn’t be here if things in Windskeep were going well.’ She remembers feeling that reeling shock that the presence of her beloved cousin could be taken as anything but a gift. It had been the first time she remembers feeling angry, too. That there had been more to that story and nobody had wanted to tell it.)
"You’ve always been with me,” Lilliana says because it’s true.
She had trusted Wolfbane that day in the Meadow because he had been gold like Elaina. (She remembers looking at him and thinking what could go wrong?) She had adored Ruthless from the moment she laid eyes on her because not only did the two girls share similar coats but spirits as well - both torches burning bright, both beacons ready to light the world. Lilliana had wrapped herself around Craft instead of leaping after Anatomy because of the palomino mare who gathers close to her slender side.
@[Elaina] - regardless of where she has gone (or will go) - has been with Lilli in one gilded shade or another.
"And don’t you ever doubt it,” the chesnut teases, seeing the fragility peeking from behind her cousin’s eyes, fracturing out from beneath her blonde lashes. Lilliana gives a gentle sigh and presses her dark maw into the warmth of her golden cousin. Her blue eyes close and between the two of them, they could be swept out to sea with the tidal waves of memories that could come crashing over them. Some are happy and some are hard; but that is life. A knife has to cut so that the skin can heal.
It’s only when Elaina calls her Lilliana that she stiffens. Her eyes open and while the nip she gives her companion could be called playful, there is something in the way she tugs on her cousin’s pale mane that asks her don’t. Elaina has known her from the beginning and has been with her since the days she had started asking that others call her Lilli because Lilliana was such a mouthful. (It had felt like the polite thing to do - nobody needed to tie their tongue in knots over her name!)
There are other things to talk about (and there will never be enough time to say everything).
Elaina thinks she is falling apart but it does nothing to lessen the love burning in Lilliana’s eyes. There is nothing wrong with fragility between them; how many times have they proved that their love is not a fragile thing? It might be filled with broken promises but here they are - trying again.
"I don’t know,” Lilliana says honestly. She could blink and Elaina could be gone tomorrow. It hurts to speak these words because the palomino mare has just come shining into her life and here they are again, contemplating an ending. What her cousin says next, though, makes her stomach twist with dread and churn like the black ocean lapping at their ankles. How many times had she wondered that exact same thought? She had been raised underneath the knowing eyes of Marcelo as well and she had heard that mantra before; there is a reason for everything.
But as Neverwhere has told her, sometimes there isn’t.
Sometimes rain falls on souls who deserve nothing more than sunshine. Unfortunately, those souls found the clouds instead.
Lilliana aches when she asks this of her cousin: "Did you ever think the reason was you weren’t meant to find it?”
Hypocrite, she thinks of herself; but she's recalling the day that Elaina wouldn't run. She's remembering the way that Elaina has dared their world at every turn (absolutely Benjamin's audacious daughter). She knows that though they have only just found each other, the inevitable will happen and they will be apart again. Lilliana's afraid that her cousin will go looking for answers and will learn the hard way that some things are best left alone.
LILLIANA
if i ever get to heaven
i've got a long list of questions