does elliot love luke back pls tell me :(
I like your name, m’dear!
Elliot loves Luke.
He says so when he is fifteen, remember? ;)
‘”What do you love, Cadet Schafer?”
“Serene,” Elliot replied promptly.
… “What else?”
Elliot sunk down low in the chair, hands linked over his chest, and kicked the desk. To punish the desk even more, he eyed it darkly.
“So long as this goes no further,” he muttered. “Luke, I suppose.”’
Elliot loves Luke and Serene, and he does not love anyone else in any world, and that love (combined with an ambition to change a world) is the reason why he chooses to stay in the otherlands.
Commander Woodsinger knows. Indeed, the commander at all times is more clued into Elliot’s feelings than anyone else, which is horrifying for her because she doesn’t want to care about the feelings of any cadets, she just wants them to be efficient!
But I think your question is about whether Elliot loves Luke back romantically?
Elliot never tells Luke he loves him. But then, Luke never tells Elliot he loves him either.
Elliot says, when contemplating romance in the aftermath of his ill-fated relationship with Jase, that the idea of fancying Luke romantically is ‘obvious emotional suicide.’ He’s perfectly prepared to try to romance Myra, or Dale, or Podarge, and when it’s clear Myra doesn’t love him back romantically, it hurts Elliot but it doesn’t devastate him, the way Serene not loving Elliot back devastated him.
Elliot is flat desperate for love. He hopes, throughout the book, to be loved back: the idea of being loved first, and have someone wish for him to love them back, is something that never occurs to him. To Elliot, he is not the kind of person to whom such a thing might happen. Luke and Serene are that kind of person, eminently lovable: Elliot isn’t. That’s just truth, to him.
He says, to Luke, when talking about romance, and his own affection-starved childhood, ‘I didn’t learn how to… run when I was a kid, and I still don’t know how to do it without falling on my face.’ (He doesn’t mean ‘run.’ Though as metaphors go, it works, in that we the reader know Elliot actually runs extremely well.)
Does Elliot love Luke romantically? Does Luke love him romantically? Is it just a crush? How do you know if you’re in love with your beloved friend who you’re very physically attracted to?
I would say Elliot’s extreme awareness of how much Luke can hurt him, his admiration for Luke, his willingness to tell Luke secrets he tells no-one else, and his terror of being abandoned by him, indicate no lack of love.
(Also he’s attended Luke’s every Trigon game, both practise and actual, for four terrible years, long after Serene quit attending practise, and nobody else’s boyfriend or girlfriend has this record of devotion. When Elliot realises this, he is going to be so vexed.)
Elliot’s relationship with Trigon, ft. my terrible, lazy Microsoft Paint skills:
… wait is it games or matches? Oh well too late, it’s set in stone and there’s no going back now, absolutely no way to repair the damage that I have done in this highly impermanent medium, anyway, let’s just keep moving right on.
*beams at Parks and Rec*
Everyone at camp truly believes Elliot is a fan of the sport.
