@etincelled
Silence isn’t something Elliott has ever particularly enjoyed.
Silence, to him, has always brought back memories of a home fallen all-too-quiet (but why? That part in his mind is...foggy, and buzzes threateningly whenever he dares breach it). He’s used to the comfort of noise, of multiple voices all clamouring for his mother’s attention even when that frustrated him, of the buzzing streets of Solace, a city that never actually seemed to sleep. He was used to the bar, a constant din of people barely able to hear one another over the sounds of their shouting, he was used to the Games: the sound of gunfire resounding through the Ring, his teammates yells’ crackling in his earpiece, the pounding of his heart in his chest which sometimes felt like the loudest thing of all --
Noise, at the end of the day, meant company. It meant people. It meant an escape from long nights lying awake in an empty flat, staring at his ceiling and wondering if the emptiness of it all, the loneliness, might consume him completely.
Where he was now wasn’t total silence to be fair: he was sat in the snow beneath a tree wrapped up in multi-coloured fairy lights, gazing down from a distance at the ice rink in Wisteria Square. The delighted cries and laughs of the residents of the city making use of it were a far-off din, barely even a background noise, as he combs his fingers through Suki’s crystalline mane at the back of his head and sips his hot chocolate.
Snow drifts down all the while he watches, forcing him to shake his head every few minutes to rid his fringe of the flurries accumulating across his fringe and threatening to freeze.
No, silence was not something Elliott had ever enjoyed. If anything, it’s something he’s always damn right feared.
But as he settles his hot chocolate down, rooting it firmly in the snow, and begins to pack a snowball into his hands, watching Suki as he does and grinning --
He throws the ball off into the blackness, laughing as Suki takes off after it instantly, before returning to him with a withering look --
Companionable silence. Maybe that was something that wasn’t quite so scary.
He’s enjoying a game of tug-o’-war between Suki and his winter glove, when he hears the distinct sound of footsteps crunching in the snow behind him. He whips his head around, and it takes his eyes a moment to adjust between the dark and the glare of the fairy lights but that’s a face someone does not forget too easily and --
Suki succeeds in pulling him forward, but Elliott is too stunned to take much notice and therefore ends up falling over onto his side along with his glove, and into the snow.
Damnit. Thankfully, being covered in snow is thankfully is significantly less humiliating than mud, which the other had seen him covered him in many-a-time. Therefore he rolls onto his stomach, props himself on his elbows, shakes the snow off his face and hair and stares up at the newcomer.
“Natalie?”