"I'm cold, Nessa." She wasn't really, aside from the little feet that had pattered across the marble flooring of their mansion's lavish landing in order to reach her older sister's room. But the company of her sister always made her sleep that much more soundly, and trying to obtain a spot in her bed had become a bit of a habit now. Some nights, she knew Nesta would begrudgingly give up the comfort of her spacious bed to accommodate her younger sister curled up next to her, whilst on other days, she would send her back to bed with promise of other times of shared comfort to come. Little did they know that there would be many times of shared beds, where moments of comfort would be few and far between.
"Nesta, I'm cold---I can't shake the cold..." Her teeth had been chattering for well over an hour, and despite having the luck of being in the middle, between her two sisters, for this night, there was just no warming up, no winning the eternal race against the icy cold of winter that seeped through the cracks of their cottage. No matter what, it always seemed to catch up with her. And once it held her in its icy grasp, the cold would seep into her bones and settle there until every part of her ached. Pressing herself further against her older sister, Elain clenched her jaws tightly together.
"I'm sorry, I didn't want to wake you. Could you just---"
Nesta's warm breath washing over her was a good remedy against the wintery chill. Perhaps the only remedy she'd found; the fire had crackled out, their father asleep in front of it, and with no more wood to fuel it, they would have to wait until the next day to gain a true semblance of warmth again.
Cold. So very, very cold. Not just her body, her very soul was cold now, her heart stilled, her breath frozen in her lungs, and she couldn't speak, couldn't hear, couldn't see. Everything around her was black now, a deeper, darker black than anything she'd ever experienced. And then the ice, Mother Above, the ice that ran through her veins---she opened her mouth to scream, but no sound emerged. Death gripped her, and she was deconstructed, piece by agonising little piece, until she was nothing but essence of the girl once known as Elain. The Cauldron stilled for the briefest of moments, marveling as it does with all Creation, and it gifted her with something in exchange for the marvel of her life. She could see. She could see so very far now.
"It's been cold without you."
She doesn't know why she says it like that, nor does she know if the message will even reach its intended goal or simply fall on deaf ears, but she has to try something. There was a point where she would have simply let the situation be, where she would have focused on her own pretty little things and pastimes in order to avoid confrontation...and she has been doing that, for far too long now.
It's taken quite a bit of time for her to come to that conclusion, and it takes even more conscious effort to not fall back into the same patterns, but she's on the right track. So is Nesta, she knows for a fact. But too much has happened between the two of them to just address that out in the open, out of nowhere. And so, she pushes past her habit of making herself scarce and busying herself with inconsequential things, in favour of what truly matters. Her sister.
She doesn't know a better way to say it. She can't outright say it. But it's written on her face nonetheless.
