♥ - What does ‘love’ mean to them?
Love was a complex feeling.
There were many layers to love that Elia had experienced and seen. There was the parental love from parent to child. A love for one's siblings. A love for a husband. A respected love for friends and allies. A love for the people. And so many more than Elia could ever dream to count. It was a thing that has made many stories and many songs. It has been a motivation to fight, and a motivation to protect. There were so many forms of it, that she learned to.
It can be empowering, but it can be a double-edged sword. How much pain can be felt to the heart when one's love is not returned? Or the thought of it ever being returned even though you feel like giving it all. It can be... such a sweet, sweet pain. And that pain may or may not give such pleasure.
To Elia? Love was a precious feeling to be had. To her, it was a layered feeling of both affection, respect and understanding. In that, one could understand the other. One could feel like they could hold their hearts in their hands, and give themselves to each other. It was a scary, yet precious thought. She knows that it can be passionate as well as painful. It can be so sweet, and yet... it can be bittersweet.
Love can be sweet, love can be a risk... but it's a risk worth taking.
☼ - Something that/Someone who makes them happy.
Someone that could easily make Elia happy is Oberyn.
She loves both of her brothers dearly, but considering Oberyn... he was like her other half. When she was young, they were practically inseparable as children. He knew how she was, from her strength down to her limits, and from her likes and little nuances down to things that she cannot stand.
Even when they grew older and had their own wants and dreams, he would never fail to care for her, and never failed to make her smile. If she felt like utter crap, whether she was sick or something else happened, he would be one of the people to bring her out of it, if only for a little while.
✖ - Who is someone they just cannot stand?
dances over the two obvious and goes to the third obvious.
There are not many people in this world that Elia felt so strongly against.
But among those people, she hated the king.
Not at first, mind you. She didn't know the man when she was betrothed. At that time, the story of the Targaryen madness... the effects that happened in the Defiance of Duskendale that left him the way he was... at the time, she was just a girl, and only knew stories and whispers. And there was only so much you could base a person solely on stories.
She has seen the Queen in tears, if only for a few moments. She has seen fear in the children's eyes, when they fear they've done something that he would see insulting or something he wouldn't approve of. When she sees so much reaction stem from him, her own views were forming. Fear... and even hate that she should see so much of it. But she kept those views hidden. She hid her mask concerning him well.
From his own fear and paranoia, he used her as a bargaining chip towards her own homeland. With his aid, even her own home became a pit where she practically had to dance to avoid falling. He denied her children the safety that they needed, much less of Elia's own well being. He was part of the reason why the air was so charged with chaos and there was very little she could do to ease it.
His fear became her pit. His cage became her grave. And she never forgave him for any of it.
