In which I don't portray Elsa merely as Roy's punching bag/an emotional support beam for once. Sorry about that tending to be a recurring theme in the past.
Prompt: Twist
Words: 487
It isn't going to last.
Cole's an occasional guest, Elsa reminds herself as she pushes him back against the wall in an overpowering kiss. He'll learn her house rules.
It wasn't going to last.
Her parents' bodies, laden with bullet holes, littered the ground.
Through black and white newsreels, she and Lou saw the gruesome fate of their forsaken homeland, displayed for the world to see and spit upon.
It wasn't going to last.
Lou crashed to earth, and drifted away after the ghosts of her past.
In retrospect, she shouldn't have cried about it. She felt pathetic for believing that someone was going to remain in her life for long when experience had already taught her better.
It isn't going to last.
To this day, she gives a self-deprecating smirk at just what Cole must have thought of her when he first saw her, sobbing and pumped full of morphine.
He's too polite to say when asked.
His eyes were the first thing she herself saw of him, reflected back at her in her vanity's mirror. Elsa knew all too well the sheer melancholy within them.
Light glints off his wedding band. She would never force him to leave his wife and children, and she knows he isn't compelled to budge, anyway. She respects him for that, and envies him a little in his attempt to live a dream she herself had removed from her mind years ago. Why bother to want a family, when someone could put a gun to her husband's head, and brainwash her children into becoming perfect soldiers?
It isn't going to last.
She smiles knowingly as she lets Cole inside. "Did I answer all of your questions, Detective?"
He cups her chin. "I'm afraid not." Stroking along her jawline, he adds in a sultry tone, "I think I'll have to use more creative methods of coaxing the information out of you, Miss Lichtmann."
He's rougher than usual. Elsa knows her hips will be bearing bruises, but she could care less. Adrenaline pulses through him, revealing that he's in fact, a man, rather than a self-constructed machine.
He doesn't have to say good bye; the expression on his face says enough. Standing at the gap between two worlds, Cole hesitates, his hand above the door knob.
She's used to partings, so it's all right. But she silently wonders if solving even this case, one of a caliber that just may solidify him as a legendary figure, is truly enough to dispatch that deep sadness he carries with him. She knows he'll have to find it in himself to let it go, and understands that she must also speak for herself on that account.
It wasn't supposed to last.
With no place else to go, he crawls, an exhausted shell of a man, back to her apartment that following night. He knocks, and she realizes that she is all that he has now.