Title: "Return to Sender" 1/1
Author: monimala
Rating/Pairing: PG, Elijah/Elena, post-ep/filler, AU.
Disclaimer: I don't own these characters and am making no profit from their use.
Summary: 475 words. Takes place after 3.15, "All My Children." Elijah writes her a letter each day.
My dear Elena,
I hope this letter finds you well. No, not simply well, but thriving.
Elijah writes her a letter each day. He does not send all of them -only the ones that aren't quite so maudlin, quite so full of florid poet's ramblings- and he burns several. He watches the edges of the stationery curl in the fire, till nothing remains of his idealism but ash. Black ash, of course. Not white. For white would be his undoing, would it not?
The sunset is different here, Elena. Cleaner, calmer, somehow. Perhaps because there is no peril. I only wish that you, too, could experience such peace.
He spends thirty-six glorious hours in Vienna. A day in Prague. The weekend in Bucharest. You'd love Europe, he tells Elena. I wish I could show you my favorite places. The shops, the libraries, the pubs.
Of course he knows such wishes are futile. Elena is but a girl, a beautiful, human girl, and her fate lies elsewhere. Anywhere but with him. She has her two suitors; she has her calling. She has a dozen things on her agenda; chief amongst them is survival. Walking down the cobblestone streets that her ancestors traveled, breathing in the air and the age, is not an indulgence she can afford. So he does it for her, and he describes it all in full detail. He tells her everything but how her absence wounds him like the ubiquitous dagger through the heart.
He sends her a grand total of nine missives in the post… and, in the end, stays away from her a grand total of three weeks. The same feet that walked through Austria, meandered in the Czech Republic and roamed Romania, find themselves at the threshold of her bedroom door… at the threshold and then over it, where he'd been just weeks before to leave her his very first letter.
He finds her well. No, not simply well, he finds her thriving. Sun-browned and beautiful, the sweet tension of her hard-won muscles covered by the casual cotton of nightclothes. Her dark eyes light up with genuine joy, and she slips her slender arms round his neck and welcomes him home with a tender press of her lips against his cheek. "Don't laugh, but I really missed you," she sighs. "You're the only sane one in the bunch, you know."
He doesn't laugh. He wouldn't dream of it. Instead, he cradles her lovely face between his palms and gives her a proper kiss. Breathless, hopeful, almost absurdly sentimental. "I've missed you, too, Elena. For far longer than you could possibly imagine."
He can't really say if he's the least bit sane. All he knows is that he's hers, and she, not white ash, is his ultimate undoing.
With that realization comes a different kind of peace.
Always and forever,
Elijah
-end-
February 26, 2012