Some days are nice. Full of sand kicked up by tires they've never really learnt how to fix and food, cheap meat scorched by fire that Ellis can light by simply holding her hand over a pile of twigs. They've come a long way from when Nadie had to crouch down over hastily piled-up sticks and coax out the flames from between her hands, fingers stumbling over an old match-box, slightly crooked from when she'd bashed it into a shelf, a little angry over how the man in the shop had been eyeing Ellis.
But now, now Ellis is useful. More helpful. And far too well versed in the ways of deciphering Nadie, of knowing when she needs to talk about something and when she wants to keep quiet, occasionally missing the way she can tell her stories of gods she can never quite see, kitchens that will never be cooked in and other dusty, cultured tales that will never truly belong to her, Ellis, the grown-up child who never had a mother to tell her these things. Not like Nadie once had. It saddens Ellis to remember that bright eyed little girl that Kokopelli had once shown her, wandering through the golden fields that dwarfed her, hands clutching a flute that she carried almost carelessly – but Ellis knows how Nadie can appear almost cavalier with the things she holds dear and really, that child's grip she had was forged in something that could put steel to shame. Nadie possesses a love that burns stronger than the flames that swallowed her hometown. And just once, Ellis would have liked a photo of that time to have survived, something showing Nadie how she once was; not better, not worse, but just different, full of the dreams her mother laid out for her, spirit tales from the desert she would one day battle her way through.
Nadie, of course, is no mother. Not to anyone. Though she is perhaps the closest thing Ellis will have to a guide, a navigator in this dusty wind-swept land that they have managed to fall in love with, despite the pain it has both brought to them time and time again. It's like a bad love song, the kind Nadie hates and refuse to let Ellis put on, even when the urge to fiddle with the radio is just a little too strong.
But still. Ellis and her love for Nadie is nothing like a love song. It doesn't repeat, doesn't tune itself up into the yearning wail of a catchy chorus. It simply exists, humming quietly in the background, infusing Ellis with a security that she never wants to lose. As long as Nadie exists, she floats, she sees the fire and sky as not just one colour but a mixed, dashing array of everything that makes her magic buzz inside of her. Her love for Nadie is not something to make her feel sad; it is something to make her feel alive. To prove she existed first and foremost as Ellis.
But still. Sometimes she looks at Nadie, tries to catch the sparkle in her eyes and thinks: look at me.
Nadie sometimes looks at Ellis. And finds it difficult. She is not the child she once was, trapped inside the nubile young body of a teenager everybody seemed to fall in love with. Well...that last part hasn't stopped. It never will. Ellis is beautiful, in a classical, European sense that Nadie imagines professional painters like to get their hooks into and smooth over with their brushes. And she knows how to be kind, to smile and mean it in a way Nadie sometimes envies. Nadie had sometimes felt too loud, too brash for the places around her, like she could break everything that looks at her by smiling when she means it. Gradually, with Ellis that sense has lessened; it's hard to feel like a killer when the person most precious to you wants you to give up the gun, not for protection but for the sake of finding money.
Ellis doesn't want her just to live though, Nadie is slowly coming to realise. She wants her to be happy doing it happy with her. And more importantly, she wants Nadie to look at her, right down into her, right when she's staring back and...and...what?
Maybe if Nadie could hold her gaze properly, the way Ellis deserves, they'd both know. But Nadie is afraid of where it might leave, where it might change them, in all the prickly undiscovered parts of their relationship that could cause her to raise a gun to the one person who could both tell her to kill her and that she loved her all within the space of a minute. And, all the more incredibly, love her even more because if it.
It was a kamikaze kind of 'lovers' suicide thing, straight from the old tales, the grander tragedies that Nadie's mom tried to steer her away from whenever she asked about them. But it happened. It existed because of an evil, evil, now dead man. And Ellis is grown up now, learnt how to say things with her eyes that she once had to struggle to learn how to say with her tongue.
But still. Nadie can't look at her. Not yet. And maybe it's her turn to struggle, to learn how to put certain things down in words, the way she had to teach Ellis all that time ago. Maybe one day she'll get there. And learn how to raise her eyes up, to the sky and sand and fire. See Ellis. And answer, with no words at all: yes. I see you too.