.
"Elise," he whispers shakily, his pallid fingers just barely brushing over the side of her cheek to swipe away loose strands of her hair that had fallen over her face. "You're so...pretty, don't you know...?" His voice cracks at the last part with a sickly tone, and it takes all Elise has not to cringe or look away in pain. Raivis' head rests on her lap, his blue-violet eyes, which she'd noticed had glazed over, staring at her with a loving but somber expression swirling within them, which only makes the current predicament worse for the young Germanic girl.
"You've told me so a few times before," she chooses to answer after a long pause, slightly frowning. His hand continues to caress the side of her face so gently it feels as though it is merely a soft breeze blowing past her. She tries not to eye the bloody gashes marring his arms, or the few smaller ones flecking his dirty legs, but she ultimately fails and takes a deep breath, trying to remain strong. A light, weak titter escapes Raivis' pale lips, which sends an unnerving shiver down her spine, and his hand falls from her cheek to her shoulder. He begins to hum an unfamiliar tune, and Elise reaches over for the gauze beside her carefully. Unrolling it, she begins wrapping it over a particularly nasty one on his right arm, but he abruptly and unexpectedly stops her, a new hardness glinting in his eyes as his orbs bore into hers.
"Don't, " he murmurs, taking her hand and placing it down onto his chest. "It isn't worth it. You'll just stain your pretty hands and get nothing out of it in the end," he adds faintly, his tongue licking over his chapped lips before he sets his head back down onto her thigh and takes to staring at the dim sky as his blond caretaker unwillingly drops the gauge on the dirt, tears forming at the edges of her eyes at the realization of his obvious fate. She only wishes she couldn't prevented that one last outlash, that one last retaliation from the people who dared to call themselves a blood relative, or evem a guardian - and deep down, she felt an undeniable, sickeningly strong guilt, for she knew that this one beating was all because of her, though Raivis refused to admit it.
"Raivis," she breathes, a tear managing to escape her eye and plop down onto her dress. "I'm... sorry...I...I know it was my fault, and..." Raivis, she knows, has extremely abusive parents, parents who don't care about him yet want to control everything about him - the way he looks, the way he acts, who he likes, and who he hangs around. She knows that they didn't approve of her as an acquaintance, a friend, and least of all a romantic partner, and they'd spotted her an abundance of times to many before they finally decided to act big-time on the matter, which resulted in the current condition her beloved Latvian was in, enormous bruises and disgustingly large open wounds marring his skin, and she can barely breath as she looks at his dying face because she knows without a doubt that everthing that has happened to him in the past two years was a direct result of her simply being around him.
"Raivis, you deserved better than this, than me," she continues as her flood gates slowly break and more tears cascade down her cheeks and onto his already dirtied shirt. He listens silently, his eyelids shut as he breathed slowly, pain tingling all over his body with even the nanosecond thought of daring to move, to breath. "You," she mutters, "you really did..." She says it like he's already dead, and she knows he will be soon, seeing as there's no saving him, and she begins to rush her words, blurring everthing together. "A-and I-I don't like it, I h-hate it, I dislike how I w-was the one to bring this upon you, R-Raivis..." She gulps loudly, fingers squeezing the fabric of his shirt. "I...I want to let you know that I l-love you, and I always will...they never loved you...but I always have, and even when you're... g-go..." She struggles to stay the last word, and when she looks down at Raivis' face, she knows she can't finish it.
"Elise," he mumbles, his voice barely a whisper and the fading apparent, "Elise Soraya Vogel Zwingli..." He opens up his eyes a bit to her, bringing up his hand to her wet face once more. "I don't think I ever...said it...but I...I love you, too...I always have...and I always will, too..." He smiles a bit, fingers stroking her lips deftly, wiping away a few stray tears. "So...take care of yourself, won't you...? Elise..." A few minutes pass by, the only thing filling the tense air being Elise's sobbing, and the gradual disappearing of Raivis' breath.
More time, and she finally notices that he's gone still in her lap from all the blood loss. She can slowly feel her heart tear itself into tiny little pieces as she gazes at his eternally asleep face, noting the slight smile fixed on his sallow face, the little bit she can see of his eyes, most being concealed from her view forever from his permanently heavy eyelids, and most of all, the small, glittering tears grouped at the corners of his unseeing eyes, the last hopeful sign of life she would ever see from her treasured paramour.