Pretend

Ella liked to play pretend.

She used to play pretend a lot when she was little. She would go out with Crayton to one of those family diners that Ella loved, the ones that let you choose between whipped cream and ice cream on your pancakes, and served chocolate milk with bendy straws. Ella loved chocolate milk. They would be sitting in a squishy red booth somewhere, Ella staring intently at her pancakes and whipped cream, her forehead wrinkled as she contemplates the best way to eat it. Crayton would nudge her arm from his place across the table, and subtly point at a group of mothers fussing over young children way at the other side of the diner. "What about them?"

"They're best friends. They used to be princesses, but a group of evil knights took over their kingdoms and they had to hide and now they can only meet in secret. But some day, Papa, they're going to take back their castles! Then they can be queens and they won't have to hide and they can wear their crowns and have tea parties together every single day." she would say, excited at the game.

And Crayton would smile and say that she was very creative and his boring old mind could never come up with a story that great.

She would tell him that, "You're not THAT old, Papa."

Then he would tickle her and she would giggle so hard she would almost fall out of the booth. Crayton would grab her and hold her close and tell her that she was a princess too and that she would be just as great as the princesses in the table over there and would she like some chocolate milk? She would nod and continue the game with a "That baby over there is..."

Ella still likes to play pretend sometimes, when the pain of missing Crayton is too much to bear. She'll whisper the life stories of people in the cars she can see when she presses her face against one of the windows in Nine's penthouse. She pretends that Crayton is right beside her, and Ella will tell him the stories and how hard she has been training and about the Garde. She's probably making this up too, but sometimes she hears him talk back.

Crayton tells her how proud he is of her and how the way she told the story about Eight dropping those mugs of hot tea was really very good and that she should write it down. In many years, he says, when she is back on Lorien, people will line up through the doors and around the block to hear one of The Great Ella's stories.

Playing pretend for Ella is like Marina's painting; it's a release. She can sit at a window for hours on end. When she feels better, she stands up, shakes her sore limbs, and heads to the kitchen for a glass of chocolate milk.

A/N: Thanks so much for reading this! This is my first fanfiction, so please bear with me as I try to get this figured out. To those who reviewed the last chapter:

. . .Five/Mysteryfanaticno1-Thanks so much! I love both of your Lorien Legacies works.

Lorien [Guest]-Thanks! Ella was not present in Marina's painting because it was before she knew about Ella. You were right. :-)

EpicLoric24 [Guest]-Thanks for your opinion. It reminded me that I gave no explanation whatsoever of the last drabble. Marina doesn't know about Ella yet, so she was not included in the painting. Likewise, she doesn't know about Five's shady allegiances yet, so he WAS in her painting. I'm sorry it was short, but I'm just starting out at this, and it wasn't intended to be the start of a larger plot, just a moment in time when Marina was able to escape the convent. The main point, I suppose, was to draw upon a part of Marina that the books didn't really go into detail on past PoS.

The title, by the way, for the last drabble, was "Art."

Disclaimer: I will never own Lorien Legacies. If I did, you can bet that FoF would have had a completely different ending.

-IfICouldOnlyFly