It's like an ache that never truly fades. The picture on her nightstand hurts to look at, so Cornelia makes the portrait face the wood. Not thinking about her helps: makes it duller, somehow. Makes it hurt less. Makes forgetting faster.
So Cornelia doesn't think and treats the ache by kissing other mouths. None taste as sweet as Elyon's. That's fine. She supposes she'll learn to enjoy other people with time.
Visiting Meridian - hurts. People smile and talk about the Light. How kind and good and graceful (Cornelia wants to laugh, but she's on a diplomatic mission, and she has to stand tall, serious, face in careful neutrality as Will speaks) she is. Cornelia listens and drinks it up, like the last drop of water in the desert. It's the only way she can be close to Elyon: being together like she wants to be is an impossibility. Cornelia is a guardian, and Elyon a queen. No future that can be foreseen have the two as she wishes they were.
Sometimes Elyon requests a bodyguard, when she goes around Meridian in disguise to meet its people and know the land she was supposed to be raised in. She asks for Cornelia, and Cornelia accepts it before she can even rationalize what she's saying. Later, at home, she'll chastise herself for being stupid. It's not the first time: this has been her routine every summer since she became a guardian. It's just the fifth time she's this stupid, and she still hasn't learned. Still hasn't let go.
When she arrives in Meridian for her job, strolling to the stables where Elyon is finishing preparing her own horse, she'll take a moment to be breathless. A moment, only. Then it's back to business: straightening her back, hands clasped together in the small of her back.
"Elyon." She calls, and Elyon's eyes twinkle like a thousand stars as she smiles at Cornelia. "ready to go?"
She ignores the question, walks to where Cornelia is. In her guardian form, she's taller, much taller than before. At least, from her perspective, she is.
"Geez, every time I see you it's like you got taller!" Elyon says, a sun in flesh and blood. Cornelia cannot help but smile back, and the desire to touch Elyon's sun-kissed face is too strong.
Cornelia, however, is nothing but self-restraint. Her hands stay tightly clasped behind her back, and she schools her face into neutrality.
"Yeah, it's the heels. You should invest on them." Her tone of voice betrays the warmth her face doesn't show, and all Elyon does is giggle. Her face softens. "Ready to go?"
"Unlike you, I was here on time." Elyon replies, easy and simple, using a finger to stab on Cornelia's chest to punctuate her words, as if they're still the same girls from before. Elyon's hand finds Cornelia's with such ease, such familiarity, that it's almost like nothing has changed between them.
But it has, doesn't it? Cornelia floats gently behind Elyon as she rides her horse, and she greets people, talks and chitchats and knows everyone by their name. She's Elyon, but she's not Cornelia's Elyon.: she's Meridian's Elyon.
Is that fine? Is that okay? It's a familiar stranger that knows how to smile just in the right way to make her heart jump leaps and bounds. Can Cornelia allow herself this, this stranger that is her Elyon, but at the same time, no, it's not?
At night, at some terrible inn, somewhere in the deep corners of Meridian, Elyon will insist they share a room. Cornelia will allow it because she's security detail, and it's easier to do her job from the same room. It usually means sharing a bed, too: Cornelia won't complain.
When she transforms back into her old, boring human self, Elyon, kicking the air while watching, cocks her head.
"You know, the change used to be more dramatic." She smiles, and Cornelia, slipping into her pajamas, doesn't dare to reply. Elyon gestures to her own face. "You lost a bit of that baby fat."
"Is it a bad thing?" Cornelia replies, trying to sound disengaged, distant. It's easier this way.
"Should it be?" Elyon smiles, innocently patting the bed. Cornelia ignores the invitation for the moment, pretending to not know its meaning. "I don't know. It's like you and her are the same, now."
Her is the guardian: the girl with a serious face and distant eyes, working to keep the many realms safe, working to keep her feelings in check. There's not many differences between herself and the guardian. Maybe the wings, since her normal self did not have them.
"We've always been the same."
"I'm not sure on that. You used to be warmer. To me, at least." Cornelia does not reply; instead, she finishes dressing up, slips to her corner of the bed, laying down and closing her eyes in a futile attempt to fall asleep, back turned to the girl. Elyon joins her soon after, and nuzzles her face against Cornelia's back.
It's as quick as a breath for Elyon's hands to wrap themselves around Cornelia, for her face to find the curve of Cornelia's neck. There's lips on her bare skin, and the warm breath makes her shiver.
She does not turn to face Elyon.
"We can't keep doing this. Sometimes, I'm just sure that you invent these trips because you know I'll end up coming."
Elyon does not answer, instead planting little kisses into her neck.
It's a dull ache. It's both of their loneliness speaking. They have no future together. All the excuses that Cornelia tells herself fly through the window as Elyon's sweet mouth meets hers, and she forgets that she has to forget Elyon.