Captured Hearts

Hayley knew where she recognised the image from now. It had taken her long because it was a day she kept under bolt and key in the darkest depths of her mind. The day her daughter was born and the day she herself had died all rolled into twenty four hours of complete madness. She calculated this memory must have been from after her death and felt a sick, nauseous feeling churning in the pit of her stomach.

She realised now she didn't wish to see, she didn't want to know it was real, that these events had occurred while she was dead. She thought about the short dull word now.

Dead.

It only reminded her of her loss. Not only the loss of her child but of a part of herself, a huge part that rang through her like an invisible whole. She had been doing a better job at hiding it for the last few days, revelling in witch hunts or spitting flaming remarks. The anger just fizzled off her even if she hadn't wanted it to. It's like she felt that was all she could face feeling right now. Anger.

But as the events unfolded in front of her, like from the minute she had set off on her mission to save Elijah, other feelings began boiling inside her, pushing off their lids and reaching out of her.

"I let her in." Elijah's voice sang through her soul looping around it and engulfing her like an echo.

"I don't let people in." She heard the next line but this time the cracks and creak in Elijah's voice waded their way through her hard shelled heart, which in turn began cracking like a hatchling egg.

The look on his face... Hayley could almost feel what he was feeling by some greater, darker power; she felt her temperature rise as the intense suffocating feeling swam through her.

Her eyes burned like the candles she was being bathed by. She was fighting very hard to hold onto the saline drops pushing their way over the contours of her waterline, the soft kohl of her eyeliner smudging from the early effect.

She blinked.

A droplet was wrenched from her lashes by the force of feeling and fell hurtling down her heated cheek. She did not move in fear Elijah would see her.

"You knew this. You've taken her from me!" Elijah's voice then rang out into her ears and watching him like this, so omnisciently, she struggled to believe that she was the "she" he was speaking of.

Her body tensed with a heartfelt ache and she didn't know what hurt her more, hearing his words or thinking about how she believed his feelings had changed in the present.

"I needed her, and you've broken me." His tenor wavered and sighed with the deepest sense of loss and then Hayley could take it no longer. She let out an involuntarily sob, several more tears pardoned from her glistening eyes. The shell around her heart lay in clusters around her vulnerability of emotion and as much as she wished she had stayed strong and fought it somehow she knew she would not have succeeded however hard she had tried. Not in this moment, not in this place, not with him.

The sigh in his voice felt like it had lasted so long but eventually it melted from her ears and she felt whatever has caused the projection lift away from her but only to leave her feeling broken, so very broken.

Elijah heard her immediately and he pushed his head off the surface and faced her, his chains rattling with him as he turned himself towards her with a face full of genuine concern.

"Hayley..?" he croaked wanting to touch her but the shackles were preventing him to do so without clattering.

His eyes locked onto her like she was the only thing in his gaze, the entire room vanished.

He thought about asking her what was wrong but it sounded so pathetic in his mind and he thought of his previous failures in attempting to comfort her.

Instead he waited for her, giving her time, letting her adjust.

Hayley sobbed and Elijah felt like each sound was a blow to the heart, he hated seeing her in any sort of pain.

"I'm fine, I'm okay Elijah." She sobbed against tracing the line of her eye and looking towards the ceiling as if to douse back the tears.

Elijah knew she wasn't and Hayley knew why he wasn't speaking.

Because I'm an idiot that's why. She sobbed internally but beginning to look more herself on the front. She'd settled immediately that she wouldn't tell him, she wouldn't tell him what she had seen. She had seen his face when the image had appeared, the terror behind his authoritative expression.

God no. She told herself firmly vowing to not put him through it because it was even more prominent now, his self sacrificing nature, his inability to let people in for his own happiness.

Hayley felt like she would sob again but she caught that look in his eye as she curled a messy lock around her ear. The look was nostalgic, she felt she hadn't seen it for years but unaware to Hayley the look had never left Elijah's face. It was always there, she'd just forgotten how to see it.

"What is that look?" she then blurted in her tone of annoyance covering her urge and desperation to know the answer. Elijah's face relaxed a little, he was glad to hear her speak even if her tone was of irritation. He'd choose it over hearing her cry a thousand times over.

Elijah then observed her confused, unable to answer her question. He recalled her speaking to him in the nursery.

"I saw the way you looked at me then and I see the way you look at me now..." her broken voice called out to him as he drank in her question but he brushed the thought of that night aside.

It had hurt him to hear those words, to hear that she could even assume his feelings would change so easily but of course he had thought hers had and of course in the name of nobility he would strike down his heart if it meant she was happier.

Hayley now looked at him directly, a straight and strong look and Elijah returned her gaze searching in her eyes for exactly what she was searching for in his and then there they both sat, staring into the faces of each other with a million questions and a million answers but with captured hearts and still no release.