A/N: i know its been a while since i last updated but ive been really busy with school and other stories. i hope you like this chapter and there should be more comming along soon. anyways as always read, reveiw and enjoy!
disclaimer: i do not own fairy tail
Cana ran a hand through the boys thick black hair, like a sea of tendrils her pale skin was engulfed. She was engulfed. Such an apt phrase, her life, her love, her existence engulfed by… it. The living breathing thing that spoke harsh words, cruel names and dealt out 'justice' to those who overstepped their bounds. Had she ever over stepped her bounds? There was one time, the split second where she considered refusing his offer of marriage, just a split second. But then again do thoughts count?
The question flung her into a memory, a preacher screaming at his congregation, the sin he was so afraid of pouring out of every pore as his words seemed to cleanse him, how Cana could never work out. She always remembered that one line, the line that seemed to somehow dictate her life like false-god lurking in the shadows.
"Thoughts lead to words, words lead to actions and actions lead to sin. Therefore thoughts lead to sin." The preacher wailed, his soul quivering in both fear and validation. The second enough to make Cana feel queasy with unease. How could one avoid sin if not even the sacred wall of her mind were not her own. The unease began to seep into her bones again, like a disease eating her from the inside out. Her eyes searched in the face of the boy for the much needed salvation she always found. He was her little piece of god, something no one could ever taint, not even her imprisoner or the false god in the shadows or the living breathing entity that had killed so much of her already.
"Which flower would you like today mother?" Romeo asked, his eyes wide with a life Cana could never grasp. Her face shifted, the muscles changing her expression though nothing truly changed, not within the dirty sanctity of her mind.
"How about a sunflower, my love?" she asked, her hand resting gracefully and the base of his neck. The place felt unnatural as he had grown again, growing boys, growing always too fast. He nodded, slipping out of her grasp, her expression changing again though nowadays she hardly registered something so inconsequential as an expression. Her mother used to say that the eyes are the windows to the soul, and if you look close enough you can see their true self.
Cana believed that if someone stared into her eyes they would see a sunflower. At its centre was a large black abyss, moving the rest of the plant in its selfish desire to devour as much of the sunlight as it could before the dusk. The dusk was like a fast acting poison, only cured with the break of dawn. But was dawn truly the cure to suck poison, all it allowed was for one to see their own ugliness more clearly, and who would willingly be confronted with that.
In the distance she saw him, Romeo, handing over a coin for an alien sunflower, its abyss black enough to detract from even Romeo's light. But Cana preferred it this way, looking at him from a distance. The nearer he got the more she had to admit her own existence, the smell of him filling her nostrils, her fingers trailing over his cheeks, now rough with stubble. They were once smooth but time took even that from her.
Romeo pushed the sunflower into her hand, his smile as precious as a crystal in sunlight, light refracting in beautiful patterns without reason or rhyme.
"Thank you, my love." She said, her expression curving, her lips pushing her cheeks, a foreign feeling. The boy nodded curtly as his father had shown him to. How she hated it, the hard formality of the gesture, why did he even have to take the one piece of beauty from her? Isn't prison supposed to be a stagnant form of pain rather than the loss and loss of that precious to you?
She cupped his cheek, watching as he calculated whether to shrug her off, and she silently prayed he would let her keep her hand there just that second longer. But eventually the moment passed and she was forced to pull her hand away, her palm cold.
Cold.
She was cold.
But who was she?