the prompt is an elf promises to never love a human

When did she get so frail? Was the onset so slow that it went unnoticed or did she hide it that well?

To Mari, she had never visibly changed until last night. 

Vanessa had sworn while going down the stairs. A simple movement had thrown off the alignment of her bones. She grimaced but quickly smiled before saying that it was okay. Vanessa limped down two steps before Mari made the executive decision to lift Vanessa up into her arms and carry her back into their home.

They could eat out another time.

Mari wrapped Vanessa’s knee up as best she could, elevated it and iced it as well before promising to get medicine from her healer the next day. Vanessa insisted on going to her own doctor but Mari won our in the end. Fae medicine was better anyway. 

As the days passed Mari noticed more things. The time it took Vanessa to get up and down. The slowness of her steps were as they walked down the street. Just how white her hair had become.

The truth is that Vanessa had been like this for years but they had both ignored it. Now the inevitable was painfully unavoidable.

No matter how much they shifted

settled

slowed 

time continued to flow like sand through a grasping hand away 

and cruelly so

Mari did her best to hide her sadness but she broke at Vanessa’s bedside amid the beeps and woosh of oxygen machines. She thought Vanessa was asleep and was surprised to feel her cold hand on her own warmer one. 

“Do you regret?”, she asked.  Her voice a whisper of what it used to be.

Mari dried her eyes before replying “Not once. I never will.” 

It wasn’t until after the funeral that Mari admitted to herself that that had been a lie. She did have regret and she had rage.

She’d never do it again.

She wouldn’t go from outward lovers to pretending to be a daughter and then a caretaker in public. 

She would not be the one left behind to deal with years of healing from the loss of the love of your life.

She refused to be the future holder of memories when their brains became too fragile to hold them for themselves. 

Her body and her spirit had become a tomb. A burial ground for those she had loved the most and it was full to bursting.

Never again. Mari promised herself as she took off her black dress.

“Never again” She screamed between sobs as she crawled under covers that still held Angela’s scent.

Never, she promised herself, would she love something as ephemerally beautiful as a human being again.