Wildflowers | Alec Volturi

quinze

"We cannot deny that there is a monster inside of us all. That was what Robyn believed."

Robyn couldn't quite figure how long it had been since she had cowardly run away from the village -- had sprinted over the distance with her tail tucked between her legs, heart shattered to bits and tucked away behind tears that stung her eyes and trailed down her cheeks.

She couldn't quite recall the time that had passed, but she could remember still smell the smoke.

The fire that stuck high over the village that spread with the screams were pinned to her mind, burning her as it did when she reached too close to the flames crying out for him as he stood pinned to that mast like what they were doing was normal.

Jane at his side had screamed, cursed and yelled at everyone within sight -- promises of death tumbling from thinned lips as the flames licked higher dangerously.

It came in flashes of hard-wrought images, of pain that lanced through her hands from the tips of her fingers and a wailing mournful cry in her heart at the thought of him gone. At everything gone, because it was her alone that had run.

A coward, a damned coward is what she was, and Robyn could not shake that looming shadow from her soul no matter how long she sat immobile in that meadow where she had shares secret moments with the boy she loved. Their stolen kisses would stain the earth here forever, would spill over in the wildflowers that had once been stuck in her hair by hesitant hands that brushed a finger over her cheeks in a delicate manner.

Smoke curled up in the sky, reaching above the treetops that surrounded her, but Robyn couldn't shake the appearance of fire as red locks caught in the wind and danced at the edge of her vision. It was haunting, dragging her from the depths of her bones and sticking her to the one place she could still feel him because he was never truly at home in the village, not with the way he was treated, the way they tried to burn him.

Robyn could not remember the exact moment that the screams had stopped and had turned into an echoed memory that bounced around him in her thoughts.

She could not remember where the nightmares stopped and wakefulness began. The nightmares were okay until they continued when she was awake, her head playing tricks on her as she stared at the wildflowers, the fire flickering in and out of focus burning with her imagination.

The smoke around her, the signs of death, danced around her in tendrils, curling around her with each trembling breath caught with heavy-lidded eyes.

Something had come after she had left, something that she had missed by only a few minutes, that had razed through the village in order to bring them to terrified screams that eventually died away to an empty silence and the roar of fire that rose high over the trees.

Whatever that was, she couldn't even guess to, didn't even want to, as the fear that she was left completely alone, that whatever it was would come for her next.

Robyn was frightened and alone and she knew she would need to leave, to eat something more than the berries and fruits that grew near the meadow, that she would need more sustenance than water and fruits, than plants that she knew. She would need meat, she would need warmth, she would need to have a physician look over her burns before she succumbed to her injuries. 

But despite all that she knew, Robyn couldn't bring herself to leave the meadow, their meadow, where the heart and soul of her memories, of her relationship with Alec was born and matured. 

This was where they first kissed, where they would sneak away in the early mornings just to be together. This was where Robyn first declared her love and made her intentions clear. This was where she married her husband.