― 𝒔𝒕𝒂𝒓𝒄𝒓𝒐𝒔𝒔𝒆𝒅.
❝ you never knew the stars had
a flavor until you first kissed him.
it turns out they taste like ambition
and ancient fire, desperation, and
dark matter, and the mind-numbing
fear of bei...
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STARCROSSED (book one). °• CHAPTER NINETEEN •°
" AND IF IT'S REAL, YOU HAVE TO FEEL IT. "
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ELEVEN WAS ONCE JUST A CHILD. The government turned her into a weapon and used her abilities for their own selfish needs. Elijah's heart hurt every time he thought about it, how a girl whose powers were so strong that it would cause headaches that brought intense nosebleeds, and how she was forced to use them until she accidentally brought evil into their small town that she sacrificed herself to get rid of. Will was just a child. Will had survived on his own for days when the Demogorgon was chasing him and it's beyond Elijah how he made it or how he's possibly fighting against the possession of whatever shadow monster had taken control of his mind.
Hell, Elijah was just a kid. It's easy to forget that sometimes when he's stressing over the other's needs instead of his own.
He was tiredly digging through the barrels of trash that the Byers' shed had to offer to find whatever scraps they could use to hide it. Nevaeh worked beside him by ripping tape strips and sticking them to the edges of what he found so they could attach it to the wall later. Elijah snuck a glance at her. Bags sat below her dark eyes and her shoulders slumped at a low angle. He almost forgot that his baby sister, too, was a kid. They were a year apart. Who knows what she saw when she thought she was dreaming? And she saw someone who laid his life on the line for them be brutally murdered before her. God knows what was going through Nevaeh's head because Elijah couldn't guess.
Shot in the dark, it wasn't anything good.
"Do you want to talk about it?" Elijah offered after a beat.
A long strip of tape that Nevaeh pinched between her pointer finger and thumb ripped off the roll. "About what?" She played dumb.
Elijah sighed. He was left torn down the middle. He didn't want to force Nevaeh to talk about it, but he didn't want her to suffer when she kept it inside either. Doing so would be like allowing a bomb to stew and slowly count backward until an explosion. Elijah was the diffuser with a pair of shears and was sweating the closer he grew to the red and blue wire. He didn't know which one would cause a detonation.
So Elijah chose the red one.
"The first time I saw the Demogorgon, I was in the Upside Down. I followed Nancy there 'cause I hadn't wanted her to go alone. It... It smelled us quickly. It hunted us. Every time I ran and circled a tree, it was there." Elijah took a deep and shuddering breath as he remembered. He tried not to think about it too much. "It didn't matter I escaped. It was never going to stop so we tried to draw it in. Every bullet Nancy fired at it was like poking a bear with a stick. It stood over me, it... It opened its mouth, and... And I thought that was it for me. I didn't think I'd see you or... Or Dad again."
