Three days left of shore leave and Ellie isn’t really sure how she should spend it. She’d done all the normal things - visited her father and sat with his multiple whining children, visited her brother and sat in silence, visited the markets and picked up some supplies, visited the Castle and let Flo roam amongst the ramparts. But the infants were too loud and Jasper was too quiet and she felt like the three bears and just didn’t know how to find the compromise where her brain wasn’t too full and wasn’t too empty and was just right.
So she wonders about Dakota.
Ellie has always felt she should be closer with Kota - she loves her, she raised her, really, though gods forbid she forget to acknowledge Flo’s help. Or Jasper’s, for that matter. But she has so many siblings and they are just all so different - her father is a collector of interesting DNA to mix with his own, it seems. Jasper and she, they are so alike in so many ways; she assumes it’s the fact of having the exact parentage. They are also so opposite, she knows, from the outside - but she will always be closest to Jazz, and he to her, even if he will never admit as much.
Kota, she’s second. The rest of the kids - Ellie knows their names, sure, but when even Draco isn’t always sure of the other parent it gets hard to keep up. But Kota isn’t that much younger, and for a while Draco really tried at a normal family. He failed, of course, because how could a fairy like Draco ever settle down to a wife and a home and kids?
She loves him but she was so glad when Jasper took Kota and herself away, and the three of them thrived for a time. And then she and Kota moved away and Jazz darkened - the light the girls brought with them they took away just as easily.

Flo curls around her leg and Ellie focuses her mind; her tracking powers may be a little stiff from disuse and she has to concentrate a little more but she pulls the thread of Dakota from the bundle that sits in her thoughts and she begins to follow it. She could trace it right up to the spot where Kota stands but she’s never liked to do that - she likes to give fairies a chance to turn and run. She laughs once, lightly, shaking her head as the track fades, reaching out gently to pick it up again. She often loses herself when tracking, and as the trail comes to an end Ellie blinks a few times until Oliford stands clear in front of her. She likes it here; she often stays here when she can, there’s a particularly comfortable inn just off to the left.
She can’t see Kota, but she can sense her - not just through her tracking but by some family bond. Jasper scoffs, says it’s just her power and she’s romanticising it, but she knows that it’s more than that. She can sense him, too, although the fog of shadows usually heralds his arrival far more clearly.
She sees a few familiar faces, waves to a couple of old friends, but she just waits, certain that her sister will sense her right back.

i o d i n e .

kiss me,
beneath the milky twilight.