🌿 Tending the Garden

Elena x Elijah | Quiet grief, soft connection, unsaid things

The bell above the door chimed softly, brushing the silence like a fingertip over glass.

Elena looked up from her pruning scissors, tucked behind the counter of her shop — Gilbert & Bloom — to find him again.

The man with pressed collars and old-world eyes. Always in black. Always polite.

And always, without fail… when it rained.

“Mr. Mikaelson,” she said, lips tugging into a small smile. “Let me guess. Orchids again?”

He inclined his head with that unreadable calm of his. “If you have any white phalaenopsis left.”

She did. She always did.

He Only Came in the Rain

He never spoke much. He paid in cash. He never asked questions.

And yet, Elijah Mikaelson lingered.

She’d find him staring at the violets. Or holding a single gardenia between his fingers like it might shatter if he breathed too hard.

Once, he spent twenty full minutes with the rosemary plant.

“You only come in when it rains,” she said quietly one evening, handing him a tissue-wrapped orchid.

He looked at her, a flicker of something breaking through his restraint. Grief, maybe. Or memory.

“It’s easier to miss someone when the world’s already weeping,” he said.

And then, like always, he left.

She Didn’t Know His Story

Only that he carried his sorrow like it was stitched to his coat.

Elena didn’t ask. She knew better than most that asking never brought peace. It only opened doors to rooms you weren’t ready to walk through.

But she wondered.
He wore tragedy like perfume.
He smiled like it hurt.

And still — he kept coming back.

One Thursday Afternoon

It wasn’t raining.

The sky was sharp and blue, the kind of clean brightness spring brought after weeks of stormclouds.

So when the bell chimed, she wasn’t expecting him.

But there he was. No umbrella. No coat. Just a pale lavender tie and the smallest crease between his brows.

“Elijah,” she said, surprised. “Sunshine?”

He looked around, almost guilty.

“I suppose I’ve broken my pattern,” he murmured.

She handed him a daffodil on impulse.

“For luck,” she said. “Or maybe just to balance your aesthetic.”

He took it like it mattered. Held it like it was sacred.

“Do you know what daffodils symbolize?” he asked, voice low.
“New beginnings,” she said softly.
“And unspoken love,” he added.

Their eyes met. Something bloomed between them — not sudden, not loud. Just… there.

A Month Later

He stopped by at closing.

Still raining.

But this time, he didn’t ask for orchids.

He asked if he could sit.

Elena made tea. Neither of them spoke for ten minutes. The silence was warm. Unafraid.

Finally, she asked the question she’d kept pressed between her ribs for months.

“Who were the orchids for?”

Elijah didn’t answer right away. He stared at his cup.

“My brother,” he said at last. “And someone I should have loved more freely.”

“Did they… die?”

“Yes,” he whispered. “But not before I did.”

That Was the First Time He Stayed Past Sunset

He left her a note on the counter before he left that night.

“Your hands are made for healing. I hope you never stop growing things.”

She kept it in her drawer.

Right next to the pressed daffodil he left behind.

A Year Later

He kissed her in the greenhouse.

It was raining, of course. Heavy and slow, like a lullaby.

She was trimming peonies. He was standing far too close. And when she looked up, her hand brushed his wrist, and something in the world shifted.

He didn’t ask permission.

He just leaned in with a reverence that made her breath catch. And kissed her like she was something he’d been waiting lifetimes to hold without breaking.

When he pulled back, she whispered,

“You only come in when it rains.”

And Elijah smiled — the kind of smile that broke the quiet cleanly, like thunder.

“Not anymore.”

He came into her shop with grief in his pockets and silence in his bones.
And stayed because something finally began to bloom in the wreckage.
Something neither of them had dared plant before:
hope.