Sunspoilt - Blog Posts
in hindsight, her avoidance of those most familiar tonight has been intentional, ducking her head to let her hair shield her profile from view, choosing to go left when she'd been headed right. guinevere lovelace is not a coward, but she is aggrieved. she ends up, somehow, at a blackjack table. her betting is restrained to the table minimum, not out of an excess of caution, but of heart and will. she isn't here for money. a story is the reason she gave her editor, investigation is the one she gives herself. neve steps away from the table when she doubles her cash, chips in hand as she searches for fresh air. she finds it in the solitude of a dark spring night, tucked mostly away from the crowd. still, it's not a perfect hiding place, as is proven by mara's appearance. the funeral wasn't the difficult part. neither was the actual death. it's the burial that happens every morning, the feeling that she's trapped behind her own rib cage and unable to slip out. she buried parts of herself when she threw dirt over elidyr's empty casket. she buried parts of herself — albeit smaller — the night eli showed up at her mercy dorm half-drunk and tongue tied about his girlfriend. ex-girlfriend. ( ' she doesn't deserve you ' said without hearing the story, countered by a hiccuping ' i love her ' ) she lost two siblings within the span of weeks, one by blood another by bond. years have passed but the bitterness on her tongue lingers, a stain she can't get out no matter how many times she cleans.
" i — " rarely is she left struggling for words. she bounces between civility and contentiousness, and chooses to don a front of politeness. neve's mouth tightens, though she smiles as she plays off her reaction as surprise. " i'm not. i guess it's the closest i can get to an arcade right now. managed to win fifty bucks. " eli had been fond of vintage games and new releases alike, she still has a game that she'd been meaning to gift him for his birthday tucked away somewhere. " could say the same for you. mercy's still in the business of changing people, then ? how much was the voucher again ? heard it was a grand, but no one's confirming. " how easily she settles into her element — journalism and information extraction. she may have been a great agent had she stayed.
CLOSED ⸻ guinevere , @greatpain
half empty glass of champagne is stained cherry red around the rolled rim, unique as a fingerprint. abandoned, left to condensate atop the flashing neon promise of a slot machine. she is a self-tamed creature, primordial devotion a patchwork of girlhood starvation and the devouring that followed, that has never stopped. she is all mouth. had tried to swallow guinevere whole, the tenderest consumption, after atropos severed the human tether that had so effortlessly knotted them together. fumbled for the fraying edges of that clean cut, following it to the glutted dénouement of abandonment at the other end.
the fourteenth floor balcony. still carrying the remains of that tether, saturated with the burgundy stain of old blood. more appendage than object. " i never took you for a gambler, " mara hesitates in their distant periphery, an uncharacteristic nervous hope flickering like a pilot light. that inherent lure to another, steadying presence of the sibling. near sibling, if it must be said. inimitable, but always begging. the absence is violent all the same, claws and teeth and open wounds. no one escapes siblinghood unscathed. but here, in the irreverent springtime chill, an offering of balm .. " have you won anything ? "