Re: Marvel: Wren and "Brielle"
It had been too long, and Wren remembered long limbs and endless grace. Brielle had been long, beautiful lines, where Wren had been too many curves, too much fat on bone. Beside her, Wren had always been impossibly plain. Brielle was haunting, had always been haunting, and this new visage only made the guilt roil in Wren's belly. She blamed jail. She didn't blame a pulse, she blamed jail. She knew jail intimately. From the acrid smells down the long, long and endless hall to a cell, to the scratch feel of the linen on the cots, to the sound of hopelessness as it sobbed in the dark night; Wren knew jail. She knew holding tanks, one-night stays. She knew collars and collars and collars for spreading her thighs for money. She knew. She knew Brielle wasn't made for those halls, those cots, those nights, and she blamed the changes on that. The black and the boots and the loss of the elegant ballerina. It weighed down Wren's shoulders like rocks, and she felt bowed beneath the weight.
She watched lighter snap, watched it paint Brielle in red and gold.
She sat.
The slide was a skeleton with bone fragments poking past the skin, and Wren was a careful perch at her cousine's side. "Have you seen Anaïs?" It seemed a better thing to do, to ask, than to answer. But the question was still there, hanging in the air between them. "I've been okay." She left it at that, because what was there to say? I stole your man, your life, your freedom? I'm happy? Non. These things could not be said.