‘Gloria?’ she had asked, surprised, confused. The creature kept talking with her and that alone was amazing enough. Elliot and Genny were anomalies, broken people, who had adapted to inhabit tumultuous and changing landscapes, contorting themselves into minds and dream; how Gloria coped so well with her simple questions and seemingly unphased reaction to the most fantastic circumstances was astounding. A strong and stubborn woman, admirable and unfathomable. Oddly the more she considered Gloria’s plight and resilience, the more determined she was to rise and prove herself equal. A curious cycle between two women who found strength in one another, and miraculously able to overlook it within themselves.
Again
The word, like an echo, like a clock bell in the distance struck her and, as Elliot fought to speak over it, she wrinkled her face against the cacophony. The sensation was like being knee deep in unfamiliar water while the word crashed against her legs and pulled when the wave went rushing back from the beach, out to the sea. It pulled at her, in a hollow version of her own voice.
Again
Everytime he spoke it was circles upon circles, a puzzle of finding where a thought began and where it ended and with the added noise, it seemed impossible to understand. The thought of a retort formed in her throat, of course she had no desire to see the young man naked. But then it struck, just as the wave swelled and battered her again. How could the bird be the piece of her she’d left attached to Tennant? If anyone was capable of capturing it, surely it was Elliot. But if he hadn’t.
Her eyes grew wide, snapping to where the bird had been in her hands only to find the cage empty. And then a frightened shout to mingle with the thunderous echo, “Gloria!”
Aga
At first her feet slipped, or perhaps the ground had? Had she lunged for Gloria in realizing something was dangerously amiss? Had she lost traction as she leapt? The swirling paint pattern of her ball gown tossed and turned as she tumbled head over heel, until the garment was thoroughly mixed to a flat and motionless, nothing gray. Simultaneously her falling from the floor was arrested too, by a ceiling support beam that caught her right in the gut. It had knocked the air out of her, followed by an unpleasant, “hhng,” of surprise before she managed to drop, perhaps several feet, her back impacting the hard and uneven ground. Her hair, still somewhat luminous, splayed out in a disheveled mess as she had quite literally fallen from whatever grace she'd possessed.
Even accustomed to morphing memory-scapes and the dangerous distortions of dream worlds, this had caught her off guard. But then, this didn’t seem to be by choice. Elliot had been struggling for normalcy and lost the battle.