wear this; spare speech
for a prompt over at the noir ficcathon of awesome; it ran away with me and accidentally became like, an actual fic, so it's getting posted over here.
we have seen the best of our time
goneril/edmund and regan, pg-13, 3128 words.
we that are young
Shall never see so much nor live so long.
She knows mere weeks before it happens, Oswald creeping into crannies for her, rooting out information and presenting it to her with "ma'am"s and apologies. She barely has time to memorize what she'll say; she barely has time to find a good dress. She wonders if her sisters know, and scoffs at the idea. (Regan: maybe Regan. She never can tell, with Regan.) She hasn't seen her husband in four weeks, only summing them up to wonder if he'll make it back by the time of the giving.
This could be her chance, she thinks. A third of the city is still blocks and blocks of holographic lights, sleek bellowing cars and fast-shot guns and liquor and dancing under your very feet. A third of the city is still the city, still the Chicago that she knows better backwards than forwards and runs through her body like blood and bones. A third of the city is still her city, and she will take it, tender it until it grows like a weed into something no one expected it could be.
The city lights reflect in her eyes, and she will take it, she will have it all.
*
Her sister is drinking vodka when she finds her, perched on the bar like a bird whose bones are too large for its body, lurking instead of graceful. She has a loose scraggle of men around her, a bartender waiting to refill her glass at the snap of her fingers: this is one of their father's bars, and they are known here like the faces of Chicago's Most Wanted.
"'Scuse me," she says, crass and loud, beautiful words saved only for when they'll be of use. The men look her up and down, and don't move an inch.
Regan looks down at her, one leg crossed over the other and her fingers curled around a slippery glass. "What are you doing here?" she accuses, and looking down her nose she still looks like a bird, a hawk, maybe, sleek and glaring.
"Nothing," Goneril says, code of detachment that she and her sister have always followed to a t. "I wanna talk to you."
"Fine," sighs Regan, shooing the men away with a hand that more swoops than flutters, scattering them in all directions. Goneril forgets sometimes that Regan is married, forgets nearly as often as she forgets she herself is. Cordelia is meant for marriage: the two of them are meant for freedom and affairs and late nights at jazz clubs. She thinks how foolish it is, that they are married.
They sit down at a table meant for three, the empty chair pulling focus and making them sit off-centered, too close together. Regan's eyes dart around the room, but Goneril is used to that: she does it herself. She says, "So, this is your place now, huh," because the bar's in the section of city that is Regan's now, to to what she plases with.
"Sure," Regan says, eyes still darting. "Father'll take it back soon enough, you know."
"What do you mean?" A waiter silently puts a glass down in front of her.
Regan's eyes still, pointed to Goneril's. "He's a man without a country now, isn't he? He'll drink us dry, wait and see." Goneril stares at her, and Regan smiles. "He's the same man, Goneril. This is chess, not charity."
Regan has the same hook in her smile, same glassy eyes betraying how she never really means what she says. Goneril wonders if she remembers playing together, Regan, younger and wilier (and prettier and cruller, always more than Goneril ever was), always winning at their games. If she shot Regan, pow pow, her thumb as the trigger and finger for the barrel, then Regan used her dying breaths to poison Goneril with lemon juice, acidic on her tongue as Regan laughed and laughed, rolling on the ground and mindless of her fantasy-inflicted wound. It is more ladylike, Regan told her, mocking their nanny's clipped tone and stifling air of superiority that fit Regan uncomfortably, like a perfume she was too young for. Men shoot other men, women choose more underhanded ways of killing.
And still, Regan never was their father's favorite: little Cordelia, pale and sickly but wearing her sickness elegantly, a frailty pulled around her like cobwebs that made others want to help her, carry her, give her anything.
Goneril and Regan had everything they could want, except that one, prized spot in their father's heart that had stood empty until Cordelia was born, killing their mother and any hope of a similar place to inhabit. Goneril thinks about this, and spends her whole life trying to find a place like that, and the only difference between her and Regan, she thinks (prettier faster crueler better), is that Regan doesn't know that she's looking.
*
She meets him and he is beautiful, softly handsome with blackish hair and dark-mirror eyes that reflect colors and lights and her, when she gets close enough to see. He is clever and he is hers, she is sure of it, the minute she gets near enough to whisper in his ear and see her own face distorted in his eyes. He is hers, that way her father was never hers and Albany was never hers, the way her sister resisted for so long. Her cored heart has been filled, and she can stop looking.
His smile is filled with something she can't quite make out, but that's all right; she doesn't need to know every piece of him now, long hours ahead, she's sure, for knowing each other.
She lets him go back into the night from whence he came, and he dissolves into it like a phantom of a man. She curls a hand to her breast, remembering the slow beat of his heart under her palm, comforting herself that he really was there and solid, not something that could dissolve into the lake mist crawling low-bellied down the streets. She fists her hand and remembers, and knows, does not hope, that he will be back in the light.
*
Regan's house has always been its own sort of person, crouching on its block like a caged circus animal and fenced on all sides by the streets of the city. It is a place you go to hide in, too many dark corners to name, complicated and unsteady so that the wind whistles through it at night. If houses reflect people, Goneril can understand the way Regan and Cornwall fit this house as if it's a sheath for their blade-like persons, all edge and dull glint.
Like all her predictions, this one of Regan's has come true: their father does not leave them, now that he has bequeathed the city into their hands. Chicago is the only place he knows, and in that way he is not so different from the rest of them; no other place would welcome him, even if he could escape from the dirty streets and drowning pull of the lake. No other police chief would look at him in such soft focus, no other city would let him slip through its jaws and end up on his own two feet. Chicago is the only place for him, for any of them, and sometimes in the dead of night Goneril resents that.
Tonight the night is living, the way it always is here. The parties are well underground, cars sheltered and people locked behind doors not their own. Goneril has just fought her way through wind and rain to Regan's door, where, when she pushes the heavy oak open under her hands, she knows she will find not just her sister but her father, a parasite in this animal of a house the way he had been in Goneril's own.
Regan's smile is sticky-sweet, but Goneril takes her hand and faces their father, railing and mad. The wind howls through the house, and Goneril worries for a sickly moment that it has come alive.
Thunder rumbles into all the dark corners of the house, that remind Goneril now of Edmund: all things dark and trap-like have gathered to him in her mind. Thunder roars and lightning coats the sky in greenish light, flashing into the house even through heavy-curtained windows, light scampering in through edges and unsealed lines. It is eerie, and no one's face looks quite right, in the quick-changing light.
Cornwall says, again and again, to step away, come back from the storm, but Goneril yearns to run to it, get drenched and feel wet to the bone. Her father must feel the same and, uninhibited and wild in a way that is usually so much more contained, he throws open the heavy door and laughs to the wind, the rain that gusts in to slick his face and hair. Goneril is horrified, but when she looks to Regan, her sister is calm: her face is smiling, an empty, slight smile that she could easily deny, if pressed. She is watching their father like she knows his mind; he is shouting at the thunder and the stars, and even Goneril doesn't understand him now.
She worries for her sister, for her father, for Edmund somewhere out in the storm, and she worries for herself, trapped in this house of madness, her family decaying around her.
*
She hears her sister has cut out Edmund's father's eyes: she is surprised, perhaps unduly so, that her sister has finally wrenched out the cruelty that has always defined her, and used it on someone else.
It is no matter: Edmund has never liked his father.
She knows this even though Edmund speaks very little of him or of his brother, formerly glorious, now fallen and mad. Instead Edmund speaks to her of kingdoms, the things they could do with half a city and some instinct, build an empire that would so overshadow her father's he would become a footnote in their own history of the land. He could make the city sing their name, he tells her; he could craft it into something new, something never seen before. She could be rich enough to sleep in furs, powerful enough that no one could think of fighting them, much less have any hope of defeat. They could rule the whole state, St. Louis and the river and New Orleans and the bay; they could own the lake and the fields and the prairie stretching to California. They could live like kings, liquor and cigarettes and money at their feet; as long as the people last, they could. They could last forever.
He kisses up her spine and whispers words of empires, he promises her the city and that, to her, that's like promising the world.
*
She meets him at a club that used to be her father's, now hers in all its glory and thick smells, low ceilings and brassy, clinging music. He sits carefully, at geometrically precise angles so no one, not even Goneril, can truly see his face. He speaks to her low and intimately, and she matchers his tone best she can, reminded forcefully of long games of cops-and-robbers played with her sisters years ago.
She tells him what he must do: he dreamed to her, but she will make it happen. She knows the business of empires better than he, better than anyone (except; except). She was playing at this before most children even though of it, and she knows, now, that this is her time.
She will do this, she will build it and an army to bring it about. Armies of moonshine whiskey and the very best cars, tobacco smoke and sleek pistols shining silver in the moonlight: these are things she knows, and she will create them into the armies that will bring her a kingdom, queen of the city, queen of all she can see. The beads on her dress clatter together and swing as she leans closer to Edmund, nearly touching as she tells him of her plans. He smiles and it is hypnotic in the dusky light of the club, the violated darkness she remembers from inside Regan's house the night her father went insane. She hears he's worse; she's seen that he's worse, and why should she care. He gave the city to her and she will make it better than it ever was, and she doesn't owe him anything.
People owe her everything, not the other way around: she will build on favors long due and the knife tucked under the sole of her shoe, and she will prosper. Leaning just the hairsbreadths closer to touch him, she kisses long and sharp, hand in her lap as she twists off the ring she's had now since she was a girl, foolish and sentimental, but now to a good use: take it, she tells Edmund, slipping it on his smallest finger, the only one that will fit it. It is yours; remember me, remember our imagined future that we will make real, together, forevermore.
*
Union Station, marble under her feet and the people running to Chicago and from it thronging around her. She walks to the telegram window with a veil over her eyes, dimming the forceful artificial lights and creating her own world inside this greater one, cutting away sights and sounds until all she can hear is a dull mumbling, cut through by her heels clicking sharp across the floor. This is a world she knows: this is a world she can stay in.
She murmurs her message across the counter, to the grey-looking girl who takes it down with a dull reminder, five cents a word. Spilling out a message, coded names for people and actions, and the words still feel silky and powerful coming from her lips. Kill Albany; she tells him. He is nothing, he is a coward. They don't need him; he will simply be in the way. Then, they can be together; then, the whole world can know their devotion and their vision. Their devotion to the plan, their vision of each other, the creation, beginning now, of all their wildest dreams. Starting today, there will be a beginning.
She tells the girl to send it, and she feels complete, warm ball of newness and promise tight in her chest. She will have it all, she will have the city and Edmund too, she will take it for herself and it will give her everything, everything she could ever want and more.
*
Regan's eyes are as dark as Edmund's, and this, Goneril thinks, she should've seen as a sign.
Equally dark bitterness is twisting inside her, slimy and catching like the weeds that grow at the bottom of the lake, catching at her ankles when she swam in it as a girl. Betrayal is white-hot in her chest, her sister, Edmund, tangled and burning and furious.
This was supposed to her future: this was supposed to be her heart.
She hates them both, furiously, suddenly like a door slamming open in the wind. Her sister, always prettier, always cruller, and her lover, mysterious, never enough time to know each other the way she had wished. This is not justice, this is a trick: she had wanted power and she had gotten ruins of a love, a play of great devotion and madness that is wiped out as the house lights flood in, chasing away the shadows that had captured their audience for a little time. The curtain is down now, Regan and Edmund exposed as they try to leave the theater unapprehended, but light is tricky and menacing and scraping them both raw, leaving Regan and Goneril looking the fools.
But the faint sense of shared persecution, always able to keep them sided with each other before, is gone: they ended up opposite sides of the coin, drawn and divided and now ready to fight.
*
She remembers playing with her sister long ago, when quarrels were constructed in their minds over petty events, and games drawn from things around them, gunshots and cash and bowls upended on their heads like helmets. They fought wars with lemon juice and mimed weapons, and things were better then, remembered in Goneril's mind with fuzzy edges and faded colors. Things were better then, and what she would give to go back to those days.
Edmund is in her arms and it is no comfort, not now that he is bleeding black blood onto her pale ghostly dress, smearing it and staining whole swaths a sickly reddish that will turn brown, she knows, and ugly. Losing him to her sister is not like losing him to a masked stranger with a sword, and she feels tears on her face and doesn't know if she is crying for Edmund, her sister, or herself.
Her sister, who staggered off too soon to watch Edmund die, gripped by a strange illness that only Goneril knows the cause of. Lemon juice and betrayal, and she knows that by now, her sister will be dead.
Albany is shouting at her, waving a flimsy telegraph she already knows the words of: she knows so much, it seems like, her head crowding like the station full of people and trains all running somewhere, and she had thought, for a few short months, thought that she had been done running.
She scrambles up, laying Edmund's head on the parking lot asphalt as tenderly as she can. Her dress is ripped, fluttering in bloody ribbons around her feet, and she slips a little on the slick of his blood as she goes running off, running again, running always.
(There is a man, a boy, is a suit too big for him slumped with a blood-crusted hole in his chest, and she doesn't mourn for him, never mourns for people only good enough to serve as guards; she does take his revolver, old and not very good but fine, for what she needs it for. Only one bullet, and she will not remember that it was too old, too dirty for her; not fitting for her, filled with dreams and plans and city lights.
The dreams have gone flat and dusty, the plans turned to rubble, and the city, well, the city just goes on. The barrel of the gun tastes like loose change on her tongue, and she remembers picking up pennies in the street, before her father told her, we are too good for that. We build empires; others can peel sticky coins from the gutter. We build empires, we construct, we are the new and the fast and the better. All the other can die: we will live on forever.
Well, the city just goes on.)
endnotes: forever obsessed with king lear, goddamn. best play, is the opinion over in these parts. i should read it again, watch a few film versions and reminisce.
for those paying attention, the timeline is a little fucked-up; i apologize.
incidentally, the way goneril sends a telegram is not the way you'd actually go about it: either you'd dictate you message over the phone, or write it on a pad to be transcribed. ah, artistic licence; where would i be without you.
we have seen the best of our time
goneril/edmund and regan, pg-13, 3128 words.
we that are young
Shall never see so much nor live so long.
She knows mere weeks before it happens, Oswald creeping into crannies for her, rooting out information and presenting it to her with "ma'am"s and apologies. She barely has time to memorize what she'll say; she barely has time to find a good dress. She wonders if her sisters know, and scoffs at the idea. (Regan: maybe Regan. She never can tell, with Regan.) She hasn't seen her husband in four weeks, only summing them up to wonder if he'll make it back by the time of the giving.
This could be her chance, she thinks. A third of the city is still blocks and blocks of holographic lights, sleek bellowing cars and fast-shot guns and liquor and dancing under your very feet. A third of the city is still the city, still the Chicago that she knows better backwards than forwards and runs through her body like blood and bones. A third of the city is still her city, and she will take it, tender it until it grows like a weed into something no one expected it could be.
The city lights reflect in her eyes, and she will take it, she will have it all.
*
Her sister is drinking vodka when she finds her, perched on the bar like a bird whose bones are too large for its body, lurking instead of graceful. She has a loose scraggle of men around her, a bartender waiting to refill her glass at the snap of her fingers: this is one of their father's bars, and they are known here like the faces of Chicago's Most Wanted.
"'Scuse me," she says, crass and loud, beautiful words saved only for when they'll be of use. The men look her up and down, and don't move an inch.
Regan looks down at her, one leg crossed over the other and her fingers curled around a slippery glass. "What are you doing here?" she accuses, and looking down her nose she still looks like a bird, a hawk, maybe, sleek and glaring.
"Nothing," Goneril says, code of detachment that she and her sister have always followed to a t. "I wanna talk to you."
"Fine," sighs Regan, shooing the men away with a hand that more swoops than flutters, scattering them in all directions. Goneril forgets sometimes that Regan is married, forgets nearly as often as she forgets she herself is. Cordelia is meant for marriage: the two of them are meant for freedom and affairs and late nights at jazz clubs. She thinks how foolish it is, that they are married.
They sit down at a table meant for three, the empty chair pulling focus and making them sit off-centered, too close together. Regan's eyes dart around the room, but Goneril is used to that: she does it herself. She says, "So, this is your place now, huh," because the bar's in the section of city that is Regan's now, to to what she plases with.
"Sure," Regan says, eyes still darting. "Father'll take it back soon enough, you know."
"What do you mean?" A waiter silently puts a glass down in front of her.
Regan's eyes still, pointed to Goneril's. "He's a man without a country now, isn't he? He'll drink us dry, wait and see." Goneril stares at her, and Regan smiles. "He's the same man, Goneril. This is chess, not charity."
Regan has the same hook in her smile, same glassy eyes betraying how she never really means what she says. Goneril wonders if she remembers playing together, Regan, younger and wilier (and prettier and cruller, always more than Goneril ever was), always winning at their games. If she shot Regan, pow pow, her thumb as the trigger and finger for the barrel, then Regan used her dying breaths to poison Goneril with lemon juice, acidic on her tongue as Regan laughed and laughed, rolling on the ground and mindless of her fantasy-inflicted wound. It is more ladylike, Regan told her, mocking their nanny's clipped tone and stifling air of superiority that fit Regan uncomfortably, like a perfume she was too young for. Men shoot other men, women choose more underhanded ways of killing.
And still, Regan never was their father's favorite: little Cordelia, pale and sickly but wearing her sickness elegantly, a frailty pulled around her like cobwebs that made others want to help her, carry her, give her anything.
Goneril and Regan had everything they could want, except that one, prized spot in their father's heart that had stood empty until Cordelia was born, killing their mother and any hope of a similar place to inhabit. Goneril thinks about this, and spends her whole life trying to find a place like that, and the only difference between her and Regan, she thinks (prettier faster crueler better), is that Regan doesn't know that she's looking.
*
She meets him and he is beautiful, softly handsome with blackish hair and dark-mirror eyes that reflect colors and lights and her, when she gets close enough to see. He is clever and he is hers, she is sure of it, the minute she gets near enough to whisper in his ear and see her own face distorted in his eyes. He is hers, that way her father was never hers and Albany was never hers, the way her sister resisted for so long. Her cored heart has been filled, and she can stop looking.
His smile is filled with something she can't quite make out, but that's all right; she doesn't need to know every piece of him now, long hours ahead, she's sure, for knowing each other.
She lets him go back into the night from whence he came, and he dissolves into it like a phantom of a man. She curls a hand to her breast, remembering the slow beat of his heart under her palm, comforting herself that he really was there and solid, not something that could dissolve into the lake mist crawling low-bellied down the streets. She fists her hand and remembers, and knows, does not hope, that he will be back in the light.
*
Regan's house has always been its own sort of person, crouching on its block like a caged circus animal and fenced on all sides by the streets of the city. It is a place you go to hide in, too many dark corners to name, complicated and unsteady so that the wind whistles through it at night. If houses reflect people, Goneril can understand the way Regan and Cornwall fit this house as if it's a sheath for their blade-like persons, all edge and dull glint.
Like all her predictions, this one of Regan's has come true: their father does not leave them, now that he has bequeathed the city into their hands. Chicago is the only place he knows, and in that way he is not so different from the rest of them; no other place would welcome him, even if he could escape from the dirty streets and drowning pull of the lake. No other police chief would look at him in such soft focus, no other city would let him slip through its jaws and end up on his own two feet. Chicago is the only place for him, for any of them, and sometimes in the dead of night Goneril resents that.
Tonight the night is living, the way it always is here. The parties are well underground, cars sheltered and people locked behind doors not their own. Goneril has just fought her way through wind and rain to Regan's door, where, when she pushes the heavy oak open under her hands, she knows she will find not just her sister but her father, a parasite in this animal of a house the way he had been in Goneril's own.
Regan's smile is sticky-sweet, but Goneril takes her hand and faces their father, railing and mad. The wind howls through the house, and Goneril worries for a sickly moment that it has come alive.
Thunder rumbles into all the dark corners of the house, that remind Goneril now of Edmund: all things dark and trap-like have gathered to him in her mind. Thunder roars and lightning coats the sky in greenish light, flashing into the house even through heavy-curtained windows, light scampering in through edges and unsealed lines. It is eerie, and no one's face looks quite right, in the quick-changing light.
Cornwall says, again and again, to step away, come back from the storm, but Goneril yearns to run to it, get drenched and feel wet to the bone. Her father must feel the same and, uninhibited and wild in a way that is usually so much more contained, he throws open the heavy door and laughs to the wind, the rain that gusts in to slick his face and hair. Goneril is horrified, but when she looks to Regan, her sister is calm: her face is smiling, an empty, slight smile that she could easily deny, if pressed. She is watching their father like she knows his mind; he is shouting at the thunder and the stars, and even Goneril doesn't understand him now.
She worries for her sister, for her father, for Edmund somewhere out in the storm, and she worries for herself, trapped in this house of madness, her family decaying around her.
*
She hears her sister has cut out Edmund's father's eyes: she is surprised, perhaps unduly so, that her sister has finally wrenched out the cruelty that has always defined her, and used it on someone else.
It is no matter: Edmund has never liked his father.
She knows this even though Edmund speaks very little of him or of his brother, formerly glorious, now fallen and mad. Instead Edmund speaks to her of kingdoms, the things they could do with half a city and some instinct, build an empire that would so overshadow her father's he would become a footnote in their own history of the land. He could make the city sing their name, he tells her; he could craft it into something new, something never seen before. She could be rich enough to sleep in furs, powerful enough that no one could think of fighting them, much less have any hope of defeat. They could rule the whole state, St. Louis and the river and New Orleans and the bay; they could own the lake and the fields and the prairie stretching to California. They could live like kings, liquor and cigarettes and money at their feet; as long as the people last, they could. They could last forever.
He kisses up her spine and whispers words of empires, he promises her the city and that, to her, that's like promising the world.
*
She meets him at a club that used to be her father's, now hers in all its glory and thick smells, low ceilings and brassy, clinging music. He sits carefully, at geometrically precise angles so no one, not even Goneril, can truly see his face. He speaks to her low and intimately, and she matchers his tone best she can, reminded forcefully of long games of cops-and-robbers played with her sisters years ago.
She tells him what he must do: he dreamed to her, but she will make it happen. She knows the business of empires better than he, better than anyone (except; except). She was playing at this before most children even though of it, and she knows, now, that this is her time.
She will do this, she will build it and an army to bring it about. Armies of moonshine whiskey and the very best cars, tobacco smoke and sleek pistols shining silver in the moonlight: these are things she knows, and she will create them into the armies that will bring her a kingdom, queen of the city, queen of all she can see. The beads on her dress clatter together and swing as she leans closer to Edmund, nearly touching as she tells him of her plans. He smiles and it is hypnotic in the dusky light of the club, the violated darkness she remembers from inside Regan's house the night her father went insane. She hears he's worse; she's seen that he's worse, and why should she care. He gave the city to her and she will make it better than it ever was, and she doesn't owe him anything.
People owe her everything, not the other way around: she will build on favors long due and the knife tucked under the sole of her shoe, and she will prosper. Leaning just the hairsbreadths closer to touch him, she kisses long and sharp, hand in her lap as she twists off the ring she's had now since she was a girl, foolish and sentimental, but now to a good use: take it, she tells Edmund, slipping it on his smallest finger, the only one that will fit it. It is yours; remember me, remember our imagined future that we will make real, together, forevermore.
*
Union Station, marble under her feet and the people running to Chicago and from it thronging around her. She walks to the telegram window with a veil over her eyes, dimming the forceful artificial lights and creating her own world inside this greater one, cutting away sights and sounds until all she can hear is a dull mumbling, cut through by her heels clicking sharp across the floor. This is a world she knows: this is a world she can stay in.
She murmurs her message across the counter, to the grey-looking girl who takes it down with a dull reminder, five cents a word. Spilling out a message, coded names for people and actions, and the words still feel silky and powerful coming from her lips. Kill Albany; she tells him. He is nothing, he is a coward. They don't need him; he will simply be in the way. Then, they can be together; then, the whole world can know their devotion and their vision. Their devotion to the plan, their vision of each other, the creation, beginning now, of all their wildest dreams. Starting today, there will be a beginning.
She tells the girl to send it, and she feels complete, warm ball of newness and promise tight in her chest. She will have it all, she will have the city and Edmund too, she will take it for herself and it will give her everything, everything she could ever want and more.
*
Regan's eyes are as dark as Edmund's, and this, Goneril thinks, she should've seen as a sign.
Equally dark bitterness is twisting inside her, slimy and catching like the weeds that grow at the bottom of the lake, catching at her ankles when she swam in it as a girl. Betrayal is white-hot in her chest, her sister, Edmund, tangled and burning and furious.
This was supposed to her future: this was supposed to be her heart.
She hates them both, furiously, suddenly like a door slamming open in the wind. Her sister, always prettier, always cruller, and her lover, mysterious, never enough time to know each other the way she had wished. This is not justice, this is a trick: she had wanted power and she had gotten ruins of a love, a play of great devotion and madness that is wiped out as the house lights flood in, chasing away the shadows that had captured their audience for a little time. The curtain is down now, Regan and Edmund exposed as they try to leave the theater unapprehended, but light is tricky and menacing and scraping them both raw, leaving Regan and Goneril looking the fools.
But the faint sense of shared persecution, always able to keep them sided with each other before, is gone: they ended up opposite sides of the coin, drawn and divided and now ready to fight.
*
She remembers playing with her sister long ago, when quarrels were constructed in their minds over petty events, and games drawn from things around them, gunshots and cash and bowls upended on their heads like helmets. They fought wars with lemon juice and mimed weapons, and things were better then, remembered in Goneril's mind with fuzzy edges and faded colors. Things were better then, and what she would give to go back to those days.
Edmund is in her arms and it is no comfort, not now that he is bleeding black blood onto her pale ghostly dress, smearing it and staining whole swaths a sickly reddish that will turn brown, she knows, and ugly. Losing him to her sister is not like losing him to a masked stranger with a sword, and she feels tears on her face and doesn't know if she is crying for Edmund, her sister, or herself.
Her sister, who staggered off too soon to watch Edmund die, gripped by a strange illness that only Goneril knows the cause of. Lemon juice and betrayal, and she knows that by now, her sister will be dead.
Albany is shouting at her, waving a flimsy telegraph she already knows the words of: she knows so much, it seems like, her head crowding like the station full of people and trains all running somewhere, and she had thought, for a few short months, thought that she had been done running.
She scrambles up, laying Edmund's head on the parking lot asphalt as tenderly as she can. Her dress is ripped, fluttering in bloody ribbons around her feet, and she slips a little on the slick of his blood as she goes running off, running again, running always.
(There is a man, a boy, is a suit too big for him slumped with a blood-crusted hole in his chest, and she doesn't mourn for him, never mourns for people only good enough to serve as guards; she does take his revolver, old and not very good but fine, for what she needs it for. Only one bullet, and she will not remember that it was too old, too dirty for her; not fitting for her, filled with dreams and plans and city lights.
The dreams have gone flat and dusty, the plans turned to rubble, and the city, well, the city just goes on. The barrel of the gun tastes like loose change on her tongue, and she remembers picking up pennies in the street, before her father told her, we are too good for that. We build empires; others can peel sticky coins from the gutter. We build empires, we construct, we are the new and the fast and the better. All the other can die: we will live on forever.
Well, the city just goes on.)
endnotes: forever obsessed with king lear, goddamn. best play, is the opinion over in these parts. i should read it again, watch a few film versions and reminisce.
for those paying attention, the timeline is a little fucked-up; i apologize.
incidentally, the way goneril sends a telegram is not the way you'd actually go about it: either you'd dictate you message over the phone, or write it on a pad to be transcribed. ah, artistic licence; where would i be without you.