Hotaru
i'm still here but all is lost
The night is winding down, and Ru has only returned to give her spare key for her room at the inn to Talyson so he need not pay for his own or wait up for her in order to leave together. Especially considering he is far drunker than Ru, who is nearly entirely sober. Worn thin by her conversation with Sunjata, she keeps as far out of sight of anyone but Tal as she can to preserve the wondrous reputation she’d reinstated this evening. Then she steps out onto the patio instead, with its empty chairs and tables as the people had flocked drunkenly to the beach. There, she sinks into one of them and pulls her heels off with a wince. She’d taken them off during her talk with Sunjata, but putting them back on to venture inside had only made the soreness more palpable.
She remains there, reclining backwards to look up at the stars with a distant expression as she tries to make the whirlwind night fall into order in her mind. The difficulty of seeing Remi’s smile in tandem with Ronin’s hostility, Sunjata with his far too lovely plus one, old friends and family in Phoebe and Mel. Even a steamy encounter with Danta. Then the scraped-raw, hollowed-out feeling that had come from her talk with the Flood. It had simultaneously healed something inside her to reunite so positively after two whole years, but it wouldn’t change how exhausted it leaves her.
So she merely sits and listens to the faint sounds of firewood, music, and conversation. Trying to force the progression of the evening to make sense in her mind and reclaim that spark of fire that had been smothered by old, painful shadows. Idly spinning her rings around her knuckles as she watches a shooting star streak across the sky overhead.
