Who: Ain!Rose, Russ!Robin, Bay!Pitch (and Pitch's horse!) What: Meeting up and starting toward the castle Where: Fairy Tale door When: Recently Warnings/Rating: None
Ainslie was not afraid. This world she found herself in did not frighten her. It was large, empty and cold, but this was nothing to the world she had been born into. It would be enough to say she was fearless, for she was in many ways, but it was not fearlessness truly. She was simply raised to handle these things, worse things, with her head held high. She was born to run one of the largest mafia familias on the east coast, si? Despite her wildness and her willfulness, her abuela had taught her all the things she would need to survive. She did not want to run a familia, but these things, these learnings, they did not disappear like agua. She doubted that there was more evil here, in this place, than in the bloodied home she had returned to when her parents were butchered. No, this place did not frighten her.
The tree that Ainslie had described to the hombre on the journals was at her back. It was as tall as a montaña, grey and with the most bare of leaves. She sat against it, thankful for the fur that lined the vestido she wore, long and white and to the ground. She would remain for una hora, she decided. If the man with the horse did not come in this time, she would continue on. The valley that Henry had told her to find was very far, and she did not want to be in the cold when darkness came. There was no door here, in this vast nada, and she would have no choice but to wait until she was returned to the hotel, where she would not be herself. If she did not have faith, these things might cause her to despair, but they did not. She sat, and she waited, testing this new magic she felt within her by growing a circle of yellow flowers at her feet.
Things in Bay's Vegas life were defined by their ability to be measured. He might have left behind the life of a forensic scientist, but the training was still there. Things were quantified, things could be looked at and seen. Despite what the woman on the journals had said (if she was even a woman, Bay was sure that his friends were still fucking with him and he'd find out for sure as soon as he met this 'Ainslie' by the tree), he didn't believe the horse with him was a magic horse. Not even with the eyes.
There was something resembling magic in the world, yes, he'd learned that much in Haiti, dancing to the drums, his feet packing down the earth and his head somewhere else. The horse could be explained by science, even if he could not explain why the thing insisted upon following him everywhere and had he ridden one before, he might try to ride this one, even with it's yellow eyes and the impatient pawing of it's front hooves, like it was ready to run. Gallop? Whatever. "We're going to find this Ainslie first," Bay told it as if it gave a damn. Maybe he was losing his damn mind instead, thinking he was locked into some demented Ren Faire with a horse and an Etch-a-Sketch that never shut up.
He was sure that he could open it up now and new words would appear on the pages, but the horse liked to push at his back whenever he stopped, a warm muzzle that was merely a nuisance. If Bay didn't keep moving then, it became more insistent he learned, and if he still resisted, the damn thing would try to take a bite out of him. He probably should have just left the damn thing somewhere, but he felt oddly protective of the animal, even if it was a pain in his ass. "This girl better exist," he told the horse as they continued walking towards the dead, gray tree. Had to be dead, right? Trees just weren't gray like that and still alive. "Then we'll get you to a vet. Maybe some food." Come to think of it, he hadn't ever seen the horse eat anything. Not tree bark, not grass, not anything. Weird horse.
There was nothing about this damn forest that Russ liked. Not a bit of it, from the dead at his feet to the broad dead trees above his head. There was sunshine but it wasn’t a Vegas sun, bright and unstinting and vivid, like tinsel-bright lights and brashness. It was watery, pale-looking, like it weren’t sure it wanted to be anything at all as it came through the branches and it was dim, for all the fact the leaves didn’t damn grow all that much. He was trudging through, the leather boots were soft but they were thin and there was no weight to them; he was used to picking up his feet like they were heavy-treaded, steel-toed and unless he was real deliberate about it, here he didn’t make a damn sound. The bow he’d considered leaving behind; there’d been a moment back there at the beginning he’d considered tossing it - breaking it, leaving it in pieces - but the mean-spirited feeling didn’t last long, and eventually (reluctantly) he’d slung it over his back where it sat. It didn’t feel heavy but it didn’t feel like nothing, either - it was comfortable, in a way he didn’t much want to think about close. It was like knowing, when he’d held the thing, how it would be to fit one of the damn arrows against it and let it go, and Russ - who wasn’t a man who thought much of guns - didn’t know how he felt about that either.
It caught his eye before he was thinking about it; a flash of yellow, close to the ground and he moved before he’d thought about it, the gray stealing over him as his shadow melded with that of the trees. The cloak was warm but it was the dappled dark green of a forest that was alive, and it didn’t do much in all that dead black. The yellow didn’t look right, it looked unreal, like someone had taken a crayon and scribbled over the steel of the forest and Russ ducked his head and he headed toward it with a soundlessness he’d forgotten about. There was a girl, tucked in behind that yellow, and her cloak was white enough in the thin light to look almost gray as the trees. He didn’t want anyone at all and their problems, he wanted a goddamn Door and a way through to the other side, but she was sitting wedged up against that tree like she weren’t going nowhere and she didn’t look like she fit much with the forest either. It was bad as tights, and boots and a bow, but something low down nudged at compassion Russ didn’t have. His feet crunched on dead wood - deliberately - and he stepped out, all apprehension and glowering dissatisfaction with his own self, right up to that little circle of yellow flowers.
Ainslie looked up when she heard the crunch of feet on the dead earth, but she did not start or run. There was no point, si? She would not outrun anything in this empty death, and she had already come to believe that everything here had once been in el desierto. Like her, whatever approached was probably lost, as Henry had told her. Night had not fallen, and she was in no danger of being eaten. For a young woman who lived a life where a gun might be fired at any moment, this was almost a relief. She waited, her blue gaze on the yellow ring, which was becoming thicker with petals as she looked upon it, and she only looked up once feet became part of the landscape.
She looked up, and she looked up, and then she smiled. "Robertico Capucha," she said, recognizing the green and the bow the hombre held in his hand. "This is supposed to hide your face, si?" she asked, standing and looking over his shoulder for something that resembled a hood. She looked older once she stood, once he was closer to her face. More twenty something than a teenager, even if all this copper that tumbled over her shoulders was deceptive in this way. "You are not the hombre with the horse," she said unnecessarily. "He was to come here."
She weren’t jumpy and that was a positive; all Russ had seen for hours was little jumpy woodland furballs who set his stomach growling like he hadn’t been fed for weeks and was looking at a drive-through menu. Woodland creatures fucking skittered, and that put his nerves on end; no, Russ was damn fine with ‘not jumpy’. The flowers, itty bitty yellow ones that made him think of roadsides, of empty dust-filled spaces where nothing grew big at all before it starved and died of lack of water, were spreading. Russ watched, with a scowl that said he thought none of things that grew that fast, but she got to her feet before he could express just how little he thought of magic. Magic bundled him up in tights and gave him a bow, magic had him wandering through a wood when he’d sat in dust as a kid, wide-open spaces that didn’t have a tree in them.
“Russ,” he said, instead - correcting her, he didn’t know who the Robertico guy was, but it wasn’t him. If someone else was wandering around in tights, they were just as fucked as he was. “And I don’t got a horse. Just a bow.” He wouldn’t have known what to do with a horse, the only horses Russ had ever come across were black and white, flickering celluloid on a tiny TV crammed into a corner of a leaky trailer. He’d liked them fine - on TV, that was. He stared back at her, if she was going to look at him, and Russ was brash and bold and unapologetic in looking. His eyebrows knitted tight, all blond suspicion bristling, and the stubble was threatening to be a beard. She was stop-light red, pretty in a way that looked untouchable and she was young but not as young as he’d set out thinking, she wasn’t a kid even if that robe covered her to her toes and hid everything that would clue a man in.
“Who the hell are you?” he asked, with all the gracelessness of Russ, not Robin.
"Bay," came a rather masculine answer from within the trees. It had taken him nearly the entire hour to make it to the dead tree with yellow flowers growing at its base. It did not occur to him that it might be magic, no more than his heart might be, or that such magic might only be unlocked with a kiss -- he wasn't kissing the damn thing, and he wasn't kissing the girl with fire and copper hair, or the man with a bow beside her.
Stepping out from between two trees nearly as dead as the one they were using as a signal post, Bay emerged wearing clothes as black as the horse that followed him. And true to his word, a horse with eyes as yellow as the Vegas sun followed after him at a steady clomp-clomp of heavy hooves on the dirt and under bush. The man with the bow he did not know, but the girl? "And you are?" He asked, wondering if this was the Ainslie that he had spoken with, her words formed with sand on the pages of his book. Was it at all possible that any of them were more than some elaborate trick? Time, and her answer, would tell.
Ainslie was no child. She had come closer to twenty-five than twenty now, and she felt married in a way that made her arms heavy in this way that only a bad matrimonio could. She was accustomed to a world with ballrooms, where people treated her as if she was made of dinero, and this was because she was made of dinero. America had different rules for the very wealthy, but she had not been raised there. It had been Europa, where princesses were still princesses and where billionaire heiresses were still expected to attend classes in how to curtsey without dipping too low. She could not recall anyone addressing her as the hombre with the bow did, and she tried to decide if she hated this as much as she should.
She did not like it, she decided after a momento, and she began to tell him this when the other hombre appeared. Si, there he was, the one with the caballo.
"I am waiting on you and your caballo," she said once she brushed the dead leaves off her snowy skirts. The yellow flowers died when she was no longer looking at them, and she did not notice. "Ainslie," she added, tapping two fingers to her chest, as if to say that this was who she was. "And you are Russ and Bay," she said, walking past them both, as if she did not need to ask or say she was doing this. It was the horse she approached, though she did not come very close to him. "I am not certain this horse needs to be helped. Can you not feel the magia?" she asked. She had already learned she was a locator for this, for magia. She did not know things about this world, but she was learning quickly.
She looked back at Russ. "We are walking toward the castillo, the one in the valley. Would you walk with us?" she asked, because this was the polite thing to ask.
Russ noticed the flowers; perhaps it was because Robin did and the echo of the man and the hollow he had left in his own world was one that noticed the small, slight changes that signified danger sometimes and nothing practically always but noticed all the same. They shriveled, curling in on their yellow selves until they were nothing, almost dust. It reminded him of high summer, of sitting in the red dust and poking at weeds that were so tired of fighting to exist, they were almost done and of knowing somehow what that meant. He didn’t like it and he didn’t like flowers that grew out of nowhere and went to nothing. It was a waste, and it wasn’t real usual, and he didn’t like either of those things at all. Ainslie wasn’t a name he’d heard often, it sounded foreign, like it would be a tangle on the tongue and he didn’t say nothing and he didn’t nod, like he’d heard, but he grunted. It was a hard, distant kind of sound, and Russ looked at the horse instead and the man who’d come with it - Bay, she’d called him.
“That horse looks weird,” Russ said, balefully. He said it with all the in-expertise of a man used to horses who galloped across screens, not forests but he was pretty sure horses weren’t supposed to have eyes as yellow as those flowers. The girl - Ainslie - she walked right up to it, bold as if there were nothing wrong with it at all, like it weren’t the biting kind and she could tell that kind of thing right off. He didn’t care much for polite anything at all but he looked at Bay - tall and broad and comfortably known quantity; no snow-white cloak, fire-red hair and female about him.
“You’re headed back to the castle?” Back Russ said, and meant it, tided up on its doorstep when this whole mess had begun. “What do you want the castle for?”
Russ' inexpertise with horses couldn't be any worse than Bay's own. After all, Bay hadn't even realized yet that the horse that he'd been calling 'he' was actually very much a she. What he did know was that yellow eyes weren't right on anything, not horses, not humans, only maybe cats. "I'm going to the castle, not back. She's going back," Bay said to Russ, who looked like the Ren Faire edition of Robin Hood. Ainslie was what? Red Riding Hood with that hair? Bay had no idea and he didn't particularly want to think about who he was, not when he looked like he'd been dipped into bleach and turned into Michael Jackson.
At least Bay didn't have the white gloves, nor the desire to go moon walking across this valley. It probably wouldn't work quite as well trying to attempt it over underbrush anyway. Not even all this magic that everyone thought was here was going to help. This was starting to feel more and more like a bad acid trip. "I'm not kissing him," he said to Ainslie, recalling the other person who had suggested kissing the horse to unleash his magic. No magic. Stepping aside so she could get a better look at him, he was almost surprised to hear the horse moving closer to him with a shuffle of hooves and snapping twigs.
"And we're heading there because there has to be someone there that can take a look at him." Cause Bay didn't have the first clue on how to take care of it -- and the eye thing. They were still weird looking. And so were the now dead flowers that could have been any color when they were alive, but Bay knew they had been yellow. He'd never placed a high price on normalcy, but some of this was downright strange.
Out of all of it, it was Bay's insistence that he was not kissing the caballo that made Ainslie laugh. They were ill-matched, all of them, and she could not help but believe that this cuento de hadas was turning into a comedia. "I will not make you kiss this caballo," she assured him. "She has very big teeth, and I do not believe kissing her will cure her magic. I do not believe this is a curse," because along with the growing flowers, she had picked up Rose's sense of curses and of breaking these curses.
She looked at the horse for un momento mas, and then she looked at Russ. "My muchacha lived there until recently. I have spoken to someone who knows the Bestia, and he told me to go there. He has given me directions, but this is a long walk," she admitted, wondering if the horse with the yellow eyes would allow a passenger who did not weigh very much. "I would rather not be out in the open like this every time I get sent back here," she explained, which was the logical reason for the long journey. Everything else here was dead, and she did not wish to stay in this freezing, cold place.
Russ was tired and it was cold and he didn’t want to care about the redhead and the stupid horse, not a bit. He looked at the guy who was so concerned about kissing the damn jaundiced horse, and he didn’t want to care about him either and the Spanish swirled into the rest of it like molasses, warm and thick and slow. He didn’t want to but something low and uneasy distilled itself, pressing heavy on his shoulders where the bow sat against his back. “I came from there,” he said, and he scowled because Russ didn’t like helpful, not one bit, but the dead flowers and the chill in the air and the yellow eyes on the horse all stacked up to make it worse, “I know the way.” He did; Russ wasn’t much for directions and he didn’t go walking, except from one place to the next and then the shortest way he could, but the way back was a pattern in his head, one that mapped itself out easily into a distance.
“It’s not cursed, you think?” Russ stared at the horse. The horse didn’t do much; it was making up to the girl, Ainslie, like she had carrots for fingers. “What the hell does a cursed horse look like, where you’re from?”
"I know all about her teeth," Bay said, one hand raising to rub at his shoulder where she'd bitten him once. She. Hell. He rolled his shoulder as he looked back and forth between the horse, the -- Ainslie, and Russ. All this talk of curses and magic though -- he shook his head. Curses were possible but why would anyone curse a horse? "Whatever. She's not cursed," he said under his breath as he looked towards his -- mare. That's what female horses were, right? He reached out to lightly scratch the ridge of her mane, hairs parting easily around his fingers and before she could answer Russ, Bay interrupted.
"We should probably get a move on if we want to make it there before it gets dark." It wasn't fear exactly, not of what the woods could hold or what might be out there when the sun went down, but it was cold and only likely to get colder once the sun set. He leaned in a little closer to the horse, gladly stealing up some of the heat coming off her. And where a gentleman might have offered Ainslie a hand up to mount the horse, he didn't offer her the option. There was still that odd sense of being protective of her, that she was his and he wasn't going to leave her behind, not in some wood, not all on her own, not now, not ever, she'd carried him so far -- he stopped the mad riot of thoughts with another quick shake of his head, his hand coming up to pinch the bridge of his nose. Maybe this was a bad acid trip. That only left the question of how it'd been administered because Bay didn't do shit like that.
Once he was sure that the tumble of thoughts was stopped, he let go and ran a hand through his short hair. As soon as he got back to his own house, he was sure as hell figuring that out.