Who: Rose and Henry (Beast) What: Meeting up in Las Vegas Where: The MGM Grand When: During the Switch Plot Warnings/Rating: None
Rose was in a good mood, and even the Beast's strange comment about looking different didn't steal that good mood away. Snow might live in a hovel that wasn't fit to sleep in, but Rose had spent the afternoon having the best conversation she'd managed to have with her sister in years. It hadn't resolved the past, because nothing could take away all those years of abandonment for her, just like nothing could take away the hurt of losing Charming for Snow. But things were better, and Rose was a silly little thing that lived in the moment. She was willing to take the good mood and wrap it around herself like a cloak for the time being, even if it needed to be thrown off at some point in the future.
She was dressed in the Mundane fashion, but much more conservatively than when she'd arrived from Fabletown in a tube top and micro-mini. Her dress was yellow, and it almost reached her knees. Save for the mesh along the center, it was decent, and she paired it with a pair of Tess' chunky heels and hair that was brushed out and loose.
The driver of the yellow carriage knew precisely where she wanted to go when she gave him the Beast's description of the gambling place, and she paid him with money that had been stuffed in a drawer at Tess' cottage. And by the time the carriage stopped, she thought maybe she could get used to this Mundane world. She still wanted to go home, but it had been a good day, and she was in a very good mood.
But the fact remained that she had no idea where she was going.
She stood on the sidewalk a moment, and then she climbed the steps that led into the green castle. It was crowded, but not so very crowded that she felt uncomfortable, and she stepped inside and closed her eyes when the cool air blew on her face. She would give the Mundane world credit for this system of cooling they'd developed. It reminded her of the heat in Snow's cottage in the Mundane world, and she thought the Homelands could use both of these during the hot summer months and the biting winter months.
Her thoughts were interrupted by a jostle of people behind her, and she stepped forward, to the edge of the casino floor. She craned and stretched, wondering where a creature of the Beast's size could hide in such a place. One of the floor managers spied her, and he approached and asked if she required assistance, but he gaze was not a welcoming one. He asked her for identification or her room key, and she pursed her lips together in consternation.
She had neither of these things.
Henry had some time to learn Daniel’s land and its people. He treated the experience like he imagined he might approach a campaign in some strange land, not that he had ever been a very good commander, in his own mind. The only reason his people had lasted so long against the Witch was the home ground advantage, and when she had burned that it had only been a matter of time. Henry felt that he did a passable job of his campaign in this new place, because with only a few proddings from Daniel he figured out that half the city was a gambling den disguised as fantasy palaces in the first twelve hours. In all honesty, the most difficult part of the process had been trying to acquire shoes, because he discovered that Daniel’s mostly unused pairs were two sizes too small, and it was astonishingly difficult to get shoes when one didn’t have a pair to begin with. People seemed to think you were untrustworthy.
It turned out, however, that Daniel kept an absurd amount of currency on hand, and Henry had no trouble finding food when he was hungry, entertainment when he was curious, or shelter when he was tired. Henry felt strange walking on two legs: weightless, without purpose, deaf but with eyes surely more keen than when he was last human, and he felt the need to navigate the incredible noise and press of people because he felt surely, surely, he would not have them long.
It was foolhardy to call Rose from her sister’s care, but his eyes were so keen, and he knew her smell and her voice so well, he thought that it while it may yet be torture to imagine her full, the opportunity should not--could not--be missed.
He almost talked himself out of it several times.
In the end he stayed, trying not to crane his neck, trying to be inconspicuous in the smiling crowd and the crowing machines. He looked for red hair, because he knew she had red hair, just not the details of every scarlet thread. He wondered exactly how her mouth set on her small face; in his mind it blurred as it came closer, and her identity was a soft inhale of fragrant petals. He watched for her in the crowd. He didn’t expect to stay, didn’t want her to see him this way, so fleeting and such a stranger, but he felt he had to see her, and he could not resist.
Henry stopped with his palm pressed down on the cold edge of a flickering machine, and he watched her stand at the edge of the fabric-stretched floor, the sun-filled door at her back. He knew it was her in an instant, though for some reason he expected her to be older and smaller both. And he smiled to himself, because of course she would think him older and bigger, if she knew... but of course she didn’t. And she shouldn’t. It would be unimaginably cruel.
He was speaking to himself firmly about removing his presence from the floor entirely when another man approached her. Henry forgot about the arguments, and he learned that it wasn’t entirely the animal that drove possessive jealousy to its limit. He had better control than he did in fur and claws, but he still bared his teeth where no one could see, and he moved confidently forward out of the glimmer of copper lights. He was wearing his gray silk and new shoes, and he was tall and commanding in both as he walked past the man’s nose and stopped in front of his Rose as if she was the sun of his day. “Go away,” he growled at the man. It was very soft, but very pointed, like an ivory tooth.
Rose was in the process of stammering through an explanation of having left her key and identification elsewhere, both of which had resulted in the uniformed man informing her that teenagers were not allowed on the casino floor. She wasn't sure what a teenager was, but she felt certain that she wasn't one; she wasn't sure how to prove it without identification. This would call for something sneakier.
She'd just decided that when the man in grey approached.
Rose didn't look up at first, because she wasn't expecting the Beast to be wearing grey silk and smart shoes. She used the interruption to try to figure out an unobserved entryway to the area with the clanging and blinking machines, thinking it busy enough to hide a Beast, perhaps. But the growl caught her attention (because men, in her experience, didn't growl). It was a romantic notion, but it wasn't reality. Growling required more interest than she'd found many men to have in practice, especially if he'd already bedded whoever he was meant to be growling over.
She didn't gasp when she saw his face, though it was a near thing. She might have looked a little like a copper and yellow fish then, her mouth opening and closing, but no sound coming out. "I know you from a dream," she finally blurted, which sounded entirely insane to her own ears, but it was true. He was different, but familiar, and her cheeks went red with belated anger. The man in the uniform was making threats about the growling, but Rose didn't very much care. She tugged on a grey suit sleeve, trying to get the not-Beast's attention on her.
Someone else might have questioned meeting someone in a dream, but Rose's entire life was magic and curses. She didn't question it at all.
"You could have told me," she insisted, anger and red cheeks, color high, and maybe there was more than anger to that. She was still staring, but there really wasn't anything to be done about it. She poked him with a finger - his shoulder, then his elbow, then his stomach. She pinched her own arm; not dreaming. "You are him, aren't you?" She looked around, as if something large and scale-furred and winged might come out of a corner and clarify matters, possibly.
Henry looked down at the man in the uniform, and his expression perfectly suited the situation. He was a king’s son looking down at someone loud and foolish who didn’t realize he was either, and there was a very long distance between the two men in that moment. Henry lifted his head on the solid pillar of his neck in a very slow gesture that came from being born into privilege. His eyes turned away, and it was not arrogance but quiet certainty, a knowledge that came from having survived a world without what birth had intended.
He was taken aback at being prodded--rather more violently than necessary, he thought. He flinched when she caught him high on the shoulder where the half-healed wound began, some remnant of Daniel’s madness in the other door, but he didn’t say anything, and from the way his expression cleared rapidly he did not think much of it. He stared down at her instead, not moving when the man in the uniform issued a few more threats that meant nothing to him, the rich hazel green a verdant wonder at her face.
He said nothing in immediate reply to her accusation, but he looked downright guilty when she mentioned the dream, and so he stepped forward and took her arm very firmly before tucking it into the crook of his. Henry was very warm on the surface of his skin, warm and clean. He smelled like pungent, freshly-cut herbs diluted by thin mountain air. A slight muskiness, like an old fur coat, clung to his skin, especially around his joints. “If you’ll permit me,” he said softly, as if he was asking a question when he was doing absolutely no such thing. He led her back out of the doors and onto the busy sidewalk. A swift desert wind pulled at his sandy hair.
Rose already knew that men and women in the Mundane world weren't particularly polite or respectful. She thought it came from having no castles and no woods. No kings, no queens, nothing but rush and bright lights. It was a very different kind of life, and she didn't care for it. But, beyond that, she didn't think it produced very nice people either. She discounted the man in the uniform almost as soon as her Beast (who wasn't a Beast at all) turned his attention to him, and she did it with the understanding that he would take care of whatever the problem was. It would make feminists' hair stand on end, but she didn't know that. After all, she wasn't from the Mundane world, and she believed women had their own kind of power.
The flinch didn't stop her from poking, though she did poke a little less fiercely. But she did continue on, and it was only when he tucked her arm in his that she stopped attempting it. He smelled like home, and she liked that, and maybe that was the reason that she didn't put up a fuss. "I'll permit you," she said, managing to sound like she was actually allowing him to do something, even when he was manhandling her out the door and into the sunlight. She glanced back at the casino for a moment, before turning her attention entirely back toward him.
She was shorter than he was, but she tipped her head back with determination and pulled her arm from his. Her hands settled on her hips, over yellow fabric, in a gesture so modern it might as well be Mundane. "Why the fuck didn't you tell me?" she asked, using Snow's words and thinking they sounded very good. She ruined it with a smile that was beaming pleasure with her own accomplishments. Yes, that had sounded very well, she decided.
Well, technically, there was a castle, down there at the end of the Strip, but it was all blank, weather-stained poured concrete. To Henry it looked like a cake or child's toy sculpted of wool or hammered wood, too perfectly formed to be real. The colored rooftops were almost comical, and he had spent several long minutes staring at it with growing amusement in his eyes. He decided to walk in that direction now, following the stream of people fighting the wind with alcohol and cheap garments in bright colors. He made sure that he kept Rose close to his side, and he rapidly adjusted his pace so he didn't move faster than she could keep up without running.
When she finally spoke, he looked down at her and flashed a grin. Henry's grins were loose, as the Beast grinned with gaping tongue and teeth. His tongue flashed past the inside of his molars as he teased, "Such language is not befitting of a lady in foreign lands." He was not even the slightest bit serious, because his expression came a very long way as he sobered to venture a true answer. "I... did not want you to know. It seems unwise to... become accustomed. We will undoubtedly return. Soon. Don't you think?" He slid an uncertain glance sideways, uncertain if she agreed. He thought he would not be able to argue with her if she decided to take offense, because he would not spend his time here arguing with her. His forearm flexed compulsively under her hands, and his pace slowed.
She hadn't noticed the colorful castle, but she hadn't been out in this loud and noisy village as he had. She had gone from the hotel, to Snow's cottage, to this place. And now, she wasn't paying much attention to anything but him. Even with her hand on her hip and her head tipped back, she saw nothing but him. "I think you're supposed to be outraged," she said of his reaction to her language. She wasn't certain it was worth the effort to get the angry, vulgar words right if he smiled like that when she said them. She almost asked if she was using them wrong, but that would give away her uncertainty, and she had no intention of doing that. And even she couldn't fault his logic. Her hand slid from her hip to her side, and she looked ahead as his pace slowed. It was a loaded question, and she wasn't immediately sure what to do with it.
"This is how you're supposed to be," she said, but there was worry there. She had meant her words on the journal, her concerns that he would become like every other male she had known if he continued like this. The man in the dream, the man she now knew to be him had been dangerously charming, and she wasn't certain she wanted him to be dangerously charming. "Anyway, you sent me away," she reminded him. The fact that she'd gotten kicked out of Fabletown was unimportant just then. "Does it really matter if you're not going to ask me back?" she demanded, the question a challenge wrapped in a squint of copper eyes and even more brilliantly red hair in the Vegas sun.
And then there was the matter of the Witch. He was whole and hale, which she took to mean that he hadn't met up with his Witch after all. But the Witch was real now, as she had not been before, and Rose knew she would not be able to let that go. Letting things go was not one of Rose's better qualities.
“You think I should be angry,” he said, running his tongue over his mouth (very pink, very normal). His tone was light but suggestive, implying that she didn’t know what she said. He thought of that as part of her personality, and he liked it, because it was implied an inherent honesty in her that very few other people had. He kept her hand curled over his arm, though he would rather have taken it and all of her into a close twist that never unraveled. “I spend a lot of time angry. I do not enjoy it.”
He began to walk again, as if the movement soothed him. He had very long strides and always paused at every corner, as if reluctant to leave the shadow of cover. The crowds were reassuring in some way, and he navigated them well, his height such that he could look over the heads of many. “I sent you away because you wanted to go. That was all you ever said; how it was a prison, how much you hated it.” He turned his chin so she couldn’t see his expression, the movement utterly human.
"I think you're supposed to be," which was very different indeed from thinking he should be. Strangely enough, his comment about being angry often left her surprised, though she knew it shouldn't. She didn't think of him as perpetually angry in his beastly state. She thought of Snow and immediately pictured anger. When she thought of him, anger wasn't the first thing that came to mind. He was unthinking, difficult, yes, all of these things. And he threw tantrums and growled, but she didn't think of him as inherently angry. But he began moving again, and took her thoughts with his long strides and the confidence with which he traversed this world that still made her draw back and away from random people who came too close.
"You sent me away because you thought I was sleeping with Faust, and with Quasimodo, and probably with Blue and Bigby too, somehow. Oh, and Robin. We can't forget Robin," she said, and she wanted to own to the things she'd done in Fabletown, to rub them in his face and make them hurt him like they'd hurt her. But she held her tongue in the end, because she didn't want him to look upon her with disapproval. As the Beast, it was easier to pretend he wouldn't judge her the way others did for her bad behavior. As a man, it wasn't as easy. "If I really hated it, I would have gone," she finally said, after a very long pause. It was haughtily said, because there was pride that needed be preserved, if possible. "I never do things I don't want to do," she claimed, bolstering herself back up with her own voice. "And I like living in a castle." Sold. Face saved.
He turned once more, and they circled around the castle. He was hesitant to bring her inside the blaze of lights and sound, not because he was a mindless, possessive monster, but because he felt that it would be easier to lose her out of daylight. Henry used the sun to navigate, and he found their way over the convoluted streets designed to drive them into the gambling palaces and the metal taverns.
“I did think that. It is easy to think you should find entertainment elsewhere, with such faces to entice you,” Henry replied grimly. It hurt his pride, and it was clear, but he also showed no sign of being angry the way he should. Instead, he only frowned at himself, frowned at the prospect of losing her so easily, and then he looked quite devastated all at once. “I am sure you find life with your sister more fulfilling, even if you must sacrifice your castle.” He lifted his hand and pushed his fingers into his jawline, which was already roughening at this point in the day. Henry’s rapt green eyes shuttered, and he pressed his mouth together. Thoughtlessly, his eyes roved, looking for the Witch without hope that he might see her.
"Entertainment," she repeated, her lips pursing together in an unhappy line. "You think sleeping with men is entertaining?" she asked. In the book Blue gave her, she obviously thought that was the case. But it was different here, for her. Sleeping with men in her sister's court to cause scandal was one thing, but doing it for fun was another thing entirely. "In our world, where things are different, what is a woman who sleeps with men because it's entertaining?" she asked, indignation taking over, and her hands coming back to rest on her hips, annoyance over yellow fabric.
She scoffed at the idea that life with Snow was more fulfilling. "I hated it there. I got myself kicked out on purpose," she admitted, while omitting what she'd done to make it happen. Something shadowed her hazel gaze, though, and her hands slipped down from her hips, anger diffused by just saying those words. She watched him rub a hand against his jaw, and she watched his gaze stray, and she stepped in front of him to get his attention on her instead of everything else. People complained and walked around them, but they didn't matter.
"Are you going to kiss me while you can?" she asked.
It worked. The hazel eyes came back, and in the shadow of the large colorful spires and in the traffic of the many-colored people, he focused on her upturned face. Henry had never been the type to second-guess such encouragement, and he smiled briefly before wrapping a long arm around her back and waist and pulling her into the line of his hip and thigh. The cut green smell was gone and the dry air left only the faint musk of man and beast. He was very warm through the silk where the wind was cold.
He said, “In my mind ‘entertainment’ need not be bedding alone. And I should hope it would be entertaining, or what is the point?” He dropped his chin and kissed the top of her head where her hair met the line of her forehead. He couldn’t smell all the things the Beast could, but she still smelled warmly floral and familiar. “I do not know why you would seek to be excluded when you could leave if you were unhappy. You’re a contrary woman.”
He used his free hand to touch her shoulder and neck, marveling at the trace of his fingers and the unique sensation it created. “We should go somewhere there is music,” he said, wistfully. “The sounds here are high and screeching. No instruments.”
She sucked in a deep breath when he wrapped his arm around her waist, and she let her eyes begin to drift shut. For the first time in a long time, she actually wanted someone to kiss her. When his lips met with the crown of her head, she was actually surprised enough to let her eyes snap open, and she stared for a long second when he pulled back. She was a fish out of water, mouth opening and closing and surprise on her features. She didn't even remember to argue about being contrary.
She stepped back, his fingers falling away from her shoulders, and she managed to save face and nod in the direction of Tess' cottage. "There's something called a jazz club there. I saw someone with a horn," she said, sounding distracted by her own ridiculousness. That's what she got for letting other people convince her things were different than they truly were.
She broke away from him. "I'll summon a carriage, and we can go."
The people here were so small. He was used to towering over everything that dared near him. Savoring the painless maneuverability of his limbs, Henry flexed his shoulders and brushed his cheek against the softness of her hair.
He was too tall to see her expression when she was so close to his chest, but he did notice when she stepped back and away from him. Distress and then determination crossed his features, the fine points of chin and cheeks moving in distinct silhouette as the decades of the animal made his pupils flare. He stepped forward when she tried to retreat once more, and though his fingers fell away, they curled into the warm air where she had just been. "Where are you going?" he asked, trying not to sound alarmed.
He could be tall and confident and yet empty without his Rose. This world felt a stranger place without her in it, and he was terrified that she would move away and be gone from him entirely. The darkness that found him in the long nights of winter wrapped freezing vines around his chest.
She'd always known he was possessive in a strangely animal way, and she took that clutch of fingers in the air to be more of the same. That thing that made him want to keep her in the castle, something to be owned like the invisible servants or the horror-filled moat. She wouldn't read into it, she told herself. Andrew and Draco and Faust made her think things that weren't true. After all, men were men, whether they were beasts or no. It brought to mind the dream, and how he'd been there, and she turned a brilliant smile on him a moment later; she was good at brilliant smiles.
"I'm summoning a carriage," she repeated, and instead of walking toward the curb alone, she closed her fingers in his and pulled him. There was no magic, no spark, and she realized she missed the feeling of bitter-thick on her tongue and between her fingers. He might be human here, but she was poignantly certain that she wouldn't be able to hold his attention for more than a tumble when he was like this. It made a frown mar her features.
She had planned, until then, to try to blackmail or threaten his witch to uncurse him once they were home. Now she just wasn't sure anymore.
A yellow cab appeared as soon as she neared the side of the road, and it slowed and idled. "I have currency from Snow. He will take us where we wish to go," she explained.
They were surrounded by females in various states of undress, both in print and in person, and even in such a place Henry had no difficulty keeping his attention on Rose. He was reassured by her hand in his, and took one long stride to close the distance between them. Henry was the kind of man who was used to mounting his own horse, and failing that having carriages open for him under white gloved hands. He tried to remember how the yellow cab’s door operated, and he managed it open for her while the driver waited.
Ironically enough, Henry’s present appearance didn’t do him any favors. His expression eased from concern and tension, and he didn’t look like the kind of man to be concerned about keeping a woman’s attention. He appeared to balance on the precipice of youth and practiced age, and nothing of the great number of years he had lived under his curse were present on his skin. He smiled quickly and some of the mischievous nature of the man before the war came through, like sunshine through linen. “Will you dance?”
It was a short respite, he knew, but he decided he would take advantage of the minutes where he could.
The question, something from a dream, except twisted and turned around, made Rose stop before climbing into the cab. She looked up at him from behind the door that he held open, and the brightness returned to her features. "You can ask me when we get there," she said, but her expression was all agreement, and maybe there was a little bit of bounce back in her step when she climbed into the carriage - just a little.