Who: Faust and Rose Where: Faust's shop When: Recently! What: Meeting again in a garden Warnings: wizards and witches
The door was opened to a musty little shop caught in the darkness of early evening. The walls, shelves, tables and counters were made of that rich, dirty red sort of wood that felt warm to touch and seemed heavy enough that someone could perch on them without breaking. Every surface was filled with something. A potion, a scroll, a charm, a bottle of dried somethings. Behind the counter was a wall three Fausts tall with an unsafe looking ladder that he never used stacked with the really valuable things he didn’t want the customers turning around in their hands. The floor was dusted with dried mud here and there in incomplete footprints that hadn’t been swept up just yet. Otherwise it was clean and everything was clearly labeled and placed in their own section for customers to peruse. The large windows in the front and side of the shop had the curtains drawn and a couple little lamps were flickering in their corners. It smelt faintly of forest and that sharp spice of magic. It seemed too quiet for someone who smiled and laughed as often as Faust.
He was over in the corner, writing in a large book of numbers and figures. A tall man with light red hair, a white shirt that puffed up in the shoulders too much for his liking, a gold vest and impossibly long tan pants. Faust didn’t look as worried as he did the last time she saw him, though the burden was still there. A invisible, dark, heavy thing on his shoulders that made them slump a couple inches forward as if he were getting used to carrying it. Faust was stuck being two men at the same time now. The alchemist who kept to himself and the wizard who could command the darkness or pull a coin out of a girl’s ear. No one in this town really suspected much of that second part, so he had to keep it pulled in like a dirty rug hidden under a table. He couldn’t decide if he was blessed with a fresh start or cursed, but perhaps a little of both was the theme of his life now.
Faust looked up as the door creaked, smiled and placed his pen down. “Rose?” He asked, no hesitance or fear in his voice. Only the confidence of someone foolish enough to be attracted to strange magic than afraid of it.
The creak of the door came with a sharp tang of green on the air. Bright, bright green, like spring grass newly cut. The scent was there before she came into view, red hair copper bright, eyes amber and skin pale as the white sands to the North. She was still dressed in the nightdress she'd fled to Passages in - a long thing, creamy white and with demure pearl buttons at throat and cuff. Her hair was snarls and tangles to her waist, and she only lacked an enchantment on her lips to look like a witch from the old legends. She stepped into the shop with a slap of bare feet on the floor. Slap, and she looked down at her feet and remembered the sound of her feet in the dream.
When she looked up, there was confusion in her amber eyes. Was this a dream? She turned in a circle, as if that could verify truth somehow, and she smacked her bare foot against the floor again. Slap.
The scent of magic joined the green, bitter, bitter and thick as fog after a fire. A bit of green touched the place where the roof met the wall, where the wall met the floor.
She turned to look at the man behind the desk. She could see his face. Unlike the dream people, high upon their dais, she could see his face. She crouched down, a wild thing, and looked for cracks upon the floor, cracks that housed bitter black vines. There were none, and when she straightened again, her face was calmer. The fog and bitter and green abated slightly, and she walked the remainder of the way to the old desk.
Now that calm had begun to set into her bones, Rose took in the shop with widely curious eyes. She was no lover of old things, and her mother's magic had always come from nature, but she could still see where some people might delight in a place as this. She had always longed for the bright shimmering court, so at odds with these dark woods and secrets. But she could imagine old mages, bent over tomes here, bubbling liquid on a cauldron and dark things being invoked.
But Faust looked nothing like that. He was there, a man of science and medicines, and she thought he was ill-suited to it. To be sure, he looked as handsome as Faust always looked. But this place seemed so small, and she wondered if she thought it was too small for the man, or for the man's magic, or both.
"I've come to see my hat," she finally said, after a long turn around the room, one that included a glance up, up that rickety ladder, a little of her normal curiosity filtering back into her eyes as she wondered what he hid so carefully out of sight.
Rose’s pitter patter into the shop brought the scents of the outdoors that instantly brightened his mood like a man stuck in a jail cell. He smiled gently at the wild girl, a kindness that matched wizard eccentrics rather than a stuffy old scientist. Her behavior reminded him of a witch he met on his travels. A wild, woodland sort of woman who stopped to have conversations with trees and cursed at the birds for singing a song wrong. Faust knew this part of her could exist, would exist if this world kept pushing her to be rebellious. And, he enjoyed it the same way he enjoyed Quasimodo’s hermit wisdom or Hook’s salty adventurousness. “Your hat?” He asked, seemingly confused that there was even a hat to begin with. While Rose stomped and sniffed like a tiny, red beast, Faust was calm like a burning candle in an empty room.
As he walked over to her, Faust extended his hand and with a pop the desired hat appeared between his fingers. A simple, tan top hat that looked a little more weathered than it did when he found it in the castle thorn bushes. The remarkable thing about the hat was that it wasn’t remarkable at all. Even though he could snap it out of thin air, it wasn’t magical or enchanted. Just a hat that they both loved. “This hat? Oh, I’m afraid this hat has to be earned.” He held it between his hands over his chest and if she tried to grab it, her fingers would pass through it like a spectral hat.
She grabbed for the hat, and she laughed with delight when her fingers passed through it. She wasn't bothered by the magic, and she wasn't frightened of it. She would have done a lot better in her life if she was more fearful of things, but she never had been. Snow had always been careful and timid, but Rose had always run into things. It wasn't that she leapt without looking. She looked; she just wasn't scared. She was born fearless, and she remained so to that moment. Even the nightmare, which had frightened her, had done so on a level that only touched her magic, while leaving the wild girl beneath unchecked. But he was right that the woods made her wild, that fear and emotion brushing against the edges of her magic just made her more unmanageable, and she'd been unmanageable to begin with.
She grabbed at the hat again, but this time vines closed around his ankles. They came from the corners of the room, speedy, thornless things, that held him firm, while she reached again. "What do I have to do to earn it?" she asked playfully. If fear twined wildly with the green that followed her around, she didn't seem bothered by its crisp scent. She'd grown up in a cottage with a witch, one hiding during the Adversary's cleansing of magical folk. She was accustomed to the scent. It was like homecoming to her, safe and warm, a hearth and four stone walls that felt like safety.
Faust laughed as she did and slowly let the hat shimmer away into nothing again. “Well you-” He started, but startled at the vines suddenly around his ankles. He looked up at her in surprise, giving another bursting chuckle and didn’t try to pry or curse them off. Science was about thinking, but magic was about feeling. The vines had a tight hold that didn’t scare him so much as assure him that she didn’t want him vanishing like the hat did. “I have a garden out back that is sulking and reluctant. I thought perhaps you could give it a good talking to?” And, with that he was out of her green grip. Black, inked clouds that smelt faintly of salt and woodsmoke appeared at his feet as he simply moved through the vines like a ghost through a wall. He walked towards the back of the shop and held a wooden, hatched door open for her.
Outside it was finally dark, but the garden glowed like moonlight. Tiny mushrooms and fungi in luminescent blues and greens lit up as they climbed under old trees and against stumps. There was a grand, mystical variety of anything from dark nightshade to bright dragon’s tongue and it all smelt like the bag he had brought to Beast’s castle, but alive. In the far back where the garden was still untamed and a little wild, he had a pool of water with lilies, crickets and frogs. All creatures that prefered the night as he did. But, for all its variety, the garden seemed too new and unfamiliar with this land to grow properly. And, while Faust had given it care, he hadn’t the time to tend to it enough.
The laugh calmed her. That familiar chuckle that rolled along her spine and soothed the magic that was black-touched. She smiled, and the smile was bright and blinding in the darkness of the shop. "That's not very nice, especially after we've been apart for so long," she said of the hat's disappearance, but he was right about the vines. They weren't intended to hurt him; they were only intended to hold. She glanced over his shoulder when he mentioned the garden. Her expression, already bright, brightened more, and she only gave him a small sulk when he walked through her vines as if they were nothing. "It's not very nice to make a witch feel inferior," she said, and something in her voice said that was the first time she'd labeled herself in that way. Witch. Hmm. She bounced on her bare feet, and she moved past him, closing her eyes and enjoying the smell of woodsmoke and salt. She didn't understand what it was, precisely, that brought the scent. But it reminded her of an old warlock that visited the cottage after Snow left.
She followed, when he moved ahead, and she turned her head up to the gloaming sky. She edged past him a second later, out into that magical blue and green. She walked all the way to the back, to where that pool sang with crickets and frogs, and she turned there, looking back at him and smiling. It was wild, yes, untamed, yes, but she liked gardens best like that. She liked things left to their own devices, not bothered by hands that had no business pruning and cutting and forming them into humanity's version of prettiness. She dug her bare toes into the earth, and she breathed in the night air, and she listened. Things began to perk up almost immediately, as if coming to attention. Petals stretched and leaves shook and trees stood a little taller. She laughed, laughter as bright as her hair. "The Beast would hate this place," she said, acknowledging the magic there. "Tell me how you've been, you and your hat."
He put his hands on his hips, expression wondrous as the garden stretched and brightened to her presence like a cat curling awake from a long nap. He could practically hear it sing for her and in the moment he wished his own magic wasn’t from a place so terrible. “And, I hated his castle. You’ve made very contrary friends.” Faust walked through his garden, settling on a stump near the glowing mushrooms to watch her reflection off the small pool. There was no immediate answer to her query, the tall wizard soaking in how pleasant it was to be outside with her in a garden. And, he knew that gardens were his favorite place to be with her now. A mix of human influence and wild nature.
“I’ve been comfortable.” Faust said eventually, voice easy and soft in the chirping night air. “The new girl in my hat is disturbed by my past. My memories. As a Catholic girl should be.” He didn’t much care for talking about the church anymore in this land, but it was still chained to him. Would always be chained to his powers. “But, as you can see I’m managing. Quasimodo has taken up helping me with the shop and the townsfolk absolutely adore him. I’ll have him married off in weeks.” Faust seemed at least pleased about that. He worried about the not-hunchback the same way he worried about Rose, though they tended to get in different kinds of trouble. Faust, too, made contrary friends. “I’m not certain this is the life for me, but as long as people keep coming to me with magic woes, I think I can survive.”
She sat down on the grass, crossing her legs beneath the white of her nightgown and regarding him. "Contrary friends find me," she said in rebuttal. It was true, to a certain extent. She hadn't sought out the Beast, and she hadn't sought out Faust. She wasn't sure she would actually call the Beast a friend, but he was more friend than anything else these days, she supposed. She tugged at the grass beside her hips, careful not to upend it with the tugging. "I miss the castle," she admitted. She'd liked it there. It was abandoned and overgrown, and that spoke to something inside her. Maybe the same wildness she loved in this garden was what drew her to the Beast. But she knew her friend didn't share that particular love.
"Comfortable isn't happy," she said, with the simple perceptiveness of the young. And, being young, she wanted much more than comfort from her life. She was a greedy thing, like roots that choked out other roots for the best path to the water in the dirt. The encounter with Pitch had made her less girl, less human, but no less trouble. "Managing isn't happy either," she corrected.
But she listened about Quasimodo, glad the quiet man had found a home. She hadn't thought of him much. No, to be truthful, she hadn't thought of him at all. But still, she was glad. "My Eloise is older and quiet, but she likes me," she said, not as troubled by the changes in the mundane world as she once had been. They would come and go; she would stay. "She shouldn't be disturbed," she chastised of his girl; it was loyalty and protectiveness that made her voice sound petulant. And in the end, she came back around to his claim of surviving. "Don't you want more?" She paused, her golden eyes determined. "I want more for you."
“I know you do.” Faust said of the castle, an almost sternness in his voice that would remind her of Snow or other adults who knew better. He thought the Beast was abusive and terrible, but knew there was no pulling a girl’s affections away. The wizard would let Rose’s sister worry about that mess. Or, let her find out if it was a mistake or not for herself. Certain flowers needed to grow wherever they pleased, after all. Perhaps he was protective of her, but Faust refused to shelter anyone. A man of science and magic did not think in these terms. And, when he looked at the girl sitting in the grass that grew whichever way it pleased in whatever shape it desired, Faust hoped she’d only grow stronger and wild with time. Not tame, reserved and careful like a potted plant hanging in a windowsill waiting to be dropped and cracked open.
“Of course I want more. I’m a man. I’ll always want more.” He leaned forward, hands folded together and elbows on his knees as he watched the tiny black bugs buzz and wiggle near his shoes. “Wanting more got me in a lot of trouble the last time I was in this town. I’m better off waiting for my friends to get in trouble before causing some for them. Your encounter with the nightmare man? I can make you something to ward him off. This is the sort of thing I should do with my talents, don’t you think?”
She huffed at the sternness in his voice. "I'm not there, am I?" she asked of the Beast's castle. "I won't be going back. I saw him in the mundane world. He was a man, and not a beast, and he still didn't want me. I'm not going back. I'm going to practice, and I'm going to become a better witch than my mother. People will fear me," she said, ruining the entire effect by laughing at her own potential terribleness. But she sobered a few moments later, and she sighed and tugged at the grass again, watching as the black bugs moved near his foot. "I'm not very nice. I could be a good witch," she said, as if being very terrible could help with such things. Perhaps it could. Perhaps good witches were always doomed to fail and hide in cottages. Bad witches - very bad witches - became queens and assistants to kings. She didn't appreciate hiding - not yet. Just as she didn't appreciate safety.
"Women want more too," she informed him, and she didn't think trouble sounded as bad as he made it sound. But she hadn't seen his hell, and she couldn't imagine anything worse than the Homelands during the long war. "Is that all we can do? Ward him off? He'll find another bed to crawl beneath." She exhaled this time, an exasperated exhale. "He likes to mock. I hate it when he mocks. Can't we do something so that he can't be terrible while people sleep?" she asked hopefully. She couldn't do it, not while she was asleep. But maybe something in that shop could.
“How old are you, Rose?” Faust asked, pointing at one of the bugs and turning it into a wisp of smoke with a eek and hissss. “Didn’t you or Snow tell me once you’re older than the trees? And, you still haven’t been tamed. After all this time. It makes me wonder.” He turned his hand like he was latching onto a door handle or the string of a balloon and all those black critters at his feet magnetized together into one large, shiny beetle the size of her foot. It staggered, dazed and bewildered before continuing to climb up and around the stump, unaware that it could fly. “Have you ever been humbled?” Which was a word that didn’t fit in a land of fairy tales and no gods. Humble was a Christian word by many accounts. And, it could have simply been a virtuous word to keep people in line, but to the devout it was the first step towards salvation. And, all that nonsense Faust hated himself for believing in.
“It’ll take some experiments. Trial and error.” Faust stood up and the oversized beetle at his feet panicked, lifting its shiny back in two parts like a jewelry box to reveal thin, sparkling, translucent wings. They made a noise that was alarming and beautifully delicate at the same time before buzzing off into the night sky. “There’s nothing he could show me that could scare me. Perhaps I’ll mock him right back so I can see his tricks first hand.” Faust looked up at the dark sky, right at the moon and he could have sworn he saw the magic beetle fly across it.
"I don't remember," she said honestly of her age. "Older than I look by hundreds of years, but it doesn't feel that way. Snow aged when she left for the Mundane world. It was just the same for me. She aged, and I didn't." Age didn't matter in the Homelands. Thousands of years were seconds, and seconds were thousands of years, and Rose hadn't realized it was different until the Doors had come and things had changed. She smacked at his hand when he fried a bug, her love of nature making the smack an unthinking thing, all lean and bright green bite on the air giving it teeth. But his question about being humbled took her attention from the other bug, and her face was a myriad of confusion, a kaleidoscope of not understanding. "Humbled? How do you mean?" she asked, finally, reluctantly, giving away her lack of understanding completely.
She let him stand before she did, turning her face to watch the beetle fly away. She didn't look back at him until she was standing herself, toes digging into the dirt again and her face a curious mask of consideration. "Do you want to do that? Mock him, draw him out?" she looked around the garden, and she looked toward the shop beyond. "Do you want to, because you're bored here?" She wondered if she had brought him the equivalent of a puzzle, something to wile away the hours, and she felt sorry for him a little, now that her own madness had abated. "I'm sorry you aren't happy, Faust." She was born to be happy. Hurt didn't stick to her skin, and pain only cut her for a little while, however sharp its brambles. She didn't like lingering in sadness either, and she was good at shrugging it off and becoming lost in other things. She was a spoiled creature, She wasn't sure he was the same way. "Let me see my hat before I go."
“Humbled. To- no. Nevermind. It doesn’t matter here.” He said, waving his hand and the worry from his face changed to a forced smile when he looked back down at her. Faust would have this conversation with Quasimodo later. Quasi didn’t mind being thoughtful or sitting around talking even if it didn’t lead anywhere. “I want to draw him out because he hurt you, Rose.” He said sternly, sounding a little like an old fashioned paladin instead of a wizard. “Because he’ll likely hurt anyone he can and I doubt anyone else here has the means to stop him.”
Faust turned and started back out towards the shop, rolling his hand in the air to pop the hat back between his fingers and he reached behind him to hand it off to her. “I’ve made you ward dust. It should keep your cottage safe for now.” He told her, still attempting to brighten his mood for her and feeling a little like the dark haired woman in his head. Always trying to tell everyone else that the world was fine because they believed it to be. Because it was easier to play along, wasn’t?
The shop was warm and amber and Faust moved behind the counter to pull out a bottle of dust made out of salt, dried leaves and shimmering somethings. There were instructions written in black ink on thick paper attached to the cork that told her a spell and how to distribute the power accordingly. “An old witch showed me this while I was on my travels. Before the door.” He said proudly, that real smile finally warming his lips. Fond, intelligent and a little strange.
She knew the smile wasn't real. She'd seen enough real smiles on his face to know what one looked like, and that wasn't one. She would ask Snow about it later, she decided, instead of pressing him. Or maybe she'd ask the Beast what he meant. Either way, she'd have an answer when she talked to him again. She was young in ways that only someone who had been a perpetual teenager could be, and she was vindictive and loving in that same way, all emotion without real understanding. But she couldn't argue when he said Pitch would hurt other people; he would. "You'll tell me if you need help," she said, and it wasn't a question, and it wasn't a request. There was demand in her eyes that spoke of the kind of witch she would be one day, if something didn't temper all that fire along the way.
She took the hat when he reached it back, and she perched it atop her mass of copper curls and tugged it down to her forehead. The mention of the ward dust immediately piqued her interest. She'd been working through her mother's tomes, and she'd found wards, but nothing called ward dust. She was busy wondering if she could work her way backward, to figure out how he'd crafted it, as she looked at the instructions. She knew better than to think any dust could keep anyone completely safe; she'd lived through a five hundred year war that was nothing but magic, after all.
"You liked her," she said of the old witch when she looked up, another statement, one without a question. And maybe the dream with Pitch had shaken something inside her, because there was a little less wonder in her wild eyes than there had been once, a touch more knowledge.. She tugged off the hat, and she held it out to him, the brim smelling bright green, and she palmed the dust bottle carefully. "You come and tell me why you're sad, when you're ready to," she said, more woman than child in the issuing of the invitation. "And when you're ready to move on, you come tell me that, too."
And then the wild child was back, all grin and tangled red.
“I like most witches I meet.” Faust took the hat back and ran his fingers around brim, glad it would smell like the wilderness for a while. “They’re all unique. Most of them cunning.” He liked vibrance in all its forms. Backwoods, hag-nosed witch or tumbling, bright red almost witch. Both vibrant in their own ways. He was supposed to be attracted to the light, the untangled and pure. And, he was on certain occasions, but they lacked the complexity a scientist loved to explore.
Surprise struck his face when she made her demands. Flustered and a little off balance which Faust rarely seemed to do despite his towering height. For a moment he seemed embarrassed that she saw his sadness so clearly even if he didn’t know the depths or reach of it. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll find something to pursue. I will.” But, he nodded all the same in promise that he’d tell her once it was all ironed out and in a way that Rose could understand. He didn’t vanish the hat but let it rest next to his hand so his pinky was just barely touching it as if for safe keeping. And, when she grinned he returned it brightly and reached out with his free hand to grab hers. “You are wonderfully terrifying.” Faust teased with a squeeze of his fingers. “You’d make the best sort of witch.”
"Not all witches are worth meeting," she told him, but she didn't seem to mean it. "Once, I made Snow rescue a witch from an oven," she confided. "She wasn't a very nice witch." But she'd pressed, and she'd pressed, and Snow had eventually capitulated and set Frau Totenkinder free. She'd never asked what happened to the witch that had gone with Snow to the Mundane world; she would ask, she decided.
The surprise that crossed his features made her sorry for her bluntness, but only slightly. She was worried about him, and she wasn't sure he would find something worthy of him. But there was a problem; she didn't know what would actually fulfill him. Being here, in this warm amber-lit place didn't do it, she knew that for certain. She decided that she'd drag him out, if he didn't find something soon. Languishing here, that wasn't for him. And if there was darkness in him, so what? She didn't care so much these days. She'd tried to turn pure and good and sweet, both for the merchant and the Beast, and what had it gotten her? Sold off as a prisoner, and then cast off for a harlot. She was ready to dig her toes in and find her own place. And if that place was full of magic, so be it.
She turned her attention to him again when he squeezed her fingers, and she made a childish face. "No, I'm not," she said of being terrifying. "I can be very bad, but I'm not terrifying," she said, but there was pride when he said she'd make a good witch; she hoped he was right about that. She leaned in, and she kissed his cheek. "Tell Quasimodo I said hello," she said, and that was her way of parting. She tipped his hat with her finger, and then she turned for the door.
Faust wouldn’t mind being taken away from here on even the thinnest excuse. Adventure, danger, exploration and magic were all things he was built for now. And, he had friends who were built for it, too. But, for now he’d hone his skills. If he wanted to be this world’s mage, he needed time to understand how far he could reach without touching those burnt, charred doors that he had seen before dropping here. “Take care.” He told her with fake sternness and a tilt of his head, affection climbing over his words like vines on a stone wall. And, he watched her patter out of the store, waited for the door to close and turned to spend more time out in the garden with his hat.