Little Red (little_red) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-06-24 13:24:00 |
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Entry tags: | door: tales, red riding hood, rose red |
Who: Red and Rose
What: An encounter in Rose's cottage
Where: Rose's Cottage. In the woods.
When: About now.
Warnings/Rating: No? Red's crazy with bad (cannibalistic) history flashbacks?
Babies. Babies were very complicated things. They required feeding and tending and feeding and tending and somewhere in there, no time for parents to sleep. And Red wouldn’t have minded, actually enjoyed seeing the man having to deal with it all, but it meant that she was almost as exhausted when he stepped through the door. The hotel had dropped her in the ruins of an old hunter’s shack, barely enough to it to be considered a structure any longer, the frame of the door listing heavily to one side. The rest of the building was crumbling, and anything useful that had once been inside was long gone, taken by persons, animals, or nature itself. And normally, normally Red wouldn’t care. Would walk away from the structure with knife close at hand, hunting and doing what she could to keep peace in the forest.
But exhaustion made her hungry, and she’d had little enough in the way of food herself to satisfy her on her side of the door. The man had been promising to bring food to carry through, something that would hold her over until she could steal, scavenge, cook, but with his own exhaustion he had forgotten. So Red tightened her belt, tried to ignore the cramping rumble of her belly, and walked.
The sun had moved significantly by the time Red stumbled out into the clearing. As focused as she’d been on simply moving through the woods, she hadn’t noticed where she was going, and after a moment of surprise, she shook herself, grateful that nothing had come upon her in her sort of walking daze. It was careless and would lead to harm if she wasn’t able to keep herself from repeating it, but that thought was quickly set aside as she studied the cottage in the clearing. It was familiar, though it took her a moment to place, as the last time she had approached from the front and was currently staring at the back of the building. She remembered the rumble of a Wolf’s growl, the rasp of threat, but her own body betrayed her usual caution and pushed her forward, knife drawn. She needed food, and even if there was no hanging scent of rabbit as there had been last time, she was convinced that there must be food within.
She pushed the door open carefully, slowly, waiting for it to reveal itself as a trap, waiting for something or someone to jump out at her, but nothing presented itself and she breathed out a sigh and let herself into the building. It was tidy inside, warm, and even the lingering presence of Wolf wasn’t enough to stop the memories of her Grandmother’s cottage springing suddenly to mind. She had to close her eyes for a moment, hand resting on the wall, and let the old memories wash over her. Being under a roof, one that was so familiar, even if she’d never set foot inside this cottage before, caused her heart to race and her mouth to go dry. She felt trapped and vulnerable, waiting for a large figure to step from a bedroom, invite her in, coax her to eat and drink, remove her clothes and join him in bed. But none came, and though her hands shook from fear as well as hunger, it was the hunger that drove her to the table where food was laid out.
Knowing from experience how she would make herself ill if she ate too much too quickly, she tried to keep herself from shoveling it all in at once, kept herself from consuming all the food in the house. Just a little, some water from a pitcher, and then she sat on the floor near the banked coals of the fireplace. It was warm, and she had more food in her than she’d had in too long, and it all called her to lay down, relax, close her eyes.
Somewhere in her mind, something insisted that this wasn’t her story. That eating and sleeping in another’s house was someone else’s tale, a girl with bears and fair hair, but she didn’t care. She slept.
Rose had returned from her latest trip to the farmhouse looking a mess, as she always did. The refuge the Beast had offered her had turned out to be a disaster. Barely any thatched roof left, and only part of the stone structure intact. The wood that had once made a barn had been eaten away, and the forest had long-since begun to encroach upon the farming land. She'd been very tempted to just turn her back on the place, but it was a challenge now, and she intended to make something of it. The farmhouse, once fixed up, would be four times the size of her little cottage, and it abutted a village that the Beast had kept fed through the hard, lean years. There would be work there, spells to be sold, tonics to be requested, potions to brew. She was on her own now, and she needed to think about things like that. She'd left behind the notion of a future that involved a prince of her own, children and a castle. No, she was well on the road to becoming a spinster witch, and spinster witches took care of themselves.
And there was Snow.
Rose was happy for Snow. She envisioned a world in which Snow and Faust went off together and lived above his little shop. She was happy, but she was envious, too. And she was envious of stupid Harry, because Harry had Draco, and Draco could have been hers. She was considering making that particular situation worse, because she'd always been as spiteful as she was copper-bright, especially when she had a thorn in her paw. And she did have a thorn in her paw. He was called Henry, and she had to remind herself to hate him every single morning.
Rose was lost in her thoughts when she made her way into the cottage, jeans and a rose tee-shirt, her hair in a messy bun of indomitable red. She threw her basket on the worktable, and she noticed the missing food. She thought nothing of it, because Wolf ate with her most nights, and she assumed he'd come in and rummaged while she was away. "You better have left me some tarts," she muttered, because the woman she'd sold the potion to relieve her of her unwanted child had made such wonderful tarts as payment. A glance toward the fire made her sigh, and she assumed the legs she could see belonged to Wolf.
"I'm going to start charging you payment for sleeping here," Rose said, grabbing a remaining tart and going to sit by the fire. As she neared, she realized the legs were too shapely for Wolf. She paused, and her eyes narrowed. Vines began to climb in the windows and from the opening at the far end of the loft, and they all snaked toward the unknown figure before the fire. "Wake up!" she yelled.
She really was too tired, shouldn’t have been on this side of the door at all. Not when even the sounds of someone entering the cottage, moving about and speaking, couldn’t wake her. It took the shout to pull her, gasping and suddenly adrenaline-spiked, back into consciousness, and she tumbled to the side as she scrambled up, lucky to stay out of the fireplace itself. She crouched, more like an animal than a girl, knife in one hand and her other itching for the axe that was across her back. She blinked quickly, trying to clear the sleep away and bring her mind back up to its waking speed, not noticing at first that her hood had fallen back in her scramble, revealing the ox-blood lining and her own sunset hair, pulled back from her face in a fraying braid and revealing the smudges of dirt there, left by her own grubby fingers.
It only took her a moment to focus on the other woman in the room, knowing who it was, though staring at her strange clothing. It looked more like something the man would wear on his side of the door, and she frowned in confusion, different than the standard scowl on her face. She didn’t move, didn’t say a word, simply crouched and waited, a sliver of her mind on the vines she could see inching along the walls.
I took all of thirty seconds for Rose to realize who had been slumbering in front of her fire. She rolled her eyes, and her gaze strayed toward the knife, even as the vines stopped their progress and trembled in wait. "Put that away," she insisted of the knife, another roll of eyes as she made an exasperated sound and turned her back to the wild thing in her cottage. "I'm not actually running a free kitchen for woodlings," she said, because Red reminded her of Wolf just then, that same untrusting mania in her eyes.
But, despite all her protests, Rose opened the locked larder and pulled out some cured meat and crusty bread. "I keep the good things locked away, so no one eats them," she explained, setting out a plate with a hunk of bread and meat. "If you touch the axe, my vines will strangle you," she added, as if threatening strangulation was so very normal a thing to do. "And you really should go wash your hands in the well behind the cottage."
Red didn’t move. Still in that tense crouch, the muscles of her thighs beginning to burn in protest with the position, she watched. And listened. And it didn’t take her very long to realize that the woman in front of her was Rose, friend of the Wolf and Snow’s sister. And the angry owner of the cottage. She finally eased up from her position, legs screaming with the slow movement, and stood there, knife still held in casual fingers, like an extension of her hand.
Before she had fallen asleep, Red had eaten some of the food that was sitting out on the table, but had done her best to only take a portion of it. She wasn’t in the cottage to ravage it or be too greedy, just to give herself enough energy to keep going in the woods. But the appearance of more food - bread that was unburnt, without mold, and with a crust on it that almost crackled - made her stomach clench again around its own hunger. She looked down at her hands, the way that dirt and mud (and admittedly, hints of old, dark blood that may or may not have been her own) caked under her unevenly bitten nails, and frowned. She didn’t want to leave without the bread, knowing that the door could be locked behind her easily if she stepped out of the building to wash. She eyed the vines, keeping her hands away from the axe, and slowly, reluctantly, slipped her knife into its sheath on her belt. Her hand curled into a loose fist, her thumb rubbing over the insides of her fingertips.
“They’re,” Red’s voice caught on the roughness of her throat, the last words she’d said being to the Wolf, however long ago that had been. She turned her face away and coughed into the crook of her elbow, old polite habits still clinging to her in the oddest moments, and then tried again. “They’re fine.”
"They're filthy," Rose corrected. "Go, the food isn't going anywhere, and it'll give me a chance to change out of these working clothes before I sit down to eat myself," she added, pointing toward the door. She didn't think she needed to give this feral woman directions to the back of the cottage, because Rose knew someone who lived in the woods when she saw her. That unkempt appearance meant Red had probably been visiting cottages and wells for years, and she could probably find her way between them better than Rose could. And close up like this, it was hard to imagine the angry woman from the book.
There was no doubt that Red was feral and distrusting, but in person, Rose felt pity, and that pity made the anger in the book seem less anger and more unhappiness. For the first time, she actually took a moment to wonder what had happened to Red. Well, not really. She knew what had happened to Red - a man had happened. But men happened to many women, and they all didn't end up like this. And just like that, the selfless thought was gone and returned to where it had come, turned inward toward her own experiences and laced with a lack of understanding about why Red's differed.
Red hovered, still refusing to move until it seemed that Rose was at least not going to lock the door once Red stepped outside. Her first few steps were still hesitant, but then she nodded and headed for the door, keeping one eye on the woman and the vines until she was outside.
The well was easy enough to find, and Rose was right about her knowing how to get there, how to pull water up. The bucket came up filled with almost too-cold water, and she tried to push her sleeves up as well as she could before plunging her hands in. The edges of her sleeves still caught the water, soaking until the material turned dark. She knelt next to where she’d placed the bucket on the ground and simply held her hands in the water for a long moment, watching the dirt start to pull away from her skin. It was nearly mesmerizing, and she was transfixed by it for several minutes before she finally started scrubbing her hands together, using the nails of one hand to dig under the ones on the opposite hand. It took too long, and she kept shooting glances at the door of the cottage, where she’d left it open a crack, making certain it hadn’t been closed and locked in the time since she’d been at the well. Once she was certain it had not, she cupped her hands together and brought water to her face, scrubbing at the grime there as well. In the back of her mind, she remembered hot baths in a copper tub by a fireplace, but those were years past.
Once her face was as clean as it was going to get, the water causing the bits of hair around her face to curl slightly and drip onto her pushed-back hood, she headed back to the cottage. Her feet were silent on the ground, and the door only squeaked slightly when she eased it closed again. The bread on the table drew her again, but she chewed on her lip and waited for Rose’s return.
Rose stepped out from behind the screen below the loft, fingers twisting her hair into braid as she watched the woman in the doorway. "Better," she agreed after a moment of perusal, and she crossed the cottage floor and made her way to the workbench, stepping right in front of Red without worrying about knives or axes.
The vines were gone now, returned to wherever they had come from, and Rose's jeans and shirt had been replaced by something more fitting for the world they inhabited. Her dress was old roses and cream, narrow at the wrists and dragging behind her bare feet and along the floor. She was a witch in the wrong colors, silk that should be black and smelling of moths and dust. But she wasn't that witch, and she poured them both goblets of wine, old metal worn and worked by hands over the centuries.
The wine was rich and red, and Rose sat down at the workbench and pulled her own plate of food forward. "Sit down," she said, motioning to the wooden chair across from her. "I don't have a penis. I'm not going to hurt you," she told the feral girl with the pushed-back hood. "Do you have a cottage? A place you normally live?" she asked, though she knew what the answer would be.
Red’s first thought at seeing Rose emerge from behind the screen wasn’t ‘witch’ or even ‘enemy’, but ‘clean’. The material of the dress called to the touch of fingertips, but even with clean hands, Red held her fingers back. At least until Rose stepped in front of her, moving around the room, and then fingers that were still damp with well water traced a fold of fabric as it moved, transfixed by the fine weave and soft color. Her attention was still held when she whispered, words scratched and soft and barely meant for anyone’s ears at all: “Your dress is nice.”
She ignored her own words as she shook away the distraction of her still sleepy mind, and sat at the table. Within a breath, the bread was in her hands, tearing small pieces of it away from the whole to hold in her mouth and savor as she ate them. The wine was ignored, and the side of the plate that held the cured meat was turned away to be along the farthest edge from her. She didn’t comment on it, didn’t even look at it, all of her attention on the airy, open texture of the loaf in her hand. Her eyes jolted up to Rose’s face and she blushed at the mention of male things, a color that was dark, sudden, blotchy - not the delicate flush of a maiden, but the ugly rush of blood to the skin. Her skin was pale enough, especially now that some of the dirt had been scrubbed away, that the sudden coloring was stark and obvious. Red tried to hide by focusing on her meal, and spoke with her mouth half-full at Rose’s question. “I live in the woods.”
Rose felt the hand on fabric, but she didn't stop or start. She just glanced at Red as she sat, and she wondered where the other woman had been born and what her life had been. There had to be a before, didn't there? People didn't just wake up like Red, and she assumed only a person with a perfectly boring childhood could end up like this because of a man. "Thank you. It belonged to my mother," she said honestly. She'd found dresses and dresses in the trunks when she'd reinhabited the cottage, and she remembered enough of her childhood to know the dresses had been payments for spells and work. Her mother had been on retainer with kings, and she had the right clothing for those meetings. Rose liked that they were soft, and she liked that the protection spells had kept the fabrics soft and sweet. She wouldn't wear these dresses around Faust or the Beast, because they made her feel vulnerable, but she wore them here.
Red's devouring of the bread earned her a quirk of brow over the edge of a wine goblet. "You only eat bread?" Rose asked.
It had been years since Red had worn any sort of dress, and never had she owned one so fine. Her hood, the old one, the first one, the one that had been stolen by man-who-was-wolf, had been one of the nicest things she’d ever worn, the fabric of it soft and heavy, and sometimes she could still remember the sway and drape of it on her shoulders. The memory was a physical weight on her for a moment, before she took another bite and pushed the past away.
Her mouth was full when Rose asked her question, but she took the time to chew and swallow this time before answering. When she spoke, she lifted her gaze even though her shoulders were slightly hunched, protecting the close edge of her plate. Her pale eyes were intense on Rose’s as she spoke. “I eat other things. When I can find them.”
"Then, is there something wrong with the meat and wine you found at my table?" Rose asked, wondering why she was even bothering. Red reminded her so much of Wolf, and she had no idea why she'd bothered with Wolf, either. Maybe it was too much loneliness, too much time alone in the woods, only the villagers for occasional company. She'd start missing that stupid caterpillar next. Maybe she could blame it all on Draco, who hadn't gotten in touch after she'd kissed him. Men. She tore a chunk off her own bread, and she watched Red with the eye of someone who wasn't entirely trustworthy. But then Rose was never entirely trustworthy, so that was nothing new. "Have you killed anyone recently?" she finally asked, and maybe she was intentionally goading. After all, the last time she'd talked to Red, Red had threatened all the men she cared about. If she was willing to admit she cared, that is. Which she wasn't.
Red froze with her hand half-way to her mouth, piece of bread almost touching her lips. But she paused, not meeting Rose’s eyes for a long, quiet moment. Gaze still averted, she cleared her throat carefully. “I don’t drink wine.” That was a start, but the pause was heavy, more to be said. “Or eat meat. Unless I have to. And then I kill it myself.” And even that happened far less often than one might expect from a girl so outwardly bloodthirsty. With those words, she shoved the piece of bread into her mouth, shoulders tensed and defensive. It was a warning as well: Do not trespass, here there be monsters. If she noticed Rose’s wary eye, she didn’t comment on it, though her hand paused momentarily again in mid-air at the next question. Another bite eaten before a reply. “No.” It was sullen honesty. The truth of it was, for as many threats as she had made, for as much as she prowled the woods, she’d barely killed anything or anyone since finding herself sharing time with the man. He hadn’t tamed her, but he was always there. Watching. And it was unsettling to be observed while sliding a blade into a man’s belly.
"That isn't healthy," Rose said. Not necessarily of not eating meat, but of only eating bread. She didn't care, really, if Red ate meat, didn't eat meat, or choked on a diet of only dough. But she liked being critical. It made her feel better, especially when she was feeling cranky and petty, and she she was definitely feeling cranky and petty. She reached across the table, forked the meat Red wasn't eating and put it on her own plate. She poured the undrunk wine into her own goblet, next, and then she sat back to watch the woman across the flat and wooden surface. The assertion that Red hadn't killed anyone made Rose hum her pleasure, a sip of the rich wine following the sound. "Well, that's good," she said a few seconds later, after putting her own slab of bread on Red's plate. "I would hate to curse you in my cottage. It's bad luck, cursing people indoors." It wasn't, but it sounded good, and Rose pressed her bare toes to the table's wooden leg, leaning the chair back slightly afterward. "You could live inside, where it's safer," she added with practicality. Ugh. She was starting to sound like Snow. That made her frown.
“I eat other things.” The tone was defensive, sudden, and Red’s gaze snapped up to Rose, frowning. She stole different things, from barns and fields, milked cows or goats when they presented themselves, slipped things from slop troughs of swine, found fish in streams when she came across them. “Just... not those things.” Her gaze flicked to the meat and wine for only the briefest second before she had to pull it away again, swallowing hard at the bile that tried to climb the back of her throat. she shoved more bread in her mouth to try to counteract it. Before she could swallow, the threats of cursing started and she glared at Rose, her fingers twitching for her knife, safely in the sheath at her hip, so she picked up her fork instead, holding it in a tight fist instead of a loose grip. Her next reply was clipped, quick, and harsh. “Who says indoors is safer?” Hadn’t her own worst times occurred under a roof?
Rose watched Red's fingers twitch, and she lifted a copper-penny brow. "Don't do that," she suggested, still with the chair leaning back, as if she hadn't issued a warning in a sing-song voice that sounded fit for a fairy tale. She picked up a piece of the cured meat with her fingers, and she nibbled a corner thoughtfully. She knew her Red's story, but this wasn't some quiet and mousey girl from the country, and she tried to decide if she cared enough to want to learn more. "Why not?" she finally asked, because she had nothing to ask other than that, and nothing else she really wanted to learn. Red wasn't a great conversationalist. She had no Hat, and she had no banter. She didn't have long, pale fingers that could unknot hair, and she didn't growl at her and keep her on her guard. The question, simply, boredom. Not concern, and not caring; boredom. The question about the indoors being safer made her look up at the ceiling of the cottage. "There's shelter. Shelter is always safer."
The fork stayed clenched in Red’s hand, though her fist didn’t move forward, didn’t leave its resting spot on the table top. She had to drop her gaze away as Rose began eating again, memories too close to the surface of the way meat felt between her teeth, the way rich red liquid could slip down the back of the throat. Her voice felt thick as she tried to push words out without losing the precious food she’d consumed. “...too red,” she managed, though she knew it wasn’t a good answer, didn’t address anything - not really. She had to squeeze her eyes shut for a moment, breathing shallowly through her mouth even as she could feel her hairline prickle with sweat, different than the cool well water caught in her hair. “Sh-shelter is a t-trap...” Her heart had begun to race, hands cold as she finally set down the fork. The thought of being inside, being with someone that so easily drank and ate things that could be awful, human, made the walls start to close in around her. Eyes still closed, she tried to slow everything down, knew what this was, this rabbity feeling. It had happened before, before she’d left her mother’s cottage for good to wander in the woods. Those weeks between her Grandmother’s death and her own escape into the trees had been hard ones. And she tried to slow, to forget again.
Rose realized, somewhere in the middle of those disjointed words that were supposed to be explanations, that Red was crazy. She didn't hate men, and she wasn't just violent. She wasn't like Wolf, who wanted to tear things apart because it had been his instinct once. No, she was just crazy. Rose was too selfishly sane to like insane people much. She set the chair legs down on the floor, and she rolled her eyes, because even insanity couldn't do anything about her nature. "That's stupid. Being outside means you can be attacked from all sides, and there's too much area to really see everything. Inside, where there's only one entry point, it's safer," she said, motioning to the door. "And you can use spells and wards to keep people out," she added. She trusted magic, even more than she trusted walls. And she loved the woods, but she knew that people lurked in them that couldn't be trusted. "Don't go crazy in my cottage. If you're going to go insane, do it outside," she suggested. No one had ever mistaken Rose for being a very nice person, after all.
Red lifted her hands to her face, pressing fingers that were still cool from the well against eyes that had gone hot. Her breath was still too quick, but she did her best to calm it before speaking again. “Outside is free. It’s not a trap.” The bread, so good a moment before, felt as if it was caught in her throat, a painful stone to speak around. “You can avoid. You can run.” She stood suddenly, her chair catching a floorboard and teetering precariously before it rocked back to settle with all four legs on the floor. Turning her back, hunching her shoulders, she moved an arm to wrap around her stomach, the other hand to press against her mouth. Bile burning the back of her throat, she pulled a shaking breath through her nose. Holding so still, her only movement was the rise and fall of shoulders with her breath and the very faint tremble of tense muscles.
She finally turned, face having gone milk-pale again, her eyes just as light, but haunted and with thumbprint bruises beneath them. She glared across the room at Rose. “I am not insane.” She paced though, both arms moved to wrap around her own body. She was a trapped animal in the cottage with the woman who drank wine and chewed through meat with no worry that it might be blood and flesh. “There were no spells. The attack came inside. Do you not understand?”
"Are you going to throw up on my rug?" Rose asked calmly, eyeing the rug beneath Red's feet with a great deal of concern. It had been her mother's, and she had no spells for cleaning up sickness. With a sigh, she decided to make Wolf clean it, if it came to that. "Anywhere can be a trap," she added, wondering how Red even managed to survive in the harsh winters that the Witching Wood boasted. It was fine now, in summer, but winter could be brutal without a roof and a hearth. She watched Red's progress with unimpressed, golden eyes, noting the pallor in the other woman's face when she turned. "You're acting insane," she retorted calmly. "And just because you were attacked inside, doesn't mean you can't be attacked outside, and it doesn't mean all insides aren't safe." She wondered if she should suggest Red go to Fabletown, where there were doctors that helped those that were crazy. Here, there wasn't much hope for people like Red, but maybe there was there. Because, you see, Rose had officially decided that Red was too crazy to live.
Rose stood, unconcerned with Red's increasing madness on her rug, and she began to clean the table, dipping the plates in a bucket of flaked water and then pulling out a rag to dry them.
Red simply stood and stared at Rose, trying to process the other woman’s words. Her eyes were wide, pale, still a little wild, but also filled with disbelief. Years in the woods, she’d been living, and though townspeople sometimes chased her away when they saw her, though there had been men that were more horrible than she could often deal with, no one had been quite as callous as Rose in those few moment. Though Red had also never come quite as close to telling anyone about what had happened in that cottage those years ago.
“Yes,” she finally ground out. “Anywhere can be a trap.” It was more growl than words, and she grabbed the bread that was left as she said it. Anywhere could be a trap. Especially this cottage that was somehow too familiar, too close to the warm comfort that had been her grandmother’s. Bread in hand, she drew her knife again and stalked for the door. She would not make the mistake of visiting this cottage again. Not even if it was her only choice. She was back into the woods within moments, senses once again on alert as she moved through the trees.