Olive knows Rose has (ex_thorns985) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2012-11-14 02:28:00 |
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Entry tags: | beast, door: tales, rose red |
Who: Rose and the Beast
What: Outside and the Draco fallout
Where: The Castle
When: Recently
Warnings/Rating: None
Rose had been kicked out of her door shortly after Draco's departure and, upon going back in, she found herself in the closet she'd hidden in immediately after the incident. It was a cramped space in the bowels of the castle, down a stair that curved in the thick stone walls, which she'd been fairly certain the Beast could not pursue her down. She'd intended to hide there forever, if need be, until Draco provided Olive with a key to his world.
But that had been before her conversation with Daniel W. She'd known men like Daniel W. Her sister's court had been filled with that type of man, and they'd never interested her very much. Charming was the only one who had managed to squirm his way beneath her defenses with his doggedness, and she had avoided that sort of man ever since. They only brought trouble in their wake, and they only left broken hearts in their beds. It didn't occur to her that the Beast might be that kind of man, or that he might have been that way before the curse. Rose was still young, and she had spent a lifetime guarded and wild in the woods, with only her mother and sister. There had been no men there, no princes, and she was not wise in the way of these things, despite her very remarkable pretense.
She cracked open the door to her closet, still garbed in the red dress with the rose embroidery that she had chosen to wear for her meeting with Draco, and she made her way up the stairs with increasing loudness. She wanted to be heard. It would be less of blow to her pride if the Beast sought her out, rather than her seeking him out.
Initially the Beast had cooled his temper by tearing apart everything that the intruder had dared touch, and when he returned to something like thinking sanity even he was astonished by the destruction that he had wrought. He remembered hearing the voices, and he remembered being angry, but the rest of it was just flashes as the animal took over and left nothing of decision in his actions. He tracked down Rose’s scent to the smallest stair and then, when he realized he could not follow her there, had lingered for some hours, helpless against the territorial rage that sprung up every time he thought of someone stealing her away. In the end only the calm beyond the door had completely restored him to his former self, and that was because he had forced Daniel to stay where he was for some indeterminate time.
The previous few weeks had been prosperous hunting, which meant that two or three days without a trip into the woods didn’t do too much alarming damage on the stores, but winter was coming and game would soon be sparse as everything left in the dead woods went to ground. The Beast was waiting at the top of the stairs, sitting in his awkward half-sprawl that allowed the mismatched back limbs some semblance of rest while he lounged back on one flank. A thin shadow down the stair was his tail flicking back and forth as he waited, and when she appeared just beyond he huffed and sat up to attention, eyes aglow in the soft light as his ears pricked forward. He decided not to say anything at first just in case whatever that thing was ended up being wrong.
"Oh," she said, as if she hadn't seen the shadow of his tail, and as if she hadn't heard the thump, thump, thump against the stones. "I didn't know you were there," and if he could smell lies with that nose of his, well, this was definitely one. She smoothed down the red skirts of her dress, and she eyed him without an ounce of wariness, because she was very good at hiding what little wariness she possessed. Instead of moving forward, toward him, she pressed back against the stones beside the narrow stair, her hands behind her skirts, and her fingers tugging at the stones behind her. It wasn't like Rose not to know what to say, but she didn't right then, and so she embraced bravado, because bravado had never, ever failed her.
"I'm going for a walk," she told him, bold as brass, and as if nothing untoward had happened at all. She pushed away from the wall, and she walked past his tail without looking down at it, as if walks happened every day, and as if towers were destroyed every day, then put together anew by pale wizards every day.
She took three long strides (longer than they needed to be, really, and then she turned to look over her shoulder at him, all red lips and a jumble of copper curls. "You can come if you like."
The Beast pulled himself up to full standing, hindquarters coming up to stand even with the rest of his body, fur and stripes misaligning and stretching under the uncoiling muscle. The hoove-like back paws made soft ringing impact on the ground and his tail curled around one of them as the wings flipped, adjusting to the movement as he moved forward. He turned his head just as she went by, catching her on the hip with a brief bump of his forehead in entirely catlike fashion. His eyes slid, green and hooded, to watch her as she walked past and moved hastily away.
He dropped his head when she looked back, unsure of his reception, and then he pricked his ears forward in front of the soft stubs of horns set deep in the gold mane. His head came up at the invitation and he moved quickly forward, not in a slither but in a bound. He slowed by her side immediately, moving just behind, and the heavy musk-scent of his fur enveloped them both. “In the gardens?” he asked, tentatively.
She pretended not to notice all that movement, though it did register with her. Had she feared him, that bounding approach might have made her start, but she didn't fear him at all, and so it was all pretense when she looked over, as if she was surprised to find him at her side. Her gaze softened a moment. She was glad to see him uninjured. She had been sure Draco had not used offensive magic against him, but it was hard to tell how magic would affect someone who was cursed. Layering spells was not wise, and Draco had turned out to be a more powerful wizard than she had expected.
"If you like," she said of his suggestion of the garden, as if he'd merely asked her for walk, rather than this being her own push for a moment outside the castle walls. She knew the forest beyond was dead, but perhaps the garden was not, and she moved ahead of him a second later at the prospect, twirling in red and letting her exuberance show. She was terrible at being the reserved princess, even the reserved princess of a dead manor that didn't hold with tradition. That was Snow, not her. She'd been born without a hint of reservation in her entire body, and she walked backwards as she waited for him to lead the way. "Which way is it?" she asked, and even her horrible exchange with Justine was forgotten in the light of his acquiescence.
“Go out the kitchens,” the Beast said, in his rumbling voice, all thickened by an inhuman tongue and a chest that went on deep as it rolled dusty air out toward her. He moved ponderously, the round shelters of his folded wings riding high one after another as his shoulders twisted under the lift and pull of each paw. “This hall here.” He lead while following, speaking up to direct her out a stair and down another hall before they were abruptly in the warm familiar light of the underground kitchens. They were on the highest level, and there was flour in the air and the scent of fall baking: nutmeg, cinnamon, and rising bread.
The kitchen gardens were small in comparison to the vast walking gardens that had flourished in the Beast’s youth, but they were connected, and the carefully tended and sheltered herb gardens were separated from the overgrown mass only by a wall and a door fitted with an iron key. The key was in the lock and the door stood ajar, and the Beast trod carefully down the dirt path under the gray sky to wait for her to slip through it. He was thinking about the trespasser, but he was forcing himself to wait before asking.
The kitchens smelled delicious and, admittedly, she was hungry, but they couldn't compare to her longing for the outdoors. She saw the iron key in the door from paces away, and she ran forward and pushed the door wider, before stepping out onto the trodden earth. She smelled the night air (assuming the greyness was only nightfall), and she went as far as she could manage, before she reached the wall. She set both her hands there, and she turned to him with a frown and a crestfallen expression. "Still walled," she said, and she wondered if other people longed for freedom with as much fervor as she did. People raised in castles, and people raised in places with rules and lines that weren't crossed, maybe they didn't long to run free in the woods like she did. But still, there was night air, and that counted for something. It was like a room without a roof, she decided, but still a room, for all that it seemed not.
“Yes. Built to keep out the beasts.” His voice was bleak with sarcasm, as the garden made him melancholy. The smell of it was both fresh and familiar, more green and cracked flesh immediate than the rest of the forest put together. But to the eye, it was still bleak. Like everything else in the Beast’s land, the garden was brown and dark, and it had gone wild and overgrown before it had given up, vines crawling up toward the top of the solid wall built two men high and weeds choking the bereft skeletons of the willow trees. They walked a choked carpet of dead grass, and it was beginning to crunch under the night freeze. Under the Beast’s paws it made little noise, but Rose’s steps were like snapping popped corn. He led her on what appeared to be a path to the trained eye. His head hung even on his shoulders, and in the strange glistening emptiness of the dead garden, the Beast seemed proper and right, where in the castle he was a mismatched brute of a thing. After a little while he said, in a quiet voice. “Did you ask him to come take you away?”
Her fingers plucked uselessly at the wall, and then she turned completely and pressed her shoulders back against it. "Built to keep things in," she added, because everything felt that way lately. "Mother used to say society would hem us in, but Snow and I wanted to marry princes, to be princesses, to stop being weirds, witches. Who doesn't want to be a princess?" she asked, copper and youth, and she looked up at the dark sky and shivered at the feeling of magic there. She seldom felt any magic beyond the curse that cloaked the castle, but since Draco had come it had been different. She pushed away from the wall, and she dragged her fingers over an herb plant that seemed to straighten at her touch. "No. I invited him to tell me about his world. He wanted to take me with him, but I said no. I gave my word, and I won't break it," she said, and the plant bent and reached as she stepped away from it. She eyed the wall, wondering if she could climb it. She hadn't scaled trees or walls in so long, since before the merchant, since before Snow's court. "I spoke with Justine. Did you see?"
The Beast didn’t answer in words, but he shook his head slowly, his great shaggy head thin and somehow less in the heavy cold air, which dampened the usual gold motes of fur that was his mane in the lamplight. He watched her fingers on the plant, and his wet dark nose twitched heavily in the low path of the garden. Abruptly he brought his head up. “Will you come see the roses?” His tail lashed all the way to one side, and then all the way to the other, lying flat against his flank until his wings stretched just far enough to reveal a soft layer of down where they met his rippling shoulders. “They are not far.”
"I hated Snow once. That hurt hatred that doesn't leave room for anything else. I feel that way about Justine now," she explained with a huff of breath that was visible in the cold night air. His abrupt question about the roses surprised her, but she nodded and the smile that took over her features was immediate and genuine; Rose did nothing by halves, not even smile. "There are flowers?" she asked, because flowers were much better than herbs, and roses were her favorite ones. She was named after them, after all. "At home, there are roses on everything I own," she said excitedly, and she moved very close, eager to get to the flowers he'd promised. She loved her books, but she loved her flowers more. She pushed at one of his wings, urging him forward to wherever they were going.
She could no more move him than she could a mountain, but the feathers gave softly under her push, and after a moment he looked back at her, basking in the warmth of her smile. The flushed flat of his tongue appeared with the gently gape of his jaw, no teeth, just tongue, in silent laughter. He spread one wing over so that it draped against her back, broad and densely warm. “There are no flowers,” he said, soft and apologetic. “But there are roses. The plants.” He opened his mouth to say that her father had taken his rose, but the words never escaped him. “Do you still wish to see? I don’t want you to be saddened by their state.” The wing curved tighter about her shoulder, bringing her nearer to his body and the curve of his broad wolf’s jaw as he turned to watch her face.
The warmth of the wing was pleasant given the chill in the air, but her impatience would not allow her to remain still for long. "The roses don't bloom?" she asked. It was cold, but surely with care the roses would bloom. "It doesn't matter. Flowers like me," she assured him, because they always had. Even as a child, things had bloomed wildly around her. It had caused her mother - concerned as she was about her own magic being discovered - no end of worry. As she'd gotten older, she'd learned to control it somewhat, but it had never disappeared, and she had used the ability as a security blanket, warm and reminding her of home, when she lived with the merchant. During those long years without Snow, she had made nothing bloom, nothing blossom, and she had uncursed no one and saved no fairy rings. But those days were gone, and she wasn't worried about his roses. "Show me," she said, taking a step in a random direction in an effort to get him moving. "Snow and I have decided to uncurse you," she said out of the blue.
He tightened the wing so she could not go far, and he turned slightly, sweeping her along like an errant duckling, toward the right path. It was fully overgrown with the roots of an ambitious tree, but there was a path, and he led her over it with his wing close about her. Her scent took over that of the harshly green garden. The smell of cracked bark tried to crowd him in, and there were no sounds but their steps. He rolled one reflective eye back at her, molten gold in the gray light. “Uncurse me,” he repeated. “I don’t think so. But e’en so...” (This was quite formal.) “--how, exactly?”
"We don't know yet," she admitted of how he was to be uncursed. "We were considering looking for the witch hunters, to see if they knew anything of your witch, assuming you didn't know the particulars of your curse," she said, not really paying any attention to the path he was leading them on. Just as she knew he wouldn't kill her, she didn't think he would let her come to any harm in a walled in garden, no matter how overgrown it was. Plus, she didn't need to see it - didn't want to see it, either, because she could picture what it had been like instead, what it should be like. "Snow is the one who breaks curses mostly. I just help. I can do it on my own, but it's never the same," she explained, not quite understanding that her heart wasn't normally in it when Snow wasn't around. "But Snow's lost her magic in the mundane world, so we might need the witch hunters. I'm not sure yet."
The Beast was quiet for a few moments. He paced forward in three heavy steps, his bulk shifting from one side to another and yet somehow still silent in an awkward glide entirely unique to his strange anatomy. “This witch has been my enemy for decades, years upon years, and in all that time I cannot conquer her hold on this life. Whatever of her that was human, it is gone, for she has bled the blood of a hundred men in front of me and still she lives. I would not have you or... or anyone you care for in her path, Rose.” His strangely formal tone continued, and though his wing was close and warm in a living cloak about her shoulders, he did not look up at her as they walked on the cold path.
"Snow and I aren't scared," she told him defiantly, because they weren't. "We've dealt with all kinds of curses. We might not even need to see her or talk to her, if we can figure out what the curse is," she said, sounding hopeful, because was always the optimist, and Snow was always the pessimist when it came to curses. And, too, being outside helped her mood. "Could we go outside the walls?" she asked, emboldened with each step of real, solid earth underfoot. Even without the safety of his wing as a shield, she would have braved anything to be outdoors. But with that wing there, she felt sure nothing could touch her. She looked over at him. "He shouldn't have used magic, but it would be nice to have visitors that you didn't try to eat," she reasoned.
The Beast halted his steps. A wild bramble had taken over the trunk of a massive dead oak, and they stood now in the lee of the castle, protected by the wind and the runoff from the mountainside. Far over their heads, Rose’s tower lifted toward the gray clouds, and ahead in the brown tangle bits of the roof from the battle not long before littered the ground.
At her suggestion, he showed all of his teeth in a silent snarl, glistening ivory and violently colored gums. He did not growl, but his wing swept forward to usher her toward the confused bramble. Gruffly, he said, “The roses are here.”
Under normal circumstances, she would have pushed to get a reply, a response, some acknowledgement beyond that show of sharp and unforgiving teeth. But the the dead bramble took precedence, twisted brown and with just a hint of life. One of the vines showed signs of recent life. A touch of green in the twisted stem, a thorn still damp at the tip, a leaf that was not brown, and she turned to him curiously. "These haven't been dead long," she said, and it was a question. "Are there tools? Gardening implements?" she asked, even as the vines seemed to untangle slightly to be nearer her turned back.
The Beast watched Rose move in the bramble, eying the plants as they reached for her. It was only because they were his mother’s roses, always gentle and beautiful even in the face of the most bitter cold, that he did not growl and snatch her back from their grip. He moved forward until he was at the very edge of the garden, and he sat in his odd sideways lean to look out over the confusion of flora. It was so gray, so lost. The rose he had smelled in the cooling loss of summer was now gone to the hands of the greedy merchant, and he had not been able to find another. He flicked an ear as she turned back to look at him, and then he closed his eyes. He imagined the path he was sitting on, edged in beautiful white quartz mined from the hills and paved only in soft dark soil. He imagined the back door now covered over with thorned branches, his mother leaning in its shadow, smiling out at nothing. The gardener’s shed.
He opened his eyes and turned his furred chin toward the far wall where it began to curve. “There.” It looked like a heap of moss, but he sprang over a mess of stumps that used to be apple trees before pawing at it. He shifted up a rotten bit of timber. “Good steel. May yet be of use to you, if you like.”
Rose did not have the kind of magic that made roses bloom in an instant, but she could grow things that shouldn't be able to grow and thrive, and she could do it with impressive quickness. Her mother had always said the gift came from her name, and from the fact that was as impatient as Snow was patient. Combined with her sheer stubbornness, she had no doubt that the roses would bloom, even with the sky overhead gone darker and darker with every moment they spent beneath it.
She fished out the trowel he revealed beneath the rotten timber, and she rushed back to the rose brambles and dropped to her knees in the dead ground. She lost all track of time then, as she carefully freed the roots from the weeds and thicket that had ensnared them, fingers going dirty and blood-pricked, but she loved this more than anything, and it showed on her features. Gone was the wild child that had walked across her sister's dining tables, replaced by copper and song and soothing words to vines long dead.
By the time she sat back, she was tired, but the vines already looked greener. "Where's the water?" she asked. The herbs were tended, so there must be water to be found in this garden.
The Beast had fallen asleep under an overgrown gorse bush that had taken one of the romantic oak skeletons hostage. He slept in a curve, with his dark wet nose hidden under one broad white wing, and he resembled nothing if not an oversize chick gone to nest. When she spoke, the feathers slid down and together, interlocking in the most complex of nature’s designs, and he blinked sleepily into the shockingly dark air. It took his eyes only a moment to adjust, but he thought it must be later than he anticipated. He sniffed the air, pushing his chin out toward her, making sure the hint of tacky blood he smelled in the air was mild, and that she was not in distress.
The Beast yawned a great yawn of tongue and teeth, making a yowl sound and shaking himself into upright position immediately following. “There is a ditch along this wall. It took in rain water and lead to the moat, if it is still intact.” He trotted around the edge of the remains of the path, and then sat by a stone cistern that used to be a fountain. Someone had destroyed the elegant carvings, and a maiden poured only empty air from her shattered pitcher and single hand. “You must never drink the water here,” he said gravely, looking down at it.
She stood when he yawned. "I'm tired too," she admitted, but she wasn't tired enough to leave this undone. She followed him to the ditch, and she frowned when he said she couldn't drink the water there. "But then the roses shouldn't drink it either," she reasoned, looking down at the cistern with confusion. If the water killed the land, then what did they drink inside the castle? Was the water heated to boiling in the kitchens? She turned to look at him. "I can pot some of the plants inside," she said, "just in the doors, if there's leftover water from the kitchen to use." It would be more window garden than true garden, but she was lost in thought about the water now. What if everything was being caused by a curse to the water itself? She couldn't tell, standing there, and she wondered if Snow could tell if she came. There was too much magic everywhere here, and she had trouble unraveling the strands of one from another.
The Beast shook his great shaggy head. “The water is well enough for the plants.” His expression was not readable in the gathering dark, the lupine cast to his muzzle and jaw more profound in profile, accented without the smooth extravagance of the mane. “Just not for you. In fact, I imagine it would be good enough for them.” He thought dark things about fertilizer, but then he sighed deeply, and thought only of this sad use of his fallen comrades. The moat might prosper with plantlife, for that was all that ever would prosper there. All that should, even. In all honesty, the Beast did not think that Rose would be able to revive his mother’s garden, but he thought she might coax one or two of the plants to flower in the spring, at that would easily be enough for him. “The kitchen water is from a well, and for drinking; it’s not deep enough to be cast out in a garden,” he added, disapprovingly.
"I don't understand," she said of the nuances of the water. "Good enough for who?" she asked, wondering who his mysterious them was. She didn't like the look on his great and furry face just then, and she rested her hands on her hips when he said the kitchen water was for drinking. "Then we can catch some rainwater that isn't tainted," she told him. "Or we can go beyond the wall and find a stream," she suggested, looking up as the sky darkened, then darkened more. Her hands moved from her hips, and her arms wound around her. "Do you feel the chill?" she asked him, even as she turned to look mournfully at the vines. "Just a little water from the kitchens this once?" she asked, wanting to get the roots damp before total darkness set in, and not trusting any water in this walled enclave now.
The Beast didn’t answer her first question, thinking about his lost ones under the bleak black surface of the water, wondering as he always did what might happen if he splashed down into the water to join them. Her words sank slowly through the practiced melancholy, and he blinked hard and gave his prickling fur a hard shake. Paw by paw, he backed away from the edge of the fountain. The unnatural chill settled heavily over his feathered shoulders, and he loomed near her, head peering up toward the sky. “It is not necessary. I think it will rain soon, and besides, if you water them now, will the water not freeze in the night?” The Beast knew next to nothing about keeping roses. His knowledge encompassed which things in the forest were good to eat and which would boil your insides with hellish fire. He belonged in the herb garden.
"I'm not going to water them. I just want to soak some drops into the ground, so the vines might drink," she explained, though she did not like the way he pawed away. She was going to insist, but she decided, rather unexpectedly, that this would not do for a garden. Surely she could find a place inside? Break through the foundation stones and throw open the stained glass. She wondered about his library, and she wondered if she could find it and make it work. Or another room on the main level? That decided, she turned to look at him, not liking the bleakness on his features. "We should go in," she said, and she turned and headed back the way they'd come, secure in the knowledge that he would follow. "And we need to discuss my visitors. Snow will be coming, and we've asked the witch hunters for assistance," she explained, intentionally putting distance between them, to encourage the chances that he would not argue.
It was the ballroom that looked out over the Queen’s Rose Garden, though there was little left of the windows, which stared with glass-less sockets out over the grim panorama. From the look of the stone, it was not part of the occupied portion of the castle, the majority of which was neglected to save hours and space. “I will have the servants fix the fountain,” he decided, lifting his front and hauling it about in an awkward turn to follow her toward the castle. He paused several times to look up at the sky, feeling it as a witch wind on the back of his neck.
He muttered like a frustrated bird as she brought up visitors. “I will not have visitors,” he growled, increasing his stride without effort so he caught up to her immediately. He craned his neck and took her arm in his jaws, his control such that he could do so without bruising or even pricking the skin with his fangs. His molars were almost bovine in places, and he could snap a doe’s neck without difficulty with jaws alone. He drew her back so she could not retreat, and let her go so he could bump his forehead into her hip in a most proprietary fashion. “Trespassers sneaking in the nooks and crannies where I may not see.” His fur was bristling and he was working himself up into anger. “Foul thieves in the night that do not know doors...”
And yet Snow had come through the front door, and the Beast had not tried to tear her into small bits the way he had the man. It was not actually the people he objected to; it was the fact they were on his territory without his permission, trying to hide from him. It enraged him, and he did not have the presence of mind to notice the difference.
"What servants?" she asked. Surely the candlesticks and brooms couldn't fix anything. Neither could the pots and pans. Anyway, the fountain was the least of the things that needed fixing, but she didn't tell him that. If they were servants, they could help her to relocate the garden. Perhaps some of them would know stories or tales that they could share with her. She didn't have the airs of a princess; she wouldn't mind befriending servants. Perhaps there could be a ball, even.
Her interest still showed on her features when he closed his teeth on her arm, and she frowned and yanked, but not out of fear. "You can't just grab people," she informed him, all pert nose and cheeks gone red from the cold outside. "You can ask me to stop, and I'll stop, if I want to," she explained. She didn't care much for manners, but if they were to have visitors then he couldn't go grabbing them, could he?
"And no one will sneak or thieve," she explained. "They'll announce themselves, and we'll let them sit in the sitting room," she added, getting ahead of herself, swatting at him lightly when he bumped her hip. "And you won't bump them, and you won't drag them everywhere," she added. Though, admittedly, she didn't mind such things herself. She'd always been badly behaved, and she liked the trait in others. Snow could be perfect and adore perfection. She liked cheek and daring, however much she thwapped his nose for it.
The Beast groaned. It sounded like a boat leaving harbor. “Not the sitting room,” he complained. “The parlor is not in shape for guests.” The Beast’s expression turned comical as he closed one eye in pain of the fact that... “I sound just like my mother.” He huffed wet air out of his nose and then dropped his head entirely, ears flat. He disliked the situation, but he was somehow appeased at the idea of people announcing themselves. He could sit and glower at them, and if they so much moved the wrong way toward his Rose, he could bite them. Yes, that sounded quite appealing.
“When I was a man I grabbed at people all the time,” he added, starting on their way again and twitching all his feathers to get the itch out of some of them. His voice sounded suspiciously muffled. “And I did not get slapped nearly as much as you slap me.” It was the first time he had ever alluded to not being as he was always. He waited for her to go first into the smaller wall that enclosed the herb gardens. The smell and warmth of the kitchens beckoned.
She smiled as soon as he said the visitors couldn't be in the sitting room, because she knew the taste of impending victory and the early signs of capitulation; she'd seen them often enough from her mother and Snow, always agreeing to some great and wild scheme of hers. The surprise when he mentioned his own mother made her gaze immediately snap to his face. Despite the knowledge that he was cursed, she seldom thought of things like his family or what life had been like before the curse.
"When you were a man, you could grab men due to your rank, and women due to your face," she reasoned; she'd yet to meet a cursed man who wasn't beautiful. Witches tended to always curse the pretty ones. "But times have changed, and now you must ask," she explained, moving with him and gazing past him into the ballroom, which seemed just the thing. But the warmth of the kitchens beckoned, and she ran ahead, red skirts trailing behind her. "You deserve slapping!" she called out as she went.