blake thorne doesn't believe in (anatkh) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2012-12-15 22:12:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | door: tales, quasimodo, rose red |
Who: Rose and Quasimodo
What: A very brief run in results in a curse.
Where: The Beast's castle (Fairy Tale Door)
When: Recently
Warnings/Rating: None!
Rose was exploring, as Rose was wont to do.
She was in search of the evasive library, and this time she took every set of stairs she could find that led upward, because it seemed a thorough way to do things, to start from the top and go down.
The castle was quiet that day, and she assumed both Beast and brother were through the door and in the mundane world. More time for her to learn the secrets of this place, this prison that was quickly becoming a home.
She was slightly melancholy as she climbed. Draco's dismissal had hit her harder than expected. She had prepared for this, for the fact that he might not choose her, and yet it still stung. He took with him any chance of a life in the sunlight, and she was willing to give up nearly anything for that. It was true that she would miss the Beast, which she would not have admitted to months earlier, but she wasn't made for walls and turrets. She was made for green fields and for things that bloomed, and the Homeland offered none of that. Even if the Beast let her wander free, the entire world was dead and black. She was coaxing roses to life through the now-cracked floor of the ballroom, but they were sad things, hungering for the same thing she so longed for.
These thoughts were all-encompassing, and she was at the topmost step by the time she realized it. She'd never climbed this high, and she wondered what was at the small door that was visible just above her head. She jumped, and she shoved at it, harder and harder, until the wood gave and it creaked open. She was a curious thing, a wild child that didn't respect boundaries, and she crawled up into the attic space. "I didn't know there were attics in castles," she said aloud, her voice echoing down the long, long space.
Quasimodo knew his way around the castle almost as well as he'd known his way through the corridors and stairways of Notre Dame. True, he had not lived in the castle as long, but he had learned its secrets with the help of the magic servants and his own explorations. He knew the secret paths and the hidden vantage points, the bookshelves which slid back and the paintings with small, intricately worked doors hidden in their canvases. He knew the stone, and he knew the view from the windows of his room. In his time there, he had grown comfortable, at ease with the drafty, almost haunted place. It was a haven, his tower room a place where he could retreat with books. He'd become very fond of tea, and of coffee, two things he'd never been allowed when he was living in the cathedral, and which remained decadent pleasures he had to force himself not to drink too quickly. He didn't know where the servants found food to serve when nothing went in or out of the castle, but, once upon a time, this grand place must have supported a great many people. Perhaps there was a magic larder in the depths somewhere, or perhaps the creature downstairs coaxed a tithe from surviving peasants. He doubted that. The only people he had seen on his way to the castle had been skeletons.
Yes, all around was bleak, but inside was shelter from the unknown, a place he tarried still. One day, he would leave. One day when he no longer felt so sure of what the world held for one such as him. He did not know when that day would come.
When the girl moved into the castle, though, things changed. He had seen a little of her, watching through chinks in the mortar and around the edge of doorways. He had heard the creature downstairs speak to her, and been surprised to find that it - he - could speak. It was almost enough to prompt Quasimodo to approach him, but not quite. The memory of what could happen when he went amongst people hadn't faded, and while he might hold his own against a mob, the Beast had the advantage of being able to tear him apart.
He'd moved more softly, and more carefully. He'd kept out of rooms he used to enjoy wandering through, like the ballroom, though the roses had caught his attention. One night, after the girl had gone to bed and the creature had stilled in whatever part of the castle he slept, Quasimodo had stolen down to the ballroom and uprooted one of the flowers. It was growing from the floor, and he thought he might let it keep growing in his room. It would be nice to have something so beautiful to look at. He packed dry earth around it and watered it carefully, leaving it in the sill with the curtain drawn back during the day so it could soak up the weak sun. But the rose withered and died, to his heartache.
All in all, Quasimodo had done everything in his power to stay away from the girl. She seemed to be some sort of prisoner of the Beast’s, but they did talk quite a bit.There was no telling how she might react if she saw him. After that, it would only be a matter of time before the Beast discovered him, and then he would, of course, need to flee the castle.
For this reason, hearing her voice ring out while he was winding through a vast, cluttered attic space sent him into a blind panic. The door that led from the attic to the tower stair was halfway across the room, past the debris of years. There were broken chairs, old chests of drawers, castoff dolls and reliquary cabinets, backed up against mouldering bookshelves and musty furniture covered with cloth. They hid him from sight, but only until she found her way through the maze.
He began moving toward the exit as quietly and quickly as possible, but, in his panic, his cloak became caught on the protruding leg of a chair, and he stumbled and fell. The cloak was usually an asset. It fought the castle's chilly drafts, and made the psychological risk of being outside his safe haven easier to bear. There was no one in the castle to see him but the servants and the Beast, and the cloak, with its deep hood, had been more for his own comfort than anything else. Now, though, with the girl here, it was meant to serve a more practical purpose. He tugged on it to free it, but it had snagged on a nail, and he succeeded only in tearing it further before it came free. More noise. She would undoubtedly come toward the source of the sound, soon, and be upon him any second. He began to stagger to his feet, his leg sending a spike of pain through him when he put his foot down.
He might have managed it, avoiding her notice. Rose was impatient, and she tired of games almost as quickly as her face lit up with the pleasure of them. She was a wild creature of novelty, one that wouldn't overturn every stone or pull back every drape. Even bored, she wouldn't have the patience for it. So, yes, he might have managed it, avoiding her altogether, even up in the attic space. But the cloak catching on the nail did him in. Someone stumbling and falling meant there was someone there who she didn't know about at all and, for someone as starved for human interaction at Rose, that was something not to be ignored.
She ran toward the noise, her feet thundering little things on the attic floor. "Is someone there?" she asked, though she knew perfectly that someone was. "Please don't be magic furniture," she pleaded. She couldn't stand another enchanted chair, even up here. "Hello? You can come out. My name is Rose." Harmless, little thing that she was, all ginger and youth and nothing to be frightened of.
Quasimodo shut his eyes for a brief moment, yanking harder on the cloak. Finally, finally it came loose, with a sound of tearing cloth. She was so close, her voice and those pattering feet coming ever nearer, and there was no use in pretending not to be there anymore. "Go away," he attempted, in as rough a growl as he had in him. Such utterances, combined with his terrifying appearance, had often cleared a path for him when he had occasionally been forced to do the archdeacon's business on the streets of Paris. Perhaps it would be enough to hold her back now.
He began hobbling for the exit, cloak still half off. He couldn't quite get it over his crooked back, nor the hood over his head. Then his damaged foot caught on an uneven floorboard. He cursed with a note of real pain, reaching out for the wall, and caught himself just before he fell.
He looked back over his shoulder to check that she was still out of sight, just in time to see Rose come around the corner into view. His eyes widened, and he froze. Here it was, his fear realized. The pretty young thing might have been a monster in the night, with the fear she put into him. Now it would all go wrong.
The cloak half off, his twisted body was obvious to the point of obscenity to most eyes. Even without leaning on the wall for support, his crooked back wouldn't allow him to straighten completely. He seemed badly put together, as if someone had been given a set of human parts and had been unable to make them match as they should. His clothes were clean but dingy, scavenged from abandoned rooms. He had no hair, only the patchy black suggestion of where hair might have grown, mismatched and strange, if he did not shave it down. His exposed skin was a mess of scaled red patches, scars, deformations, and protuberances, including a heavy one at his left brow. He would have been tall if he had been able to stand to his full height, but instead his hunched back simply made him only seem bigger, somehow. His feet were pigeoned inward, pulling his knees together, adding to his appearance of bentness, crookedness, wrongness. His eyes though, were clear blue, and they met hers in that brief moment of contact before either of them could react.
Rose was used to the Beast's growls, terrible and loud things intended to intimidate. Compared to those, the command to go away - growled or not - seemed very unimpressive. And she was too interested, too entirely curious to not follow when she saw that hobbled cloak making for the exit she hadn't realized was there.
She ran and blocked his way just after his foot caught the uneven footboard, after he'd spied her, and she stepped back just before he caught himself. She was close now, a mere two feet, and the sound he made reminded her of an injured animal. Rose was too much of a child of the woods not to react to that pained sound, and she rushed forward those two steps, her fingers lighting on his cloak, not immediately noticing the twists and turns beneath the fabric.
She noticed the lack of hair first. It was a strange thing to notice, but she spent most of her time in the company of a creature that was covered in fur, and her mind had trouble recognizing something inhumane that was not the Beast. Her blue eyes widened and widened when his own gaze caught hers.
And then she began edging backward. Slow. Slow. Step. Step.
This was not the Beast, and it was no human, and she had trouble making sense of it. When she'd first met the creature that kept her prisoner, she'd been prepared. The merchant's ramblings had led her to understand that she was being delivered to a cursed thing, a nonhuman mishmash of animal parts. But here, here there was no warning. She'd been expecting a servant, one that had not been transfigured. She did not come face-to-face with that at all.
She was five steps away by the time she screamed.
She didn't notice the magic swirling around the space, the thick and bitter taste of it on the air. It circled her, enveloped her, and then it reached its long vines toward him. It wasn't a thinking thing, and Rose would never say she could cast curses. She was a weird of the woods, yes, but she undid curses, and not the other way around. But fear does strange things, and the bitter-smoke vines wrapped around the broken man in the room, and they hugged him tight, and then they were gone, along with the red-haired girl, who was running down the stairs, screaming about a monster in the attic. Luckily, neither Beast nor Faust were home to hear the commotion, and she hid herself in her room for the remainder of the day, until the door kicked her back.
For once, she didn't pester Olive about returning.
Quasimodo hadn't expected the girl to come so close, but had foreseen the shock, the terror in her eyes when she finally looked at him. That was the way of the world. Hidden, she had rushed to help him. Seeing his true nature, she was repulsed.
He wasn't quite sure what happened next, except that something flowed from the girl over him, some foul magic he could taste on his tongue, and he threw up an arm in front of his face to defend himself from whatever harm she might inflict on him, pulling back. Though many people had attacked him when offended by the sight of him, he hadn’t expected the girl to be capable of such a thing. The girl screamed, and 'monster' echoed around the attic room. Quasimodo braced himself for pain, for scalding, or perhaps for some fell curse that twisted him even further.
He took a breath. Then he took a second, still with his arm across his face, still waiting for the terrible consequence of those grasping vines of power. When nothing came - when nothing happened at all - he slowly dropped his arm away from his face. The girl was gone.
He looked down at himself. Nothing had changed. All his twisted limbs were where he expected them to be, every blemish still in place. He did not burn, and he had not been transformed into some creature, a toad or a dragon. No blood leaked from his eyes, and no insects fell from his mouth. If the girl had intended to hurt him, she hadn’t done a very good jo
He reached laboriously for his half-fallen cloak, dragging it back over his shoulder, and shuffled toward the door. Once through it, he climbed to his tower. Best that he begin packing his few things now, before she had time to send the Beast tearing through the castle for him.
The girl was the first human he had seen in who knew how many years, and she had reacted in just the same way so many would again. He felt guilty and angry at once, sorry for scaring her and bitter that she’d been so terrified in the first place. How terrible it was to think that, though the fear and hate the world held for him had not changed in the years he had been in the castle, he would, because the girl had seen him, soon have no choice but to go amongst people like her again.