Who: Faust, Quasimodo, Rose Where: Beast's Castle When: Recently! What: Faust reintroduces Quasimodo and they play with some weird scroll Warnings: None!
In a way, Faust was happy to be locked in a castle with such a strange, small group of people. He was sure that he could leave when it suited him, but his magic wasn’t strong enough to drag anyone else along. So, what was the point? For now Rose seemed happy to throw him into a societal arena with her family, friends and just about anyone else that could get snared up in her trouble. And, Quasimodo was the sort of kind, hapless soul that Faust felt compelled to protect. Either out of a memory for Gretchen or something else in him that wished to repent for the damage he had done before landing in this new world. Before him were the people and problems that he felt able to solve without much magic or selling his soul. And, that’s what Faust needed now more than anything else.
Dressed like some old fashioned scholar in long brown pants, a gold vest and a (still too puffy for his tastes) white shirt, he braved up the castle stairs towards the attic. He hadn’t actually visited Quasimodo since their face to face meeting at the party, but he had intended to. Especially after hearing about the strange curse or charm that had been placed on him. Grey insisted that Quasimodo’s name was one that was synonymous with hunchback, but Faust had never seen any evidence of that. How strange, he thought, a man who thought he was a deformed monster, but was given the chance to be something else? Was that a fortunate thing or truly a curse that Faust was only pushing the poor man closer to.
Faust wished sometimes that he had the hesitation of most mortal men. Unfortunately, dancing with demons tended to change that notion quickly.
“Quasimodo!” His voice was loud, but kind as if he were calling his new friend down for supper. “Let’s have a look at you.” Faust knew saying something like that was a bit unkind, but the poor man would have to get used to people looking.
The tower in which Quasimodo whiled away his hours stretched up and away from the attic, but the attic itself offered a neat shortcut to it. A hidden door at the far end opened out halfway up the spiral stairs which led to his adopted home.
Quasimodo had known that Faust was coming, and thus he had prepared accordingly, dressing in his usual deep hood and cloak before he heard the voice echoing down the short passage through the stairs below. He shut the door to the tower room securely behind him, but did not lock it - he had no key, and there was really no need. No one ever came up so high, except for that girl, and now Faust.
He stepped through the passage into the attic a few moments after Faust called out his name. Let’s have a look at you. So far as Quasimodo was concerned, no one in their right mind should have any desire to have a look at him, unless they were so blind that he was nothing more than a blur of color. He wore a dark scarf around his face, this time, more comfortable than the rag he had worn at the party but just as carefully obscuring. His leg had begun to heal after the spill he had taken in the attic while running from Rose, in no small part due to the poultice and wraps left for him on a tray by one of his invisible friends. Where he would be without their kindness, he had no idea. If nothing else, they were the best servants anyone had ever known, helping him without compunction, even keeping him silent company on occasion. The castle had been mostly empty so long that he had to assume they must long for any kind of human presence, to spend time with him. He knew they had thoughts, because they did communicate with him sometimes, in gestures and kind offerings that showed a kind of understanding no simple spell could conjure up.
As far as interacting with visible people was concerned, though, Quasimodo was not sure he was ready to try talking to Rose in person again. Sending her letters had seemed like a good enough idea, because it did not involve going face to face and subjecting himself to the kind of disgust he had long grown inured to, but still had no interest in provoking. Faust, though, had been very kind to him, and Quasimodo liked talking to him very much. Though he expected Faust would soon tire of the novelty of him, the mystery he offered, he did want to take advantage of this brief chance at friendship for as long as he might.
So he wound his way through the attic. “I am here,” Quasimodo called, in that same voice from the party, deep and rough as river rocks. The room was full of cast off furniture and objects from the rest of the castle, some covered in drop cloths, just shapes in the dim, so it took a few moments for him to pick his way through to find Faust. When he did, he came to a halt, and then, remembering he ought to somehow indicate respect, he bowed his head. He didn’t really understand etiquette, mostly, but he’d read about it, and seen it take place in Paris when he was allowed out on errands. Thus the bow of his head was too quick, and a little stiff. The thought was there, though. Faust was a gentleman, and since he’d actually behaved like one, he ought to be treated as such. Now, offering respect to those who hadn’t earned it - that was a skill Quasimodo had no interest in mastering.
Faust gave an amused smirk when Quasimodo bowed his head and returned the gesture naturally as if he were passing someone he knew on the street. There was a good chance that the main reason why he and the former hunchback got along was that Faust rarely mocked anyone. Cruel wasn’t something Faust had ever been. Just too curious for his own good and easily the type who would get burned by it over and over without learning his lesson. He liked pushing people, especially if he thought it would do them some good. Which explained why he was up here, asking Quasimodo to take one of the biggest leaps of faith in his life.
“Now, Rose is going to need to see some immediate differences from what she described.” Faust spoke plainly, hands on his hips as he looked over the scarf and old cloak. “First, stand up as straight as you can. I know that must sound preposterous, but honestly this whole situation is a bit strange.” He turned a little, realizing there wasn’t much light up here and seemed to pull a candle out of thin air. With a snap of his fingers it was lit. “I think first we might need to replace the cloak.” His expression turned as if he were deciding the right color and fashion. With a barely there movement of his hand, Quasimodo’s cloak turned a deep blue and fit him like a wealthy man going out for a trek across the grounds or out to survey a building in the freeze of winter.
It was difficult not to blanch immediately at the idea of 'standing up straighter', and trying to make himself look 'different' to Rose when she had already made her assessment of him very clear. There was only so straight he could stand, after all, but he did his best. When he stood he usually bent himself a bit forward, since doing so hid the hump on his back a bit better and made it easier to get around. Making himself smaller had always seemed like a good idea.
When Quasimodo straightened, his muscles protested. The posture was not so terrible painful, but one he was no longer particularly accustomed to. Even to himself, with all the deformities only he could apparently see, he was a tall man when he straightened his back, shoulders still slouched forward a bit by necessity.
The sudden appearance of the candle caught Quasimodo's eye immediately, and he started slightly. "What?" He knew Faust had magic, but he hadn’t seen it firsthand aside from the warming of his cider at the party. Then his cloak was changing, and he took a step back, looking down at himself as rough wool spun itself soft and heavy, lined with silk. It was richer than anything he'd ever owned in his life. He gingerly touched the fine fabric, looking at the intense blue between his thin, crooked fingers. It was a beautiful cloak. On him, it seemed all the stranger, all the more absurd. "I feel like a dog wearing a crown," he said. Even if Faust could not see it, he knew that, were he himself to look in a mirror, he would see only a dressed-up hunchback, like a beast playacting at nobility. It had to seem a bad joke. "I was king at the fête des fous once," he said. "It is like that."
Faust made a disgusted sound. “This is why I only play with pirates. They don’t usually have time for mockery celebrations. Only drunken ones.” He considered himself to be far from a Christian man, but he didn’t laugh at the lowest in society. It was common for the aristocrats he burned and annoyed to spend hours laughing and gossiping over anyone who slipped from perfection and it sickened him. What a waste of breath, a waste of knowledge, a waste of humanity. “I won’t pretend that I understand how it feels, Quasimodo. But, perhaps after meeting a couple people this way, you’ll become accustomed to this gift.” The tall man refused to call it a curse. In a way it was before Quasimodo would never truly grasp how much he had changed, but the fact that he had was a gift.
There was a small pause of hesitation as Faust tried to decide if he wanted to rid Quasimodo of his scarf, but decided Rose would ask him to remove it anyway. Better to get comfortable with being looked at now instead of in front of the girl he was trying to make a second impression on. With barely a snap, the scarf was gone and Faust brought the candle up to look at Quasimodo’s face. A hum of thought and then, “We could be brothers. This is remarkable.”
"Gift," Quasimodo repeated, with no small amount of scorn mixed with his wonder. How could he appreciate a gift he could not see, that he only knew of through Faust's insistence? The itch of how and why were almost painful. What had caused this? How long might it last? Could it be rudely stripped from him at any moment, or would he spend the rest of his life knowing the stinging irony of his own form, invisible to everyone else?
Quasimodo had not expected to have his scarf stripped away so quickly, and so without warning. One moment it was there, the next, gone. He did actually flinch this time, turning his head partially away before Faust's observation sank in. He turned back a little, looking over at him, clearly suspicious. It was almost impossible to believe. Could this all be some grand joke at his expense? Could Faust really not see the scars and knotted tissue, the bulge of protruding bone, the mottled skin?
Under the candle, Quasimodo did look more than a little like Faust. Strikingly prominent cheekbones offset a narrow face and thin mouth. Handsome, if in an unconventional way. The face he would have had if all had gone right with his birth, instead of so very wrong. "...Could we?" he asked, trying not to seem too expectant, too much like he wanted to believe him. But he did. He had prayed since he was a boy that, someday, he might perhaps be good enough that a miracle would occur, and his body would be made whole and kindly fashioned. When he grew older, and years of spitting, mockery, and pain began to paint a darker world, he had begun to wish that he might be made entirely a beast. That way, he might be fully one thing or the other, not caught grotesquely between human and not. To see Faust look back at him with no sign of shock or disgust was almost too much to believe, too easy a thing to hope for, and too easy a thing to feel the creep of bitterness about. How easy it was to change one's world, if one could only change their appearance.
He met Faust's gaze. "And you are sure it is not just you?" There was always the chance that Faust, with his magic and his various eccentricities (stories about meeting demons had not been forgotten) was merely mad.
Faust’s eyes brightened at the final question, suddenly feeling more and more like Merlin or some other ancient wizard that did good but couldn’t be completely trusted to see things the same way everyone else did. “That is a possibility that has not occurred to me.” He said honestly, with an amused smirk. The humor in it died quickly, however. If Faust was mad and had imagined this whole thing, then his mistake was ten times worse than a celebration for fools or any kind of simple cruelty a man could give him. Faust knew the power of false hope, how crushing it could be, especially on a person so delicate as this former hunchback. Not to mention, if he was mad, he likely shouldn’t stay in the castle any longer. Eccentricities were one thing, but if his mind was completely gone, then he couldn’t be trusted with an ounce of magic.
“We can not know for sure until you meet Rose. If she still gasps at you in horror, then I’m afraid I’ll never be able to repay you.” Faust put a hand on Quasimodo’s shoulder. “But, I don’t think I could have imagined up something like this. So, if you’re sure, let’s not waste another moment.”
Quasimodo wasn't sure. He was even less sure now than he had been a moment before, now that Faust, too, had expressed doubt. But what, in the end, was the worst that could happen? The girl could again flee in disgust. Nothing he hadn't seen before.
He would resolve not to hope. "Agreed," he said, allowing himself to at least take the hand on his shoulder as a momentary comfort. Physical contact was not something he was much accustomed to unless it was violent. Quasimodo began to move again after a moment's hesitation, toward the door at the other end of the attic. "Where is she?" he asked. Going toward the girl instead of keeping entirely clear of her went against all his instincts, but this had to happen, now. Best that it did in a setting where he was unlikely to get eaten by a Beast if he frightened her.
Faust gave an encouraging nod of his head with a smile. This wasn’t the first time he talked someone into doing a remarkably regrettable thing. He blew out his candle and in an instant it was gone from his hands entirely. The tall man turned, venturing back down the stairs towards “I asked her to meet me down near the garden entrance. There’s a scroll she was given for the holidays that I want to look over before she does anything with it.” And, there was a glimpse to the troublemaking pair that Faust and Rose could be. He’d rather see what something could do than recoil in fear and lock it away forever. But, then again, he encouraged most people to tiptoe farther over the line than they normally would.
“Remember to look her in the eyes occasionally. Constant eye contact is unnecessary and strange, but if you don’t make it once and awhile she’ll assume we’re hiding something.” Faust advised, though there wasn’t a whole lot to teach Quasimodo for now. Rose might have been a princess, but she was a fellow wild child who valued things beyond good manners and sticky charm. This tall wizard didn’t have a large enough pool of examples to know what Rose valued in a man, but she assumed kindness couldn’t hurt. And, Quasimodo had enough of that for the three of them.
Finally reaching the back door towards the garden, Faust rose his voice. “Rose?” He poked his head outside to see if she had wandered off ahead of them and then looked back inside. Faust gave Quasimodo one last look of courage. A smirk that was both frustratingly wise and foolish at the same time.
Rose had wandered off ahead. She was terrible at sitting still, staying put, being idle. It had driven Snow crazy when they were young, Rose's need to be everywhere all at once, doing something, even when she was doing nothing at all. She'd lingered where Faust had asked her to, but only for a few minutes before the fountain across the garden caught her attention. No, not the fountain precisely - the water. The Beast had cautioned her never to drink it, and now she knew why. She peered down into it, imagining she could see limbs floating beneath the murky surface, but even that grew tiresome after awhile, and she left it behind in favor of the items in her hand.
She held the scroll from the stockings and one of the colorful tomes that Blue had helped her acquire, and she sat on the edge of the fountain, all copper hair and a dress in pink that draped over the stone edge of the fountain and dragged into the water without her notice.
She remained like that until she heard Faust's voice, at which point she climbed atop the fountain edge to help her voice carry to the castle entrance. "I'm here!" she yelled, a tiny dervish balancing on the tips of her feet to make herself taller. The colorful book was still clutched between her fingers, two pages folded back and the tale coming alive with a brilliance that didn't exist anywhere in the Beast's castle. The darkness had abated, yes, but the world was still dead and dull-dark tones.
Quasimodo managed a small smile in return, but there was no hiding his nerves. He wasn't afraid of the girl, that would be ridiculous. It was what she represented, the thousandth turning-out-of-doors she might put into action because of her privileged position with the Beast.
He had been in the garden before. The world outside the castle was perpetually barren and cold, but Quasimodo liked being outside every once in awhile. He occasionally went there at night, when the moonlight poured down on everything and gave it a kinder cast. The sun in this place just made everything seem bleak and blanched of light.
The figure that popped up on the edge of the fountain looked a little like a doll from a distance. A very active, very restless doll, perhaps, in her wet-hemmed, heavily swinging pink dress, brandishing her book. Quasimodo glanced over at Faust again, but then began walking down to the fountain, disappearing out of Rose’s sight into the barren greenery. He walked a little ahead of his companion across the short distance, and it wasn't long before he found his way to the fountain. He had visited it before himself, and knew it well. He’d never drunk from it either - call it a bad feeling.
Quasimodo stepped out from between black plants and trees, step slowing for just a moment before he broke free from them, and stopped before the girl.
They had met before, obviously, but it had hardly been much of a meeting. He remembered her face, though - it had burned into his memory when she did whatever it was she had done to him, in that moment when he had been as convinced she wanted to do him harm as she had been that he would do the same to her. He paused for a moment, then reached up and pulled back his hood. To his mind, it was a defiant kind of gesture. If this was all a lie, or something only Faust could see, then he would flatly expose to her even more of his ugliness. If, in the next moment, she screamed, or ran again, or spit on him, she would deserve nothing less than an offense to her sight. There was a kind of bitter dignity in his blue eyes, precisely the same as the ones she'd seen before, and in the sharp incline of his head to her.
Unbeknownst to him, however, all he revealed was a shock of wavy red hair. "Mademoiselle Rose." The voice that ground like a millstone was the same as the one that had told her to leave him alone. And if there was any further doubt, he was still favoring his left leg a little, leaning his weight onto the right.
Rose had jumped down from her makeshift stone throne before the man in the hood arrived, all bare feet and toes digging into the dead earth that she'd been trying to coax to life. And there were signs of it, bits of green through the muck and the defiant flower or two. But the outside world held too much magic for her own grace with flowers, and it resisted her. Through the broken window at her back, the ballroom could be seen. It was blocked inside, not accessible as many parts of the castle weren't, but she had broken through the ground stones there and grown some bushes. Curious little roses (since the Beast liked those best) that turned their petaled faces toward the sunlight and the stranger outside, as if they had sentience and could watch such things unfold as their petals did.
And Rose, Rose had been expecting Faust and the creature from the turrets, but this was no creature, and she turned to look for her "brother" for a moment. Was this Blue? Had Faust already spoken to him? It didn't look like the one called Blue in the tome she had forgotten between her fingers, but Snow didn't look like Snow in the book either. A squint of bright blue eyes and a curiouser look, and she edged closer to the newcomer fearlessly. Too close, but then Rose cared not for propriety, and the tips of her dirty bare toes met with the stranger's shoes.
"Just Rose," she finally said. "Who has Faust brought to see me?" she asked, and she looked for Faust again, then. Whoever it was, they would need to build a lie for him. The Beast was starting to grow displeased with all her visitors. He had agreed that Blue could come, but only with supervision. "Faust, brother," she called, "is this a relative I don't remember?" she asked, because he did look like he could be a sibling to the mischievous man that had taken up residence under the guise of sibling.
Faust watched the two, feeling very much like an older brother trying to make amends between his quarrelling siblings. He liked this sort of thing and thought that he could probably keep meddling in everyone’s lives until he managed to really burn some bridges. “He very well could be.” He said finally, popping his top hat out of thin air and placing it on his head. “This is Quasimodo. You two met once under different circumstances and as promised, I’ve decided to reintroduce you to him.” Faust walked over to them, taking each of their shoulders and lightly pulling Rose away just a nose so Quasimodo had some breathing room.
“He lives in the attic, though I think we ought to consider finding him a proper room.” Faust let the both of them go and crossed his arms lightly over his chest. “Well, maybe not. I keep forgetting this place is haunted by a man-eating beast. I can make the attic less gloomy, perhaps.” He suggested, though he suspected Quasimodo had grown accustomed to living between old forgotten antiques and dust.
Quasimodo had no idea what to make of this girl who came up so close that she ought to be able to see every flaw in his malformed face, yet did not flinch an inch. The surprise was in his eyes, as he pulled away a little from her sharp stare. Faust had been right all along. No one saw of him what he saw, anymore.
The strangest of it was, Quasimodo didn't know whether he ought to thank her or shake her for what she'd done to him. It would be some time before he knew whether this spell was a curse or a blessing, miracle or punishment. Clearly she wasn't aware she'd done anything, if it was, indeed, her who did it.. There was no spark of recognition there in her eyes, and when Faust reintroduced him, he did not incline his head again. He was grateful when Faust separated them by a few inches, the breathing room much appreciated. Even if she couldn't see what he really was, it didn't make him any more comfortable with that kind of scrutiny than he had ever been.
"The tower beside the attic, actually," Quasimodo said, though it mattered little. His attention only pulled away from Rose and her inquisitive stare when Faust mentioned finding him another room. "There is no need. Thank you, monsieur, but I am plus confortable where I am." Introducing him to Rose and bringing him out into the world a step at a time was one thing, but it was a comfort to know there was still a safe haven in the castle he could return to, too high for the Beast to follow, with only one way in and one way out. "Heights suit me," he said, with a faint smile, and then looked back to the unpredictable Rose, as if she might jump on him at any moment.
Rose's attention turned to Faust for a brief flicker, when he pulled her back, but it skittered right back to the newcomer, the stranger in their midst. "You're not what I saw in the attic," she insisted, less willing to believe this story than she had been willing to believe the stranger to be sibling of her friend in the top hat. No, she remembered the creature from the attic precisely, and she walked back and around, circling the man - Quasimodo, was it? - like a tiny copper vulture. There was no hump (she poked where it should be), and there was no misshapen head (she tugged the cloak away the remainder of the way), and there was no uneven legs or odd gait (she edged, edged, edged closer until he had no choice but to move).
No, Rose thought, most certainly not the same man. "Did you magic him?" she asked Faust, even as she remembered the scroll and the spell and handed it over to him.
"Did he magic you?" she asked Quasimodo a second later, in case Faust lied. She was a liar herself, so she knew people who were capable of it; Faust was absolutely capable of it. It was one of his more dangerous (and therefore entertaining) qualities. "You can tell me the truth. I already told the Beast about the creature in the attic, and if you want to pass yourself off as him, so that you can stay, I won't tell," she offered, thinking she'd found the game.
Faust rubbed his hand over his face, closing his eyes with a sigh. “I didn’t magic anyone.” It was good that Quasimodo’s transformation was so severe that it allowed Rose to look upon him without fear, but it hadn’t crossed his mind that the girl wouldn’t believe him. “I think you accidentally magic’d him, actually.” He lowered his hand and looked to Rose with an uncharacteristically serious expression. “When you two first met, you hit him with something. A sort of spell or curse. It’s made it so Quasimodo here looks different to you and I, but to him he’s still deformed.”
Even though everything was as Faust saw it, the two of them were starting to make him feel a little bit mad. Maybe this was still part of being the local wizard. He’d see things clearly even if the rest of them could not. Still, if Rose didn’t start trusting him when the strange and mystifying happened, then they’d never last in this castle very long together. The same went for Quasimodo. And, maybe asking for trust after being a notoriously comfortable liar was too much, but it was only way these three redheads were going to survive.
Quasimodo did not like to be poked. He did not like to be scrutinized, and he most certainly did not like to be talked about like an inhuman monster who had appeared from nowhere like the villain of a children’s story. "I am not a creature," he said. Another man might have drawn himself up defensively, but such posturing was not in him. He pulled back from Rose, though, turning on her when she poked at him so she could not do it again. He had no experience whatsoever at hiding his emotions, and so all the bitterness showed raw and plain on his face. "I am a man like any man, not a witch's child or a monster come to take you in the night. I told you to leave me be, but you would not go, and I am not responsible for frightening you. And perhaps I am more pleasing to your eye now, because of whatever curse or spell you have cast on me to suit me better to your sight, but I am now what I was then." It was bizarre, to be present for his own abuse in such a way, to be one of the people party to it. Stranger still, when he had been in Paris, and people on street corners had huddled and gossiped about his deformities, or shouted in his face, he had been deaf. He had read lips to learn what they thought of him, how they despised him. Now every word she said came across crystal clear, ‘creature’ echoing in his ears, an entirely new medium of disgust.
'I unmagic people," Rose explained with a frown. True, she'd never been able to do it without Snow, but that's how it had worked before. Since Snow left, it had only been flowers and things that grew, but before then it had been curses and spells. But never casting them.
She turned back toward Quasimodo when the man spoke. She was willing to believe Faust, however unlikely his words, but she hadn't been expecting the stranger's anger. She was a naive thing, for all her bad and worldly behavior, and she didn't see the harm in calling a creature by its name. But then Quasimodo kept on, and Rose cast a look in Faust's direction, even as her cheeks flushed with emotion. She didn't like being chastised, and she didn't like being treated like a child. She could be harmless fun, yes, but she had thorns when she felt injured - like now.
"I call the beast a Beast, and he thinks nothing of it. We all call him that, so don't lecture me. And as a witch's daughter, I could be just as offended by what you just said. I am a witch's child," she said proudly, burr beneath her skin and her expression shifting to guilt a moment later. She knew of slurs; of course she did. Had she not been the Lady Whore in her sister's kingdom?
"I didn't mean to curse you, if I did," she said apologetically, though she saw no harm in it. But she left it there, and she nodded toward the scroll Faust held. "I believe the magic says to blow upon it, brother."
“You have to understand he’s not used to taking name calling in stride, Rose.” Faust’s voice raised as if he were trying to smooth over both of their emotions by taking control of this strange situation. This was what he signed up for when he agreed to play big brother, but who knew it would be so frustrating? He should have known that the two of them wouldn’t have gotten along right away, but Faust had always believed that the people he liked would have liked each other. This was a mistake. The tall man in the hat turned to look at Quasimodo with a glance like this is the best we’re going to get and turned to Rose as the subject changed.
Faust held the scroll up, a studious look over his face. “It would take me a long time to decipher what it might do and I might very well accidentally destroy it in the process.” He said honestly, not recognizing anything remotely similar to the dark arts in his own land. “However, I don’t see any demonic signs or anything suggesting dark alchemy.” With a final glance over the front and back and rub of the paper between his fingers, Faust gave the scroll back to Rose. “That’s plenty good reason to try it out. Quasimodo. My apologies if our curiosity kills you. Here, let’s stand a couple feet upwind from her just in case.” He gestured behind them and after taking a couple paces, waited for Rose to use her new magic scroll.
Quasimodo could hardly believe that Rose became angry at him for being angry at her, but such was the way of people. It wasn't much of a revelation that she was a witch's child - who else could have cursed him in such a way? He had not meant the words as a slur on anyone, just repeated what he himself had been called. He did not bother to defend himself, though. Rose seemed to him a petulant girl, though her apology blunted the edge of her angry response a little. Either way, it was as he had expected. She did not like him, and though his outside could, apparently, change, he did not think there would ever be a day when calling him a creature or a monster would not sting him inside. He caught Faust's look, then backed away as he was told. He'd had more than enough magic in his life, recently, and had nothing to contribute to their talk of what was on the scroll. So he made no reply, not to Faust, and not to Rose, watching the scroll itself and waiting to see what madness even more magic was bound to create.
Rose didn't understand why Quasimodo was so delicate, but then she had grown up in a world where she was called a Weird, and where trolls and monsters and cursed bears and beasts wandered the woods, and where everything was called as it was. And Quasimodo had scared her in the attic, and she didn't need to apologize for being afraid. But, for Faust, she held her tongue and said nothing more about it. She hadn't demanded that Quasimodo leave the castle the first time she saw him, and she wasn't going to do it now, though she very much felt that he judged her as Snow did, and found her wanting in a very similar fashion.
Instead, she turned her attention to the scroll that was between her fingers once more. She waited for Quasimodo to back away, and she waited for Faust to do the same. It didn't surprise her that she was left standing alone with the scroll, but then she'd never feared much of anything, not after the initial dread wore off. She lifted the scroll and, after one glance over her shoulder at Quasimodo and Faust, she blew on it.
The magic was a heady thing, a rush of bitter and sweet on the air that swirled around her and paid no mind to who was upwind or downwind. The spell brushed over the garden in front of them, turning the grass green first, and the woods brown next. The leaves filled in, and things bloomed, as if it was spring instead of mid-winter. Behind her, the same swoosh and swirl of magic hugged the two men close, before spreading out and doing more of the same, until they were left standing in a garden so overgrown and vibrant that vines climbed the walls and the canopy of trees nearly blocked out the sun, save for rays that made it through the dense branches. Flowers dotted bushes and branches, white and pink, and Rose turned to Faust with a bright copper smile. "It worked." And, oh, it was beautiful.
Faust gave Rose a nod of confidence, unafraid of the horrors that might be on the scroll, but feeling somewhat responsible for Quasimodo. All of this was a lot for a hermit up in his tower to take in all at once. He squinted when she blew over the scroll, watching with delight as the garden brightened around them. Faust grinned back at Rose, then to Quasimodo as if some weight was lifted off his shoulders. “My god.” He held onto his hat instinctively, instantly walking forward to investigate the garden. This had to be some kind of trick? But, no. The petals of the pink flowers were soft and real in his hand, the scent of the garden flushed over him in a pleasant wave.
“Do you think it’s gone past the castle walls?” Faust was knee deep in a colorful array of flowers, hand moving over the rough, healthy bark of a nearby tree as if he had never been outside before. It had felt like a long time stuck in this dank, cold castle surrounded by frozen death.
The sheer magnitude of the spell caught Quasimodo completely off guard, and his alarm at the intensity and breadth of it pushed aside the sting of Rose's words. He was understandably a little wary of magic these days, and the rush of it around them both left him wondering whether he'd come out of this one cursed or blessed or back the way he'd started. The magic wound around them and then went on past them, a relief, and then a wonder.
Paris had been a little like this in the spring, but he had hardly ever gone out into it when it was bright and beautiful. At night, a few times, Quasimodo had walked in the parks, but never like this, in the open air, in a garden full of flowers and living things. He reached down to touch the grass. Real, and so lush! The vegetation softened the harsh lines of the castle. He wondered how long it had been since this place looked this way. Had it ever?
So much beauty was overwhelming after years of misery and a barren landscape outside the window of his quiet tower. He had never thought things could change, but perhaps his own shift in situation ought to have shown how quickly that could happen. It was difficult to resist the temptation to go wandering through the garden. "It is beautiful," Quasimodo said, with open awe, plucking a small pink blossom from a tree branch that, a moment before, had been little more than a blackened claw. "A miracle."
"It's not a miracle," Rose corrected, but she was all smiles and girlish pleasure. "It's magic." And with that, she set off to find out if what Faust suspected was true. She had scaled so many trees as a child that she had lost count. Her knees had been perpetually skinned when she was little, her elbows too, and her dresses had all borne matching grass-green stains that would never come out. She ran past Quasimodo, past Faust, copper hair tangling here and there, and her bare feet kicking up new grass and dirt.
The tree she scaled was the same one Faust had fallen from upon arriving, and maybe she climbed higher than she needed to, but the feeling of real, living bark beneath her fingers and toes was too much like bliss to stop at just a few branches. But her expression fell when she looked beyond the castle walls, and she looked down a moment later. "It only goes as far as the moat, but it goes all around the castle."
Faust lost himself in identifying the different simple flowers around the garden, the alchemist in him coming back to life. He could take over a small corner of the garden, he thought. Just enough to grow plants for potions and experiments when he was alone and restless in this castle. “Too bad it doesn’t go much farther.” He said after watching her climb the tree like some kind of jungle child. Though, he suspected it was better that way. If it could manage to heal the entire land it could cost them. Because Faust understood that good things come at a price. If someone with good intentions had made that scroll, they could cure the lands on their own. They wouldn’t feel obligated to make a show about it to someone like Rose.
“Whoever gave you that scroll wants something.” Faust muttered, barely loud enough for anyone to hear him. He plucked a yellow daisy out of the garden he was standing in and busied himself fixing it into his hat. Sure, it looked silly, but he was kind of a silly man. “Or might expect a favor in return.” Faust said at his hat, trying not to ruin such a lovely little gift. “Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe you have a secret admirer. That’s much more pleasant.”
"And yet," Quasimodo murmured, looking at the blossoms on the ground around his feet. "Still. A miracle." It hardly mattered that the blossoming of life only extended as far as the grounds. It was still more beauty of this kind than Quasimodo had seen in such a long time, and to be amongst it was gladness enough. He looked back to Faust as he began to posit the potential costs of the spell, however, and felt an edge of worry creep in on the unadulterated pleasure of being amongst such beauty. "Do you truly think so?" Not a miracle, then, but a dark bargain. Perhaps Faust merely expected such things because of his precious experiences, but perhaps not. Only Rose would be able to answer that, if someone contacted her.
Rose hopped down from her perch while Faust and Quasimodo looked around, and she wasted time scrunching her bare toes into the damp earth. "I promised no favors. I don't even know who it's from," she said, walking up to the two men once more. "Anyway, no one can threaten me. The Beast will eat them," she said with the cheerful certainty of a thing that knew it was valued. "And it can't be a secret admirer. I've sworn off men," she told them both, meaning it entirely. It wasn't that Draco had broken her heart, but he had been the last in a long chain of bad things that came with handsome faces and pretty smiles. "I can be a spinster in a tower and people can write stories about me."
She stretched up, and she plucked the yellow flower from Faust's hat with a tease-sure grin, and she tucked it behind her ear, the stem becoming lost in the copper of her hair. She didn't want to think about terrible things. Not when everything was blooming. Not after what she'd seen in the woods during the winter. "I'm going to tell the Beast. You can hide if you want." She turned her attention Quasimodo again before turning, fingers idling tracing Faust's sleeve as she stood there. "It was nice meeting you really. You scared me in the attic. But you're not scary now," she acknowledged, even though she didn't think she had anything to do with his new appearance. She'd have Snow meet him when she tricked her twin into coming again, she decided; Snow would know if he was cursed.
Faust smirked at Rose’s promise that she had sworn off men, something he had seen young, vibrant girls do a thousand times before. But, he didn’t try to correct her or give examples of previous cases that failed. “Thank you for humoring me.” He let her take the flower, grinning brilliantly at her before walking back over to Quasimodo. “Come along, brother. Cousin?” Faust looked down to the cured monster with a tilt of his head as if the former hunchback could decide how he was related. As far as Faust was concerned, now he was blood. There weren’t many people in this land of fairytales that the tall man in the hat felt a kinship for, so he decided to take it where he could find it.
“I’ll show you my workbench. It’ll be far enough away from the Beast that he may not try to eat us.” He feigned fear in his voice, but not very convincingly. One day that poor old brute would find out that Faust was more than just a bumbling alchemist. He might have even figured out that he wasn’t Rose’s brother. But, those were truths that weren’t important to Faust’s story. He had no history in this land, so what was so wrong about making one up?