Who: Rose and Robin Hood What: A weepy just-booted Rose and a thoroughly confused Robin. Where: Juuust outside Beast's castle. When: Recently-ish
He had still not found Much. It was not a growing concern - Much, for all his faults and his endless mouth, was perfectly capable of keeping himself alive if not through cleverness then through sheer, dumb luck - but a persistent one. One that coupled itself with the wide spread of trees and forest that he ought to know and did not, and remained an unpleasant and present thought that ticked over behind the more pressing ones. Such as food. The path to Locksley had long been lost; this much was clear. Robin knew the trees and the pathways, the clearings of the forests around Nottingham better than he knew the traceries on his palm, or the plains of the Moors where men screamed themselves a death against the bloody Eastern sun. He did not know this wood, it was not familiar friend but he had begun to learn her out of sheer necessity.
He had very little in the way of food and a pocketful of coins that meant nothing if there was no one to buy from and no foodstuffs to purchase. Rabbit was a fair enough meal but it was monotonous and like anyone who had traveled beyond the line of Normandy and France’s shores, Robin had the concern that came from food that lacked variety, with little desire for his teeth to rot in his own head. He had begun with the methodical determination of military campaigning and Robin’s own self, to map out this new place and he had marked his trees and the places he knew he needed (water, near enough a rabbit warren to ensure food, a dry-ish sort of place to keep the damp from running down his neck when he slept) with the knife kept bright and sharp at his hip. The bow was a reassuring weight on his back with each mile that he walked and the quiver was full of fresh arrows, having had plenty of time to sit in the dark of a night with his knife.
The dim, cool green pooled itself across the forest floor and Robin walked with only a little of his attention paid to the surroundings; each hour he spent, he learned more of the safety of his environment, of how few people passed through the dense knot of the woods themselves, the dark heart of the place. It was the light that caught him, the light that changed from a warm, verdant thing to the heavy shadow and cold brightness of a wood suddenly changed, made black and dark and forbidding. A threshold, one invisible but clearly beheld in the change between the living, moving forest and the dead woods ahead. Robin ceased his whistling, and his attention drew itself sharp like blade in hand. There was only onwards; there was, he knew, very little behind him he had not already covered but dead woods meant something, and perhaps people.
It was a few more miles of twisted, malformed woods and the eery, forced silence of a barren landscape before the cracked stone of a jutting castle, broken and old and seemingly as dead as the woods that surrounded it came into view. But a castle, too, meant people and it meant wealth of a kind and perhaps there would be something there valuable when he found people once again. Or, still, there might be those still living in the husk of what was once wealth and there would be food. Robin’s eyes gleamed bright, and his watchful hand stayed on the strap of his bow but he walked out of the wood and toward the seemingly once-again living growth that surrounded the castle beyond the moat.
There was a time, when Rose hadn't been allowed beyond the castle walls. She had been, after all, a prisoner. It hadn't seemed like it to some, and even she'd forgotten on occasion, but she hadn't been allowed to wander free into the dead woods beyond the castle. She hadn't been allowed to go home, not to her mother or the merchant. She hadn't been allowed to leave from this place and visit Snow in the normal way; she'd needed her Olive and a key to make that happen. No, she hadn't been allowed out. And that was just the way things had been until that morning, when the Beast had bid her leave, and when leave she had done.
Possibly, she could have tried to leave when the Beast had not been in residence, but the servants wouldn't have made it easy for her, and she'd known it. And, anyway, she hadn't tried. She hadn't wanted to try.
The world beyond the castle was dead and crumbling, but from the moat inward it looked like no war had been raged that killed the land. Unlike everything that surrounded it, the castle was ivy-covered and beautiful disarray, and Rose was standing in the middle of all that deadness, and she was looking upon the green land that she could no longer touch.
And it was there that she was when she saw the shape on the horizon. She was a copper thing, all tangling locks and a dress colored rust with a rose underdress. Her feet were bare, and she held a colorful tome - a comic book, her Olive called them - in her fingers. But she caught the deliberate movement and approach, something that was human and not animal in nature. "Hello?" she called, over four hundred years old and yet no older than a teenager in every way that mattered.
The blackened, long-dead forest was lipped by a moat and the castle, as Robin approached with the easy stride of the soldier and the woodsman, looked more cracked and ever more ancient as he grew closer. But beyond the moat and the wall within, green tendrils touched the very edge of the bright blue sky - and for that, Robin felt a kernel of wary gratitude, of something usual in amidst all this strange, silent deadness. The silence made the shout all the clearer, sharp on so much still air. Robin turned toward it with the deliberate speed of one sizing up a threat and the arrow was notched to the bow without a second’s hesitation. Aim first, look later.
It was not, he thought, so obvious a threat. The voice was high, high enough to be feminine (did they keep nothing but women in these woods?) and young, to carry so well across the distance. She, whomever she was, was a brightly-colored object on the very edge of all that green and too obvious a target to be threat - unless she was one so confident that it didn’t matter that all could see her. The arrow stayed notched for a long minute, Robin the still and quiet of predator rather than prey, the dark color of his clothes and the way he tied himself into the shadows, enough for onlookers to chance doubt that he was there.
His approach was quieter, smoother. Robin was a thing of the places where the trees overlapped one another and the shadows were long and the dark cast itself heavy on the ground - movement, true, but a movement that had something of the animal to it. Whoever she was, it was rare women-folk were alone, unless this were an abbey and - Robin looked up at the crumbled edifice with some doubt - this did not look like an abbey, and she did not look like a nun. She was instead something the light played with and made much of, nothing drab and quiet about her dress and by the time Robin drew close enough to the moat and the wall beyond, the arrow was away and his hand only lingered a little on the bow, in readiness.
“Hello!” he called, cheerful and with apparent absence of anything like a threat looming over her shoulder, the cheer was genuine. “Good day, my lady.”
She wasn't cheerful, which became more and more evident as he neared her. She was copper and splotchy cheeks of red, eyes rimmed and swollen from tears. "I'm not a lady," she said, petulant heartache and a sigh that could only be considered dramatic. She didn't look away from the castle as she spoke, even though she knew it was impolite. She stared forward, lower lip slightly jutting out. She was the fairy tale version of an emo teenager, and she finally turned her head to regard him.
"If you're going there, you can tell him I won't come back, not even if he begs," she said, petulance carrying in her voice and the newly whipping wind making her copper hair act as a noose.
She would show him, she decided of the Beast. She would find modern clothing, and learn modern things, and she'd know everything he didn't know. She'd be fine on her own, without him to protect her. She would go out into the world, and she wouldn't even think of him once.
She seemed to recall, then, that someone was there, and she turned her head (finally). "I'm Rose," she offered, because he should know whose message he was carrying.
No, she was no threat at all and she was certainly not a nun. Robin did not mind weeping women overmuch, particularly as they were usually persuadable - a sobbing woman could become a smiling one in the time it took to mend their woes but Rose, the color of her name, was a sulking woman and that was utterly different. A woman’s sulks could spoil a day, hanging over it heavy and thick and black and the bow he gave her swept from his stance down almost to her toes.
“It is a lovely name, Lady Rose,” Robin was solicitous, the very calm (and not in the least externally mirthful) of men who know their way around girls - all kinds, from the women who knew what they wanted to the young girls who did not but could still be charmed. He stood with his feet wide apart, and once he’d risen from that bow, his hand had settled once again on the curve of his bow as if it were a comfort and a habit and a safety all at once. He did not look unduly concerned by the contents of the castle, weeping girl on its doorstep regardless - rather, if she had been living there, it signified a master at home and one capable of mercy even if one that was strict with it.
“Have you been injured in some way?” He looked her over, sympathetic and oh, so calm, as if life’s troubles could always be solved and put away easily.
"I'm not a lady," she said immediately, and she wondered that she had to clarify that with everyone she met. She had grown up wild in the wood, and she had never laid claim to that title, not until Snow married and became a princess. And even then, she had done everything she could to burn the title down around her own ears, and she had intentionally taken an entire kingdom down with it.
Lady Rose slept with all the married men at court. Lady Rose seduced the prince. Lady Rose was the wildest thing anyone had ever seen in the Homelands.
No, she was certainly no lady. "Just Rose," she clarified.
Had she been injured? She looked back at the castle, then at him once more. "Didn't you hear? He banished me, and I won't come back, not even if he begs," she repeated, all melodrama. "I am uninjured," she added, in case he needed the extra clarification, which was always possible; he was a man. Rose didn't have much faith in the sex as a whole.
Robin was astute; she did not look hurt - beyond, of course, the more than evident appearance of tears. The appellation so rejected, he smiled all charm and reasonableness, and shrugged a shoulder - all ladies, save one, it seemed, preferred being given a title they had not. Save one. “Rose, then,” he agreed, and he looked past her shoulder at the castle. Banishment suggested a father or a guardian figure, and one that was not in the best of moods. Robin had experience enough with irritated guardians of young women and sense enough to keep his own skin intact that the desire for food and a little warmth dulled against the instinct that kept him out of trouble.
“Why did he banish you, Miss Rose?” he asked, because women who repeated themselves invariably did so until they were heard or they were answered, one of the two and as it was not something he did not wish to hear (which was usually the case, with Robin and women) he did not mind at all. And then more quizzically, “Is he likely to beg?” In his experience, men usually didn’t. Not the sort of men who banished to begin with.
"Just Rose," she repeated, her blue gaze fixing hard on him. She looked like a maelstrom, like she would tear the world down in copper if she was crossed wrong. She should have been the picture of something delicate and pale, spun of sunlight; instead, she was the wild and fiery wildness of nature, and all that splotchy red changed it naught at all.
As for why she had been banished, that earned him a delicate little sniffle and no other response. Was he likely to beg? Probably not. Men didn't; he was right about that. And she remembered, just then, how much she hated them all. Changeable things, all of them. Untrustworthy, all of them. "You're a man. You tell me. Is there any woman you would beg to return to you, or are we all the same in your eyes?" she asked, a trick question if ever there was one. Something in her demeanor said she wouldn't believe his response if it was a positive one, and she looked back at the castle a moment later.
"It was my fault," she added, a soft whisper and another swinging mood.
She was more changeable than a storm in summer, and Robin gave her a look that concealed its wariness in smooth, surface-calm. All rock surface and stillness to let all the lightning rocket around it and leave it unharmed. His hand remained gentle on his bow and he stood as if he’d not spent three days walking through forest looking for the way home, as if he had no cares but hers and those only momentarily.
He didn’t care to answer; there had been a woman once but even she didn’t quite know it and he wasn’t the man to tell her nor give over a secret that was hers for holding to another woman entirely. Instead he lit upon her woeful explanation, and Robin took it up in both hands as he let go all semblance of politeness and precursors to names that the world demanded, at a woman’s behest.
“Rose,” he said carefully, “What was your fault?” He was beginning to doubt the world beyond the wall, that castle concealing what it would. He looked at her, all baleful temper tied up in tantrums and he wondered if it hadn’t really been her fault she’d been booted out by whoever it was. “It can’t have been,” he lied smoothly through his teeth, all charm and smile and Robin lied like most men breathed, like it was a natural thing, like it was truth itself. It sounded like truth, it always sounded like he believed it - after a little, if he’d lied long enough, he began to believe it. He set down the bow - carefully, as if it were something tender and precious, something that could be damaged too easily for carelessness - and he dug in the pocket that hung from his belt. Coins sang a metallic sound from within, but he produced a clean(ish) handkerchief, one that was worn and that had probably been, once, a shirt and was now only a scrap but Robin handed it over with a flourish.
She laughed and laughed and laughed when he said it couldn't be her fault at all. He was a man, wasn't he? "You don't know that, and you don't know me. Perhaps I was terrible. Perhaps I was bad. Perhaps I was precisely as I am. You're just a man trying to be charming, and I know charming men better than most. They're sweet and kind until they have you on a table or against a wall. No, it was my doing. I'm like the scorpion; I can't help my nature. Wild things can't be tamed, or so my mother said. I wasn't made for castles and walls," she explained, impassioned, cheeks going red with feeling instead of sadness.
She turned to look at him, this man with the bow and the handkerchief outstretched, and she shook her head. "No. Save that for a lady or for a miss. I'm neither of these things, and there isn't any use pretending that I am," she said defiantly. Her mood turning and twisting and turning again.
"Check on him on your way," she said, another nod toward the castle in the defiant jerk of her head. "Tell him Rose has gone to Fabletown, and that I didn't do anything wrong in the first place." No miss no lady, and then she stomped away from him, pretty hem dragging along the dead earth.
Wars weren’t won on pretty gestures, whether the men that fought them had learned them or no. Robin’s about-turn was as sharp as the charm had been clean and sweet, and there was a clear, surprised whistle as he watched her throw herself from one temper to the next. “Do you talk about tables and walls to everyone, or just the charming ones?” There was something less of the smoothness to it, a laughter that was more campfires and men than it was the lord of the manor.
But she spoke of a place Robin had heard nothing of, Robin who had traveled far and long enough to have heard of many and most, of odd places where men smoked things that were thick and sweet and the air tasted of honey and of places where the cold was sharp and knife-like and the world was the strange blues and yellows of snow that never melted. “Fabletown?” He’d fastened on the word like it was coin to a beggar, “Where is that?”
"I talk about what I want, to who I want," she said, twirling back to give him a fiery look that (she hoped) conveyed that. "I just trust the charming ones less than I trust all the rest," explained, ready to turn again, but the interest in his voice when she mentioned Fabletown made her stay a moment longer, even as she rubbed the back of her hands beneath her eyes to dry up any remaining tears of anger. "It's somewhere else, somewhere in the Mundane world, somewhere we hid during the war. You can contact Snow White about it. She's the queen there," she explained, which was as close as she could come to an explanation of what Snow did.
She stood there a second longer, just one, before she took off in a run for the nearest abandoned place with a door. It was time to leave, before she thought better of it and begged the Beast to keep her.
Robin stood and he stared and he wondered, momentarily, if the woods and the people within it were quite mad. Snow White, and towns for mundanes whatever they were, and he had no time at all to ask a second question before the girl - bright red hair and wild moods and not a miss or lady - disappeared. Robin turned and he looked up at the walls of the castle and he picked up his bow once again.