Who: Rose What: Narrative: Causing trouble in Fabletown Where: Fairy Tales, New York When: Recently Warnings/Rating: Rose? Magic. Drugs. Lewdness. General invoking of Snow's name. All kinds of things that aren't permitted in Fabletown.
Rose watched Quasimodo and Faust go off with Snow, and she settled in to wait for Blue. Five minutes, but Rose could be like a wriggling puppy, even on a very well-behaved day. And this, this was not a very well-behaved day. She was a maelstrom. Hurt and angry, and that old feeling that she'd learned to hate more than anything in the whole wild world - abandonment. It wasn't that Faust and Quasimodo had gone off without her to sign papers with Snow that left her feeling like she had all those years ago as a child. It wasn't even that Snow didn't actually want her around. No, for once her discontent had nothing to do with her twin sister.
This time, all her misery belonged to the Beast.
She thought - mistakenly, and how could she be so stupid? - that he understood her. She thought that he wouldn't be like Snow and everyone at Snow's court had been. She thought he trusted her, that he would know she'd told him all her truths and all her secrets, all the things that mattered to a tiny, fickle heart that was almost four hundred years old. She thought he knew.
But he was just like the rest. Just like every single man she'd ever known, save Faust. He thought she was sleeping with everyone she spoke to? Fine. That was just fine.
And, once again, that old feeling welled up. The one that said she'd show them all, she'd make them sorry. They thought she was bad? They thought she was wild? She would show them bad. She would show them wild.
She abandoned the place she was to meet Blue, and she took off on her own. It was easy enough to find a store, one that gave her clothes that Snow would never approve of, garish and baring pale skin that had never seen the Homelands' sunlight. She charged everything to Snow, and no one batted an eyelash. Once she realized that would actually work, well, then things went from bad to worse.
She started at an upscale club, one filled with older men who liked a redhead with a friendly smile and thighs that spread like softened butter. By that night, she was the main attraction at a party that featured most of Fabletown's married businessmen and Very Important People. She did a lot of talking too, when her mouth wasn't full. Snow? Snow was her twin sister. Wasn't that just the funniest thing?
She didn't care that she was reliving the past, repeating bad behaviors, tearing herself down to make others pay. She'd been fighting against her past for months, and no one believed she could change, no one even saw. Why should she try? They needed a villain, and she could be one. Fine, fine. She gave in. She'd give them someone to talk about when things were boring and dull in their little boring and dull lives.
(Plus, she hated it here. She hated it so very much. More than Snow's court, even.)
She spent the night on her back and on her knees, and whenever anyone asked for identification, she just told them to check with her sister. Snow, you know, I think she works for the law. Would you like to try one of these? I think they call it a roofie.
The magic, now the magic didn't happen until morning, and it wasn't really planned.
She'd lost a shoe, and her underwear, and she was walking through a park, cold and without a coat. The party had gone somewhere, she assumed, that wasn't between her thighs, and she didn't really care by the time the sun began to rise. But it was cold, and it was winter, and the flowers on the bushes were dead. There were children walking to school, buses and cabs (though she didn't know them by name), but she couldn't see anything but the dead branches. They made her feel even more lonely; she didn't like them.
And like the unthinking child she was, she touched a finger to a branch, and she fixed it.
The bush she touched bloomed first, then the frost came off the dead grass, and it turned the brightest green. The trees came next, from dead and bald to sap and leaves. It was fast, like turning a page in a book, helped along by the maelstrom of things she was feeling, the sad passion that she couldn't even articulate as anything more than misery.
She didn't hear the reactions, and she didn't wonder over the collection of people that parted for her when she walked away.