Kit Fawkes (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
fauxfawkes) wrote2021-01-27 04:51 pm
fauxfawkes) wrote2021-01-27 04:51 pm
Prologue: And Miles To Go
Title: And Miles To Go
Universe: The KitVerse
Warnings: None, really.
Summary: When the time finally comes for Cain to leave the City, Rosella finds herself faced with a choice — and makes it.
Rosella hates London.
In her defense, it's not as though there isn't a lot to hate about London, because there is. The girls are self-centered and catty and fixated on climbing the ladder of social status; the gentlemen are either boorish clods or simpering sycophants, all of whom seem eager to make their way on the coattails (or the backs) of others. The air is foggy and choked with smoke, and the buildings rise up from the ground like the walls of a labyrinth, towering into a sky that always seems to be nothing more than a thin ribbon of faded blue-gray—when there's blue in it at all. The fashions are stifling and the expectations even moreso; ladies are meant to be frail and sweet (or at least, to give off that impression, since most of the girls she's met are anything but), educated in the fine arts but blissfully ignorant of the intellectual ones. It's cold and lonely and unfriendly in London, which is really quite a feat in a city so full and bustling with bodies.
The really awful part, though, is the family.
She's known and accepted for a long time now that families in other worlds don't work the same as they do in her own. She also knows that in the grand scheme of things, her own family is as close to perfect as families can get, even with the wizards and kidnappings and sacrifices to dragons. They love each other. They would and have gone to the ends of the earth for each other. That's what families are supposed to do, and that is what they do.
Cain's family...is different. If it were just the four of them, herself and Cain and Merry and Riff, then perhaps she could call that a family, because that's about as close to her definition of one as she's been able to find in London. But it's not just the four of them; on the contrary, it seems as though there's a new relation turning up every other week, always smiling and mouthing loyalty while inwardly scheming about politics and advancement in society. There are uncles and aunts and cousins and all manner of things, a neverending parade of visits and exchanges and appearances, and not a single one seems to bring with them an ounce of the love that Rosella is accustomed to in a place called home.
She does get along well enough with Uncle Neil, though, or at least she does now that he's stopped regarding her as merely an exotic toy Cain carried home with him after one of his misadventures. In a way, she doesn't blame him for having that perception, annoying though it may have made things; London's fairy tales are dark, grim rhymes about buildings falling and murderers taking axes to their victims, so a storybook princess has turned out to be as much a curiosity as would be a Gypsy, a fortune-teller, a lady of the Orient. Still, if there's one feeling Rosella has always detested, it's that of being kept under a metaphorical glass, pretty and preserved and frozen in time to be admired from a distance—so it isn't long before she takes steps to dissuade Uncle Neil of that notion. She voices opinions, she plays at puns; she even offers to play chess against him at one point, which earns her an incredulous look and a huffed refusal but still manages to get the point across. From that point on, he watches her more out of curiosity than indignance, and they get along a little better.
Deep down, she realizes, Uncle Neil is much the same as her mother, though they're a bit different in the way they show their similar feelings. For one thing, Queen Valanice would never raise a hand to one of her children, but Uncle Neil will if he thinks the situation warrants it, and it never fails to make Rosella cringe when tempers flare and tensions begin to spiral toward that inevitability. In an awful, backwards way, it's a way of demonstrating that he really does feel invested in Cain's future, the same way that Queen Valanice's overbearing insistence on marrying off her daughter can be traced back to her desperate urge to see her children safe.
(I didn't make this choice lightly, she says one day as the two of them pass in the hall; the layers and bustle of her entirely impractical dress rustle as she continues down the corridor, and it would take a finely attuned ear to notice that at that moment, the only sounds of motion echoing faintly off the marbled walls are her own.)
But the unfortunate truth is that outside of her tenuous rapport with Uncle Neil, Rosella really doesn't care a bit about any of Cain's family, and most of them don't even know about her. To say she keeps a low profile is a laughable understatement; she wants nothing to do with London and wants London to have nothing to do with her, to say nothing of the fact that she knows she's a liability just by existing in a world that holds both Cain and his father in it. London is as filled with dangers as it is with unpleasantness, and the less anyone knows of her, the better.
Merry thinks it's delightfully poetic, in its way—that she's become the Cinderella who appears at the ball and disappears again at midnight, leaving no trace but a memory to prove she was ever there at all. And in its way, it fits. But it's hard to enjoy a party when one knows that all the smiling guests are cutthroat underneath, and even moreso when there's no telling which shadow might hold an agent of DELILAH to cut her throat in reality.
The few minutes she manages to steal away with Cain on the dance floor on those evenings, however, almost make it all worthwhile. She's petty enough to enjoy the jealous looks of the jilted girls on the sidelines, and there's a thrilling sort of power lurking beneath a partnered dance—the man showing off his lady, the lady showing off their partnership—that, for a few precious beats of metronome time, make her feel thoroughly and truly safe. It's the most dangerous moment of the night, the moment when they're together, and yet it's also the only moment when she knows, through and through, that nothing will happen to her in that time.
They draw gossip, of course, because such things always do, but then Cain whirls some other simpering girl onto the dance floor and Rosella slips unobtrusively away and the gossiping quickly subsides, redirected onto the new lady of the moment. She always takes care not to stand out, not to make herself memorable as anything more than that girl whose name no one knows, whose dresses are fashionable but ultimately forgettable, who dances as lightly as though she were walking on clouds instead of a ballroom floor. They know her without knowing her, remark on her, ignore her—and that's exactly the way she wants it.
There's always a tiny part of her, though, that aches to stand out. Not to them, the whispering girls and the leering men, but to the only person that matters in the lot of them. And if it were a storybook tale, that would be the moment when her eyes would lock with Cain's across the dance floor, and for that moment his undivided attention would be on nothing but her, and she'd see it and grasp it and know that she's the only one he sees. But London is the furthest thing from a storybook, and it's far too dangerous to show that much interest, so they never do. Not in public, where anyone could see.
It's a different matter at home, safely behind the walls of the Hargreaves manor. It goes in steps and stages, really; there's public, there's private, and then there's alone. In public, they're always as cautious as they can be. They have to be, with the way things are. In private, things are more relaxed, more open, and they're no longer so much guarded as they are merely reserved.
Rosella keeps her own little patch of flowers by the rarely-used house at the other side of the estate, the one across the garden from the main house. On summer days, she'll spend hours out there, kneeling contently in the fresh earth as she prunes the blossoms and urges the little plants to grow. There are rosebushes, of course, because she'll always love those best of all, but there are other flowers, too—some exotic, some charmingly ordinary. She grows violets and bluebells and daisies, daffodils and tulips and daylilies, posies and buttercups and chrysanthemums; they sprout up in patches like a handful of jewels tossed glittering into the grass, and there is no rhyme or reason to how she plants them. What matters is the rainbow of hues, the beauty of the blossoms; her garden is a small spot of color in a world she sees in shades of gray, and it's one of the few places in the whole of London where she almost feels at home.
Most afternoons, she spends all day in the garden before returning to the manor house and trading her simple work dress for one of the finer, more restrictive ones that London fashion demands. But sometimes, on occasional afternoons, she'll look up and catch a glimpse of Cain walking across the gardens toward her, his coat slung over his shoulder in a rare display of informality to match her own. He's never difficult to spot, when he does; he's a silhouette of black outlined against the looming gray stone of the house, the green of the grass, the blue of the sky. The look on his face is never quite what one could call a smile, but there's a contentment to it, a hidden gentleness that so often gets buried beneath the guile and canniness demanded of a socialite in this strange, foreign land called London.
It's only in the garden that the reservations begin to melt away. They stand close, their shoulders brush, their fingers twine together. Cain cuts a rose and meticulously strips it of its thorns before tucking it behind Rosella's ear; in return, Rosella plucks a bit of ivy and threads it through the buttonhole on his lapel. They speak in memories of a gone-but-never-forgotten City: a shady spot by the lakeside, a path of flowers that never went out of season. And sometimes, on very rare occasions, Rosella will mention Daventry, her homeland now twice removed. The longing in her tone is always understated, but there; she misses her kingdom and her castle, and she is even further from it now than she was before. There's something like regret in the way she speaks of it, though it's not that she regrets the choice she made. It's more that she regrets that a choice had to be made at all.
Speaking of Daventry, oftentimes, is what prompts the shift from private moments to moments alone.
It's days when Rosella speaks of Daventry that they walk to the door of that house on the far side of the garden, when Cain gives in to temptation and lets his forehead come to rest against hers. They never speak of the choice she made, or why she made it, but he knows what she gave up to follow him, and she knows he'll never believe he was worth that sacrifice. She never tries to persuade him of it, in part because she knows him too well to think that anything she could say would convince him otherwise, and part because she knows deep down that the two can't be weighed side by side, a home in a place against a home in a person. So instead, she reaches for the latch on the door, steadies her balance before letting it swing open behind her, slides her arms around him as she backs them both inside. Even the garden is too public to truly be safe, out in the open beneath the expanse of the sky; inside, at least, the walls narrow their attentions down to the sanctuary of a single room.
The kisses are always light, soft, like the whispers of a feather. Uncle Neil was wrong in his perception that she was brought here as an exotic doll, but there are certain ways in which he wasn't far off the mark; they've been like this for years and yet Cain still touches her like he thinks it will break her, still watches his fingers trace over her skin as if he's expecting to see stains the color of soot left behind by the tips. She always wants to tell him that he won't hurt her, that he can't, except that she knows all too well that he can and quite possibly will. It's never been a secret; she's always known that he's dangerous, and ruthless, and it isn't just his Victorian sensibilities that make him hold her at arm's length, but his fear that his edges, sharp as broken glass, will cut her, too.
She tries to tell him she doesn't care about that in the way she returns his kisses, in the tactile messages she telegraphs along his neck and against the line of his jaw. But it's not so much that she doesn't care as it is she understands, or wants to, and accepts the danger that life with him incurs. He may be the earl who courts death, but she has slipped through death's fingers more times than she can count, and she knows the difference between the icy grip of impending doom and the way he traces patterns of affection against her body. Too many girls before her have died for him, and she wonders if he sees them when he looks at her and drinks in the blue of her eyes, the gold of her hair, the smirk in her spirit. She wants to tell him that she won't follow them, that she's different, but the truth is that she doesn't know if she is or not, only that she's always managed to evade her death before, and she has faith in her own ability to stay out of its reach for a long, long time.
I chose this, she thinks as she tucks her head beneath his chin, eyelashes heavy as she listens to the quiet rhythm of his heartbeat. I chose this, don't you understand? It's not too much to want to be happy...
They're always late getting back, those days; it will be dusk before they finally make the return walk across the garden, slipping further back into the demands of propriety with every step. Riff will be waiting at the manor-house door like a silent guardian; Rosella will offer him a faint smile before slipping up to her rooms to change. And sometimes upstairs she'll see Merry watching for her, as well, peeping around the doorjamb in a way that never quite hides the knowing look on her face. She'll exchange her rumpled work dress for a dinner gown, arrange the collar, pin lace at her throat, and let London stifle her once again.
It's hard to explain how it is she knows when the final reckoning with Cain's father first begins to loom on the horizon. Perhaps it's something in the magic DELILAH works to invoke, a crackling blackened thing that society forbids but so many Londonites seem infatuated with. A place like London is the antithesis of Daventry, Rosella thinks as she stares at the shadows of the buildings in the distance, thriving on technology and innovation and smog that clouds the sky; it's also a place starved of magic, churning with gears and soot, and the thin, hungry souls of the people that call it their homeland can't help but feel drawn to any magic at all, no matter the form it takes. And there is magic in Rosella, a kind that stands out in opposition, because there is still something of Daventry in her, not black and forbidden but golden and alive. Perhaps she feels it coming because the use of magic resonates with her in a way that she can't explain, draws her notice even as she recoils from the hideous feel of it.
But perhaps she also knows it's coming because of the way it changes Cain, and how suddenly even in their most languid moments, she can sense the urgency in him lurking beneath the surface. He's tenser now, his nerves honed razor-sharp, his brows drawn together as he calculates move after move in anticipation of what their foes might do. He spends more time with his poisons, staring at the curves and corners of the glass bottles as if expecting to find an answer in the deadly liquids they hold. And she finds herself suddenly longing for home, where things make sense, and fathers love their children and beanstalks stretch up into the cornflower sky.
She watches Cain change more and more with each passing day and lingers even further on thoughts of home, finding herself wondering if he would have hated Daventry as much as she has hated London, had their positions been reversed all those years ago. Would he cringe from the sunlight the way she recoils from the smog? She wonders what he would do in a castle bustling with life and love and affection; would it drive him to pace the battlements like Prince Hamlet, with only his ghosts for company? Would he feel as ill-fitting and isolated as she does here? Would he have endured it for her as long as she has for him?
It grows colder outside, and her garden begins to wither. The blooms fall and fade, the plants receding in anticipation of the coming winter. She spends an afternoon lying in bed, surrounded by pillows and lace and gauzy white bedcurtains, hugging her arms to her chest as if to ward off the coming chill as she thinks of floating and falling through clouds. She stares at the canopy overhead and wonders if perhaps this is how Ophelia felt as she sank beneath the surface of the river, enveloped in finery and gradually finding it harder and harder to breathe. Is this how it felt to watch her prince go mad?
It's Riff who eventually finds her, bearing a cold cloth and a sympathetic look. The room seems to spin as she looks up at him, feeling dizzy and faint, and she almost says will you let him, Horatio? but she knows that whatever affection Riff may have for her, his loyalty is always and foremost with Cain. Her unspoken question is no question at all; where his master leads, he will follow, even if it means running headlong into death itself.
She wants to beg them to live, but she can't, so she silently wishes for them to end it instead.
The sky is dark and overcast the night that Cain retires to his study like a man possessed, his energy and determination crackling like lightning in the set of his lips. He's penning messages to some names she knows, and to others she doesn't; he's sending for Uncle Neil, for Oscar Gabriel, and a man he calls a charlatan, the one named Dominic Crehador. The first she learns from listening at the door, her stomach twisting into knots as the pen scratches across the page; the names she doesn't discover until after she musters the courage to open the door, fingers trembling as they grasp at the knob for purchase.
The rumble of thunder in the distance isn't enough to mask the creak of the hinges as the door swings open, and Cain turns at once toward the sound, mouth already opening to bark a command—but then stops when he sees her, staying silent as she slips inside and presses the door closed behind her. He says nothing, but his eyes speak volumes, glittering like a cat's in the dim yellow light of his desk lamp. And she wants to speak, but she doesn't have the words, doesn't have the breath because it's catching in her throat, and there's nothing she can do but look at him and hope that he can read it all from her gaze in return.
She walks across the room and he rises to meet her, one hand still resting on the back of his chair as the other comes up to touch her cheek. She knows the end is coming, as sure as there is lightning lurking in the sky stretched black outside the windows, but she can't stop it and can't ask him to do it himself. She has slipped through death's fingers so many times and yet she can't teach the skill to anyone else; they've died and hovered on the brink of death and caressed her with icy fingers, and held her close as she pressed her ear to their chest and listened for a heartbeat that wasn't there. The rules of death were bent and twisted in the city where they met, but in London death is final, and already she can feel Cain slipping away toward it.
He runs his fingers down the curve of her jaw as her eyes fall shut, and a moment later there are kisses feathered soft against her closed eyelids, the tickle of black bangs on the tip of her nose. His lips are cool, or perhaps it's just that her eyes are stinging hot, her throat suddenly closed. She grasps at the lace pinned there and yanks at it, struggling to free it so she can breathe, but it's not the lace that's stifling her this time, and it's not the corset pulled tight beneath her fine dress that is stealing her breath away.
His lips find her temple as the first faint, rich notes of a herald's horn begin to trumpet through the room, and her brimming tears spill over at last as her eyes fly open at the sound.
They turn as one toward the window, the source of the interruption, and thunder rumbles in the distance; it's another minute before they hear it again, and this time it comes not in the form of a fanfare but in a melody that makes Rosella's heart leap into her throat. She's been away a long time, so long it seems like an eternity, but she will never forget the sound of Greensleeves ringing out in joyous anthem.
It can't be.
It can't be.
But impossiblity doesn't stop her from running anyway, out through the passage and into the storm, Cain hot on her heels as she catches up handfuls of her skirts and snatches them out of the way of her stride. The sound is there—it's faint, but it's there, and strangely distant—and the first droplets of rain are beginning to fall as she hurries across the stone-gray courtyard, looking for the source of the noise. It could be a trick, and there's a part of her that knows it, but no, they couldn't know this much, they couldn't know this.
She feels the whisper of magic first, and it draws her like a magnet to the fountain in the center of the courtyard, where her answer is awaiting her approach. Like the music, it's dim but it's there, a flicker of banner-topped towers in the rippling water. She drops to her knees, clutches the stone edge, and looks again—and it's a great wooden door, a rich hall within, a pair of thrones and a magic mirror on the wall, all illuminated in golden light beneath the water.
There's a touch to her shoulder, and then Cain is there beside her, and she knows from the way his fingers tighten that he sees it, too.
It's home.
She can go home.
And she doesn't know if it's her wishing that has made it so, or if it's some strange aftereffect of the magic DELILAH has been preparing, or if it's simply that she never belonged here in the first place and the time has come for her to leave Cain's story and return to her own. But it's Daventry in the water, golden and waiting, marred only by the rapid beat of raindrops on the surface of the fountain.
She looks up at him, rises slowly to her feet, and knows from the look in his eyes that he's thinking back to the sound of a carousel in the distance, the curiosity of lights and music down an alley, and the consequences that came for him after he'd ventured off to investigate it. There's a horrible finality to opportunities like this, a heartwrenching penalty that comes from indulging such curiosity, and they both know it all too well.
She wants to say, come with me. They could escape the fate that Cain is charging towards, collect the others and run away, hide in her kingdom for the rest of their days and never have to fear the threat of his father again. They could go home, and be free, and she could show him in person what it feels like to walk on clouds and soar on a condor's wings and be wrapped up in a father's fond embrace. They could go where the air is heavy with magic, golden and glittering, and fill his starving soul with it until every last bit of London's bitterness has been driven out and replenished with something better.
She wants to say, we could live happily ever after.
But then her stomach twists, and she thinks again of the words she's repeated so often since following him to London. She made this choice for herself, and she knew what she was getting into when she made it. This was what she wanted, no matter the heartache and anguish that followed, and it's cruel to have to face it again—the home in a place weighed against the home in a person. She chose this once already. She made her choice to be here. This was the fate she made for herself, no matter how many chances she gets to make it over again.
And she's just beginning to turn away from the fountain when Cain catches her arm, grasping it so tightly it hurts, and makes her look him in his deathly white face as he whispers, "Go."
The rain is cold, too cold, and it's such a sharp contrast to the fresh wave of tears that spill over onto her cheeks at the sound of the command, and it's freezing and miserable and the sky is still stretched out overhead, but none of that seems to matter as she throws herself at him, and he catches her, and he kisses her like a drowning man gasping for air. He's holding her so tight she thinks she'll break into pieces, and they're carrying on in a way that's well past improper and straight into scandalous, but it doesn't matter, none of it matters, nothing but the heartwrenching thought that after all this time, all the worlds they've endured together, now at last it has finally come to an end. And Rosella doesn't know who he's seeing as he looks at her from behind the damp bangs plastered to his forehead, but she herself is in two places at once, the courtyard of the manor in the evening and a golden beach in Tamir at dawn, and for a moment she feels dizzy and disoriented and frantic as she prays he doesn't ask her to marry him because she'll break into bits if he does.
They kiss until her knees go weak and her breath runs out, and then she just holds on as tight as she can, burying her face in the crook of his shoulder as she abandons all semblance of pride and just clings to him.
We could be happy, she thinks desperately, and it's hard to tell if his coat is wet from the rain or her tears or both. It's not too much to ask.
"You stubborn girl," he murmurs into her hair, turning them slightly to face the castle in the water for himself. He adds something else after a moment, some other whispered phrase, but she can't quite make it out because she's drowning herself in the feeling of being wrapped up in him, trying to memorize every detail at once and dreading the moment when he finally lets go and it all unravels again.
And for a moment she isn't sure what to say, because part of her wants to ask him to follow her, and part wants her to beg him not to forget her, but he has a battle waiting on the horizon and she is only one in a long line of girls that have loved him like this. It's better that she goes, she knows, because it will mean one less thing that his father can use against him, one less fear to entertain as he pursues his final vengeance. It's better that she escapes to where no one can reach her, even if it means finally giving this awful goodbye, the one that she's been avoiding for so many years.
"Find me when it's over," she finally chokes out, curling her fingers into whatever fabric she can reach, her knuckles going white as the reality of it finally hits home with the sound of the words in the open air. "Promise me you'll find me, whatever it takes..."
And he does, he murmurs against her ear the most heartbreaking endearments she's ever heard, that nothing will keep him away and he will find his way back to her, that even if she were a single rose in a thousand he would find her, recognize her, return to wherever she may be—and for once she doesn't wonder who he's seeing, or who else he may have said it to before her; she just takes it and believes it and locks it fast in her heart, because it's all she can do and she needs some hope to cling to, something to trust in to carry her through.
He slowly lets her go, and she unwinds herself from him, her back to the pool and the stone rim pressing lightly against her calves, and she looks at him one last time, aching for one last kiss that she knows she can't have.
He's beautiful in the rain, she thinks, and lingers on the sight of the one thing that made London bearable all this time. Her hatred for all this never once extended to him, and she thinks—just once, a fleeting, passing whim—that perhaps she could have been happy in London after all.
She lets herself begin to fall backwards into the pool, and on instinct he moves to catch her, just a single step before he remembers himself—and in that instant, she thinks that she could reach for him, slide her arms around him in that old familiar way, and pull him along with her, guiding him inside, not into the house on the other side of the garden but home—
But she's not the only one who made a choice, once upon a time.
His face is the last thing she sees as a curtain of water rises up on either side of her head, as she splashes through the surface and down, down, deeper than the fountain's pool ever ran, and the image soon goes blurry as it filters and refracts down through the water covering over her face.
Goodnight, sweet prince, she thinks, and lets her eyes fall closed, and lingers in that burbling darkness until at last she feels a nervous tugging on her arm; when she opens her eyes again, there is a dark-haired boy gazing back at her—a familiar, nervous boy with a face that matches her own.
"Rosella?" Alexander asks hesitantly, the first real thing she's heard him say in years and years.
"It's so good to be home," she answers shakily, her voice cracking on the last word as it hits her all at once—that everything they always said was true, and she's home again at last, and no one even noticed because it's as if she's never been gone at all.
"It's so good to be home," she repeats through a sob, and sinks to the familiar stone floor of the castle she's dreamt of for so long, and curls in on herself as she cries and cries and cries.
Universe: The KitVerse
Warnings: None, really.
Summary: When the time finally comes for Cain to leave the City, Rosella finds herself faced with a choice — and makes it.
In her defense, it's not as though there isn't a lot to hate about London, because there is. The girls are self-centered and catty and fixated on climbing the ladder of social status; the gentlemen are either boorish clods or simpering sycophants, all of whom seem eager to make their way on the coattails (or the backs) of others. The air is foggy and choked with smoke, and the buildings rise up from the ground like the walls of a labyrinth, towering into a sky that always seems to be nothing more than a thin ribbon of faded blue-gray—when there's blue in it at all. The fashions are stifling and the expectations even moreso; ladies are meant to be frail and sweet (or at least, to give off that impression, since most of the girls she's met are anything but), educated in the fine arts but blissfully ignorant of the intellectual ones. It's cold and lonely and unfriendly in London, which is really quite a feat in a city so full and bustling with bodies.
The really awful part, though, is the family.
She's known and accepted for a long time now that families in other worlds don't work the same as they do in her own. She also knows that in the grand scheme of things, her own family is as close to perfect as families can get, even with the wizards and kidnappings and sacrifices to dragons. They love each other. They would and have gone to the ends of the earth for each other. That's what families are supposed to do, and that is what they do.
Cain's family...is different. If it were just the four of them, herself and Cain and Merry and Riff, then perhaps she could call that a family, because that's about as close to her definition of one as she's been able to find in London. But it's not just the four of them; on the contrary, it seems as though there's a new relation turning up every other week, always smiling and mouthing loyalty while inwardly scheming about politics and advancement in society. There are uncles and aunts and cousins and all manner of things, a neverending parade of visits and exchanges and appearances, and not a single one seems to bring with them an ounce of the love that Rosella is accustomed to in a place called home.
She does get along well enough with Uncle Neil, though, or at least she does now that he's stopped regarding her as merely an exotic toy Cain carried home with him after one of his misadventures. In a way, she doesn't blame him for having that perception, annoying though it may have made things; London's fairy tales are dark, grim rhymes about buildings falling and murderers taking axes to their victims, so a storybook princess has turned out to be as much a curiosity as would be a Gypsy, a fortune-teller, a lady of the Orient. Still, if there's one feeling Rosella has always detested, it's that of being kept under a metaphorical glass, pretty and preserved and frozen in time to be admired from a distance—so it isn't long before she takes steps to dissuade Uncle Neil of that notion. She voices opinions, she plays at puns; she even offers to play chess against him at one point, which earns her an incredulous look and a huffed refusal but still manages to get the point across. From that point on, he watches her more out of curiosity than indignance, and they get along a little better.
Deep down, she realizes, Uncle Neil is much the same as her mother, though they're a bit different in the way they show their similar feelings. For one thing, Queen Valanice would never raise a hand to one of her children, but Uncle Neil will if he thinks the situation warrants it, and it never fails to make Rosella cringe when tempers flare and tensions begin to spiral toward that inevitability. In an awful, backwards way, it's a way of demonstrating that he really does feel invested in Cain's future, the same way that Queen Valanice's overbearing insistence on marrying off her daughter can be traced back to her desperate urge to see her children safe.
(I didn't make this choice lightly, she says one day as the two of them pass in the hall; the layers and bustle of her entirely impractical dress rustle as she continues down the corridor, and it would take a finely attuned ear to notice that at that moment, the only sounds of motion echoing faintly off the marbled walls are her own.)
But the unfortunate truth is that outside of her tenuous rapport with Uncle Neil, Rosella really doesn't care a bit about any of Cain's family, and most of them don't even know about her. To say she keeps a low profile is a laughable understatement; she wants nothing to do with London and wants London to have nothing to do with her, to say nothing of the fact that she knows she's a liability just by existing in a world that holds both Cain and his father in it. London is as filled with dangers as it is with unpleasantness, and the less anyone knows of her, the better.
Merry thinks it's delightfully poetic, in its way—that she's become the Cinderella who appears at the ball and disappears again at midnight, leaving no trace but a memory to prove she was ever there at all. And in its way, it fits. But it's hard to enjoy a party when one knows that all the smiling guests are cutthroat underneath, and even moreso when there's no telling which shadow might hold an agent of DELILAH to cut her throat in reality.
The few minutes she manages to steal away with Cain on the dance floor on those evenings, however, almost make it all worthwhile. She's petty enough to enjoy the jealous looks of the jilted girls on the sidelines, and there's a thrilling sort of power lurking beneath a partnered dance—the man showing off his lady, the lady showing off their partnership—that, for a few precious beats of metronome time, make her feel thoroughly and truly safe. It's the most dangerous moment of the night, the moment when they're together, and yet it's also the only moment when she knows, through and through, that nothing will happen to her in that time.
They draw gossip, of course, because such things always do, but then Cain whirls some other simpering girl onto the dance floor and Rosella slips unobtrusively away and the gossiping quickly subsides, redirected onto the new lady of the moment. She always takes care not to stand out, not to make herself memorable as anything more than that girl whose name no one knows, whose dresses are fashionable but ultimately forgettable, who dances as lightly as though she were walking on clouds instead of a ballroom floor. They know her without knowing her, remark on her, ignore her—and that's exactly the way she wants it.
There's always a tiny part of her, though, that aches to stand out. Not to them, the whispering girls and the leering men, but to the only person that matters in the lot of them. And if it were a storybook tale, that would be the moment when her eyes would lock with Cain's across the dance floor, and for that moment his undivided attention would be on nothing but her, and she'd see it and grasp it and know that she's the only one he sees. But London is the furthest thing from a storybook, and it's far too dangerous to show that much interest, so they never do. Not in public, where anyone could see.
It's a different matter at home, safely behind the walls of the Hargreaves manor. It goes in steps and stages, really; there's public, there's private, and then there's alone. In public, they're always as cautious as they can be. They have to be, with the way things are. In private, things are more relaxed, more open, and they're no longer so much guarded as they are merely reserved.
Rosella keeps her own little patch of flowers by the rarely-used house at the other side of the estate, the one across the garden from the main house. On summer days, she'll spend hours out there, kneeling contently in the fresh earth as she prunes the blossoms and urges the little plants to grow. There are rosebushes, of course, because she'll always love those best of all, but there are other flowers, too—some exotic, some charmingly ordinary. She grows violets and bluebells and daisies, daffodils and tulips and daylilies, posies and buttercups and chrysanthemums; they sprout up in patches like a handful of jewels tossed glittering into the grass, and there is no rhyme or reason to how she plants them. What matters is the rainbow of hues, the beauty of the blossoms; her garden is a small spot of color in a world she sees in shades of gray, and it's one of the few places in the whole of London where she almost feels at home.
Most afternoons, she spends all day in the garden before returning to the manor house and trading her simple work dress for one of the finer, more restrictive ones that London fashion demands. But sometimes, on occasional afternoons, she'll look up and catch a glimpse of Cain walking across the gardens toward her, his coat slung over his shoulder in a rare display of informality to match her own. He's never difficult to spot, when he does; he's a silhouette of black outlined against the looming gray stone of the house, the green of the grass, the blue of the sky. The look on his face is never quite what one could call a smile, but there's a contentment to it, a hidden gentleness that so often gets buried beneath the guile and canniness demanded of a socialite in this strange, foreign land called London.
It's only in the garden that the reservations begin to melt away. They stand close, their shoulders brush, their fingers twine together. Cain cuts a rose and meticulously strips it of its thorns before tucking it behind Rosella's ear; in return, Rosella plucks a bit of ivy and threads it through the buttonhole on his lapel. They speak in memories of a gone-but-never-forgotten City: a shady spot by the lakeside, a path of flowers that never went out of season. And sometimes, on very rare occasions, Rosella will mention Daventry, her homeland now twice removed. The longing in her tone is always understated, but there; she misses her kingdom and her castle, and she is even further from it now than she was before. There's something like regret in the way she speaks of it, though it's not that she regrets the choice she made. It's more that she regrets that a choice had to be made at all.
Speaking of Daventry, oftentimes, is what prompts the shift from private moments to moments alone.
It's days when Rosella speaks of Daventry that they walk to the door of that house on the far side of the garden, when Cain gives in to temptation and lets his forehead come to rest against hers. They never speak of the choice she made, or why she made it, but he knows what she gave up to follow him, and she knows he'll never believe he was worth that sacrifice. She never tries to persuade him of it, in part because she knows him too well to think that anything she could say would convince him otherwise, and part because she knows deep down that the two can't be weighed side by side, a home in a place against a home in a person. So instead, she reaches for the latch on the door, steadies her balance before letting it swing open behind her, slides her arms around him as she backs them both inside. Even the garden is too public to truly be safe, out in the open beneath the expanse of the sky; inside, at least, the walls narrow their attentions down to the sanctuary of a single room.
The kisses are always light, soft, like the whispers of a feather. Uncle Neil was wrong in his perception that she was brought here as an exotic doll, but there are certain ways in which he wasn't far off the mark; they've been like this for years and yet Cain still touches her like he thinks it will break her, still watches his fingers trace over her skin as if he's expecting to see stains the color of soot left behind by the tips. She always wants to tell him that he won't hurt her, that he can't, except that she knows all too well that he can and quite possibly will. It's never been a secret; she's always known that he's dangerous, and ruthless, and it isn't just his Victorian sensibilities that make him hold her at arm's length, but his fear that his edges, sharp as broken glass, will cut her, too.
She tries to tell him she doesn't care about that in the way she returns his kisses, in the tactile messages she telegraphs along his neck and against the line of his jaw. But it's not so much that she doesn't care as it is she understands, or wants to, and accepts the danger that life with him incurs. He may be the earl who courts death, but she has slipped through death's fingers more times than she can count, and she knows the difference between the icy grip of impending doom and the way he traces patterns of affection against her body. Too many girls before her have died for him, and she wonders if he sees them when he looks at her and drinks in the blue of her eyes, the gold of her hair, the smirk in her spirit. She wants to tell him that she won't follow them, that she's different, but the truth is that she doesn't know if she is or not, only that she's always managed to evade her death before, and she has faith in her own ability to stay out of its reach for a long, long time.
I chose this, she thinks as she tucks her head beneath his chin, eyelashes heavy as she listens to the quiet rhythm of his heartbeat. I chose this, don't you understand? It's not too much to want to be happy...
They're always late getting back, those days; it will be dusk before they finally make the return walk across the garden, slipping further back into the demands of propriety with every step. Riff will be waiting at the manor-house door like a silent guardian; Rosella will offer him a faint smile before slipping up to her rooms to change. And sometimes upstairs she'll see Merry watching for her, as well, peeping around the doorjamb in a way that never quite hides the knowing look on her face. She'll exchange her rumpled work dress for a dinner gown, arrange the collar, pin lace at her throat, and let London stifle her once again.
It's hard to explain how it is she knows when the final reckoning with Cain's father first begins to loom on the horizon. Perhaps it's something in the magic DELILAH works to invoke, a crackling blackened thing that society forbids but so many Londonites seem infatuated with. A place like London is the antithesis of Daventry, Rosella thinks as she stares at the shadows of the buildings in the distance, thriving on technology and innovation and smog that clouds the sky; it's also a place starved of magic, churning with gears and soot, and the thin, hungry souls of the people that call it their homeland can't help but feel drawn to any magic at all, no matter the form it takes. And there is magic in Rosella, a kind that stands out in opposition, because there is still something of Daventry in her, not black and forbidden but golden and alive. Perhaps she feels it coming because the use of magic resonates with her in a way that she can't explain, draws her notice even as she recoils from the hideous feel of it.
But perhaps she also knows it's coming because of the way it changes Cain, and how suddenly even in their most languid moments, she can sense the urgency in him lurking beneath the surface. He's tenser now, his nerves honed razor-sharp, his brows drawn together as he calculates move after move in anticipation of what their foes might do. He spends more time with his poisons, staring at the curves and corners of the glass bottles as if expecting to find an answer in the deadly liquids they hold. And she finds herself suddenly longing for home, where things make sense, and fathers love their children and beanstalks stretch up into the cornflower sky.
She watches Cain change more and more with each passing day and lingers even further on thoughts of home, finding herself wondering if he would have hated Daventry as much as she has hated London, had their positions been reversed all those years ago. Would he cringe from the sunlight the way she recoils from the smog? She wonders what he would do in a castle bustling with life and love and affection; would it drive him to pace the battlements like Prince Hamlet, with only his ghosts for company? Would he feel as ill-fitting and isolated as she does here? Would he have endured it for her as long as she has for him?
It grows colder outside, and her garden begins to wither. The blooms fall and fade, the plants receding in anticipation of the coming winter. She spends an afternoon lying in bed, surrounded by pillows and lace and gauzy white bedcurtains, hugging her arms to her chest as if to ward off the coming chill as she thinks of floating and falling through clouds. She stares at the canopy overhead and wonders if perhaps this is how Ophelia felt as she sank beneath the surface of the river, enveloped in finery and gradually finding it harder and harder to breathe. Is this how it felt to watch her prince go mad?
It's Riff who eventually finds her, bearing a cold cloth and a sympathetic look. The room seems to spin as she looks up at him, feeling dizzy and faint, and she almost says will you let him, Horatio? but she knows that whatever affection Riff may have for her, his loyalty is always and foremost with Cain. Her unspoken question is no question at all; where his master leads, he will follow, even if it means running headlong into death itself.
She wants to beg them to live, but she can't, so she silently wishes for them to end it instead.
The sky is dark and overcast the night that Cain retires to his study like a man possessed, his energy and determination crackling like lightning in the set of his lips. He's penning messages to some names she knows, and to others she doesn't; he's sending for Uncle Neil, for Oscar Gabriel, and a man he calls a charlatan, the one named Dominic Crehador. The first she learns from listening at the door, her stomach twisting into knots as the pen scratches across the page; the names she doesn't discover until after she musters the courage to open the door, fingers trembling as they grasp at the knob for purchase.
The rumble of thunder in the distance isn't enough to mask the creak of the hinges as the door swings open, and Cain turns at once toward the sound, mouth already opening to bark a command—but then stops when he sees her, staying silent as she slips inside and presses the door closed behind her. He says nothing, but his eyes speak volumes, glittering like a cat's in the dim yellow light of his desk lamp. And she wants to speak, but she doesn't have the words, doesn't have the breath because it's catching in her throat, and there's nothing she can do but look at him and hope that he can read it all from her gaze in return.
She walks across the room and he rises to meet her, one hand still resting on the back of his chair as the other comes up to touch her cheek. She knows the end is coming, as sure as there is lightning lurking in the sky stretched black outside the windows, but she can't stop it and can't ask him to do it himself. She has slipped through death's fingers so many times and yet she can't teach the skill to anyone else; they've died and hovered on the brink of death and caressed her with icy fingers, and held her close as she pressed her ear to their chest and listened for a heartbeat that wasn't there. The rules of death were bent and twisted in the city where they met, but in London death is final, and already she can feel Cain slipping away toward it.
He runs his fingers down the curve of her jaw as her eyes fall shut, and a moment later there are kisses feathered soft against her closed eyelids, the tickle of black bangs on the tip of her nose. His lips are cool, or perhaps it's just that her eyes are stinging hot, her throat suddenly closed. She grasps at the lace pinned there and yanks at it, struggling to free it so she can breathe, but it's not the lace that's stifling her this time, and it's not the corset pulled tight beneath her fine dress that is stealing her breath away.
His lips find her temple as the first faint, rich notes of a herald's horn begin to trumpet through the room, and her brimming tears spill over at last as her eyes fly open at the sound.
They turn as one toward the window, the source of the interruption, and thunder rumbles in the distance; it's another minute before they hear it again, and this time it comes not in the form of a fanfare but in a melody that makes Rosella's heart leap into her throat. She's been away a long time, so long it seems like an eternity, but she will never forget the sound of Greensleeves ringing out in joyous anthem.
It can't be.
It can't be.
But impossiblity doesn't stop her from running anyway, out through the passage and into the storm, Cain hot on her heels as she catches up handfuls of her skirts and snatches them out of the way of her stride. The sound is there—it's faint, but it's there, and strangely distant—and the first droplets of rain are beginning to fall as she hurries across the stone-gray courtyard, looking for the source of the noise. It could be a trick, and there's a part of her that knows it, but no, they couldn't know this much, they couldn't know this.
She feels the whisper of magic first, and it draws her like a magnet to the fountain in the center of the courtyard, where her answer is awaiting her approach. Like the music, it's dim but it's there, a flicker of banner-topped towers in the rippling water. She drops to her knees, clutches the stone edge, and looks again—and it's a great wooden door, a rich hall within, a pair of thrones and a magic mirror on the wall, all illuminated in golden light beneath the water.
There's a touch to her shoulder, and then Cain is there beside her, and she knows from the way his fingers tighten that he sees it, too.
It's home.
She can go home.
And she doesn't know if it's her wishing that has made it so, or if it's some strange aftereffect of the magic DELILAH has been preparing, or if it's simply that she never belonged here in the first place and the time has come for her to leave Cain's story and return to her own. But it's Daventry in the water, golden and waiting, marred only by the rapid beat of raindrops on the surface of the fountain.
She looks up at him, rises slowly to her feet, and knows from the look in his eyes that he's thinking back to the sound of a carousel in the distance, the curiosity of lights and music down an alley, and the consequences that came for him after he'd ventured off to investigate it. There's a horrible finality to opportunities like this, a heartwrenching penalty that comes from indulging such curiosity, and they both know it all too well.
She wants to say, come with me. They could escape the fate that Cain is charging towards, collect the others and run away, hide in her kingdom for the rest of their days and never have to fear the threat of his father again. They could go home, and be free, and she could show him in person what it feels like to walk on clouds and soar on a condor's wings and be wrapped up in a father's fond embrace. They could go where the air is heavy with magic, golden and glittering, and fill his starving soul with it until every last bit of London's bitterness has been driven out and replenished with something better.
She wants to say, we could live happily ever after.
But then her stomach twists, and she thinks again of the words she's repeated so often since following him to London. She made this choice for herself, and she knew what she was getting into when she made it. This was what she wanted, no matter the heartache and anguish that followed, and it's cruel to have to face it again—the home in a place weighed against the home in a person. She chose this once already. She made her choice to be here. This was the fate she made for herself, no matter how many chances she gets to make it over again.
And she's just beginning to turn away from the fountain when Cain catches her arm, grasping it so tightly it hurts, and makes her look him in his deathly white face as he whispers, "Go."
The rain is cold, too cold, and it's such a sharp contrast to the fresh wave of tears that spill over onto her cheeks at the sound of the command, and it's freezing and miserable and the sky is still stretched out overhead, but none of that seems to matter as she throws herself at him, and he catches her, and he kisses her like a drowning man gasping for air. He's holding her so tight she thinks she'll break into pieces, and they're carrying on in a way that's well past improper and straight into scandalous, but it doesn't matter, none of it matters, nothing but the heartwrenching thought that after all this time, all the worlds they've endured together, now at last it has finally come to an end. And Rosella doesn't know who he's seeing as he looks at her from behind the damp bangs plastered to his forehead, but she herself is in two places at once, the courtyard of the manor in the evening and a golden beach in Tamir at dawn, and for a moment she feels dizzy and disoriented and frantic as she prays he doesn't ask her to marry him because she'll break into bits if he does.
They kiss until her knees go weak and her breath runs out, and then she just holds on as tight as she can, burying her face in the crook of his shoulder as she abandons all semblance of pride and just clings to him.
We could be happy, she thinks desperately, and it's hard to tell if his coat is wet from the rain or her tears or both. It's not too much to ask.
"You stubborn girl," he murmurs into her hair, turning them slightly to face the castle in the water for himself. He adds something else after a moment, some other whispered phrase, but she can't quite make it out because she's drowning herself in the feeling of being wrapped up in him, trying to memorize every detail at once and dreading the moment when he finally lets go and it all unravels again.
And for a moment she isn't sure what to say, because part of her wants to ask him to follow her, and part wants her to beg him not to forget her, but he has a battle waiting on the horizon and she is only one in a long line of girls that have loved him like this. It's better that she goes, she knows, because it will mean one less thing that his father can use against him, one less fear to entertain as he pursues his final vengeance. It's better that she escapes to where no one can reach her, even if it means finally giving this awful goodbye, the one that she's been avoiding for so many years.
"Find me when it's over," she finally chokes out, curling her fingers into whatever fabric she can reach, her knuckles going white as the reality of it finally hits home with the sound of the words in the open air. "Promise me you'll find me, whatever it takes..."
And he does, he murmurs against her ear the most heartbreaking endearments she's ever heard, that nothing will keep him away and he will find his way back to her, that even if she were a single rose in a thousand he would find her, recognize her, return to wherever she may be—and for once she doesn't wonder who he's seeing, or who else he may have said it to before her; she just takes it and believes it and locks it fast in her heart, because it's all she can do and she needs some hope to cling to, something to trust in to carry her through.
He slowly lets her go, and she unwinds herself from him, her back to the pool and the stone rim pressing lightly against her calves, and she looks at him one last time, aching for one last kiss that she knows she can't have.
He's beautiful in the rain, she thinks, and lingers on the sight of the one thing that made London bearable all this time. Her hatred for all this never once extended to him, and she thinks—just once, a fleeting, passing whim—that perhaps she could have been happy in London after all.
She lets herself begin to fall backwards into the pool, and on instinct he moves to catch her, just a single step before he remembers himself—and in that instant, she thinks that she could reach for him, slide her arms around him in that old familiar way, and pull him along with her, guiding him inside, not into the house on the other side of the garden but home—
But she's not the only one who made a choice, once upon a time.
His face is the last thing she sees as a curtain of water rises up on either side of her head, as she splashes through the surface and down, down, deeper than the fountain's pool ever ran, and the image soon goes blurry as it filters and refracts down through the water covering over her face.
Goodnight, sweet prince, she thinks, and lets her eyes fall closed, and lingers in that burbling darkness until at last she feels a nervous tugging on her arm; when she opens her eyes again, there is a dark-haired boy gazing back at her—a familiar, nervous boy with a face that matches her own.
"Rosella?" Alexander asks hesitantly, the first real thing she's heard him say in years and years.
"It's so good to be home," she answers shakily, her voice cracking on the last word as it hits her all at once—that everything they always said was true, and she's home again at last, and no one even noticed because it's as if she's never been gone at all.
"It's so good to be home," she repeats through a sob, and sinks to the familiar stone floor of the castle she's dreamt of for so long, and curls in on herself as she cries and cries and cries.