rosiebriar-blog

[rosiebriar-blog]

home is where the heart is.

Summary: Rosalie Briar never wanted to make Regium her home. But as it turns out, her home was never a place -- it was always a person. Mentions: Meghan Stanwyck, Paula Soucie, Philip Gregory, Flynn Reynolds

She does not know how, or why -- all she knows is that she does. Rosalie Briar finally reaches her breaking point.

She tires of it. Of all the shootings. Of all the death. The blonde con artist is at home, tucking her gun into the back of her jeans and getting ready to leave for the day, when it occurs to her: it does not feel like home anymore. Not just the apartment, but the entire goddamn city. It's not her home. It never was.

Regium is nothing but toxic destruction, and it has turned her into the one thing she never wanted to be -- someone who is not only tied down, but who is willing to condone violence in order to stay that way.

An idea begins to form in her head, and when she meets up with Meghan later that day, Rosalie makes a suggestion that she feels is in both of their best interests. Because it will benefit them both. Solve both of their problems.

Meghan agrees.

In an unprecedented move, she decides that the one person she really wants to come clean to before leaving is Paula. A bold choice, perhaps -- spilling her entirely life story to a cop of all people. But Rosalie has always been good at reading others, and in the time she has spent in the hellhole that is Regium, she has come to consider the blonde officer a real kindred spirit.

Besides, Paula isn't even that surprised by what she hears. As it turns out, she's known about her flighty friend's multiple aliases for quite some time -- and assuming that they might be used for reasons other than avoiding former hook-ups and clingy exes is not entirely unreasonable. Letting her know exactly what those other reasons are right before the flighty friend in question stops being a menace to the city? That is Rosalie's parting gift to the law.

That, and whatever information she still has on the seedy underbelly of the city, whether it is accurate or not. Granted, it might not even be helpful, but as it turns out, there really is no honour among thieves. Of course, she avoids selling out any of her friends. But perfect strangers?

The city can burn in her absence for all she cares.

But she promises to keep in touch. She promises that if Paula ever needs anything, literally anything at all, she should never, ever hesitate to contact her. And then, right before she leaves, she asks for one last favour.

Keep an eye on Philip for me, will you?

Leaving feels good. Leaving feels right. It felt right the last time she left as well, but perhaps it is for the best that she returned initially -- if only to take care of business, to tie up loose ends. Besides, there was only ever one real reason she decided to stay back then.

So, she sits down and tells Flynn. She tells him everything. She tells him about the gun, tells him about all the backdoor deals she's made and about a world that she never wanted to be a part of, that she is finally and permanently signing herself off from. She tells him that she is running away again and she tells him exactly why that is. Except this time, she does what she never had the guts to do before.

She asks him to come with her.

She says please. Please come with me and Meghan, Flynn. Because the world can go to hell in a handbasket for all she cares, but Flynn Reynolds has always been and will always be her family, and she does not want to be without him anymore.

She never wants to be without him.

Rosalie wonders if she has ever been quite as happy as she is in the moment when he says yes.

Meg eventually finds a home in Italy, and although the boot-shaped country is ripe in food, fashion, history and art -- the four things that Rosalie loves most -- her and Flynn cannot help but remain who they have always been. They are at their core rootless wanderers, waking up every morning ready to embrace a new day, a new adventure, each vastly different and more bizarre than the last. Except now, they have the means to make it happen.

It's a vivid daydream, conning and stealing their way through Europe, and they're actually living it.

And when one particularly sunny afternoon the blonde uncorks an 82' Bordeaux, she finds herself thinking back to a different time -- a time before their travels, before Regium, before all those years she spent alone on the run. A time when two kids in their late teens would pour cheap wine into an expensive bottle and pretend that they were living in France instead of in a shitty ten-floor walk-up without proper heating.

She looks over at her partner in crime; leaning back in his seat on the sundeck, sunglasses placed lazily on his nose, with a white trilby hat on his head tipped rakishly to the side.

She wonders if their past selves would even believe that they actually made it.

As for romances, they come and go -- remaining as fast and as fleeting as they have always been.

In Madrid, Rosalie has a brief but passionate affair with a cat burglar who specialises in recovering old Spanish silver, and who ends up getting strangely competitive with her friend; not over her attention or affection, but over who is ultimately the best thief.

(Flynn is, but she waits for a long time to tell him that, least it blow his ego out of proportion.)

In Budapest, Flynn gets stabbed in the arm with a fork for trying to sneak out on a girl in the middle of the night. When he finally gets back to the hotel room and tells her the story, Rosalie promptly breaks down into fits of laughter and states, in no uncertain terms, that he definitely had it coming.

So, they're definitely not the most romantic bunch. But that's all right. Maybe one day, they'll both find someone to settle down with, but for now, neither of them are in any rush. Because while Rosalie rarely makes errors in judgement, once upon a lifetime, standing in a Las Vegas hotel room, she was wrong about one thing.

She was wrong when she thought that eventually she'd have to find a different way to live.

The blonde con artist never needed someone she was willing to slow down for. She needed someone who was willing to get up and run with her. And in that person, in the connection they shared that spanned all the way from their late teens into the life they lived now, openly and honestly and finally without fear, she found a home.

Rosalie Briar never did touch a gun again.

[rosiebriar-blog]

'Cause we are living in a material world And I am a material girl

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Boys are like lumps of coal. They are dirty and cheap and they get hot when they're rubbed. And some of them turn into diamonds; so collect as many as you can.

Kitty Wilde

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Hello, Lovelies

I'm quite sad to see the game close. It's been a while since I met a community of writers with whom I've connected so thoroughly, both IC and OOC -- and after the times we've had together, I consider many of you to be my friends. I already have a lot of you on Skype, but for those I don't, you can reach me on crimsonwriting.

I also recently created a new 1x1 blog ( http://crimsonplaying.tumblr.com ; I forgot the login for my old one and I've been wanting to create a new one for a while anyway ) which you'll be able to reach me through should you wish to. <3

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Rosalie took a seat, not exactly being the one to ask for permission before making herself comfortable. For a second, she was caught off guard by his question. She shouldn't have been, it was a reasonable follow-up question, but it occurred to her then that she had not come up with a feasible cover story for why she'd moved out of Flynn's place. And she wasn't exactly in the position or the mood to tell Adam that it was indirectly because of him. "I don't know where you get the idea that I can't complete household chores," she replied indignantly, but with a small smirk playing at her lips. "I've lived on my own for most of my adult life. When I was 19, I was totally broke. My apartment was a six-floor walk-up with insufficient heating."

"Good. I’m running out of all that whiskey I got for Christmas already." Maybe he was exaggerating there. He still had plenty of those, as he still had some of his own previous stock. Adam shrugged then, with a smirk plastered on his face, at hearing she had moved back to her apartment permanently. There were many ways to mortify the blonde woman when playing neighbors. His amusement only lasted as long as the thought lasted, however, which wasn’t that long, because she also repaid the favor at times. "Your friend finally managed to win his bed back? Or did the sheets get dirty and you didn’t know how the washing machine worked so it was time to move?" Not like he knew how one worked either, but that was besides the case.

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Her eyes and words are so icy Oh, but she burns like rum on the fire Hot and fast and angry as she can be

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Satisfied that they seemed to have reached some sort of silent agreement, Rosalie listened attentively to what the other woman was saying, understanding lighting up in her eyes. "In my professional opinion, you'll need a good go stash--cash, fake IDs, passports. Even if you aren't planning to leave the city, a couple of good aliases are always useful, and in my case, necessary. I might be able to help with that." Calm, collected, businesslike; when talking about these matters, that's how the blonde was. Still, there was that little tone in her voice that implied this was not something she did for just anyone. "If you ever need somewhere else to stay, my apartment happens to be fitted with a top-notch security system, and I have a couch, too."

"You aren’t wrong," Meg sighed. The girl standing in front of her was something dangerous. The kind of organized anarchy that really shouldn’t be embodied into one whole entity. A thief, she assumed, or some sort of con. Whatever the circumstances she knew that much and the other woman knew that Meg was a wanted fugitive who no doubt had some sort of bounty on her head. The situation seemed fitting for the two of them. She put a hand on her hip, looking around them casually to make sure there weren’t any others listening in. “I’m couch surfing with a couple friends. My ex-boss is trying to locate me, I’m trying to keep him off my tail. If he catches me I’m probably looking at some serious hot water.” And probably a nice six-foot deep hole.

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By now, Colton's apartment was fairly familiar to the blonde. She hadn't spent an excessive amount of time there, but she'd been around enough to feel like she could make herself at home, at least to a certain degree. Sauntering into the kitchen, Rosalie chuckled lightly over her shoulder as she placed the bag of groceries on the counter. "Oh, you know," she replied dismissively, but with a lighthearted tone that came naturally to her. "Same old, same old."

Retrieving various items from the bag, she finally reached for the bottle of wine and handed it over to her company, smiling as she did so. "How about you? I'm glad to see that you seem to be in a slightly better mood today."

Colton had popped down to Tod’s earlier to make sure he was okay, and having assured himself that his friend was doing well, he headed back to prepare for Rosie. He’d been trying to keep himself busy recently, barely spending more than a day or two alone, trying to stick to his - now rather badly abused - list of new years’ resolutions. One he’d been doing extremely badly at, however, was that resolution of not drinking. He was essentially ignoring it by now. 

Cleaning up the last bits and pieces of mess around - an old magazine, a book he’d got out of the library - he heard the door and leapt up to answer it. “Come in,” he said with a smile. “And damn, I’m glad to hear that. How are you doing?”

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"Yes, I completely agree. That is the exact reason why I never bothered with college in the first place. I've always known that my talents were more suited for a different career path." And by different, she of course meant illegal--Rosalie couldn't help that conning people happened to be what she was good at. Besides, she could have any life that she wanted to without having to train for it. What more could she ask for? "You should include that in your last will and testamente," the blonde suggested. "'No tees with my face. Coffee mugs and actions figures only.' But honestly, I don't even get the point of differentiating between one set of miniature plastic human beings and another set of miniature plastic human beings. They're literally the same thing."

"I can always try again at some point. Maybe I can get into the real manor. That would really be something to write about. I was actually surprised to discover that Hefner was a feminist. He’s really enlightened for someone of his age. And college is a societal thing. Not everyone needs a degree to be a success. Many of the brightest dropped out of school." Elena shrugged. College was something that everyone praised the virtue of, but Elena didn’t see the value. She had not completed a degree, but she learned more from talking to her peers and her professors than she did from any formal class. "Tees are so tacky. I’d want to be on coffee mugs at the very bottom of the list, but it would be preferable if I was an action figure. None of that doll vs action figure nonsense either. They are the same toy."

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"I was, yes," Rosalie replied with a devious smirk. "And honestly, I think that you were, too. Am I wrong about that?"

"And let me guess…" Marie mused, glancing in the blonde’s direction. "You were born with it."

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"Oh, who the hell cares what Dane thinks?" Rosalie made a dismissive motion, as if waving the other man's opinion off, before smiling at Oliver. "Take me there, okay? I don't even care where it is or if anyone thinks it's dumb. I could use a little bit of silly in my life, you know."

Oliver blushed under Rosie’s touch and he smiled. “I won’t say anything. Promise.” He nodded enthusiastically and shuffled his feet. “W-well, there’s this one place I like to go, b-but… I don’t know if you’d like going there. It’s a little silly. And Dane would think it’s dumb…”

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"Do I have to have a specific reason? Perhaps I was simply yearning for your delightful company." Even as she said the words, Rosalie couldn't take them entirely seriously--and she didn't even try to hide that fact, either. "No, it's a thank you present. For my security system. Now that I've actually permanently moved back into my apartment, and all."

"I’m going to call you Tennessee Honey from now on." Mainly because it was the only somewhat feminine whiskey name he could think of, but also because he practically associated the blonde with drinks by now. Not that he was complaining, it came perfectly for his current mood. "What brings you around this time, Blondie?"

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Rosalie raised an eyebrow again, but there was a softer, more sincere expression on her face. She turned to face the boy with him. "Ah, this three year old?" Crouching, she smiled warmly. "Hi, I'm Rosie. Do you want me to help you find your dog?" Tilting her head up, she glanced at Phoenix. "It's all right, Phee. I went and saw her myself. Besides, it seems you have more than enough on your plate already."

"That’s what I thought, but people seem sort of amazed that I keep suggesting that a three legged dog can exist whenever I ask." Phoenix replied. "My dog, I let a three year old hold the leash. Not one of my better ideas." He looked at her, pausing. "I forgot to text you and tell you that Elena was okay, didn’t I?"

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"Not that I can recall, but I'm fairly certain I would've remembered that," Rosalie replied with her signature smile. "I assume this is a specific dog you're looking for rather than a random question you happen to be asking people on the street?"

Phoenix stopped in front of someone about to walk by. Next to him he held the hand of a little boy to stop him from walking away. “Have you by chance seen a three-legged dog run by?”