scoutwilson-blog

[scoutwilson-blog]

rvsethorned‌:

status : closed to @scoutwilson location : briar’s apartment timestamp : october thirteenth

Papers are askew across coffee table, she’s surely run herself ragged within the past few days. Stretching herself thin had never been hard for Briar, the option of saying no something in which she’d never quite grasped. Scarlet was missing, and both Briar and Scout had dealt with the consequences. Wonderland had become a tension filled chaotic pit, cut throat men and women all looking for answers. For own personal benefits, or merely out of the generosity of their own greed. She’s down to the last bit of wine within her glass, legs tucked beneath her as she remains bundled up upon the couch. But tonight, she’s determined to put something else, anything else, onto her troubled mind. A remedy coming in the form of whatever it was she was mixing tonight, unbeknownst to anyone and everyone. The knock startles her, crossing the hardwood floors to open door willingly at the sight of Scout. It’s a warm welcome, a soft sigh of relief escaping before she wears a softer smile. “I was hoping you got my text.” She moves back inside, nodding an invite inside. “I’ve got boxed wine and pizza leftovers, but I just ––– I really wanted to see you. This entire weeks just been ––– “ The word hard doesn’t seem to do it justice, but she settles. “Hard. I didn’t see you at work yesterday.”

Scout can feel it choking her, the weight of Scarlet missing from her life. She doesn’t understand it, doesn’t think she’ll ever be fully free from the naïveté that she suffered through in her former life to fully make sense of the turn of events Fabletown was suffering under now. It makes her stomach turn, the thought that someone would hurt Scarlet--Scarlet, who had always been kind of Scout, even when, no, especially when Scout hadn’t deserved it. Scarlet, who had been there for Scout when she cried for thought she had torn apart Ella and Charming’s marriage, for every time that Scout got too drunk because a patron had begged her to have drinks with him and what the customer’s want, the customer’s get. It happened during her shift today, and instead of taking care of her Cessair had taken a single look at her, watched her unable to stand quite right, and told her to get the fuck out of Wonderland. 

She’d meant to go home, really, left the club with every intention of curling up in her bed and sleeping, but the thought of sleep made her see stars, made her heart beat so fast she thought she might jump out a window instead, so instead she walks. Walks and walks until there are goosebumps on every inch of her body and she can barely feel the alcohol anymore, then walks some more, and when she finds herself walking past Briar’s apartment building she wants nothing more than to have someone just tell her thing will be alright. That they’ll find Scarlet. That this absence in her soul can be filled once more. 

The sight of the tiny girl sends something cold for a moment down Scout’s spine, and she wonders if she’s chosen her moment wrongly, if there’s something dark and rotten in her chest that’s only going to ruin Briar’s week further, but the warmth in the other girl sends her over the door’s threshold anyways. “I didn’t, actually,” she says, speaking for the first time in hours. She crosses her arms over her chest, realizing for the first time just how cold she really is. “I lost my phone a couple days ago. I think it’s probably at Sally’s, but I forgot to ask her about it.” She pauses, looking at Briar fully now. “I just wanted to see you, too.” A dark chuckle escapes her, completely inappropriate for the mood, but she can’t help it. She cocks her head to the side when she speaks again, raising her eyebrows for a beat. “Great minds.”  

She looks at the ground now, twisting her mouth to the side. “Sorry about missing work yesterday and not telling you.” A pause, she keeps staring at the floorboards. “Lost my phone, like I said, and I guess I was just sort of... having a day. I was there for the day shift and I was supposed to work the night with you, but this one customer really set me off, and Cessair told me to get it together or take the night off, something about not needing me anyways.” She shrugs and looks up, knowing there’s more to say but feeling unable to say the words. 

“He had to kick me out again tonight,” she says, rolling her eyes. “He probably wants to fire my ass. Good thing Grimhilde would rather keep me under her thumb than have me out roaming.” 

[scoutwilson-blog]

ellabellamy‌:

WHEN: October 11th, 09:10.  WHERE: Castle of Dreams.  WHO: Open. 

Blond hair tightly wrapped in a bun, Ella sighed as she looked at herself in the dingy mirror of the employees’ bathroom. Her break was about to end, and the young woman wasn’t looking forward to getting back to cleaning. It wasn’t that she disliked it; it was what she did best, after all. It was just so repetitive after a while, and she had already been at it for hours that day. Still, she needed the money and the job satisfaction, and therefore she only blinked once more before getting out of the bathroom. Pushing her cart towards the rooms, she frowned as she saw that most of them had requested to be left alone. Work might have been a drag sometimes, but doing nothing was much, much worse. Finally, Ella spotted a room with no sign on the door, and knocked. Getting no answer, she unlocked the door and walked in, going over to the bed to get the sheets. Gently humming to herself, she didn’t hear that someone had walked out of the bathroom, and didn’t notice them either until she bumped into them. “Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry.”

Scout doesn’t want to to be there, wants nothing more than to scrub her skin from her bones the moment she steps through the back door to the Castle of Dreams. She loathes this place, loathes what her co-workers do here every time they step across the front threshold. It sticks in her throat, the weight of it, the discontent, but instead of making her fight it just makes her silent--the silence is easy, she think. It’s the way of their world, and she wants to learn how to live in it, and letting places like Castle of Dreams thrive was part of that. At least she hadn’t been made to come here with a customer yet--though she supposes it might just be a matter of time before one of her employers tells her to do as much or get out. She’s just about to leave the bathroom when she hears the door to the room click open, and Scout curses her misfortune; being caught here was the last thing she wants, but when she peers through the crack in the doorway and see it’s just Elle she breathes a sigh of relief, before panic catches her again. She’s trying to slip out quietly, without being seen or heard, when suddenly the blonde backs up right into her. “No, it’s--” she says, waving her hands in front of her in some failed attempt at placation without actually speaking. She wants to flee, wants to fucking run. Of all the people to bump into here, Elle Bellamy is nearly the last of them. “You’re good; this isn’t my room. I’m the one who’s not supposed to be here. It’s just--” She pauses, her eyebrows furrowed together in discomfort. “One of the new girls left her phone here earlier and just... she um, well she didn’t want to come back and get it so... I came for her.”    

[scoutwilson-blog]

slurred words <3

She can’t help it, rolls her eyes immediately at the mention of Milo Thatch. It’s not something that she can control, she finds, not anymore, not when there’s brandy coloring her world amber and and making everything seem harsher than it really is. Or maybe she’s shedding rose-colored glasses–either way, she rolls her eyes; either way, she’s callous. “What a bore,” she says, shaking her head and sighing, lifting the nearly empty glass to her lips as she stands up. “I mean, you can love books without being…” she makes a gesture like she’s trying to sum something up with her hands, but it comes off clumsy and all she can say it “like that.” She’s breathing heavily, staring into the bottom of her glass now. “Fabletown is going to chew him up and spit him back out if he’s not careful.” She lifts the glass to her lips and downs the rest of it in a single sip. There’s half a pause before she goes on, and it weighs on her more than she’ll admit when she’s sober later. “I hope he’s careful.” 

[scoutwilson-blog]

slurred words 👀

“Little bird…” she sighs, drawn out by melancholy and the full moon staring at her in the darkness. They’re just walking by the bookshop, closed now in the early hours of morning before the dawn, but Scout remembers just earlier chatting quietly with the doe-eyed thing behind the counter as she bought yet another book she didn’t need. “Wendy, Wendy, Wendy–she’s one of the good one’s I think.” She purses her lips, trying to think, but her thoughts come out something contorted and she can’t seem to make sense of them, can’t hardly make sense of the ground beneath her feet as she walks down the side walk arm in arm with her friend. “She’s so tiny! I tower over her,” she says, chuckling and leaning into her friends side. “I just want to put her in my pocket, keep all that is gold glowing and whatnot.” She pauses half a breath, then laughs. “Though my pockets probably aren’t the safest place.” She shakes her head, goes on while still laughing. “Maybe I should keep as far from her as possible, make sure she stays golden that way.” A twist of her lips, pursed to the side as she pretends this idea doesn’t bother her. “I think I could manage that.”

[scoutwilson-blog]

slurred words

"Ugh,” is the first thing that she things to say when one Morrigan Firmin is mentioned, and it’s a sentiment that stands no matter how many a positive thought she might have for the woman--not that she has all that many of those either. “Bitch likes to run me ragged,” she says, hand instinctively going to the place on her shoulder where it’d felt like she’d tweaked something the last time Morrigan came to the club with a new routine for Scout to learn. “She’s--she’s shameless, though.” She pauses, and she’ll tell herself later that it’s because she was trying to think carefully, to think clearly, but she knows that if she were truly being careful she’d keep her mouth shut altogether. “She’s shameless in who she is, a villain by every definition of the world but proud of the atrocities she’s committed, truly thinks she was justified in every one.” She pauses again, the liquor weighing heavily on her stream of consciousness. “There’s something to be admired in there somewhere.” 

[scoutwilson-blog]

slurred words pls <3

“Ugh—her husband is a piece of work,” she says, her face quickly turning into a scowl. “Well, her ex-husband nowadays, I guess. Took them long enough to figure out they just weren’t right for each other. It’s not my fault, you know? He kept crawling around Wonderland—“ she’s stops suddenly, forces herself to shake her head and try to clear the liquor from her head. “But that’s not fair,” she says, her eyes still closed. “You asked about Ella, not Charming.” She inhales deeply and forces her eyes open, but she can’t look up from her hands, clenched together in her lap. “We all deserve to be more than the men in our lives, she—she deserves more than that.”

[scoutwilson-blog]

slurred words from hook and belle !

“Ah, Belle! Oh Belle, oh Belle, oh Belle. Everyone’s favorite beauty,” she sighs in mock contentment. Then she tilts her head to the side, laughs scathingly. Shaking her head, she can’t help it, can’t help but laugh at the mention of Belle. It’s unfair, maybe. Biased, definitely, but she’s so tired of the idolization. “I get it, okay? She was perfect in her Homeland and she’s peachy keen here, too. I get it,” she flings her hands up, stands from where she was sitting. Like she can’t contain it. Like she can’t hardly bear it, the weight of her own resentment. She grabs at the bottle of red wine on the table, slings it back and takes a long drink. “She comes around Wonderland like… like she can save us, or something? Like there’s something that she can do to help us. And it’s just–it’s delusion is what it is, thinking she has any kind of power here.” She shakes her head again, turning away from her drinking buddy. “She’s everyone’s favorite, but beauty makes people weak--no, not even weak, I think it makes them stupid, themselves and the people around them. And I have no place in my life for weakness, not anymore.”

“O’ captain, my captain,” she says, throws herself out of her chair as a tinkle of laughter bubbles from her chest. Without a care in the world, she uses her chair as a stepping stool and pushes her way onto the table. “Have you seen that movie?” she asks, spinning in a quick circle as her friend bursts into laughter. “You know who took that whole carpe diem thing really well? James Hook.” She taps the air where her vision aligns with her friends nose, as though she is bopping them from a distance. It makes her laugh, thinking about the mundie movie. “All that think differently, be different--I mean, what’s more different than being a pirate than being a professor?” She laughs, shifts so that she’s sitting on the edge of the table now. “Really, we should all take a note from that guy’s book.” She pauses, leans forwards so that her nose is nearly touching her friends, so close she can feel their breath on her face. “Here in Fabletown? We can be whatever the fuck we choose.”

[scoutwilson-blog]

a list of don’t sentence starters :

❝ don’t you dare touch him/her. ❞

❝ don’t look at me like that; like i matter to you. ❞

❝ i don’t understand why you’re acting this way. ❞

❝ don’t say that to me, [NAME]. not you, of all people. ❞

❝ what i don’t understand is how you can be so nonchalant in this situation. ❞

❝ please don’t make me go. ❞

❝ i don’t want to leave yet. ❞

❝ why don’t you just stay the night ? ❞

❝ don’t you love me anymore ? ❞

❝ no, you don’t understand. ❞

❝ you could, but you just don’t want to. ❞

❝ no matter what happens, don’t forget about me. ❞

❝ don’t say that you love me. ❞

❝ how can i live with myself if i don’t at least try to save you ? ❞

❝ don’t you know better than that by now ? ❞

❝ i don’t want anything to do with you anymore. ❞

❝ i don’t want to live a life without you in it. ❞

❝ your mind games don’t work on me. ❞

❝ i don’t want anything to happen to you. ❞

❝ please don’t miss me once i’m gone. ❞

❝ don’t go breaking my heart. ❞

❝ i don’t think anyone could love you the way i do. ❞

❝ you really don’t understand how much you mean to me, do you ? ❞

❝ i don’t want to die. ❞

❝ now don’t assume that this suddenly means we’re friends. ❞

❝ i don’t want you to be with anyone else. ❞

❝ don’t touch that, it’s valuable ! ❞

❝ ’ just friends ’ don’t look at each other like that. ❞

❝ please don’t cry. ❞

❝ don’t we deserve a happy ending ? ❞

[scoutwilson-blog]

slurred words !!!!!

“Goldilocks, she’s… she’s I mean, what’s a nice way of saying that she’s someone to look out for? Not to be bitchy, but I wouldn’t turn trust her as far as I could throw her.” She scrunches her eyebrows together, purses her lips. “You know, I know a lot about the fables.” She shakes her head, trying to think more clearly. “She’s not what I expected, you know? Not after the first time I read her story. It wasn’t sweet, exactly, but I saw her as this lost little girl who just needed a bed to sleep in. I thought I’d meet Goldilocks around town one day and she’d just need a friend. That’s what I get for not looking further, for not looking at the older stories, I guess.” She looks down, away from her friend. “People here though, no matter what version you look at, you should stop expecting them to be like their stories.” A pause. “I should know that better than anyone.”

[scoutwilson-blog]

slurred words !!

“Ah, my favorite rose,” she says, lifting her hands to her chest, a soft smile warming every single inch of skin on her face. “My favorite thorn.” She shakes her head, her smile playful and her heart on fire. She grips the bottle in her hand, giggling as she takes a long swig from the bottle of red wine. It dribbles down over the edge of her chin, and she wipes it away with the back of her hand. “She’s the most beautiful one there, you know, in Wonderland. People go there and waste away all their money just to get a glimpse of her.” She leans forwards, like she’s telling her companion a secret. “They don’t see it, the people who go there and watch us girls dance, but she’s got all these sharp edges.” She leans back, the cold wall behind her back jolting against her warm body. “Like me,” she says. “She’s like me.” 

[scoutwilson-blog]

slurred words !

“You know, I try not to pay much attention to her,” she says, her head tilting to the side as she tried to conjure a concrete feeling out of her head. She doesn’t want to talk about magic right now, doesn’t want to talk about things that make her blood boil and the space behind her eyes prickle. “I see her sometimes, in the bookshop.” She wonders for a half second if that’s something the witch would want kept secret, decides she doesn’t care even if it is. She has no obligations to Morgan Green. She’s pursing her lips though, trying to go on and say more, trying not to say what she wants to: that she hates magic users like Morgan, hates that they exist, hates that Fabletown is run by them. She knows there’s liquor lacquering her tongue and if she’s not careful, she’s going to say something that’ll get her in trouble. Her shoulders are tight, but she plays like they aren’t, waving a hand as if to push the topic away from the air. “Ask me about someone else, someone worth my time.” She’s done with magic. 

[scoutwilson-blog]

Slurred words

“Cain…” she lets herself trail off for a moment, thinking about her friend. There was something about him that made her want to do him justice, that made her want to do right by him; even when so many other in Fabletown couldn’t see past the exterior, she saw something kindred in him. A soul whose life had been undone by magic, someone who would never be the same because of it. “He’s such a drama queen, honestly.” She shakes her head, laughing. “I mean, have you seen his hair? I love my boy, but you can’t trust anyone who spends that long in front of a mirror every morning just focusing on their hair.” The smile on her cheeks is so wide that it almost hurts, but it’s more genuine than any of the one’s she had worn for the crowd tonight. She takes a slug from the bottle in her hands and then hands it over to Sally. “C’mon, catch up. We’re going to need to be drunker if we’re going to gossip about our friends.” A pause. “Especially the one’s who could probably tear us in two if they heard us.” 

[scoutwilson-blog]

slurred words pls pls pls !!!!

“Oh, Peter–” she says, her eyes falling closed, a small smile gracing her cheeks. “Peter, Peter, Peter.” She can’t help the bubble of laughter that rises in her chest, surprising her and every one around her. “He likes to act so big and tough,” her eyes are still closed she realizes and she lets them flutter open, shaking her head incredulously while she keeps thinking about the boy from Neverland. “Second star to the right and straight on ‘til morning,” she says, scrunching up her face in mock seriousness. She lets it go when she goes on, and it falls blank. Empty. “He runs around like the little lost boy he is, trailing other little lost boys behind him, thinking himself bigger than he really is.” She pauses, finally meets her companion’s eyes. “Doesn’t he know that stars here are just dead things hanging in the sky?”

[scoutwilson-blog]

Send “slurred words” to hear my muse describe yours whilst ridiculously drunk.

[scoutwilson-blog]

“what a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness.” - leo tolstoy

OOC BASICS MUN: Kaitlin AGE: 21 TIMEZONE: EST  PRONOUNS: She/her

IN CHARACTER BASICS FABLE NAME: Snow White CHOSEN NAME: Scout Wilson GENDER: Cis-female, she/her pronouns FACE CLAIM: Adrianne Ho AGE: Twenty-Five BIRTHDAY: November 1st ZODIAC: Scorpio Sun / Cancer Moon  OCCUPATION: Dancer at Wonderland

Fun non-skeleton application bits below the cut!!

CONNECTIONS: Snow White has her name on a fair number of the currently posted skeletons, so I drew somewhat from what is provided in those. These are obviously going to likely change somewhat once I talk to the muns of each, but these were my bare bones interpretations!!

CINDERELLA: You honestly can’t even blame her for the way that she looks at you, and there’s this weird part of you that thinks if things were any different, perhaps the two of you could have been friends. Maybe in another life, in another fairy tale, the two of you could have bonded over being forgotten children, over being left behind by parents who died on you before they could get a chance to love you the way that you deserved. You led different lives; where your step mother forgot you until you posed a threat, Cinderella’s made sure she always knew who was the one in charge. All the same, most days Prince Charming just feels like another piece of your narrative that you weren’t in control of, and you think that maybe she’d be able to relate to feeling out of control, to wanting to find your voice no matter what it cost you.

SALLY FINKELSTEIN, ALICE, AND THE BEAST: Like calls to like, or so all the stories say, and you think that your motley collection of friends shows nothing quite as well as it does this idea. You love them for all the holes that they have in them; they’ve all been blasted by shrapnel and left standing with jagged holes in their lives where the light used to be, and you love them so much more for it. That all of you continue to stand, in spite of it all; you think that you’ve had it easiest out of the bunch, more than think–you know. That’s how you tend to feel about everything though, that the world has withstood more than you, that you need to shoulder their burdens to make sure they continue standing. You’re happy to do it though, so long as it keeps them kind, so long as it keeps them curious.

HEXXUS: They terrify you in a way that your step mother never has, and it sends thrills down your spine equal parts thrill and terror. You think that you should know better, after spending so many years watching Rose Red get into any trouble that she could, after sitting quietly by her side, perfectly content. But for all that your Stepmother scared you, she forgot you until you were an adversary. Hexxus pays you no such kindness, decorates you in glitter and draws smiles across your cheeks so tight that they ache. Queen Grimhilde is terror, but Hexxus is horror, and for the first time, horror truly has its eyes trained on you. There’s something thrilling in that.

CRUELLA DE VIL: You think that maybe you should be afraid of her, but underneath all of her fur coats and her cruel smiles and the scent of tobacco that lingers, you know that she is nothing but a cruel woman, and you spent years living with a cruel woman. You know cruel women. Worse yet still, you know cruel women with magic at their fingertips and in the blood and in the food they serve their friends. Cruella de Vil thinks that she can scare you, make you feel small, make you feel like you aren’t worth anything more than the skin on your bones. For now, you think you’ll let her think that, let her think that your kindness is weakness, but you know your strengths and you know your weaknesses, and her telling you anything contrary to that won’t change the facts.

THE HUNTSMAN: There’s a part of you that’s resentful, and it’s a part of you with a voice so loud that sometimes you think you might drown in it. It’s not that you bear a grudge against him for saving your life, far from it. You bear a grudge against the world, against Homeland for placing you in a narrative that made you so absent of a self, so absent of a choice, of your own free will. You were born, fair and beautiful and great, because your mother asked the winter night as such. You were cast aside by your father, ignored and made small by a man that couldn’t bear the sight of you for the pains it brought to his chest. When you grew beautiful, your stepmother paid in blood to have a monopoly on violence, asked a Huntsman to bring Death into your life once again. You’re grateful to him for going against her, for protecting you at great cost to himself, you’re sure, but he’s another piece in your story that you weren’t in control of. You even love him for it, but for all that you look at him and feel infinite softness, there’s a part of you in the back of your mind that love’s him as hard as diamonds. Sharp enough to cut.

QUEEN GRIMHILDE: Every fiber of your soul hates her with all that it can do as such, but you have never been built for such darkness, for such cruelty, and even in the face of what she tried to do to you there’s a part of you that can’t help but ask the question Why? Why had she done what she’d done to your father? Why has she done what she’d done to you? To Rose Red? No matter how long you think about it, you just can’t seem to make any sense of it. Was it truly all for power? Was beauty truly worth the cost of all that spilt blood? You think that her answer can’t possibly be yes, want to believe that your father had to have seen something good in her in order to agree to marry her, magic or no magic. She owns you now, body and soul, but you can’t help but wonder what it is that she’s so afraid will own her.

POTENTIAL PLOTS:

NO THROAT CAN HOLD ME. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here. It’s something of a dark plot to begin with, I suppose, for a character who I view as starting out our narrative as something of a light among large swaths of darkness. She has just spent millenia living what almost feels like a life of platitudes, of being small and being made smaller still, by both the people around her and by herself. She thought that’s what she was supposed to do, I suppose. She was a maiden with dark hair and bright eyes with sunlight threaded through her blood and the earth in her heart. Where Rose Red was always vibrant, Snow White tempered herself. She sung songs to the bluejays and hummed along with the cicadas at nighttime. She read stories by candlelight instead of sneaking out of the castle, and spent her days sketching and singing rather than dancing about with her sister and causing mayhem. What if she were to fall off the proverbial bandwagon? She’s always been this prim and proper thing, and it’s made her innocent and kind beyond belief, and she loves that about herself, that her smile can brighten another person’s day, but I think that coming out of Homeland also gave her the opportunity of breaking out of this loop wherein her narrative is contingent on her being saved. Maybe it’s time to abandon the hummingbirds and the sketchbooks, to embrace the eyes trained on her at Wonderland and get herself well and truly lost.

FORGIVE ME, FOR MY HEART. My God, someone give this girl someone to love, and I’d rather it not be someone who is content with complacency, who is content enough to exist in a marriage that is broken, that’s loveless (I’m looking at you, Prince Charming). I imagine she feels similarly to him as she feels to the Huntsman, but to a lesser degree most likely. Where the Huntsman risked his own throat to save hers, all Prince Charming had to do was press his lips to hers in order to bring her back to life. She’s grateful to him for saving her, even if it came at no personal cost to him, but there’s also that part of her that resents having to have been saved. I’d love for her to fall for someone who makes her see stars, who she loves for the sake of love. I think it would be infinitely fascinating to see how she reacts to love at all, to see how after all of this fighting to find her own voice, to find who she is outside of the things that people have done to her, how would she react to the feeling of her heart being in someone else’s palms?

SWEETNESS BORDERING ON TEARS. Oh! My! God! I am such a slut for family relationships and the inevitable pain that they bring me. There’s something so fascinating especially to me about the relationship between sisters. Maybe it’s because my own with my sister has changed so much over the years while all the while staying exactly the same, but Rose Red and Snow White make me feel Some Type of Way™. The crimson to the other’s pure white, Rose Red is someone who Snow White almost forgot to be jealous of while they were growing up. I think that they tempered each other in a way, one the quiet and the other the noise and together they made something magic. But what about now, after Snow White ran and their Stepmother imprisoned Rose Red? I’d probably argue that, in that situation, Rose Red had the worse end of the stick. It didn’t matter that Snow White was the true object of her ire, Queen Grimhilde still saw her other step-daughter as a potential threat in the future. Does Rose Red harbor any resentment towards her sister for leaving her behind? What effect has this had on their relationship?  I can definitely see this being one of the driving forces behind Snow White kind of stumbling headfirst further into the dark underbelly of Fabletown. Without Rose Red there to temper her quiet, she will need to find her noise somewhere else, and I’d be very afraid where she finds it.

WHAT KEEPS A KIND GIRL ALIVE IN THE WILD? The answer is fairly simple: kindness pays for kindness. I’d love for Scout to take someone, not exactly under her wing because I’m not sure that she’s in a proper sort of from of mind at the moment to completely well and truly be responsible for another person, but I certainly want for there to be someone in Fabletown whom Scout would die for, whom Scout would protect with her life the way the Huntsman protected hers with his own. Perhaps she feels a bit like she owes the world, having survived not one but two assassination attempts, but I think she is just the kind of soul who loves to love, who loves to spread light where she can even while she’s letting the darkness seep into her soul. I’d love to see her interacting with someone who’s naive, someone who hasn’t had the same bad things happen to them as they’ve happened to her, or maybe someone who is currently going through a hardship that she can help them through. A huge part of Scout is her innate kindness, and to see that manifest itself in her sharing it with someone else would be incredible.

PLAYER’S CHOICE:

CURIOUS / NAIVE: There’s no doubt that Scout is curious. The stories don’t pay much credence to it as far as I can tell except to say that in Snow-White and Rose Red that Snow White is quiet and tends to favor reading to playing outside. I’ve taken that and combined it with what we get in the Disney version and the other Grimm fairytale and come to this conclusion that Snow White has this insatiable need for knowledge. She loves to know things, and I can just see her sitting in the gardens reading a book, not noticing the time passing until suddenly the sun has disappeared behind the horizon and she can no longer read the page before her. As she grew older, she wasn’t allowed much to interact with her people, but she was allowed out into the woods near the castle, and she wandered the grounds at length, learning about the wildlife and the fauna there, learning about the flowers that could kill and the herbs that could heal, sketching each of them in a journal for her to learn and memorize. This curiosity did her well enough in Homeland, where she was kept separate from other people and she had Rose Red to fill her in on any human stories that she might want to hear, but she is also deeply naive when it comes to human interactions. She’s learning, slowly but surely, what it means to truly live among the villains, but she is still learning. Her curiosity is a wonderful thing, and it makes her more knowledgeable about so many things in this world than many of her fellow fables, but there’s a reason curiosity killed that cat, and Scout is well on her way to finding out just how true that it.

THE BIRDS AND THE BEES: Perhaps this is something of a cliché Snow White headcanon, but I’d imagine she, and Scout by proxy, have quite an affinity for mother nature and all of her creatures. She feeds the ducks bread every couple of weeks, and leaves milk out for the stray cat the lives near her apartment. She tried bringing it home with her once, but it mewled and cried and scratched at her door until she let it back out into the streets. Sometimes things just can’t be caged, and she’s starting to truly understand that. In Homeland, she spent a lot of her free time cataloging different plant species, and could probably have killed someone without any need for magic, all she’d need to do are pluck a few berries and toss them in among a small bowl of blueberries. There aren’t exactly as many fauna in Fabletown for Scout to analyze as there was in Homeland, but she still has all that knowledge tucked up in the back of her head.

HISTORY IS WRITTEN BY THE VICTORS: Scout has something of an affinity for reading texts, always has and she suspects she always will. It started in Homeland, where she did little with her time but spend it in the library, or reading books stolen from the library in various nooks throughout the castle grounds. She could devour texts about their history and fictional books and nonfiction texts about anything and everything in between, and since coming to Fabletown she’s found that she quite enjoys reading about human history. Her apartment is often an absolute mess because the sheer volume of books she’s collected cannot be contained within the four walls.

DREAMING IN SLOW MOTION: Scout, since coming to Fabletown, has had a great deal of trouble sleeping. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why that is, but she doesn’t like to talk about it all the same. It makes her feel weak, that this is her terrible thing she must overcome. There are those in Fabletown who have had it far worse than she, whose families forced them into servitude and who got turned into household objects, people who watched loved ones die, get eaten by wolves. She was forced into a coma, made to sleep without sleeping. That, she thinks, is what has made her so afraid. That while she was in the coma, she remembers the people being around her. She remembers the dwarves mourning her, remembers the elderly old woman cackling over her as her throat closed up and she couldn’t so much as scream for help. Maybe if she’d truly been asleep, maybe if when Prince Charming kissed her she hadn’t heard him coming, maybe then she wouldn’t be so terrified every evening to go to sleep, scared out of her mind that she’ll wake up without waking up once again. But she is terrified, and so she avoids sleep. She’ll go running, run as far as her legs will take her and then run back home. She’ll curl up in a booth at the local diner with a book in hand and sip at the jet fuel coffee until she’s so tired the world blurs before her eyes, stumble home and into bed and sleep a fitful sleep for a few hours and then wake up to do it all over again the next day. Sometimes soon it will catch up to her, but for now she’s surviving.

IN CHARACTER INTERVIEW:

QUESTION ONE: How do you feel about the Exodus?

She knows what the rest of Fabletown would say, thinks that she knows all too well how they would skin her alive for her honest answer. She can’t help it though, can’t help the way that Fabletown feels infinitely more like a home to her than Homeland had ever felt.

She smiles, something soft and subtle, but there all the same.

“If I tell you, do you promise not to tell?” She says, keeping her eyes trained on the  police deputy standing next to her. He’s close, too close almost. Close enough that she thinks she can smell his aftershave on his skin, mixed with the scent of coffee grounds and something woodsy. They both are leaned against the wall, shoulders pressed up against the concrete wall outside of Wonderland. She’s been allowed a break to answer the officer’s questions, but something about the way he’s looking at her makes her wonder if he’s really taking her questioning all that seriously.

“Only if you answer correctly,” he responds, and somewhere in her head she knows that he’s trying to flirt, that he’s playing coy with her because she’s in her work uniform and the skin exposed makes his gaze drop from the truth of the situation to her clavicle.

With him looking at her, even more so, with him not looking at her but at her body, she’s reminded of all the times that she wasn’t afforded the opportunity to be anything more than her pretty face. She thinks about the time in Homeland where a prince kissed her awake and got to call it saving her life, then marry her for his efforts; thinks of being completely at the mercy of the Huntsman, teary eyed and begging for a life she barely even wanted. She remembers sitting in the castle like a ghost, some shell of a girl barely able to lay claim to her life. She thinks about Homeland, and then she thinks about Wonderland, about the clash and the gore and the glitter and the glitz and all eyes on her. She thinks about all the ways that she’s felt like… well, likesomeone. She thinks, even with the glitter she had to scrub off her skin at the end of the night, rubbing at flesh until its red and raw, and the outfits that left nothing to the imagination, that she is more free than she ever was before the Exodus.

Her head cocks to the side, and she knows it’s a risk, but she answers honestly all the same.

“I think it’s the best thing that could have happened to me.”

QUESTION TWO: Was it hard adjusting to life in Fabletown? Do you miss the Homeworld?

“Not particularly,” she says in response to his second question. “You and I didn’t know each other back then, but something tells me you wouldn’t have been half as interested back then as you are right now.”

She is still smiling that half-smile, her eyes amused by the police officers line of questioning. Scout knows that it’s only standard, that they’re asking anyone with even half a connection to Scarlet Morales the same questions, but they feel trivial all the same. She’d had as hard a time as anyone else adjusting to Fabletown. No one she knew had an easy time. Who could have, after all? They’d been stripped of everything that they knew and thrust into a new land, a new world, one absent so many things that they had known once upon a time.

“I find that hard to believe,” her officer responds, almost scoffing as her appraises her.

“Just trust me,” she says, raising her eyebrows and tilting her head to the side in an arrogant way that feels foreign. “Everyone else does.”

QUESTION THREE: Where is your favorite place in Fabletown or New York?

“My favorite place?” she says, echoing the officer.

She has to pause for a moment, contemplating where she thinks might be her favorite place. The list, she felt, could go on for miles. She loves every single one of the parks, loves to walk through them and hear the wind in the trees at dawn, the song of birds calling to each other the only other noise when the human world hasn’t seen fit to rise yet. There’s the museum, where she loves to sit and stare at the marvels that humans have created with a few strokes of a brush on canvas. She loves it there, sitting among all that sheer humanity. It’s Earth’s very own version of magic, she thinks. She thinks about late nights, killing time before her shift starts, wandering through the bookstore, perusing spines and picking up one’s that speak to her.

“Would you believe me if I said the bookshop?” She says, her eyebrows raised as though she expects somehow that she will be laughed at, as though she’s prepared to laugh at herself, to make herself small for this man. Old habits are hard to break, she’s finding.

“So she’s got brains and beauty,” he says instead of laughing, and she is immediately grateful.

“I’ll let you be the judge of that,” she responds, laughing lightly, feeling a weight off her chest.

QUESTION FOUR: How do you feel about magic? Do you think it should be banned, regulated, or neither?

And immediately the weight is back, twice as heavy.

Three times.

Four times.

Growing with every impending second, every moment that she has to think about the terrors magic has inflicted on her life. It’s a horror, a thing that rots in the pit of her stomach and turns her blood to battery acid, the memories that come to the surface when she thinks about magic. A finger pricked on a needle, a blood offering for a beautiful daughter that her mother hadn’t even know she was making to the land. Red lips whispering in a grieving man’s ear, about beauty and power and the taste of trouble on the horizon that could be squashed by a simple exchange of vows. Mirror, mirror on the wall, who’s the fairest of them all?

Death, she thinks, wrapping its slender fingers around Magic’s throat.

That’d be the fairest scene in the land.

Her jaw is tight, but she tries her best not to make it so. She’s spent her time since coming to Fabletown trying to forget the girl she had been before, the girl subject to the whims of magic and the terrors it caused her. Here, she was better. Here, she could be stronger. Here, the magic wouldn’t touch her.

“I think magic makes it easier for weak hearts to rule,” she says carefully, not wanting to make her stance against magic quite so obvious. It never did her well, not in a place where magic would always be the true King. “And weak hearts often can’t support others. The last thing Fabletown needs is to be ruled by people who don’t know how to help anyone but themselves.”

Let her officer do with that what he would.

QUESTION FIVE: Who do you think killed Little Red Riding Hood?

“I don’t think I’m high enough on the totem pole to be of much use to you on that one,” she says, her shoulders still tight from trying to avoid the last question. She purses her lips, narrows her eyes slightly as she fully takes in the face leaned in so close to her own.

It’s nice, she thinks; all sharp lines and planes contrasting with shadows. For a half second, her finger twitch and she wishes she had her sketchbook with her so that she could do a fast outline of the officer’s face. But she hadn’t picked up her sketch book in weeks, and something tells her that he would take it as a sign of something that she didn’t want for it to be. She liked to appreciate beauty, and something in his gaze told her he probably liked to exploit it.

She pushes away from the wall then and takes a step backwards, keeping eye contact with the pretty police officer whose name she’d need to pretend to forget if he ever came crawling around Wonderland during his off duty hours. She didn’t mind the wandering eyes, liked them even, could bask in them for hours and not get tired of them, but something about him made her feel like maybe she would give in if he asked, like maybe he was someone she could lose herself in.

She had lost herself for years.

She didn’t need to do it again here.

Fabletown was her second chance at freedom. She wasn’t going to waste it on a pair of sharp cheekbones and a smile to match. So, she looks away, turning on her heel and begins to walk away, figuring that was the end of the interview. Once you got to the question of who killed Little Red, there couldn’t be much else left to ask, after all. She hesitates on her fourth step though, and turns back around. She’s almost unsurprised to see the officer still has his eyes on her departing figure. Almost.

“I wouldn’t think twice about looking more closely at Queen Grimhilde.” The words tumble out of her before she knows fully what she’s said, and her officer looks surprised she gave him an actual answer. She doesn’t blame him; she’s surprised, too. “Maybe it’s old grudges coming to bear, but I’ve never known her to be averse to murder if it would further her own gain. Not sure what she gains from Scarlet being gone, but if there’s something there, you’d be right to suspect her.”

And with that she turns away again and doesn’t look back when she walks through the backdoor, straight into the heart of Wonderland.

[scoutwilson-blog]

The only thing I remember from my childhood is when you are scared make yourself tall. I’m the tallest girl alive. I’m the tallest knife. No throat can hold me.

Dalton Day, from the title poem of To Breathe I’m Too Thin (via bostonpoetryslam)

[scoutwilson-blog]