*sigh* Because even though it has been three years, I'm still inexorably drawn to the Kisses Cursed universe.
I'm going to do my best to keep to the world as laid out in Petals Fallen/Kisses Cursed, so expect some shuffling around of HP-canon ages and events.
I have some ideas in mind for the next chapter, but if you have a suggestion regarding a scene or character you want to see featured, please let me know!
Lily, 1977
For the fourth time this week, I find myself at the fountain in the centre of town.
Everyone says that the Rose Fountain is creepy. I admit, it's a strange sort of thing to have in a town square. It's called the Rose Fountain because the rose motif is carved all over, but the real focus is the people. Six figures all in a circle, knowing grins and leers twisting their sculpted faces, water trickling from their mouths or the objects in their hands. Their eyes follow you as you walk.
And yet, I am still drawn to the fountain. Cannot help but come here, day after day, to stare up at each of the statues in turn and run my fingers over the carved names at their feet.
There's Past, who can't be more than eight years old. Dark hair, dark eyes, childish scowl, pendant around his neck, a rose in one hand and a toy in the other. It looks like some sort of figure, perhaps a doll in a gauzy dress. The funny thing is that everyone who gets a good look at the doll's face swears that it resembles someone from town. It's never the same person twice, either. When I'm feeling particularly fanciful, I imagine that the doll looks like me. Hermione keeps a log in the library where you can write down your name and that of the person you think Past's doll resembles, but I can't quite bring myself to write my own name in it. It feels too much like a confession, but what of I'm not sure.
On the opposite side of the fountain is Prophecy. Prophecy, who spits water from his mouth like an invective. Unlike his counterparts, he is the only one of the figures whose eyes do not have any detail to speak of: no pupils or irises, just blank white marble. Despite that he, like Past, is a child, he's probably the most unsettling of all six of the figures. It doesn't help that he's depicted restrained, chained up by roses. The thorny vines twine around his limbs and burst into bloom around the crown gracing the boy's head. It'd be almost beautiful if it weren't so creepy.
To Prophecy's left stands Beast. One of the more eerie looking ones, because his face is inhuman and he's missing his heart. To be more precise, there's a gaping hole in his chest, from which grows a single rose in full bloom. A clever idea, but rather unnerving in practice. Beast's long fingers are wrapped around the stem of an ornate goblet, from which the water flows like blood. He offers up its contents with a tiny smirk.
His counterpart is called Nameless, who stands barefoot on top of a mass of rose thorns. Like Beast, his face is pale and gaunt and just a bit off. Unlike Beast, his heart appears to be whole. There's a ring resting in one of his hands, the stone much too large for its setting. Nameless looks to be contemplating it, and the viewer, and finding both wanting.
And then on Prophecy's other side, Monster, the young adult incarnation that doesn't look all that monstrous at all. Well, the white marble of his face has veins of a darker stone that creep over his cheeks towards his eyes, but I'm sure that's just a quirk of nature; the sculptor's bad luck that the block of stone he'd been carving wasn't pure white after all. James swears up and down that the Monster's teeth are pointed, curved even, like the fangs of a snake (James hates snakes). I have to admit I can't quite see it; for all that he holds a rose stem between his lips, and dribbles water from his mouth like he's just eaten something particularly bloody, the statue's smile isn't wide enough to tell the shape of his teeth for sure.
Across from him is Riddle, nearly identical to the Monster in posture and countenance. Riddle's rose is tucked in the lapels of his suit, and he holds out a small book with a mocking smile. The fountain's mechanism is hidden beneath the open pages, so that the water flows from between his fingers to trickle into the basin below. It looks almost as if the book were bleeding ink.
Six figures, half monstrous and half not, all just slightly wrong and with definite airs of superiority. I have to wonder what the first Lord of the Manor was thinking, to commission the Rose Fountain to look like this.
Town legend connects the fountain to "The Curse", the fairy story that every mother here tells their children. We grow up on the story of the Curse the way other children grow up on Snow White and the Frog Prince. I will tell it to my child, when and if I have one.
Pandora says that the name of the story is actually "The Kisses Cursed", but then Pandora has always been strange. The Curse isn't a love story, far from it in fact. What place would a true love's kiss have in a story which features characters such as the Beast, the Nameless, and the Prophecy?
And a cursed kiss, a doomed kiss, is hardly much better.
I shiver, even though it's still summer and really shouldn't be that cold for months yet. It's almost sunset. James invited me over to his parents' house for dinner. I turn to leave, but I can't help but glance back one last time at the fountain, bathed in the final rays of sunlight. Past's eyes glint knowingly back at me.
Sometimes, especially in twilight hours such as these, it feels as though the town is just … waiting. Waiting for what, I don't know. When I was little I used to imagine that the statues would come to life, but of course that's just silly. Then again, they are life-size and rather realistic. If monsters and beasts were more than just fairy stories, this is certainly what they would look like.
If it wasn't obvious, this particular scene is set in the alternate universe created when Tom chose to reset the last fifty years. But the two timelines are intertwined – Lily doesn't get to escape Past's clutches just because the town isn't cursed in the same way ;)