Part One
Everything we hear is an opinion, not a fact. Everything we see is a perspective, not the truth. - Marcus Aurelius
It had been a hard mission, the one that resulted in Quinn's death. Ruby and Quinn had no choice but to team up with Snow White and Charming. Ruby had never heard stupider call signs. However, Snow and Charming had selected them after their first mission in which they had run into the Evil Queen. It made sense to them, which was all that mattered. Even if it was stupid. It was an equally stupid moniker in Ruby's opinion, but the Evil Queen had coined it first. Right before everyone else, criminals and agents alike, adopted the stupid fairy tale names. It was likely a response to the Evil Queen's ever growing presence in the world. She came in from seemingly nowhere, with a staggering amount of resources that left no doubt in anyone's mind that she was one of the new powers of the world.
Since that first mission, Snow White and Charming had dedicated their careers to bringing the Evil Queen down. Until their mission with Quinn and Ruby, they hadn't had all too much luck. The Evil Queen was always two steps ahead of them, countering their moves and escaping far too easily for the Agency's liking. Eventually they got a lead when Snow White managed to make one of the Evil Queen's generals defect.
It was his faulty information and apparent death wish that had gotten Quinn killed. So many things had gone wrong. There wasn't meant to be anyone left in the warehouse that Graham led them to. Graham should have known about the underground bunker that let the Evil Queen and her men hide away, completely undetected and in a position to ambush the agents. Snow and Charming had followed the Evil Queen out of the warehouse after a rather violent verbal sparring match between Snow White and the Evil Queen. Ruby, Quinn and Graham were left behind in the supposedly empty warehouse. Only Snow and Charming had been easily duped by the Evil Queen. She had been two steps ahead of them again. She had wanted Snow and Charming chase her just to get them out of the way.
The Evil Queen had appeared moments later on the upper level with a sniper rifle in hand and her body guards around her. Snow and Charming were nowhere in sight, still trying to chase the Evil Queen down. It hadn't taken long for the Evil Queen's men to flood the bottom floor where Quinn and Ruby were. Rather than chasing the Evil Queen down, they had been searching for clues in the wake of her escape. In the face of ten guns pointed at them, Ruby and Quinn had put their hands up while one of the Evil Queen's men shoved Graham to his knees.
"So nice of you to turn up, Graham." the Evil Queen said with a snarl. "I would have preferred you to keep your friends at home, but you never were particularly good at following orders. At least you decided that meeting here was in your best interests. You've certainly ruined my fun, Huntsman. I wanted to rip your heart out. I guess a bullet to the head will just have to do instead."
The Evil Queen loaded her rifle. "For your own sakes, stay out of my way, agents. This has nothing to do with you."
Evil Queen lifted her rifle, staring down the scope for a few seconds before firing quickly. She left no time for Ruby to attempt to salvage the situation. The bullet pierced Graham's forehead dead centre. Blood and brain sprayed out of the back of his head in a fine mist. The bullet casing had barely touched the ground before one of the Evil Queen's body guards picked it up. It was a practised move, one of routine that ensured that the Evil Queen never left any evidence. Two steps ahead indeed.
"He wasn't one of your agents; he was a defector from my ranks. I had every right to kill him, just like your Agency would do to any of your people. So don't spout righteous nonsense at me and don't try to fight my men. I have no intentions of either of you dying today, but that can and will easily change if you force my hand."
The Evil Queen turned and headed towards the nearest door.
Ruby's eyes flicked towards Quinn and he nodded at her ever so slightly. They were trained agents and the Evil Queen was one of the most powerful criminals in the word at the moment, they had a duty to try and bring her in. Ruby's first elbow did a fair amount of damage and the man behind her fell to the floor while another fell to her boot in his temple but that was the end of her luck. A hand came out and shoved a taser into her neck. It hadn't worked out so well for Quinn though. The men surrounding him weren't as generous. The last thing she heard before falling to the floor unconscious had been a gunshot. The Evil Queen had gotten away and both Quinn and Graham were dead, spilling blood into a large puddle on the warehouse floor.
Ruby had spent two days in hospital, and it took another three weeks before Granny would let her do anything other than paper work. The first place she went was Graham's apartment. He had insisted that the Evil Queen didn't know about it, that it was a better safe house than any they could offer him. He was wrong, and in the end, it was that fact that led to the fiasco in the warehouse. Ruby found the note from the Evil Queen. It was an offer that Graham had taken up. In return for his surrender and his life, Graham's nephew would live. As a result, Graham had planned the meeting at the warehouse knowing full well that there was a secret basement level. With Snow and Charming gone Graham should have been alone and ready to die for his betrayal against the Evil Queen. Ruby and Quinn shouldn't have been there, they weren't in Graham's plan and now Quinn was dead. Graham didn't even know; he didn't even know what he had done by working with the Evil Queen again and he never would. But the Evil Queen did. Ruby had trashed the place in her search and left with one thought on her mind. The Evil Queen and her people would pay.
/-/-/-/-/
Belle smiled up at Ruby as she entered the inventor's underground lair. Belle's call name was 'Beauty' but almost no one used it. Belle never did field work and almost never left her workshop in the lowest levels of the Agency's headquarters. It would be easier to get into the White House with a siege engine than getting into Belle's workshop.
"Hi Red, what can I help you with today?"
"I'm going after the Evil Queen. I need some gadgets and any intel you can give me."
Belle started bustling around her workshop, picking up gadgets and placing them on the one clear table in the middle of the room.
"What sort of intel? I don't really do intel. You should try Jiminy Cricket."
Ruby sighed. "Belle. I know who you were before you came here. I know that the Evil Queen held you captive for years."
Belle froze with her hand on something that looked particularly weapon-like. Belle's hand clenched slightly and Ruby's hand moved down to her side arm.
"Belle?"
Belle jolted into action again, her hand leaving the weapon to pick up a grappling hook. She dropped the grappling hook onto the table. There were a lot of gadgets piling up, and Ruby would need to dig through to try and find the most useful tools to take. Belle would insist on all of it.
"Then listen to me when I say don't go after her alone. She dangerous, but as long as you don't get in her way she'll leave you alone."
"She doesn't leave Snow White alone."
"Well Snow White isn't completely blameless so that's not a good example." Belle scoffed. "The Evil Queen is a cold and disturbed person, but she is also a tactical mastermind and a genius manipulator."
"I've read her file, Belle." Ruby said absently as she picked through the slowly growing pile Belle was creating.
Ruby moved most of the gadgets to the side. A few of the gadgets she kept simply because she wanted to see how they worked. That was how quickly Belle came up with new inventions. But by the end of the visit Ruby would limit herself to only a few gadgets.
"I'm looking for intel a bit more useful. Something we didn't know about her, something that could give me an edge."
"Like what?" Huffed Belle. "She likes apples and plays a mean game of chess. Is that what you want to know? Or maybe that her reputation of being ruthless and violent is well earned? Those myths about her cutting people's hearts out are true. No? How about the fact that she stills her own apple cider? I can't help you, Red. The information you want isn't something I can share, even if I knew it."
"That's very specific information. How do you know that sort of stuff?" Ruby said.
"I thought you knew who I was before I came here?" Belle drawled sarcastically.
"You lived with Rumpelstiltskin. You two were involved and the Evil Queen kidnapped you because of it."
Rumpelstiltskin was an unpleasant man with his hands in most illegal activities across the globe. From money laundering and gambling to people trafficking Rumpelstiltskin was involved.
"Yes. Then the Evil Queen found out, faked my death, and kept me locked up for years to use against him. For all her faults she is not a bad host, but I was always a threat and the things I was exposed to were limited at best. I can't help you, Red. If you're really going after her you'll need to find someone else to talk to. I'm not getting involved with any of those people again."
Belle started ordering the gadgets on the table, removing a few of them after critical glances at Ruby.
"Where would you look if you were me?"
"That depends on where you want to end up. I'd suggest somewhere underground where you can have adventures with dodos and talking rabbits. There are people out there who know the Evil Queen and know her story. Find them."
"That makes no sense."
"It makes perfect sense! You need to find the Evil Queen's story if you're going to find her."
"I don't need her story," growled Ruby. "I just need her."
"If you don't know where you are going, any road will take you there. And that's all I'm telling you. Figure the rest out, Red."
Ruby grabbed the bag Belle was holding out full of equipment she probably wouldn't or couldn't use and left.
/-/-/-/-/
Ruby spent a day in her apartment sorting through the gadgets Belle had given her. Without Belle to tell her what half of them did it took a bit of guesswork, but she managed to narrow down the pile. It quite possibly would have been a good idea to get a demonstration of each new gadget before annoying Belle to the point of being shooed out of her lab. She had no leads because Belle had been useless and if the Agency had a lead on the Evil Queen they would have gone after her already. Ruby supposed she could track down Snow and Charming seeing as they were the so-called experts.
There are people out there who know the Evil Queen and know her story. That's what Belle had told her, and Snow and Charming were the agents most likely to know.
Ruby dropped down into her couch. There was a weird obsession with stories in their agency. Snow and Charming were always going on about 'good' winning or some shit. To Ruby it just seemed like they were deluded because the Agency was in the business of murder and trickery. It didn't matter if it was for national defence, it was still murder. But if that let them sleep at night, it wasn't Ruby's concern. As long as they did their jobs.
Still, no one ever liked to talk about the fact that the whole Agency and the criminal world were obsessed with a bunch of fairy tales. Except Belle, apparently.
Belle liked books. Everyone knew that. If she wasn't inventing she was in her own personal library just off from her workshop. It was a pretty big library and no one else was even allowed inside let alone allowed to touch her books. One agent had tried and had ended up on deskwork for a month while his hand healed. The Agency didn't generally hire well-adjusted individuals and Belle was no exception. Morals tended to get in the way of the job if you were well adjusted.
But talking about adventures with dodos and talking rabbits was a bit beyond not being well adjusted.
Ruby was the first to admit that she didn't get out all too much. Her life was her work and that meant that she didn't have a lot of spare time for indulging herself in hobbies. But even she could figure out that Belle was alluding to something. All it took was a quick Google search and Ruby was practically kicking herself. Alice's Adventures in fucking Wonderland.
Several drug cartels merged to form the Wonderland Crew a few years ago under the rather firm hand of their new leader, Cora Mills. She called herself the Queen of Hearts. They had followed the naming scheme of the Evil Queen, an action put down to trying to ride on the coattails of her success. With such similar names it wasn't a far stretch to believe that they had some sort business connections. But as far as the Agency knew the Evil Queen had never even thought of approaching the Wonderland Crew. Their only connection was through the Queen of Hearts' employment of the Mad Hatter, who had once worked for the Evil Queen.
A visit to Snow White and Charming would be a good start. Then Ruby needed to get access to the Wonderland Crew. The only way to do that was through the White Rabbit. Too bad the man was fucking impossible to find on a good day. She'd need to send some feelers out. Jiminy Cricket hadn't let her down yet and hopefully he wouldn't now.
/-/-/-/-/
Finding Snow White and Charming had actually been easier than Ruby had expected. There was no such thing as 'work friends' at the Agency. They were secret agents and the unspoken rule was to keep personal and professional lives separate. They didn't even tell each other their real names but apparently Snow and Charming were the exceptions to the rule. They weren't only partners in the field, but they were married and living in a small but well decorated apartment in the inner city. It was horribly domestic and kind of gross in Ruby's opinion. Her own apartment consisted of only the necessities and a military level security system. Snow was surprised to see her at their front door but had welcomed her inside, which had seemed like a great breach in protocol. How they managed to stay alive so long when they invited dangerous people into their house was beyond Ruby. She may have no intention of harming them, but the fact remained that she could. It wasn't unheard of for agents to snap. Hook had been an alright guy until he had used information about the Agency to try and barter vengeance from the criminal world for his wife's murder. If Snow and Charming were willing to let her into their home now, they'd be willing in the future.
Charming greeted her with a grin and a silent apology over Quinn's death in the form of a quick squeeze to her shoulder. Ruby almost decked him in response. She and many other spies she knew did not take well to being touched. Snow went to make them each a cup of tea. They sat in the lounge and made small talk while Ruby pretended to drink her tea. She didn't really eat food that wasn't prepared by herself.
"What brings you by, Red?" Snow eventually asked.
Ruby placed her cup on the coffee table between them. "I want to understand the Evil Queen better and I was hoping you'd be willing to share the story of when you first met her."
Snow and Charming looked at each other; silently communicating in the same way that Ruby had once done with Quinn. While it was true that Quinn's death mostly fell on Graham and the Evil Queen's shoulders, Ruby couldn't help but blame Snow a little bit for bringing Graham to the Agency. Not only that, they had then fallen completely into the Evil Queen's trap that Ruby and Quinn had been defenceless to face her. Snow nodded to Charming and he sat back and began to tell the story of what had happened the first time they came face to face with the Evil Queen.
Ruby had read the reports. She knew that Snow White and Charming had been on a mission to investigate an arms dealer. While new and completely unknown, the arms dealer was able to ship a large amount of guns in and out the country very quickly. Their mission led them the warehouse and the arms dealer, the Evil Queen. It was that first encounter with Snow and Charming that something changed for the Evil Queen. If Belle's hints were any indication that something was important.
"We had the location of the warehouse and when we turned up there we found this huge cache of weapons." Charming started to explain. "It was some seriously heavy firepower, mostly fully automatic machine guns. We found her and her men escaping out the back and we followed. It wasn't until later that we found out that she had strapped this guy down in one of the back rooms and started to dissect him alive."
The man had been missing his heart. There had been more tearing than cutting around the arteries that hinted towards The Evil Queen ripping his heart out of the his chest. They never managed to identify the man, but he had probably been one of the Evil Queen's men. The Evil Queen had never taken well to betrayal, even in the early days of her business. But the vivisection had given her a fearful reputation and less and less people became willing to go against the Evil Queen.
Ruby knew this from the reports. After the Evil Queen made her escape Snow and Charming followed, and they ended up at what they suspected to be one of the Evil Queen's safe houses. Snow and Charming planted C4 around the main structure for the house and blew it up. It was excessive, but after the amount of weapons she had moved in such a small amount of time it was an acceptable response. The Evil Queen could turn into a very serious threat. Which she had, because Snow and Charming had failed to eliminate her. The Evil Queen had walked away with several minor wounds and a cut to her upper lip, which would scar. Snow White and Charming hadn't been reprimanded, they were new after all. But in all honesty Ruby was disgusted at their lack of professionalism and inability to look ahead. You did not leave a scene without confirming the target's death.
"Who owned the house?"
"A man named Daniel Stabler."
"Who's he?"
"We never found out. As far as the paper trails go he doesn't exist and we never found any physical proof of his existence."
Ruby nodded her thanks as she left. Snow White and Charming had given her next to no new information. But following up on Daniel Stabler could lead Ruby a step closer to finding the Evil Queen.
First Ruby needed to call Jiminy Cricket. Most people needed to wait for Jiminy to call them to get their intel. Ruby wasn't most people.
"Hey Cricket. Are we safe to talk?"
Jiminy made a soft humming sound and Ruby heard a few key strokes.
"Yes we are, Red. What can I help you with?"
"First off, how's the hunt for the White Rabbit going?"
Jiminy sighed and Ruby could almost picture him scratching his head in the soft glow of his computer screens.
"Badly."
"That's not what I wanted to hear."
"I'm sorry, Red but the White Rabbit is late." Archie paused for a second, continuing when Ruby didn't respond. "As in dead."
"I got it, Cricket. I still need to talk to someone in the Wonderland Crew though, so how are we going to fix that little problem?"
Sometimes talking with Jiminy was like pulling teeth. He had so much information at his fingertips and he hated giving it away even if he loved helping people. There was a trick to asking the right questions.
"I know where you can find the Mad Hatter. If you're looking for info on the Evil Queen he's your best bet."
"They call him mad for a reason. He's fucking insane!"
"Yes, but I can get you to him which is more than I can say about the Rabbit."
"Fine, send me what you have and then start looking into Snow White and Charming's first mission with the Evil Queen. I need to know the address of the house they blew up and I need it now."
"I'll text you the address in half an hour. Stay safe, Red. The Evil Queen is a powerful woman."
Jiminy hung up and Ruby made her way across the road towards her car. She knew that either Snow or Charming would be watching her from the window of their apartment. At least they would be if they were any good at their job. She purposefully headed towards the Agency's headquarters. It would give the impression that she had orders to talk to them and lessen the chance that they would ask awkward questions later. Technically, she wasn't a rogue agent. She wasn't disobeying any orders given and Granny was only partially disapproving of her actions. Bringing down the Evil Queen was a sort of overhanging mission that everyone in the Agency tried to do at least once. Though obviously no one had succeeded, anyone trying to was ignored until they got somewhere or until they screwed up so badly Granny reined them in. Now it was Ruby's turn, and she was not going to screw this up.