I own no one but my own people
A/N Thanks to JustAnOutlawFic on twitter for the story idea. Also I know it's past Valentine's Day and this is actually two chapters so it's actually not even finished yet but I really hope you guys still like it. Francis J. Grasso wrote "The Lovers" & Erin Henson wrote "Arrow"
"To the Snow White to my Prince Charming; I will always find you. Your true love, David."
Could be longer but it was full of inside compliments that were clearly meaningful to the both of them. That one could stay.
"To the woman who saw the man behind the beast; you chased away all the darkness from my life, and I owe more to you than I can ever say. Affectionately and forever yours, Robert Weaver."
That was a good one too, although Gold already knew it would be changed if it wasn't up to her standards.
"To my beautiful Ruby; There's no place like home, especially when you're there with me. Your Kansas girl, Dorothy. (Toto said to sign his name on the card.)
Aww! That one was rather adorable! There was even a little dog paw print as a way for their pet to 'sign' the card.
"To my Queen; I will be forever grateful that you gave love and happiness a second chance. You are, now and forever, the most stunning woman I know, and I am honored to be called yours. Your soulmate, Robin."
That one nearly brought a tear to her eye. This one was definitely good enough to stay.
Alice grinned at the computer screen in front of her as she clicked the 'print' button. She was getting a lot of good ones this year, hardly any duds, a rather drastic change from last year.
She only, so far, needed to make about a hundred changes to lackluster notes which considering they were getting hundreds of orders a week due to how close it was to Valentine's Day it was quite low truthfully.
Smiling, Alice clicked on the next order and any joy she felt at reading the last three cards turned to ash in her mouth.
"To Astrid. Happy Valentines Day. Love, Leroy."
No no, that would never do. This Leroy didn't seem to put any thought into this note at all. Granted it wasn't all that surprising considering he only ordered a basic dozen roses but no one should suffer a careless message to go along with her flowers.
So it was with a tired sigh as she pulled up the internet browser, already set to her Facebook, and searched for 'Astrid', glad that even in a large city like Seattle it wasn't a fairly common name like say Britney or Nancy.
She found her in moments and Alice began scrolling through her photos and posts to see her likes, her interests, what made her happy, what brought her joy.
What Astrid liked to do with the person she loved…
Sailing, Alice realized almost as soon as she began looking at Astrid's photos. She and Leroy love sailing.
Almost every photo of the two of them were smiling and happy on a boat, drinking beers on a boat, fishing on a boat, kissing one another and holding each other on a boat, walking hand in hand along a crowded dock...
Alice grinned as she clicked back to the page where she was just supposed to print out what the customer ordered on the card and not alter it unless there was an obvious typo.
She had already been scolded once by her boss Mo French, but everyone deserved something special on Valentines Day. The words on the card was half the gift; words to express how they made someone feel, full of poetry and grand declarations of love and romance…
Alice couldn't just let someone get a simple three word message!
So, when she realized the edit wouldn't show up on the final receipt so long as she printed it before she changed the wording, Alice took to rewording their messages a bit.
...Okay she reworded them a lot, but these women deserve something special! These women deserve beautiful poetry, which Alice was more than happy to give them.
So, after printing out the receipt so her boss wouldn't know, she leaned forward on her hands and let her mind wonder for a bit, thinking of sailboats and seawater and making love on the shore and soft moonlight reflecting off a clear calm sea and sunrises on a neverending blue horizon…
Then she began typing. The words came faster and faster, pouring out until she had about five hundred words written, all jumbled together and lacking sense and structure.
Alice began to move the words around, deleted some, wrote some more, deleted half of those, copy and paste a word here, a new paragraph there, change this word so it rhymes with this one until she decided to shift a single word of text around so it no longer made sense...
That was how she wrote. That was how she lived, truthfully; everything was all jumbled and confuzzled inside her brain and every day she had to take her pills so she could rearrange the thoughts and words inside her head until they finally were in the right order, just like her poetry.
Finally she looked at the end result and grinned. It was perfect. It was beautiful and poetic and romantic and best of all; it was something Astrid would love and knew that Leroy had put his whole heart and soul into writing.
"How gently darkness lays itself upon the restless sea,
While breezes scented cool and clean, are blowing wild and free,
When moonlight's blush fades gradually and hides its ash white face, All through the night with spirits bright as shameless dreams unfold,
A thousand candles dimly lit, now frame the soft embrace.
'till sunlight makes the darkness break to show the story told
Tempest waters calm and smooth, stillness now the sea,
Sky and water bound in love- as lovers, you and me.
Forever yours, Leroy."
Alice grinned as she printed out the new poem on the card. Perfect. Astrid would definitely think that her boyfriend put his whole heart and soul into the card (which Alice did with every single poem she wrote.)
The blonde clicked through a few more cards without making any edits, her joy returning as she read the romantic notes and poems that boyfriends and husbands and fiancées wrote their significant others, father's wrote to their daughters, friends wrote to friends…
That was the best part of the working at the Game of Thorns flower shop; being surrounded by love and romance and beauty and kindness… it was everything Alice wanted in her own life but had yet to experience.
On the very day she was born Alice was abandoned by her mother and her father had raised her until he went to prison when she was twelve. After that she was on her own, going from foster home to foster home being thought of as nothing more than a paycheck. Then when she was 16 she woke in the dead of night to find her foster father standing in the doorway staring at her and stroking himself. The next morning Alice put on her jacket, grabbed her faded green backpack and headed out into the harshness of the Windy City.
She survived by the skin of her teeth; begging, stealing, breaking into warm places to sleep, finally making her permanent 'home' an old shipping container out by an abandoned shipping yard. It was warm enough during the winter, cool enough in the summer, it even had an outlet that still worked so she even had some electricity.
One day Alice saw a gang member shoot a twelve year old girl whose only crime had been riding her bike down the same sidewalk where there had been a drive by. She knew the streets, she knew what could happen if she told the cops what she saw, she knew she would have been rewarded if she kept silent but the face of that little girl, staring up at the heavens with no light in her eyes, haunted her nightmares for days so she went to the cops and told them what she saw.
Which was how Alice met Detective Weaver and in turn became his informant. She would give him information about things she saw on the street, he would give her food and water, extra blankets during the winter, an actual bed rather than just a sleeping bag inside her shipping container… Then one day Weaver told her that he didn't want her to be an informant anymore; he wanted her to work at his father in laws flower shop and start to make a life for herself, move into an apartment, find her true love and get married…
Which is exactly what she had done. The apartment and job part anyway, the finding true love part was proving impossibly hard. But Alice had hope that one day her princess would come, it was just a matter of waiting.
And she would spend the time waiting by making others feel good and making others believe their loved ones had poured their heart and souls into their Valentine's Day gift.
Alice clicked 'print' on a note full of love, grinning all the while, but when she clicked the button that took her to the next order any happiness had been drained from her heart when she read the note that would go along with six pink carnations, the cheapest arrangement they offered.
"2 Robyn. Happy vday. Luv Melody."
...What kinda cheap crappy message was THAT? This girl, this Robyn, she would be heartbroken and devastated and know that whoever this Melody character was didn't really care about her. Not only had she ordered such cheap cruddy flowers but hadn't even spare a half a moment's thought for the card! What kind of jerk does that?!
Praying with all her heart that Melody and Robyn were just barely friends Alice quickly searched for Robyn on her face book and, as luck would have it, she found one with a single shared connection with a friend of hers Henry Mills. She was his cousin actually and this Robyn Locksley was indeed dating a woman named Melody Gale.
Robyn was also, without question, the most beautiful woman Alice had ever seen.
Stunning in every way.
She was tall with an athletic body and long dark blonde hair that she seemed to favor putting in a single side braid and possessed two pale green eyes that even just looking at a photo of them Alice could feel herself becoming lost in.
Alice clicked through several more photos and saw that her smile could be warm and soft or smug and full of slyness and the more she looked the more the curly hair poet wondered what exactly Robyn could do with those smug lips.
There was also quite a number of photos of her standing behind a soup kitchen line, ladle in hand smiling and standing side by side with a brown eyed woman and a man who she looked damn near identical to apart from the fact he had blue eyes rather than green and saw her at some black tie event with an attractive red headed woman who shared her pale emerald eyes.
Then there was all the photos with this girl that her status did confirm she was in a relationship, this Melody Seawater; a tall strikingly gorgeous woman with long black hair and dark green eyes who had the kind of body you were sure only existed in magazines. The more Alice looked through the photos, the more her heart ached for this Robyn woman.
Every photo of the two of them, Robyn was beaming or looking at her girlfriend with affection or wanting to be as close to her as possible. She was looking at her girlfriend the way Alice had always dreamed of having someone look at her like, with more love in their eyes than Alice knew what to do with. Melody, meanwhile, was far too busy looking at the camera and trying to perfect that perfect pouty lip or catch that perfect natural lighting…
There was also quite a few photos of Robyn standing besides Melody cheering and beaming with pride as the black haired woman dressed in a racing swimsuit held up her gold medal. But, Alice realized with a frown, Robyn had just as many of not more so photos of herself in various archery tournaments, standing there pride and grinning and holding up her medals and her bow but Melody was nowhere to be found and more often than not she was standing side by side with that same blue eyed man from earlier, Alice guessed her father, who was holding up his own medals.
No. No, this isn't right. Robyn deserved better then not only that sad sorry excuse for a Valentine's Day gift but a better class of girlfriend overall. Alice never even met this girl before but she could tell she was kind and gentle and strong and decent and worthy of a far better class of love then what Melody was giving her.
Maybe Alice should just let this card go as is, maybe then Robyn would realize she was deserving of something far better then what Melody was willing to give. But no; she would never do that. She could never do that to someone, especially to someone as deserving as this Robyn Locksley.
Blinking away the tears Alice turned back to the task at hand and opened up a new word document and began to write as feverishly as she could. Her fingers sailed across the keys as quick as you'd like, a thousand words pouring out of her soul and heart. She cut this word, added this one, moved this sonnet, cut half of that paragraph, wrote a hundred more words… on and on it went until she was left with a poem Alice felt was worthy of the archer on her screen.
"I made my life an arrow,
The tip a deadly sharpened point,
So people never came so close,
That I may disappoint,
I'd sit and watch in silence,
As the world would pass me by,
Wondering how far I'd fall,
If I ever tried to fly,
You watched me with such interest,
Like it was me you tried to find,
As though you knew all of my secrets,
And the thoughts within my mind,
You looked like all the others,
But what I did not know;
Was while I'd made myself an arrow,
You had made yourself a bow,
And apart we'd both been useless,
But we'd finally worked out why;
Since you need someone to pull you back,
If you ever want to fly,
So you aimed me with precision,
And I flew straight from the start,
Until I landed with a solid thud,
On the target of your heart.
All my love, Melody."
As Alice read this poem she smiled softly. This was hers, this was Robyn's poem, she knew it was, she knew this would be what made Robyn smile and feel her heart full with love.
She would think it was beautiful. She would think it was written by someone who loved her, who knew her, who respected her.
She would think Melody wrote it…
Printing out the card Alice clicked on the next order and her entire face fell as she read the card that went with the order.
"2 Alexandra. Happy vday. Luv Melody. (Don't read this in front of R.)
Alice swallowed hard as she stared at the order. There wasn't even a thirty second time difference from when Melody put in one order and the other…
Swallowing hard, Alice just shook her head and hit 'print.'
Melody didn't get to be a poet to two women…
More to come I promise! Please Review!
