The suitcase latches click with a finality she wasn't quite expecting. Jake looks at her with pleading in his eyes, and for the first time Rose notices that they're red. "Don't look at me like that."
For once in his life, he has nothing to say. No sharp comeback, no bluster. Nothing, and silence has never been so loud. His eyes are red, his jacket is red, his scales are red. Blood is red. Her birthmark is red. Roses are red. Rose never wants to see the color red again, ever. She puts on a white jacket and pulls the sleeve down over her wrist (she wishes she could scrape the birthmark off and never see it again, but then there would be blood and Rose never wants to see blood again either).
She stands, pulling her suitcase up with her. "Goodbye, Jake."
"Come home when you're ready, Rose."
"Jake, I'm not coming back."
"You have three children." He might be angry now. She's not sure; it's been a long time since he was angry with her.
"They'll be all right."
Yes, yes he is angry. "They'll be all right?! Rose, you had two childhoods. One with a mother and one without," he reaches out to touch her shoulders and she jerks back. "When were you better off?"
"I wouldn't know," she snaps. "I can't remember either of them."
"Rose-"
"What." She feels cold.
"Nevermind." He shakes his head. "Do what you have to do."
He's too kind, too gentle. She wants him to scream at her, hit her, anything, anything to make her feel something. But he won't. He's always loved her too much. "Tell the kids I love them."
His eyes flash. "Tell them yourself."
He walks out, leaving her standing in their bedroom. She slides her wedding ring off her finger, and the diamond glitters in the dim light when she sets it on the nightstand. Rose can hear her husband trudging down the stairs, and she can hear the shrill giggles of her daughters. As she walks out of the bedroom, she sees Luke slumped against the wall outside the door. Her son looks like Jake, acts like Jake. "Don't go, Mom."
She shakes her head. "I have to go, Luke." He's gone in a flash of blue flame, and she hears his wings beating the night air as he flies away. "Goodbye," she whispers, and she feels the burn of tears behind her eyes.
When she turns back to the stairs, Jake is waiting for her on the top step. "The girls are downstairs." He walks into the bedroom and flops backwards onto the bed. His tail materializes, and he finds a baseball somewhere that he flings against the ceiling.
"Aren't you going to come down?" It's surprising and not that he doesn't want to give her a proper goodbye.
He shrugs. "You'll be home soon."
"No, I won't. You have to let me go, Jake." He flings the baseball harder. She's tempted to remind him not to dent the ceiling, but then again she'll never see that ceiling again anyway.
She kisses her children and says she loves them before she walks out the door, but she doesn't look back. Thunder cracks and rain pours down on her head, but she doesn't go back inside for an umbrella. The bus won't come for another half hour, and it would take an hour to walk into the city, so she sits on the bench in front of the bus stop and lets the rain mix with the tears on her face. She feels hollow, like her heart has been ripped out of her chest (but not her soul. She lost that a long time ago).
The people on the bus aren't interested in another rain-soaked passenger, and she's not all that interested in them. A woman tells her she has pretty hair, but she spends the rest of the ride in silence. Rose watches the clouds grow darker until they're dark gray against a black sky, and she counts the people leaving until she's the last one left.
"Last stop, miss." The bus driver has wandered back to her seat, and she looks at him, nods, picks up her bag, and walks back out into the rain. The bus pulls away, and she has no idea where she is, and that's just fine.
The Huntsman looms over her, the dragon skull secured to his head and his staff in one hand. "You have betrayed us, Huntsgirl. And for that you will pay with your life."
The green energy shoots toward her, but she doesn't flinch. Everything goes black.
Then he's looming again, in the same position, the same angry eyes, the same angle of the staff, glowing green energy building at the end. She waits for just a quarter of a second, long enough for it to be too late to change the direction of the strike. He misses her by a hair's breadth, and she drops to the ground as he fires again. She smells smoke as her hair burns.
"88! 89!" He shouts, and the two boys jump into the fray. 88 grabs what's left of her braid, and another strike hits home. The world fades to black.
But then he's looming again, like before, staff pointed, energy building. She's learned from last time and springs into the air as he fires. When he fires the second time, she flips her head so that her long (beautiful, her favorite vanity) braid is entirely singed off. 88 misses when he grabs her braid and falls forward, grabbing her ankle. She falls, but pulls herself up and launches her body toward the door. 89 is waiting for her there, blocking her path.
Blackness, and the Huntsman looming.
He's going to kill her over and over and over again, and sometimes she fights back, ripping the staff from his hands (only to be electrocuted by the security program. Her fingerprints aren't authorized anymore). Sometimes she lets him kill her several times in a row, hoping that maybe this time it'll stop repeating (even death might be preferable to dying). Sometimes she tries to escape, taking each time she dies as a lesson, but by the time she's lost track of how many times she's been killed, there's nothing left to change.
The nightmare won't end. She's stuck here, trapped between 88, 89, and a line of reinforcements, staffs pointed, like a firing squad. Huntsgirl stands in place, waiting for death. As the staffs begin to glow green, 89 shifts his weight to one foot and crosses his arms, like he knows how this is going to end and so he may as well sit back and enjoy the show. Fine, she thinks, fine. His eyes are on her but unfocused, off in some other world. The energy beams shoot toward her, but this time they don't strike her. She's reached out and seized 89 in his distraction, holding him in front of her as the beams crackle into his chest.
The Huntsclan stands there, frozen. She sprints away from them before they can recover, out the single door in the room, and runs. She makes it to the subway, people watching her oddly as she strips her mask off and collapses into a seat, breathing heavily.
And when it's all over, her children are watching. "Luke," she breathes, looking at her oldest son. "You shouldn't be here."
"We saw everything," Ava snarls. "You should have let yourself die."
"You don't understand," she pleads, turning to her daughter.
"We do understand," Kyra shouts, hands clenching into fists by her sides. "We understand that you would kill a child to get what you want."
There's nothing to say. Nothing that could absolve her, no way to deny that she threw 89 into the line of fire so she could escape. "Where's your father."
The children cross their arms in unison. They all look like him, and from the time they were born she was grateful for it (from the time she stopped being able to look at herself in the mirror she hoped any children they had would look like him). Black eyes, jet hair, the set of their faces, all him. Luke has his jaw, his hands, a son the spitting image of his father. "He didn't want to see you," Kyra says, emotion gone from her face. "He hates you."
"If you can kill someone else's child," Luke mutters, "what's to stop you from killing your own?" The birthmark she's always tried to ignore, the one he inherited from her, glows green around his left ankle.
"I'd never hurt any of you."
Ava turns around and holds up her hair. A dragon glows green on the back of her neck. "Do you like my tattoo, Mom?"
She hears Jake's voice in her head. "It's a really cool dragon tattoo."
"Jake?"
"He's not here." Ava puts her hair down but doesn't look at her. "You'll never see him again. He doesn't know who you are anymore."
The pedestal has crumbled. The fall strikes her mind and leaves her dizzy; his love was always steady, always supporting her, and she's thrown it away. But then she's always deserved to lose it, never known how she'd kept it.
"Neither do I," she sighs, folding her hands in her lap. "Neither do I."
…
Rose jerks up in bed, slamming her head against the ceiling. "Ow!" Her temporary bunkmate kicks the bottom of the mattress. "Sorry," she whispers. She sinks back into her pillow and stares at the clouds covering the moon through the window. The bed feels cold against her skin despite the furious clanking of the radiator under the window. Cheap polyester sheets nearly crackle with built up static every time she moves. Her hair will be a mess in the morning (her hair hasn't been a mess in as long as she can remember), and her makeup that she didn't take off will be smeared with tears and sleep. She feels grimy, dirty (but the voice of the Huntsman bursts into her thoughts, his laugh raising goosebumps on her arm. "Well, Huntsgirl, perhaps now your face will be as ugly as your soul." 88 and 89 snicker with him). She shakes her head and buries her face in the pillow.
One leprechaun, two leprechauns, three leprechauns…
…
The four of them have fallen asleep in the big bed, plus the dog at their feet. Jake has Ava curled around him, crying softly, and Luke and Kyra fell asleep long ago, though their sleep is not restful. He smooths Ava's hair as her sobs drift into soft hiccups.
This won't last long. Rose will be back. And when she comes back, they'll try the individual and joint therapy again. He'll make a point to tell her she's beautiful more often, bring her flowers on his way home from work. She always liked those red roses. She never wants to come with him on patrols anymore, but maybe they can fly around the city a few times.
"Daddy," Ava whimpers-she's only nine, she shouldn't be crying, missing her mother."
"Yeah," he whispers, wiping the tears off her upturned face.
"When is Mommy coming home?"
"Soon, I promise."
She nods and buries her face in his shoulder. Short, jerky breaths turn into the slow rhythm of sleep, and Jake reaches out to the lamp and flicks it off. In the darkness, he leans back against the headboard and lets the tears drip down his face. Rose will be back soon, he promises himself. And when she comes back, they'll fix this.
…
A/N: This story is really hard to write, for a lot of reasons, but I absolutely plan to keep going with it. Can't promise faster updates though, unfortunately. Hope you guys enjoy this chapter. Thanks to everybody who reviewed chapter 2!