Jake slouches into the sofa, sipping tea that actually isn't that bad. Fu sits beside him, grumbling about the impossibilities of being good at video games with fat dog paws-although by some mystery, he can mix potions just fine, what with having unusually opposable thumbs. Largely from laziness, Jake has always chalked it up to magical dog powers that haven't evolved to work on video games yet.
"So kid, what brings you down here?"
Fu's tongue is sticking out of his mouth at an odd angle, and if Jake weren't so beside himself, he might laugh. "Just needed to get out of the house."
"So you come to the old man's place? Ha! Imagine trading a wife and kids for a grumpy old man and his talking dog."
Jake tries very, very hard to speak at a normal tone and volume, but he's fairly certain he failed. "Rose left last night."
Fu freezes. "Oh-" he croaks. "You all right?"
The sounds of a lost video game bleep in the background, but it's been forgotten. Jake leans forward, putting the teacup on a side table and his head in his hands. "I thought we were happy, Fu." He sighs heavily. "I guess I was wrong."
It wouldn't be totally out of character for Fu to throw on his disco outfit and start to boogie-back to the single life, eh, kid? And all that. But Fu's seen this before, the pain like a cannonball to the chest that leaves Jake with a little less life and a little less spirit every time she's lost to him. If she'd done it on purpose more than just the once, or twice now, then maybe Fu would say it's time to boogie. But twice in almost thirty years isn't so bad. They'll get back together. They have to; he has twelve hundred biscuits riding on their fiftieth wedding anniversary.
Still, there's not much he can really say to the man on his couch-but then that's never stopped a talking dog from talking before.
"Look, I'm sorry. She'll be back. You and Rose have pulled through worse."
"I think we're out of chances, Fu. Before, it was always dragons or Huntsclan between us, but it's not anymore. It's Rose. She wants out."
And because it's been 25 years since the first time he lost her and he can't imagine a day without her, Jake digs the heels of his hands into his eyes and pretends to be angry. She's been suffering a long time, months, years. Hard to say. She's always been so strong and resilient and he took it for granted that she'd always be able to keep the demons at bay. He might have disagreed with her methods, sometimes (often), but she'd always pulled through the nightmare. Until she hadn't.
"She's been hurting, and I didn't care."
Well, a talking dog's gotta do what a talking dog's gotta do. "Okay look, Rose has plenty to be upset with you about-"
"Thanks."
Fu rolls his eyes. "Of course you cared. Kid, if she was upset with you, she should have been straight with you. You're busy, she's busy, you have three kids-and let me tell ya, they are no walk in the park if you know what I mean."
Jake's voice is thick. "That's not the point, Fu. She's hurting. She feels guilty about destroying the Huntsclan and it's been eating at her, and I just thought she'd figure it out, or we'd figure it out. I just didn't do enough to actually figure it out."
"All right, so go after her. Bring her back in time for Thanksgiving."
"She told me not to!"
"Aw, kid, fourteen year-old Jake would be disappointed."
Jake shakes his head, hands still pressed against his eyes. "My life isn't a romcom, Fu. I can't leave the kids and chase Rose, I don't know where she went; she doesn't want me anymore anyway. I need to forget about this whole thing for a while. Luke needs to finish the semester and start college; the girls need to focus on their grades and their dance recitals and having sleepovers. The four of us will stay together, and when she comes back, we'll deal."
Fu can feel his jaw on the ground but doesn't quite have the wherewithal to pick it up. "Who are you and what did you do with Jake?"
Jake's shoulders are quivering, and Fu still can't see his face. He'd like to give him some reassurance, swear up and down that Rose is coming back; she always comes back, but then again maybe Jake's right. Life hasn't been a movie for any of them, and it's not going to start now. The hero might not end up with the girl after all-his luck on that front has probably run out by now. "Tell me she's coming back, Fu. I don't know what I'll do without her."
There we go.
"Of course she'll be back. I've got biscuits riding on it."
Fu would like to think that Jake rolls his eyes and chuckles somewhere, deep inside.
.
.
.
Rain on her wedding day was lucky, they said, pinning the flowers in her hair and fussing with her dress. Remy had been working on it for months, fussing with her sewing machine and enough tulle to bury them all. Everything had been bright but the day, and she'd chosen not to let the dreary weather be a sign of things to come. She and Jake would make their own luck, good or bad.
The pedestal felt stable then, bolstered by the planning and the flowers and the diamond ring, and she'd thrown herself into the chaos with abandon. But now she's sitting in a cheap motel, dim with the dying lightbulbs in the old lamps and wet from the rain. How far away her confidence seems now. Rain pours on the roof of the tiny motel room, and she's put a dingy towel on the carpet to catch the drips coming in through the ceiling. Maintenance was supposed to come through with a bucket two hours ago. Rose curls up under the thin blanket, hoping distantly that there aren't any bedbugs, and pulls the pillow to her chest. The silence is deafening, the way it hovers over the room and echoes her heartbeat. It's dusk, nearly 6, and she can feel the lightness of her stomach at a time she should be making dinner-tonight would be a Tuscan chicken night, she thinks, or maybe she'd risk Ava's wrath and make spinach salads. No, she wouldn't. Jake would be in the fridge looking for cake or flying down to the nearest McDonald's after dinner. Tuscan chicken it is. Except she's not home, and the only thing she'll be having tonight is the coffee she bought at the truck stop.
Her room smells a little mildewy, like Luke's clothes when he left them in the laundry too long. There's cigarette smoke, heavy from the rain, that seeps through the thin walls and itches her nose the way Jake did when the flames rolled off his body. In some ways she wishes he were here, to hold her and promise everything will be all right, and in others she knows that's all he's done for the last several years and it's only made her feel worse. But it's time now to let all of that go. Her babies will be better off without her, as 32's baby would have been.
Of course, now she's just diving into self-pity. Well so help her, she's lived 25 years pushing it down, and now she's going to wallow in it, no matter what it does to her. Rose is tired, has been tired, for longer than she remember, and above all else she's tired of fighting.
So screw nobility. The only thing it's ever gotten her is pain and guilt bottled up in a fake smile. So she snaps a rubber band on her wrist, snap, snap, snap, and bites her lip until her mouth tastes like copper. There's no sense-never has been any sense-doing anything worse than that. She's dreamed enough to know that when she dies she'll only come back and have to do it all over again. She can only survive one way, that unspeakable way, the one that makes her see blood on her hands like Lady MacBeth.
She'll go down to the city tomorrow and get some backbreaking job somewhere. One with regular drug tests because she promised, and she's broken enough promises for one week. There's a deep part of her that misses those days of no yesterdays, when her mind was numb to everything except how to keep it that way and how to not get caught.
"Why are you killing yourself?" He'd demanded, cornering her in their bedroom. "You have a two year-old child. He needs you, Rose. I need you. Stop hiding in whatever that is and let's get help."
Her eyes had been glazed over as she sprawled across the bed. "I don't want help. "
"Quit trying to fix everything on your own! Yo, you're not even trying to fix it, you're just running away from something that never even happened!"
He'd been angry with her, probably the first time, probably the last time, and it had been a long time ago. It still stings, a little, less than it had stung then when she'd been so surprised that her vision cleared and she'd blinked twice at him, as if waking up.
Jake had slumped into bed when it was over, this first real, angry fight, gripping his hair with both hands. "Look, I love you, okay? I've loved you since the moment I met you. I just don't understand why you have to do this."
"I don't know. I don't know who I am. I don't know what's right and what's wrong."
"Then let's fix it. Let's go to counseling."
"I don't want counseling. I want answers."
"Well you're not going to get them if you keep this up." And he'd reached over to her night stand with his tail and swept whatever it was into the garbage.
So she'd promised, sworn on the souls of all the dead she couldn't save that she'd stop. She'd kept that promise, spent months in rehab, moved out of the city, started a new job, stopped seeing some old friends, all the little things that the psychologists and psychiatrists said would make her relapse. It's harder when she's alone, but she's put her family through enough.
Enough broken promises for one week.
Rose feels hot tears slide slowly down her face, leaving salty tracks on her skin, and she tries to think about something else. She won't sleep (she never sleeps anymore, unless it can't be helped). She'll just keep detailing every inch of the room, every crack in the wall, cobweb in the corner, until she forgets what she was trying to forget in the first place. Silly questions, all of them, about who she was before and who she has become. Answering them won't keep the babies from crying in her dreams, or the Huntsman from infecting her mind and shooting her over, over, and over again.
.
.
.
When she wakes, after dozing off for a minute (an hour? Short enough not to be tortured with some horrible vision, long enough that she's drowsy), the sun is blinding in the Colorado sky, and the cold has seeped into the room like the smoke from the night before. A sharp rap on the door jolts her into consciousness.
"Huntsgirl! Open this door. Immediately."
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A/N: I think we're starting to get somewhere. One of the things that most interests me about writing fanfiction is the opportunity to figure out whys. So this was both a good and a frustrating chapter because on the one hand, nothing happens, but also a lot of things happen. So I don't know how I feel about it. Feel free to tell me how you feel ;)