Another night on the… well, what passed for the town, around here. A one-time village swallowed up by the crawl of New York City. Still a village, really, in so many ways. Hard not to know everybody, when you had a few hundred years and only a couple blocks to share. Made for a peculiar sort of atmosphere. Especially when you were one of those Fables who had to fight and pay for a place here, knowing that most of your neighbors took it for granted. But, that was hardly a productive thought. Or a pleasant one, especially given recent… tremors, in his relationship with the most reliable name in illegal glamours. Of all the stupid, boorish, idiot things…Théo polished off the last of his brandy at the thought, the damn thought. The damn fearful thought. What if he was forgetting? Losing what magic he’d had? He lifted that glass again, thoughtlessly. Empty. Right. The bartender had started to wind her way closer, watching. He draped a smile over his frayed nerves, prepared to charm his way to a second round on the house - or, at least, to a distracting conversation. At least.
Before he could settle into that, though, company arrived. Not unwelcome, but a surprise. The offer, too. “By all means,” Théo’s head tilted, more than a little bemusement there. No need to point out that this wasn’t one of Marie’s usual haunts; they were both well aware. What on earth had brought her by Trip Trap, of all places? And on such a mission, too. The fresh shots hit the bar between them, followed, almost begrudgingly, by a couple slices of lime and a tarnished shaker of salt. His dark eyes flicked from the tequila to Marie, a slow, curious smile slinking across his face. “Are we drinking to anything in particular, then?”
Théo sees his version of the truth immediately.
She sees it flash in his eyes, a sharp and quick little recognition that this is not the norm, that this is not the Marie he’s come to know ever since they were all brought to this place, this town. By all means, he says, and she can read the tilt of his head without even having to try, can see the amusement in his eyes and know that he can read her just as easily as she can read him. That was always the danger with him, with the cat who spun unwanted goods into pure gold--only the most cunning could make a pawn shop filled with cast away memories successful in Fabletown. But like recognizes like, and while he reads her she reads him right back.
She could say something no one would believe, could play coy and demure and ask Can’t I just drink tequila because I want to? Could say Maybe I just wanted to order a drink as an excuse to talk to you. That would be the closest she plans on getting to the hard out truth, but even that’s too close, too honest, too true. She sighs and shakes her hair out behind her shoulders, narrowing her eyes slightly and smiling. “Shall I come up with something?” she asks instead, deflecting a question with a question. “For you, Théo, I can.”
With a flick of her tongue, she licks the back of her left hand, leaving a wet place for her to shake the salt onto. Lifting the salt shaker from the bar top, she shakes the white crystals onto her hand and then reaches out, offering to do the same for him.
Stepping through the front door to Nod’s, Marie feels out for blood.
She doesn’t know what she’s doing here, doesn’t even really know what she’s looking for, only knows that she’s looking. It isn’t her job, not even remotely, but she can’t just do nothing, and sitting in the dinner cleaning menu’s and refilling condiments feels like nothing, feels like failure, feels like giving up. So maybe she’s using the people around her, using the people who have been kind to her and vowing not to trust any of them until she finds out what happened to her friend, but that’s fine. She can leave her heart behind, can be empty and cold in pursuit of the truth.
“Wendy,” she says, not quite smiling but not quite emotionless either. “I need some help finding some stories. Think you could help me out?”
…hoping that they will see you for something you will never be.
It shouldn’t have gotten to him as much as it did. It was poison, slow acting but deadly. Maybe he was just blaming a blameless woman, finding no fault in the fact that she had just told him the truth. Every time he thought of her words, he could feel the ground shift beneath him —– and whatever sureness he had of himself would crumble whenever that happened.
His apartment had become an overwhelming place to be in. Whether it was hunger or the fact the silence had become deafening, the Sheriff wasn’t sure —- - all he knew was that he wanted to get out of the one place in town he used to feel good in. It made him nervous, knowing that he was slowly losing his grip on just about anything: from his own mind, the relationships he had built, the job he had been given… It was a long list and the Fable didn’t seem anywhere near stopping the self-sabotage.
He told himself that some food would help him, or perhaps be enough distraction. Wolf wasn’t going to eat it, he had no strength to convince himself to do it. Buying it, taking it back to his apartment and letting it sit there until it went cold and then rotten was more his style. Opening the door to the diner, Wolf made sure he came at a time when no one would be around. It was early enough —- or late enough? Wolf hadn’t slept and time had become confusing —- and Wolf was relieved to see no one else had decided to get up so early.
No one else but the owner of the diner.
For a moment, he felt weightless. Marie was a friend and in a town that seemed to want, more and more, to burn him for what he couldn’t do or for what he had done —- Wolf had lost track —-, seeing her had come as a relief. That feeling didn’t last long, however, for it was shattered by the words that had escaped her. He was taken back by them. Both surprised and confused. Eyebrows furrowed and him, left speechless as he felt his chest sink.
….And then, he wasn’t surprised anymore. “I’m doing the best I can, Marie. I’ll find whoever did this.” Wolf believed in his own words less and less.
She sees the moment his heart drops, and she wills hers not to go with it.
She knows him too well now, she realizes immediately, realizes that she knows how to read the furrow between his brow and the sharp rise of his chest when he inhales at her cruelty. She can’t remember exactly when it was the the sheriff had become her friend, can’t remember when she started looking forwards to him coming in earlier than everyone else. Maybe it happened that first time, when he came through her door in the early dawn hours of morning, when the street lights haven’t yet gone off but the sun is starting to crest over the horizon and everything is cast in a kind of hazy light that’s not quite night and not quite day, but somewhere in between. They had always sort of existed in that space; Wolf didn’t have friends, not really, but the pair of them had bad coffee at dawn from freshly washed mugs, had jokes over omelettes that she could rarely convince him to finish, had nights together where he worked on finishing paperwork at one of the back booths because if someone didn’t egg him on to get it done than it never would. The part of her that loves him for this, the little ways that he’s allowed her to take care of him without actually taking care of him, that part of her breaks when he responds and barely looks surprised at her cruelty.
“Will you?” she replies half-heartedly, the part of her that cares about him warring with the part of her that cared so deeply for Goldi. She tilts her head to the side and raises her eyebrows, both needing an answer and never wanting one, some part of her wanting to just stay standing with him in this moment indefinitely. She wants to pretend like it’s any other morning, like he has come in and they can talk while she puts salt and pepper in all of the shakers, like it’s the end of any other day and he can laugh at her still being unable to properly roll silverware.
They aren’t there anymore, but even as she knows this, every fiber of her screams when she looks away from him and towards the floor, inhaling and closing her eyes for a moment. She doesn’t apologize, doesn’t pretend like she’s sorry for what she’s said to him, but when she looks up again she wills herself to be kind.
“C’mon,” she says, unpursing her lips and shaking her head as she turns away from him and walks towards the kitchen. “Cook’s late but you’re here now, so I might as well make you something to eat. You can come sit with me while I make it.”
Like a black bird flying through the skies, walking through the doors of the Trip Trap feels like sending a message, feels like she is made of feathers and bone and she has flown so far from herself that she can’t recognize who she is anymore. There are so many other bars she favors, so many other places in Fabletown that don’t make her feel so much... well, like a fable. There are places where she goes to forget herself, places where she goes to feel free, and places where she goes to embrace this new life of hers, but here in the Trip Trap there’s nowhere to hide. Here she is surrounded by Fables commiserating and drinking and it feels like something dangerous, like a place where who she is and who she is not is going to be made public, and that’s not something she’ll ever be ready for.
But Théo is here, sipping at a nearly empty drink and talking to the woman behind the bar, and it is Théo that she wants to talk to, Theo that she needs to talk to. If Wolf won’t find out what happened to Goldi, then she’ll do it herself. "Tequila, please,” she says, sliding onto the empty stool next to him. She makes no hesitations, no play acting at just noticing him there, and turns to him immediately. “Can I buy you another?”
All iron and decay, like something is rotting inside of her, the good part of her soul that she’d thought she was cultivating, the part of herself that she’d thought was actually turning into something pure, into something good, something that could care for not just herself, but other people, too. Guilt burns something heavy in Marie’s chest, wracks through her blood every time that she thinks about the ways in which she failed Goldi. It had been a long week, covering for her missing waitress, running herself ragged trying to figure out if it was something that she had done, something that Marie herself had said to make Goldi draw away from her so. She’s just setting up the final touches for the morning, putting ketchup bottles back where they belong and wiping down menus, work that doesn’t belong to her but she’ll do all the same. Maybe it’s her way of distracting herself, this refusal to find a replacement for Goldi. Maybe it’s her way of paying penance, but then her first customer of the morning walks through her door, and all of her guilt turns itself to anger and a small voice in the back of her head wants to push him back out through the door he came through, push him against a brick wall and demand every answer she knows he won’t give.
“And here I thought you’d be too busy figuring out how Goldi’s body lost its head to come in,” she says, her jaw hard and her eyes harder, tongue pressed to the roof of her mouth in an effort to hold back everything she wants to shout at her friend. “Should’ve known better.”
Once upon a time, Maid Marian from Maid Marian became a reality.
SHE bares a resemblance to ALICE BRAGA. The Fable, who identifies as CIS FEMALE, goes by the name of MARIE and appears to be THIRTY-TWO years old. The BUSINESS OWNER lives in FABLETOWN.
THE BASICS
THE FAIRYTALE & THE CHARACTER: Maid Marian, who is often times attributed to the Robin Hood folklore, but she was originally her own folk tale.
CHARACTER NAME: She prefers to go by Marie, not appreciating how time and human history has warped her story.
AGE: 32.
GENDER & PRONOUNS: Cis-fem, she/her.
FACECLAIM: Alice Braga
OCCUPATION: Owner of I Am The Eggman Diner
AREA OF RESIDENCE: Fabletown
ARE THEY GLAMOURED? No
THE FAIRYTALE/LEGEND’S BASICS & HOW THE PEOPLE OF FABLETOWN PERCEIVE THEM:
Note: I actually went with a super specific argument about the Maid Marian folk tale from Francis J. Child, wherein he thinks that the earliest versions of her story were actually from ballads portraying her as a sex worker, which I think is a super interesting history given that she gets kind of heralded as this image of the Virgin Mary in a lot of later texts. So she’s definitely someone that strays pretty far from the recorded fable, but nonetheless here she is.
The first recorded history of Maid Marian begins with a single question: now come ye for peace here, or come ye for war? She was said to be born of the blood of a saint, with glossy black hair the color of a raven’s wings, that with time it would hang down in ringlets meant to mimic the halo that belonged atop her head. Even among streets painted with fallen tears and other hardship, she was a streak of gold across blood red cruelty. Maybe it happened because she once had a famous lover named Robin, this conflation of her story with another’s that turned her into something gilded, into something golden. The truth of her story is something harder to swallow, a life lived not in peace and not in war, but perhaps with a hand in either. The truth is that she comes from neither, from something in between, something soldiers on either side of the aisle loved to take advantage of. A body for a pouch of gold, a ballad named for the Virgin Mary even though she was told to be anything but. Legends painted her as saint, a mother, a gilded girl with with love in her eyes, but there was never anything but the lust forced upon her by a man that was supposed to be her blood and protector. She has been heralded through the ages for her loyalty to her family, to a man that she has never met, and every time someone in Fabletown finds out that this is the story she’s been given, it makes her want to scream. Perhaps this Robin Hood had a wife once, and perhaps her name was Marian as well, but that has never been her. This Maid Marian was sold by her blood for the cost of his sins, and for every part of her that never wants Fabletown to know her true story, she can’t accept this false one either.
WHAT ARE YOUR CHARACTERS THOUGHTS ON FABLETOWN?
There’s a very small part of her that longs for the past, for what she was forced to leave behind. If there was a single thing that she would have stolen with her to bring into this new world, it would be nature. She misses sitting on a rooftop and feeling the sun on her face, leaning against a casement ledge and being able to see trees in the distance, the sounds of birds waking her in the morning. She is used to darkness well enough, spent years living in a brothel built of dark wood and darker souls, but in a countryside tavern there’s access to horses, to running rivers of water with flowers growing along the bed. Here in Fabletown, there is nothing but grime. Beer and grime. Yet still, here in this new world she is a free woman walking, and even if this world is not the one that she would have chosen, not the one that she would have built, she has made a home of it all the same.
HOW DOES YOUR CHARACTER FEEL ABOUT THE FRESH START THEY WERE GIVEN?
For all that Marie sometimes wishes that she could go back into her Homeworld and change her story there, wishes that she could find the power that she now has back there, she also loves the life that she has created for herself here in Fabletown. There are days, the bad ones where she walks down a street and wants to do nothing more than scrub the skin straight from her bones for fear the filth and destitution will somehow have found their way into her blood, that there’s something in this town that’s corrupting her and she’s helpless to stop it, but this is the way of their world and she’s learning how to live with it. She loathed the discontent, the weight of it heavy on her chest when she was still living in Homeland, but here she’s free of that burden, and for all the seediness that surrounds her, she wouldn’t give up her new power for anything. The rest of Fabletown tends to regard her highly, both her fable and her new life as Marie, but very few people actually know that they are one and the same. Most people don’t mind that she doesn’t share her fable with them. So long as they get good food in their bellies and don’t end up with a server that spills maple syrup in their laps, her reputation is tied closely to that of the diner’s. People come, they eat greasy hash browns and a stack of pancakes and swallow it all down with a mugful of coffee that she’s still working on every day to make taste a little less like gasoline, and so long as her businesses continues to thrive well enough to pay her food and rent, she’s content. She only wishes that the rest of the fables could find any measure of success, could be happy in this new world like she is.
EXPAND ON YOUR CHARACTER’S OCCUPATION & THEIR LIVING SITUATION:
Marie doesn’t exactly love her job, but she doesn’t hate it either, and she loves what it allows her to do. Running the diner takes up most of her time, managing shipments and orders for product, organizing her servers and cooks schedules as well as helping them out on most occassions by bringing out orders or whipping up some appetizer or meal or other when they’re busy an the cooks get overwhelmed. It’s not a big place, but it’s hers, all hers, and that’s something that makes her chest swell.
Marie lives in a sort of loft space in a studio apartment in Fabletown. The neon lights plastered along the buildings across from her big windows tend to cast the space in bright blues and purples at nighttime, but most of the time she doesn’t mind too much. As much as she misses being able to open her windows and gaze out over the vast forest she used to live so close to, there is nothing that she would give up for her independence. Her space tends to be a bit cluttered, haphazardly decorated with Mundie magazines proliferating unrealistic images of woman and promoting a lfe that she wishes would disappear. She steals them all the time, slipping them from shelves into her purse to try and stop their profliferation, but it’s not exactly like shes making a big dent on the industry. Still, she likes doing the little things. There are also collections of Mundie stories; she collects all the one’s that she can find abut herself. The one’s about a girl that she’s never met who bears her name and face, the one’s where she’s a side character in some man’s world. She hates him for that, even if she doesn’t know him. She can’t help it.
❝ The first recorded history of Maid Marian begins with a single question: now come ye for peace here, or come ye for war? She was said to be born of the blood of a saint, with glossy black hair the color of a raven’s wings, that with time it would hang down in ringlets meant to mimic the halo that belonged atop her head. Even among streets painted with fallen tears and other hardship, she was a streak of gold across blood red cruelty. Maybe it happened because she once had a famous lover named Robin, this conflation of her story with another’s that turned her into something gilded, into something golden. The truth of her story is something harder to swallow, a life lived not in peace and not in war, but perhaps with a hand in either. The truth is that she comes from neither, from something in between, something soldiers on either side of the aisle loved to take advantage of. A body for a pouch of gold, a ballad named for the Virgin Mary even though she was told to be anything but. Legends painted her as saint, a mother, a gilded girl with with love in her eyes, but there was never anything but the lust forced upon her by a man that was supposed to be her blood and protector. She has been heralded through the ages for her loyalty to her family, to a man that she has never met, and every time someone in Fabletown finds out that this is the story she’s been given, it makes her want to scream. Perhaps this Robin Hood had a wife once, and perhaps her name was Marian as well, but that has never been her. Maid Marian was sold by her blood for the cost of his sins, and for every part of her that never wants Fabletown to know her true story, she can’t accept this false one either. ❞
Once upon a time, Maid Marian from Maid Marian became a reality.
SHE bares a resemblance to ALICE BRAGA. The Fable, who identifies as CIS FEMALE, goes by the name of MARIE and appears to be THIRTY-TWO years old. The BUSINESS OWNER lives in FABLETOWN.
