“Right,” he swallowed hard, “Nosy neighbors. Yeah. That’s what happens when you live in a Monster infested town, right?”
Wordlessly, Jon followed her upstairs. He had been inside of Rose’s room once or twice growing up, though they mostly played outside and got their hands dirty. It was different now from what he remembered but it still very much resembled her. There were photos on the wall that he gravitated towards and saw one of them. He was missing both his front teeth and her dress was messy from whatever they had gotten involved in. For a moment, he smiled, tracing the outlines of wide smiles.
“Why can’t everything be this simple again?” he whispered. “I wish we could go back to that. Instead my fucking brother probably shot Jake Lupin and left him alive to tell about it! Which is something he knows he’s not supposed to do. Which makes my entire murder the vampire thing way less easy and puts me, the MUNDANE at a huge disadvantage at school. Jean cornered me in the hallway and that fucking fairy figured it out.”
Jon was freaking out, trying to keep himself from spiraling with losing sight of anything. He cautiously sits down on her bed.
“Rosie what the hell am I going to do?”
“Actually, most of them probably mind their own business. Us Cromwells have just been blessed with ones that are old and have nothing better to do than gossip. They didn’t care as much before, but now that I’m basically an adult I guess all bets are off,” Rose informed the male as she closed the door behind him and led the way upstairs.
Jon had been up in her room plenty of times for playdates and hangouts when they were younger, but being up there with him after so long was more bittersweet than anything else. A lot had changed in the last few years, including her room. The various childhood photos had been put up in what felt like another life, and had for a solid while had been constant reminders of a time she’d had to leave behind. A few photos of her and Salem had since worked their way onto the wall too, though, serving as a strange foreshadowing for the merging of worlds that Rosemary had absolutely not seen coming. And now... the subject of the photos was there again.
And everything was going wrong.
“Time travel is the one thing I’m really not allowed to do, so unfortunately I can’t actually make that happen,” Rose admitted, doing her best to be helpful even though she had no clue where to begin. But the comforting needed to wait a second, because the hits just kept coming. “Wait. What do you mean Jean cornered you? What are people saying?” Rose filed away the fairy thing for later, figuring that one stood a decent chance of disappearing with the right convincing, but if multiple people we seeing through things... yikes.
For not the first time, the alarm bells were blaring in Rose’s mind. Loudly. Almost deafeningly. Morally, she was all over the place with this one. She was helping a hunter, which in her mind was definitely not good... but she was also helping her childhood friend who she had a chance of helping to escape the hunter lifestyle. If there was even a chance that Jon could switch sides... she knew where she needed to stand.
So she sat down next to him on the bed, sure to leave a comfortable amount of space between them to give him the room to panic.
“I really wish I had an answer for you here, but this is entirely new to me. Besides just... killing people, which is not the move here, how has your family managed to stay in hiding for so long?”