Work Text:
Rosa heads straight to her rented garage in Flatbush after work so she can put in a couple of hours on the Audi Ur-S6, which is a dumb-looking car but then, collecting’s never been her thing anyway. She FaceTimes with Tom Hardy for a bit to show him her progress on the ignition system and once she’s shaken him – dear God, Hardy is a talker – she cleans up and heads home.
She doesn’t think about The Crimson Portal until she’s finished heating up her dinner and is looking around for something to do while she eats. She reaches for her phone automatically, but then she notices the heavy hardcover sitting on the counter next to it. She picks up the book instead.
Rosa had grabbed it on a whim as they were leaving the convention. Jake was right, the character on the front cover looked exactly like her and so – look, she’d been curious.
Now, she flips open the cover to read the plot description on the inside jacket. The main character’s name is Xiomara Axis and she’s a natural-born truth-seeker who was abandoned at birth and raised by a blind beggar named Ishara in the slums of Devols’r. It’s even worse than Rosa imagined. She folds the book open anyway and tucks into her leftover chicken and rice.
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Rosa’s parents were insistent that their girls be bilingual, and so they only ever spoke Spanish to their daughters when they were young. Rosa appreciates that now – her Spanish isn’t flawless, but it’s pretty damn close – but the first few years of grade school were rough. She’d already learned to read in Spanish at home but her English was almost nonexistent and she hated being so far behind everyone else. She hated silent reading time when she had to pick her way through the worn, sticky pages of the readers everyone else had burned through, and she hated the shelves full of real books at the back of the classrooms, mocking her with titles she could barely decipher.
But when she did finally crack the English – Rosa doesn’t say or think this lightly, but it was friggin’ magical. Rosa tore through books, read her way through practically the entire school library (which, admittedly, was just a one-room portable) and then got her own card to the neighborhood branch of the public library.
She read all of the worst young adult romances of the ‘80s and ‘90s, and every dumbass Babysitters Club book (though she’s since swiped her mind clean of all of them), and everything by Anne Rice and VC Andrews and Judy Blume and Lois Lowry. She was especially drawn to fantasy novels, anything based in entirely original worlds that she could get lost in. Her favorite was The Song of the Lioness series, which she read at least three times through, because here, at last, a girl was the hero.
But by middle school Rosa had decided that even Alanna of Trebond – the red-haired and fair-skinned protagonist who tried so hard for so long to hide who she really was – didn’t belong to her, a Latina born to immigrant parents who, at age 14, already knew exactly who she was but had no idea what to do with that person. Rosa was angry at 14, already hard-headed and independent. She was fed up with white girls and white boys and white men, for fuck’s sake, telling her story.
So she stopped reading. Rosa decided that she needed to live in the real world and not her fantasy novels if she was going to figure out her place.
Over the years, she’d pick up a dumb summer beach read now and again. She plowed through nonfiction books when she came across a new subject she needed to learn all about. She even briefly majored in “ethnic” literature in college before realizing it was totally insulting that anything non-white just got lumped together.
But otherwise – well, fantasy was best left to children, she’d decided a long time ago.
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Rosa’s dinner goes cold as she blazes through the first three chapters of The Crimson Portal. At the end of the third chapter – The C’y’thian Denizens – she lays the book flat on the kitchen table so she can pack the chicken and rice back into a tupperware bowl. She grabs a diet soda and a bag of Pirate’s Booty stashed in the back of her pantry instead, and she takes the book and the popcorn and the drink to her living room and curls up on her sofa, socked feet pulled up under her legs and a blanket in her lap.
She can’t remember the last time she just indulged in a book. Not since she was a child, for sure. She reads for hours, well after her bedtime, pausing only to take out her contacts and change into pajamas, and later to crawl into bed, where she keeps reading under the orange glow of her bedside lamp.
Xiomara is mean and hilarious. She’s a fierce protector and a ruthless revenge-seeker and she’s smart in a way that’s useful in her adventure-seeking life. She speaks three languages – the one of her birth, the one of her youth, and the one that was an unexpected side effect of the time she was poisoned by the Liars of Dollomar – and is proud of the heritage that unspools before her as she seeks the Ancient Forbidden Rings.
Xiomara knows herself. And if the rest of her world doesn’t understand her, that’s their problem. Rosa is in love.
She finally closes the book, sliding a slim razor between the pages to mark her place, when her eyes are aching and her concentration is so shot that she knows she’ll probably have to reread the last chapter or two in the morning. She sets the book on her nightstand and turns off the lamp, and when she closes her eyes, she sees herself: tall, proud, wild hair flying all about, black eyes bright and eager even as the world burns all around her.
She smiles as she slips off to sleep.