Chapter Text
Snow White sprung up from nothing one day, spat out from the earth with a mission to raise hell in Hope County, or so it seems.
Information on the man is sparse and unreliable, and with so little to go on it’s hard to separate fact from fiction. Some say he carries an entire arsenal on his back, others that he decimates outposts with only a toothpick. No matter what tall tale you believe, there is one undeniable truth: Snow White is a dangerous man.
It’s fine at first, when Snow’s just bothering the Peggies, wrecking their shit indiscriminately. No one has any complaints about that—no one whose opinion matters, anyway. He even makes contact with some Resistance members, exchanges information and supplies all business like. There’s a sort of symbiosis going on, a real “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” type deal. That is, until something happens in the Whitetail mountains.
After that, that’s when the name Snow White starts getting thrown around—he was just Snow before, or “‘that fucker’ if you’re feeling frisky”—and that seems to really mean something to some people, and the whole thing breaks off. The Whitetail Militia won’t have anything to do with Snow, and plenty others follow their example. Suddenly, the guy’s been ostracized, any and all good will he’d built up essentially burnt to dust.
Instead of high-tailing it out of Hope County, like anyone free of a death wish might, Snow stays, doubles down. In addition to fucking with the Peggies, he starts fucking with the Resistance. He doesn’t kill anyone, but supplies go missing at the drop of a hat. It could be anything: pelts, food, dental floss. You name it, Snow might take it. Some folks even say he’s lifted ammo right out of their guns, and his reputation’s such that there’s some fool enough to believe them.
It’s after the Mural, capital M, which served as a big enough demonstration of Snow’s willingness towards escalation that Sheriff Whitehorse asks Rook to look into him. To get in contact, if at all possible, and put a stop to this nonsense. Rook can do little in the face of that except oblige.
Might as well start at Mural itself, like she’s Sherlock Holmes, trying to glean something from nothing. It should give her some indication of where his head's at, and a relatively quiet place to ponder her next destination, too. Not to mention, there's some part of her that's deeply curious. A guy that strange, what might he create? The answer, she finds, is something that looks like it belongs in a horror movie.
The Mural takes up one of the outside walls of the jail, though honestly calling it a mural is a bit generous; graffiti is a more fitting word. It reads “Snow White was Here” in letters as tall as they are wide, black and bolded. Surrounding it are eyes staring at some indeterminable point in the middle distance, the splatter dripping from the haste with which they were painted creating the effect of inky tears trailing downwards. Color is slapped on haphazardly, and in some places it creates the impression of faces, mouths open. Whether they're screaming or singing is impossible to tell.
“Well,” Rook mutters to herself, “he’s certainly unstable.” Intelligent too, if he hasn’t gotten caught yet, and quick enough to do it all in the first place. Capability in someone who’s not all there is a bad mix. It puts a sour taste in her mouth.
When staring at a wall doesn’t lead her to any conclusion beyond that, she heads back to Whitehorse, asks him for any info he has, even the unsubstantiated kind.
"According to witness reports, you'll be looking for a white male, late twenties to early thirties, of average height. He's got brown hair, and there are tattoos on both his arms. Seems partial to wearing the color blue." the Sheriff tells her, arms crossed as he leans against his desk, pensive. "I can get you an itemized list of what we’re missing if you give me a bit, but it seems too sporadic to mean much. I don’t know whether he’s taking stuff at random, or there’s some sort of method to his madness. And frankly, I don’t care either, so long as it gets stopped.” His voice softens, and he looks like his years weigh on him heavily. “People are getting jumpy, and some of ‘em outright scared. We don’t need this, not now.”
“I’ll do my best Sheriff,” Rook nods, face serious. She won’t let him down. At least, she’ll try her damnedest not to.
“I know you will, rookie.” Whitehorse sighs, shaking his head. “I’m just sorry I don’t have more for you.” With a pat on the shoulder, he wishes her well, and Rook goes on to start the most frustrating search of her life.
—
If nothing else, Snow leaves a trail. Burnt Bliss fields and blown up silos paint a pretty clear picture of where he’s been, but they don’t tell her much in the way of where he will be. For the most part, he’s stuck to Jacob and Faith’s regions, though whether that’s incidental or purposeful is hard to tell. Rook starts her search somewhere between the two, asking groups of resistance members that live on the border about Snow, greedy for any information at all. What she gets isn’t much.
“I mean, is he even human? You know?” says one man, half drunk off cheap beer. “Like, what if he’s like, some kinda avenging angel? Come down from heaven to. Fix shit." The statement is punctuated by a burp. "Yeah.”
Others have differing points of view.
“My cousin’s girlfriend saw him once,” a woman tells her, shifty like Snow is nearby and ready to kill her for the sin of tattling. “It was brief, but there was this look in his eyes, she said. 'Evil incarnate.'” This next part she whispers: “No better than a Peggie in my book.”
The opinions of Hope County residents are diverse. Some think Snow is their savior, others their tormentor, and even more just flat out don’t give a shit.
“Oh, the new pyromaniac? Yeah, you can hear him sometimes, whoopin’ and hollerin’. I’m all for making a ruckus, but not at any damn hour of the day, you know? I got a kid to put to bed."
It's all like that, just rinse and repeat. Rook drives around from town to settlement to camping ground, as well as any other place someone directs her towards, in search of some scrap, some hidden gem to turn her luck. By the time most of the day has passed, she knows about as much as she did when she started. People are either all too happy to talk her ear off about nothing in particular, or are too tight lipped to give her the time of day. After bouncing between the two for so long she's one irate housewife away from a headache, and with evening creeping in she's reluctant to continue her questioning; something about bothering a bunch of strangers after dark when everyone's so trigger happy seems like a bad idea. But there’s one last place Rook plans on checking before she calls it quits for the day.
It’s a cabin up north a ways that may or may not be inhabited. If there’s someone living there? Great, maybe they’ve got good info. If not? Well, hopefully it doesn’t have bedbugs, cause Rook would rather not spend another night in her truck.
The cabin’s hidden behind a wealth of pines, the only indication of its existence being the shoddy dirt road that winds between the trees. Rook drives until a fallen tree across the road blocks her path, and then she walks the rest of the way. The house itself is on the smaller side, wholly picturesque if you ignore the obvious lack of upkeep. It’s not rundown, but it’s close, and the forest is halfway to reclaiming it; vegetation grows up the walls, choking the chimney, turning the whole thing more green than brown. And yet, despite all of this, a light shines in the window.
A squatter? It’s not like having Eden’s Gate run around has solved homelessness. A darker, more pessimistic part of Rook’s brain insists it’s a Peggie, or a group of them, holed up and waiting to strike the nearest Resistance outpost. Her hands inch towards her pistol as she continues forward.
She knocks on the door, waits a moment. No response. She knocks again, calling out, “Hello? Just want to ask a few questions about an individual in the area.” Silence, heavy like a lead weight. “You’d be doing your county a service if you could just help out.” Nothing.
Rook sighs, ready to write this one off and head in the direction of the closest town, see if there's not a room she can rent—when the peaceful quiet of the forest is shattered by the sound of breaking glass.
“What the hell?” Rook brings her gun up, pointing it in the direction of the noise. It sounded like it came from behind the cabin. There’s a groan of pain and the rustle of movement. Carefully, she creeps around the side towards the source.
Before she even makes it all the way there, something darts out from behind the building, running into the forest. Rook doesn’t think about it; she sprints after it.
“Hey!” she shouts ineffectually. The figure doesn’t slow, weaving between trees with a fluidity Rook envies. “Wait up!”
It’s definitely a person. A man, pale skin, brown hair. She’s gaining on him, ever so slightly. Red stains the leg of his pants, likely blood from an unseen wound. His injury slows him down.
“I just want to talk!” She calls out. He’s not wearing Peggie beige, so it’s even true. His blue shirt makes him easy to pick out from the surrounding woods, but just because she can see him doesn’t mean she can catch him. But she is getting closer, slowly but surely.
Their feet pound in tandem on the forest floor, careless of twigs and undergrowth in their wake. Rook starts panting. It feels like a game of high stakes tag.
“Fuck off!” the stranger calls back.
Rook blinks at that, not having expected an actual response. “What’s your deal?” she shouts.
In response, the stranger stops suddenly, still a good amount of feet in front of her. He turns to face Rook, something gripped tight in an outstretched hand. She stops in her tracks as soon as she recognizes it for what it is: a grenade. The pin’s been pulled, and the only thing stopping it from going off is the white-knuckled grip he’s got on the lever.
Rook brings up her hands in the universal sign of surrender. “Woah, pal. I’m backing off.”
His face is twisted up in pain, and there’s a wound on his forehead leaking blood. “Not a good time to chat, alright? Office hours are fucking closed.”
“I get you! I understand, no harm meant.” Rook’s mind is racing a mile a minute, trying to find a way to deescalate this. She tries to keep up eye contact with him, but her gaze just keeps getting drawn back to that damn grenade and the hand holding it. The tattoos on his forearms are their own...distraction...
The realization hits her like a truck. “Holy shit.” Rook gapes, can’t help it. Goddammit, she’s an idiot. “You’re him.”
This guy—this limping, blood-covered, sweaty guy—is the big bad Snow White?
His face turns from pained to distressed. “Fuck,” he says. Rook can’t help but agree, especially when he throws the grenade down between them and starts sprinting off as best he can.
“Shit shit shit,” she mutters, running away, trying to put as many trees between it and her as she can. The seconds take an age to pass, and she feels as though she’s moving through gelatin. In her haste to get away, she trips, and nearly falls flat on her face. Reflexively, her forearms snap out to take the brunt of the impact, and it feels like all the stones and twigs in the world take the opportunity to tear into her skin.
“Shit,” she says again, hissed out between her teeth, hunching her shoulders and bracing for the explosion. Any second now, she's prepared to feel shrapnel hit hit back, feel fire lick at her heels. It never comes.
She waits a few seconds more. Then ten pass. Twenty. Nothing happens.
Tentatively, Rook gets up off the ground. Her arms sting, bleeding sluggishly, but she ignores that as best she can for the moment.
The grenade is still there, tufts of grass poking out of the dirt to frame it. She spends a few more seconds staring at it, waits for that acrid smell to clog her nose, or for the pop to burst her eardrums, but all she’s met with is silence and stillness. That doesn’t keep the fear out of her throat.
Taking a step back, she picks up a rock from the ground, weighs it in her palm. It’s fairly hefty. With a grimace, Rook winds her arm back and, in what might possibly be the most monumentally stupid risk of her life, she throws it at the grenade. Immediately, she scrambles for cover behind the nearest tree. Her aim is true and it strikes the iron jacket with a resounding clang. And that’s it: nothing more, nothing less.
Rook peeks out from behind the tree. The grenade, now sporting a small dent in its exterior, sits unmoved. She steps out from cover and starts toward it, steps growing surer the longer nothing explodes. As she gets closer, she can see there’s something written on it, black marks staining the otherwise uniformly green surface. Squatting down, she tries to get a better look at it. Painted on the side of the grenade is a winking smiley face.
Rook stares at it. In its own way, it stares back at her. She weighs the pros and cons for a bit—but probably not for long enough—before she picks it up.
It’s light, lighter than it should be. Likely all of the internal mechanisms that make it go boom have been removed, leaving just a hollow shell. She resists the urge to shake it and find out.
Later, as she sits outside her car, cleaning her forearm wounds with the water from her canteen, Rook cusses Snow White out. It makes her feel a bit better. Then she thinks about how Pratt would be laughing in her face right about now, and her mood sours further.