Chapter Text
The weakest part of any system was its people. This was a truth that had been confirmed to Rosalind over and over again. People were soft, afraid, and easy to manipulate. They would ignore their instincts and walk into a trap to avoid making a scene. It’s why Rosalind didn’t mind when people called her inhuman. She liked it, actually. They didn’t realize it, but they were paying her a compliment.
The secret to escaping prison was people: getting to know them and knowing how to use them. The Boy Scout had her contraband cell phone confiscated, but acquiring a replacement was trivial. There was a steady stream of cell phones coming into the prison, most of them being smuggled in by the prison guards. This corruption wasn’t exactly a secret. Rosalind would sometimes stroke the edges of her phone and think about the rot underneath the veneer of justice. Prison guards, paid by the public to keep criminals in line, bringing contraband to gang members inside the prisons and being paid handsomely by the gang members still on the outside. Nick Armstrong was hardly the only member of law enforcement to be on organized crime’s payroll.
Rosalind liked to think of herself as a collector of secrets. That was what really hurt when Caleb was caught and then killed — not that her chances of getting her sentence reduced had been obliterated. She was never leaving prison through official means. The difference between four and three life sentences only existed in the ether of court records and the bragging rights of ambitious prosecutors. What hurt was that he had been so stupid, so careless with her secrets. He’d left them lying around where any common patrol cop could find them. He’d exposed her secrets all at once when she’d had such plans for them, for how she was going to use them as both bait and trap.
And she’s had such fun ideas for Armstrong in particular. She’d wanted to play with her food before devouring it. But Caleb. Stupid, stupid Caleb had overreached like Icarus with a goddamn DIARY, and Rosalind had been forced to improvise with the Boy Scout, and the Boy Scout had turned out to be resourceful in addition to being a goody goody. Armstrong had one bad day and died too quickly. It was so disappointing. Her only comfort was knowing that the man who had captured her would never be remembered as a hero. He’d died a rat, any legacy he’d built on her name was now buried under of the body of the young cop he’d killed, the information he’d been feeding Derians, and his failed attempt to pin it all on the Boy Scout.
Armstrong was gone, but Rosalind wasn’t going to let herself dwell on her disappointment. She was going to shed it like a snake shed its skin. The only thing she would carry with her would be the lessons she’d learned, knowledge to avoid her mistakes in the future.
She had a dinner date planned, a magnificent feast that she would lay out across the table. At night she would close her eyes and imagine the invitations and the table settings. She would plan the seating arrangements and her favorite part: the centerpieces. She would think about the guest list and their plus ones and smile to herself. It was going to be one hell of a party.
For now she was back to finding the weak points of the system that sought to confine her: the people. The rot under the veneer. Replacing Caleb with someone who lacked his weakness, and there was really only one person who met that criteria: herself. Orchestrating proxy murders from inside prison was a necessary step to freedom, but it wouldn’t be enough. She needed to escape prison to truly express herself. The next time she conducted a murder through others it would be successful in its purpose but ultimately very unsatisfying.
Rosalind was a lot of terrible things, but she wasn’t impatient. She could endure a little gruel to get to her feast with the Fierce Protector, the Boy Scout, and the true guest of honor: her Starshine, her Little Dreamer.