Okay, I never planned for this to be as freaking long as it is. I'd planned to do a one shot with Rosalee talking or remember her past as a addict. This was not necessarily the avenue I planned but ehhh I rather like how it turned out.

Two things:

1. I am not and have not ever been an addict of any kind, this is all my own imagination and I'm certainly not trying to offend or off put anyone, I just thought I'd stretch my writer muscles and try to put myself in Rosalee's shoes. I have had some experience working with vulnerable populations in Portland (yes, I live here) but my experience is not the end all be all of experience.

2. I am not condoning recreational drug use or date rape/abuse in any way shape or form. Again, from my experience working with vulnerable populations these things often go hand in hand.

Dudes, this is all headcanon this point. I keep trying to pin down Rosalee's timeline and can't because the writer's have only given us the bare minimum of back story

Anyway, enjoy!

"And they scream/ The worst things in life come free to us/ Cause we're just under the upper hand/ And go mad for a couple grams."- Ed Sheeran, The A Team

"Staring at the sink of blood and crushed veneer./ Tell my love to wreck it all/ Cut out all the ropes and let me fall"- Bon Iver, Skinny Love

Part 1. Veneer.

Rosalee was not the type to dramatically show up in the middle of the night. Except that was exactly what she was doing currently. But this had been eating at her for days. Juliette had demanded to know the truth, to see it with her own eyes once more and remember. Monroe refused, albeit reluctantly. And Rosalee caught herself echoing her new friend's sentiments (or at least she hoped for this new friend; she wasn't so sure the warm and fuzzies would stick around if Juliette ever found out about Rosalee's fuzzy side), growing angrier and angrier that Juliette had been left in the dark about everything.

She pulled up to the little house, seeing the lights on lifted her spirits a little. She cautiously knocked on the door; all the while praying that he was displeased enough with her that she would not have to tell this story. The pocket watch ticked faithfully against her hip.

But he opened the door all the same. "What's going on? You were strangely monosyllabic in your text." The corner of his mouth quirked upwards.

"Is Nick here?" she wondered as she glanced around. The white monstrosity he called a car (or truck or jeep or whatever) was no where to be seen. And the last thing she wanted was Nick's new freaky hearing to pick up on this.

"Naw, he's on some stakeout with Hank. Said he'd be gone until tomorrow afternoon at the earliest." He opened the door wider. "What's up?"

"I have to tell you something." She stepped inside, pulled off her thick sweater and let him follow her to the living room.

"And you couldn't over the phone?"

She shook her head, sitting on the couch. Drawing her knees up to her chest. "No. I couldn't. "

"Rose..." he reached out but she couldn't let him.

"I was angry with you the other day." she confided.

"I know you just want to help Juliette and-"

She held up a finger. "I was angry because we were keeping her in the dark about everything, about Wesen and Nick being a Grimm and why she went into that coma...when I realized I haven't told you what happened. After you trusted me with your past." She shook her head at herself. "It isn't fair. You deserve to know, considering...everything."

About a month ago, they sat out on the back porch and he told her about days and weeks he marked only with blood and bones, about how he about lost every ounce of control. For a while, he lived solely on instinct. Some of the stories made her cringe and want to shut her eyes against the truth. But she didn't. She waited until he finished and reached over to take his hand. Their fingers interlocked, squeezing tight.

"Sometimes," she intoned barely above a whisper. "We have to bury our pasts so they don't bury us."

"Sometimes." he agreed and kissed the back of hand. He said nothing more about it; neither did she.

"I need you to just listen and not say anything until I'm finished." She said finally, echoing his plea from a month ago. She told the story without flourish and as anonymous as possible. Almost as if those years happened to someone else all together.

There was nothing innocent about the beginning but it hadn't been malicious really. It was something to do. Something to take her mind off her troubles, off her father's death and her mother's crying and all Freddie's responsibility talk. At first it was a few drinks at the Cheerful Tortoise. But only at first. A friend, a girl she knew briefly from high school and college, invited her along to "see just how far the rabbit hole goes" she said. A girl, whose name she couldn't remember, drew aside the red curtains to show her what dreams they might find.

Sitting around in the circle, Rosalee took her turn. She was not like the others; she knew what the drug did, how dangerous it was She was the apothecaries' daughter after all. And as she inhaled that vaporous smoke into her lungs and held it, burning her throat to a raw sweetness; euphoria bloomed in her veins and she forgot. So blissful was that forgetting, that voluntary amnesia, she gave in and took another hit. The night passed with laughter and silly mindless games, the rules to which changed at every moment. They howled at the moon with their reedy Fuchsbau voices and set Forest Park aglow with their bright gold eyes. Soon though, she melted into the dawn reborn.

Rosalee woke that first moment on a semi-naked mattress in a second thought room in a downtown apartment. The two other girls beside her slept on. Her head fuzzy and mouth full of cotton, Rosalee rolled herself out of bed to find her friend, collapsed in a puddle on the run down couch in the living room. Painfully bare and empty, the apartment reeked of college poverty and minimum wage jobs. Portland was where college kids came to retire after all.

"Have fun, girl?" Her friend warbled from her position on the couch.

"Yeah," Rosalee admitted despite the growing head ache and slightly rolling stomach. "Yeah, thanks."

"Just let me know when you wanna go howl at the moon again. Maybe next time I can rustle us up some Blutbad to go run with." The girl, who really looked like a girl, winked as Rose left.

Rosalee only meant for it to be that one time. It didn't stay just once. Friday rolled around and it had been a hard week again. She gave her friend a call. Only once; the addict's benediction. Just this once. Just one more. Just a while longer. Slowly, she felt herself become the patron saint of excuses for her disappearances as trips to the Island became the regular destination for a thousand Friday and Saturday and Sunday nights, for stressful Tuesdays and miserable Mondays. Weekends stretched into weeks and then months. She went out one night in September and when she woke, it was two days before Christmas.

Her mother started to speak through Freddie only. And then Freddie stopped speaking all together and started yelling. Calling her selfish and childish. Why couldn't she see what she was doing to their mother? To him? Didn't she care? No. To be honest, she had stopped caring the moment that blissful negligence erupted in the back of her brain.

There were men, too. High, she smiled easier, flirted shamelessly and kissed men, whose last names she did not know, unabashedly. And they loved her. She was endlessly entertaining to them with her snarky comebacks matched with those innocent brown eyes. She breathed in the smoke like she didn't care if tomorrow came or not. She lived for the moment and no man who was cute enough and laughed enough would be denied. Looking back, she remembered that their faces were always distorted through the smoke, clearing in the morning when they had to learn each others' names in the cold light of day.

One morning after a marathon session at the Island, Rosalee squirmed her way out from under a man's thick suffocating arm. She pulled on a pair of jeans she hadn't washed in a week and a shirt that had seen better days. Tiptoeing around the mattress that sat directly on the floor, She found her way to the bathroom. She splashed her face and looked up at the cracked vanity mirror.

She didn't recognize the woman staring back at her. Her eyes were sunken in, skin gone yellow instead of a warm bronze. Her hair hung in clumps and her hands, that constantly fluttered now, were skeletal. A bruise bubbled up blue and purple on her cheekbone. Matching the ones encircling her wrist, her upper arm. She lifted the hem of the t-shirt just barely an inch, to find matching marks on her thighs. Surprised, they seemed to appear out of no where with only wispy memories that drifted between her ears like smoke. She flinched, remembering the fist coming toward her the steel grip on her arm. The hard and grinding kiss tearing at her bottom lip. She said yes because he could take her to the Island whenever she wanted. She said yes because there wasn't any other answer to give.

And suddenly, she knew then that 'yes' was not a 'yes' at all.

She ran faster than she ever had; only pausing to puke up the poisons she'd inhaled into the gutters. With each step the stitch in her side tightened up as if it were her own personal cilice. More and more clearly she saw the worry etched on her brother's face, adding to his cares. She saw the terror in her mother's eyes that perhaps her daughter would follow her husband into an early grave, into a place she could not follow.

Rosalee found her way to her brother's shop and opened the door. Thankfully he was alone.

"I fucked up," she announced to the shop and her brother. "I fucked everything up."

Freddie didn't laugh or smile. He didn't say. "I told you so." Instead, he walked around the counter and engulfed her in a hug. He said nothing about the bruises or about how thin she'd become. She burst into tears at the contact. He made her tea and helped her to bed, promising her the next few days would be a spectacular sort of hell.

She accepted it as she did her tea, without a grimace. She was the apothecaries' daughter; she took the medicine she was given and swallowed down the bitter taste without a word. True to his word, it was hellish. When she emerged dehydrated and shaky but sober, she slept for three straight days. All the while he applied arnica to her eye, wrists and arms.

"What do you want to do?" He asked when when she was back in her right mind.

"What do you think?" She replied, setting her hands hands on the table.

"You can't stay here, you know." Freddie replied. "It'll make it too easy to go back...Unless you want to."

"No," she breathed. "But where?"

"Seattle? I've got friends there. They said you could stay with them until you figure out your next move."

She nodded. "I need to get away from here. From these people." He bought her a train ticket for the next day. She walked onto that train without looking back.

"And I lived there until everything that happened...with Freddie," she concluded, leaning back against the couch arm. "I just...I just wanted you to know."

At first, Monroe said nothing. For a silly moment, she thought maybe he would refuse her, tell her to go. Panic electrified each thought until she felt her hands start to shake from adrenaline and habit. She hadn't escaped from it completely unscathed. Her hands shook when she was stressed and the shakes were often accompanied by rather nasty migraines that kept her in the dark for hours at a time.

"Sometimes," Monroe reached out and took her hand. "We have to bury our pasts, so they don't bury us."

She didn't ask him to keep it to himself; he would. She didn't ask if it changed what was between them; it didn't. He wouldn't forget but, he wouldn't speak of it unless asked. It was why she knew things were different this time around. "Sometimes." She agreed, pulling him closer to her. He came willingly as he always did, sliding one arm around her shoulders. She buried her face in his neck and breathed out the nervous one she kept locked up from the moment she knocked on his door.

He said her name just once, very softly. Not Rosalee but Rose. She smiled as one hand came up to cup her cheek and drew her in for a kiss. It was not like the others they'd shared. This one was bourn of honesty and trust. And the fact remained, there was nothing left to hide behind now.

"This isn't what I came here for..." She murmured against his lip, all the while drawing him down to her again with a steady hand on his sweater collar. "I just came to tell you."

"And now I know," He replied and leaned in to her pull, hands skimming from her knees, to thighs, to hips. "So...stay?" he posed it was a question. And it was entirely in her power to say no and walk away.

Kissing him without agenda and with abandon, this time she was sure.

And that's all you get...FOR THIS PART! Don't worry, I have a second half (which probably won't be nearly as long as this one and it will probably be more dialogue)

R&R please!