The Life of a Scarlet Rose
Maddie Fenton was naïve once, just like most people. To Danny and Jazz, she was always exceedingly smart, courageous, competent, and level headed. But that was Maddie Fenton. Maddie Windsor, as she was known before she married Jack, possessed all those same qualities, but they were tempered by age and naivety.
Consequently, despite common belief, there was a time when Maddie Windsor thought she was in love with Vlad Masters. He hadn’t always been a creep, after all. In college he was charming, charismatic, and intelligent. While not exactly popular, he drew people to him like a satellite. Maddie Windsor was one of those people. That she was infatuated with him was unquestionable. She thought she was in love, and wouldn’t realize until it was too late just how wrong she had been.
It was almost a week after The Incident. That was what Maddie and Vlad had taken to calling it. What had actually happened was a little too complicated to detail in casual conversation. In the simplest terms, Jack Fenton messed up an attempt to create a prototype ghost portal, it backfired, and Vlad was on the receiving end. He had been in the hospital for a few days before they had let him go, but the scars would always be there. Maddie was with him in his dorm. His roommate was out. They were alone. She was so relieved he was alright.
She was so relieved that she rushed into it. She didn’t think. Usually nothing like that would have happened. If nothing else, Maddie Windsor was very cautious where sex was concerned. Maddie was in college, and she didn’t have time for a child. She wanted children when she was older, and married, and had a home of her own and a steady job.
Apparently, life had other plans. Maddie felt stupid, of course. She should have paid more attention. Been more cautious. But she got caught up in the heat of the moment, and now she had to face the consequences. Her first idea was to do the proper thing. Marry Vlad, settle down, and raise a family. Vlad had ended that line of thought pretty quickly. That just drove Maddie away. They were both only eighteen, of course, and that was young to get married, but he could have at least helped her. Maddie considered abortion, but quickly dismissed it. She supported women’s right to make that choice for themselves, but she wasn’t sure she could live with it.
In the end, she settled for adoption. The organization gave her a whole packet of potential parents, and she finally narrowed it down. They were a middle aged couple with three children, two boys that were older, and one younger girl, only two years old. They had experience and a steady lifestyle that Maddie found comforting when it came to raising her child, and they would love her as much as their own children. The idea of her daughter having a sister so close to her own age to grow up with was comforting, too. In the end, that was all Maddie could really ask for.
It was with teary eyes and a gentle kiss on the forehead that Maddie gave up her newborn daughter. She had written her a letter to read when she was older, and her adoptive parents had promised to give it to her. The only other thing Maddie had given her daughter was a first name: Kendra, after Maddie’s own mother. Maddie hoped Kendra would be happy, and desperately hoped she hadn’t made a mistake. And the life of the scarlet rose began.
“Kendra, hurry up, we need to get moving if we’re gonna get there on time!” Winter Paris yelled impatiently.
“I’m coming, I’m coming!” Kendra Rose Paris called. It was almost the end of the summer before her freshman year of high school.
As she spoke, she came stumbling into the front room of the house. She was hastily tugging at her not quite shoes, trying to do no one knew what. Winter rolled her eyes and twirled her keys in her fingers impatiently. Kendra had, after much effort, finally cajoled Winter into chaperoning her and her friends at an outside concert festival they had been dying to go to all summer. Personally, Winter didn’t really get it, but she loved her little sister enough to see how much it meant to her and agree.
“Ready!” Kendra declared, breathless.
She breezed out the door before Winter and Winter followed, locking up the house after them. Winter eyed Kendra’s outfit with an eye roll. She wore a red vest top with black detailing that hugged her body and fake tied at the waist with stretchy elastic. Her short blonde hair fluttered messily about her head and her brown eyes were wide with anticipation. Winter swung into the driver’s seat and set out.
“I still don’t get those leggings-that-are-also-shoes things,” Winter said. The clothing item in question was a pair of black and red patterned leggings that wrapped down over Kendra’s feet in place of shoes.
Kendra huffed. “They’re like the in thing at this festival, trust me. This festival is all about weird,” she answered with utmost confidence. Winter just rolled her eyes again.
After picking up Kendra’s two best friends, Maya and Stella, they arrived at the festival. True to Kendra’s word, everyone did seem to be wearing the same impractical bottoms as her, though the tops varied greatly.
The music festival, as it turned out, was as vaguely amusing and somewhat headache inducing as Winter thought it would be. It was what came after the festival that was notable. Kendra, Maya, and Stella chatted animatedly in the backseat as she drove. They stopped for dinner, and when they got back to the car, Kendra changed. Red rings of light appeared around her midsection and moved over her body, one up and one down, and then off over her head and feet before disappearing. And Kendra was different. The color changes were the most obvious. Her skin had gone from its normal, healthy tan to a pure white. Her usually light blonde hair was crimson red, and her brown eyes were an unnatural, glowing violet. The colors on her clothes had switched as well, with all the red parts changing to black and all the black parts changing to red. It was, simply, entirely unnerving and completely unexpected. It was only after the initial observation that Winter, Maya, and Stella noticed the other part of it. Kendra was glowing. Her eyes were backlit, and her skin let off a subtle aura entirely its own. Winter suppressed the urge to scream. Instead, she raised an eyebrow with a façade of calm.
“Any explanations?” she asked.
Kendra frowned, looked down, looked around. She held her hand up in front of her face and studied it carefully. Then the other one. Finally, she pursed her lips and shrugged.
“No idea. But I don’t feel normal. I’m not tired anymore. I feel...like I could fly.”
Then, Kendra’s lips quirked up in a little half smile, and she jumped. And then it was, exactly as she had said, her flying. She was unsteady in the air at first, but after a moment she seemed more centered. No one else knew what to say. And the life of the scarlet rose went on.
Kendra was fifteen when she read her biological mother’s letter to her. It was long, and most of it was about her conception, her mother’s struggle with giving her up, and her hopes for both Kendra’s future and her own. There was valuable information about her life, about her biological father, one Vlad Masters, and about ghosts. Up until that point, Kendra had never even considered that’s what she could be. At least, partly. It had taken her time, but she’d gotten her transformations under control, learned a little about her powers. Flight, invisibility, intangibility. She chose an alias for herself: Scarlett Rose. While not particularly creative, it worked out well, and she liked the sound of it. It wasn’t long after reading that letter that Scarlett started training with one Vlad Plasmius. And the life of the scarlet rose went on.
Kendra Paris Scarlett Rose was still fifteen when a natural portal into the Infinite Realms, also known as the Ghost Zone, established itself over her hometown and ghosts started coming through. Vlad helped her beyond her training, helped her fight them off and taught her how to open portals to throw ghosts back into them. Eventually, Scarlett realized how manipulative and controlling Vlad was. She told him she didn’t want him to train her anymore, didn’t want anything to do with him anymore. Vlad, surprisingly, accepted her decision and left her be.
After that, she started relying more heavily on her siblings. Winter was the only other one still at home, but her brothers still lived in the same city. Alexander, the oldest, was an electrical engineer. Sebastian was two years behind Alex, and he was a biochemical engineer. They all knew her secret, though their parents still did not. Alex, Bash, and Winter all worked on different ghost fighting weapons and defenses for her to use, though Bash was the only one that had much success.
It was sophomore year, after Kendra had settled into her ghost fighting and school balance, that it happened. There was a new counselor at her school, Miss Spectra, and she was Kendra’s assigned counselor. As if that wasn’t enough, her office was an ice box, and Kendra always left feeling worse than when she’d arrived. It took time, but eventually, Kendra found herself at a breaking point. She changed forms and retreated to the Realms.
This was when Scarlett learned that there’s a noise distressed ghost children make. When they’re at their breaking point and they’re lost and they’re hurt, there’s a noise. It’s an instinctual thing, not quite a scream, but not quite a wail either. Lots of ghosts call it a keen, but officially, it doesn’t have a name. That was the noise Scarlett made, floating in the Realms, curled in on herself in a ball. There were a lot of ghosts that responded, but the first was a four armed greek ghost named Pandora. And the life of the scarlet rose went on.