Title: Pool Our Resources
Fandom: Gypsy
Length: 550
Content notes: no warnings apply
Rating: G
Characters: Herbie, Rose, Louise
Author note: Title from the song Small World.
Summary: Pool our resources, Rose said. If he’d known what she meant, would he still have said yes?




Pool our resources, Rose said. If he’d known what she meant, would he still have said yes?

It’s not like he didn’t know, or half-know. Trying to pull the wool over his eyes with her talk of how much they had in common, when that didn’t amount to much more than being strangers in the same town. But she was – is – a force of nature, and he always was weak for a woman like that.

There is – was – something irresistible about it, having the full force of that personality trained on you. Made him breathless, thinking about how it would be to have that energy and fire burning bright for him.

It never was for him, though, was it? He’d found that out soon enough, but by then he was in too deep. Back to being an agent again, with the worry and the ulcers and paying his lousy acts commission out of his own pocket. Rose didn’t care for anything but her kids; for June, rather, and what she dreamed June could be.

Took him until June left to see that it wasn’t about her either. He’d thought that would be the end of it, when she and Tulsa and the boys deserted them. Thought he’d finally stop traveling, that they’d settle down and be a family, him and Rose and Louise. Louise, who’d mistrusted him and pushed him away all those years, convinced he was only in it for what he could get. Till he’d offered her what she really wanted, a home at last. Oh, Mama, say yes!

But Rose didn’t want that. Wouldn’t settle for that, however many times she promised to marry him. He should have walked away right then, after she half-throttled Louise, telling her she’d got to be the star now. The panic in Louise’s eyes as Rose insisted Mama is gonna see to it. He couldn’t leave the kid like that. Couldn’t leave Rose either, not then.

It half killed him when he finally got it together to do what he should have done years ago. Because he’d come to a place where he couldn’t go on any longer, where he had to go and throw up in the alley outside the burlesque show, sick to his stomach at what he’d become, what she’d turned him into. He couldn’t stand by and watch her push Louise onto the stage to take off her clothes for those leering drunks.

So he went back to the candy business, and tried to forget the whole thing. Tried not to remember Rose crying Why does everyone always walk out? Tried not to know what became of Louise. But when someone gets to be that big a star, they burn so bright you can’t blot them out. He’d have to be living under a rock not to have heard of Gypsy Rose Lee.

And here they are, Rose and Louise on a magazine cover, staring at him from a newsstand. Rose wears that mink stole like she owns it, but her knuckles are white where she’s gripping Louise’s shoulder. She always did hang on too tight. He wonders how long it’ll be before Louise leaves her too, or whether she’ll go on trailing her mother behind her like a comet’s tail as she shoots across the sky.