Rose sits on the window-seat in the corner of her room, her knitting in her lap and Mutini sprawled over her outstretched legs.  The emerald green bolero jacket she’d been working on was almost finished save for one sleeve, and she holds it up before her critically, wondering if it might look better with some buttons.  Sighing, she sets it aside and reaches down beside her for the martini glass, having placed it on the floor to keep Mutini from upsetting it.  She takes a sip before swirling the liquid in the glass rather compulsively, watching the way her room was distorted in the liquid inside.  She’d certainly come a long way from the disgust she’d experienced upon first sampling one of her mother’s drinks, she thinks as she cradles the drink in her lap and glances out the window.  The setting sun had colored the sky a hot and bloody red, and as the light beams in through the window beside her, her pale skin acts as a blank canvas upon which the colors of the heavens could be displayed.  Her hair and body shine with the vibrant colors of the sunset, and even the highlights of Mutini’s fur ripple with crimson as he inhales.  Pausing for only a moment to admire the way his whiskers twitched in the dusty sunbeam, she takes another sip of her martini and leans back against the wall.

To say that she and her mother hadn’t gotten along would have been doing their complicated relationship a disservice.  They’d certainly kept up the appearance of getting along fabulously.  She remembered the trips to the city in her youth, in which her mother would lead her by the hand as she ran her errands, dutifully buying her a new violin or a lovely Easter dress in this season’s color at the last stop.  Her mother’s extravagant spending was not limited to birthdays and Christmases -- every time they rode the train back toward their upstate mansion, Rose would undoubtedly have something new and expensive in her hands.  It would be too easy to assume that her mother was attentive to her, but in the wrong ways.  No, she saw that every need of Rose’s was met, hiring tutors and facilitating her growing interests in both the occult and psychology with countless books and programs.

Rose used to think that if perhaps her mother had a man to dote on, she wouldn’t have to put up with her misdirected and (she was sure) feigned affection quite so much.  She’d never had a father, but she supposed she wouldn’t mind if her mother were to marry someone.  That was not to say that her mother was completely solitary -- she’d had her share of boyfriends over the years, and had even brought several of the more unfortunate ones home to be subjected to Rose’s acerbic evaluations.  She’d successfully terrified each of them in turn with her incisive appraisals of their mental health and financial stability, her wide violet eyes narrowed into a perfect sardonic sneer.  This had amused her mother to no end; as one of her potential suitors had fled to his car after truncating their date prematurely, she and Rose had gathered at the window and laughed.

But the times that they’d been able to find common ground had been few and far between.  Most often, she and Rose were engaged in a subtle war of attrition, each trying to outdo the other in making their lives as cloyingly idyllic as possible.  Rose would dress in whatever gown her mother had just bought her and fetch her drinks, prompting her mother to click her tongue at how the dress was already too short for her growing body and summon whatever famous designer had made it to take the hem out, which would in turn induce Rose to penning a short sonata dedicated to the virtues of filial piety.  As their gestures became increasingly dramatic, Rose would resort to hunger strikes or suicide threats if she perceived any sign that her mother was less than ecstatic about her latest deeds.  But her mother would always know better than to take her seriously, and would merely hire some distinguished gourmet to tempt her out of her self-imposed fast.

Rose sighs and shifts slightly.  Her legs were falling asleep thanks to the somewhat heavy cat cutting off her circulation, and she scoops him off of her thighs to set him on the floor before rising to fix herself another drink.

She barely remembered the day she’d seen her mother’s body in her crystal ball back in SBurb.  One moment, she’d been chatting with Jade, and the next, her life had been irrevocably altered.  Surely her mother, with all her biting wittiness and casual grace had been too grand a person to simply allow herself to be killed.  She was a heroine of a different era, one that Rose had never bothered to ask about, and when she’d finally caught sight of her tall, slender body dappled with her own blood, it had disgusted her to think that someone with such dynamism could simply /die/.

And yet, she had been side-by-side with John’s father.  Rose hadn’t made the connection back then, but in ruminating about it over the years, it had occurred to her that perhaps her mother might have at least died happy, near someone she might have loved.  She’d often wondered what her mother might have said about her relationship with John, and what sort of feminine wisdom she might have been able to impart.  Perhaps if her mother had been present, she might never have taken up drinking after the game, and she and John might not have broken up in the first place.  Or perhaps, had their parents really gotten together, they would have been too uncomfortable to further their relationship, and she might be with Kanaya by now.  Of course, it was useless to waste one’s time with hypotheticals.  Perhaps Dave might be able to offer some insight into split timelines in which their parents were still alive, but beyond that Rose couldn’t bring herself to consider it for too long.

She makes her way back to the window seat.  Mutini had climbed back onto its surface to effectively steal her spot, but she doesn’t bother to move him.  Instead, she remains standing, looking out the window.  The sunset had faded, allowing millions of tiny stars to make themselves visible as bright pinpricks in the fabric of the darkening sky.  This was their world now, she reminds herself.  Her mother was dead, and so was John’s father, but as cliche as it was, they had each other.  And frankly, that was more than enough for her, she thinks as she places one hand on her waist, her hips cocking slightly, and the martini held delicately in the other, slipping into a stance that was far too poised to be entirely unpracticed.