Whingy Rosie tat

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

So.

This is Rosie.

She’s less bright than she used to be, less bright when she’s alone. The copper and bronze in her hair is dull, and her eyes are the green of old bottles, and dirty tides. She’s thin and sad, and when she stares in the mirror, a thousand imperfections leap out.

She doesn’t know how to be beautiful anymore.

This is Rosie.

She’s not been sleeping of late, and when she does, it’s unsettled and torn apart by nightmares. Sometimes she sees men drowning, over and over again, their faces white as ghosts. On the good nights she is drowning with them.

This is Rosie.

She looks at the letters, at the messages, at the e mails. Her last gifts from Carin and Sam taken away, and how can anyone tell her that it is wrong to say that some deserve death? How is it possible to ask her to forgive Drago, for the tribes broken bodies and the thousand heartbreaks he’s planned, to not judge Ella-Ra, and then tell her that she needs to smile over the ashes of her old life?

And maybe Carin and Sam did deserve their deaths, did deserve the slow burn of the things that they loved, for promises made out of love and a desire to protect. Maybe she deserves the same.

But why is it wrong to then believe in justice and vengeance?

She’ll ask Cormac if he can look after Zeph some of the time. She can’t afford dog food anymore.

This is Rosie.

She found a tune that made her smile last night, that told her where the truth lies. She sharpens a sword and thinks about cutting, like the samurai did of old, and then she smiles because that’s the dream that no one has told her she isn’t allowed yet. Life is for others and the promises they made when they pulled her from the Hedge are lies.

She wishes she’d never spent enough time in Spring to believe in desire.

This is Rosie

She has to swear another Oath, death sanctioned this time. And that is fair enough, although she’d still swear that same Oath for Malachi and just die if she had to. But she hopes it will never come up again.

And, much to her surprise, she realizes that this still is a flicker of hope. Maybe this part is now done.

This is Rosie

She is still able to rub the oils into her dragon’s prickly green hide and she doesn’t care if it makes her hands bleed. She is still able to romp on the floor with the soft eyed golden dog that an old friend gave her, and he is cheerfully uncomprehending as to what the problem is. He and Rosie will still get to go back to the place where there were rabbits, and an older and more dignified dog for Zeph to run with.

She will smell the air coming clean on the sea, and not clogged up with petrol and smoke and that will make her a little cleaner. She will get to sit on the sideboard in Cormac’s kitchen and she knows that he is real and has protected her in a way that she did not think she deserved anymore, and for him she needs to stay alive and be whatever he wants her to be.

And there’s another faint flicker of hope.

This is Rosie.

She doesn’t wear bright colours at the moment. She dresses in dull green and khaki and her hair is plaited, plain and practical down her back. She doesn’t want to smile, because that would just encourage herself to think of herself as a person.

She isn’t a person. Not right now. To be a person was where she went wrong. To be a person is to be selfish, chaotic, filled with idiocy and nonsense.

She misses being a person on some days. She misses the kind of glorious certainties, the dreams, the desires, the sensations. Then she rubs ice into her skin and freezes it all away. She can’t be a person today.

This is Rosie.

Is she who she was?

She doesn’t know anymore. She isn’t the girl that Carin found in the Hedge. How can she be? She has seen too much.

She thinks that maybe the girl that Jack took to the Gilded Aspirants, and that Worthy and Dominic went questing with is hidden somewhere, locked away inside.

She isn’t bright and she isn’t perfect, but she thinks she is alive.

She doesn’t yet know if that is a blessing or a curse.

Then she remembers that Phoenix is alive, when she thought he was lost. She remembers the Lady’s perfect Mirror’d Knights now walk through streets, the gleam of steel and chivalry only bright in their eyes. She remembers that Rose is happy, and Aidan is solid and stalwart. She remembers that Moorcroft and Jack can talk to each other now, in quick patter and Worthy is coming to visit soon.

She remembers that she has been kissed, by a girl with red ribbons in her hair and a smile as sharp as mirror-glass.

And then she knows that she is truly still alive.

This is Rosie, and this is not Rosie, all at the same time. She can’t be Rosie. Not right now. She is a thing, an object, a doll dressed up and set on the stage in front of the Stalwart Guard.

She is not Rosie. She looks a little like Rosie, but the things that made up Rosie, which are want, and hope, and hunger and shine, have all been put away in a little box, somewhere inside.

They are there with the kisses, tied up with a ribbon.

She can open them at Christmas. Well, maybe not. If the war is over by November, and she is let free then she can open the box. If not, it will be another year, but that’s OK. Sometimes these things take a long time. One day, she’ll be free, and she’ll be able to be Rosie again.

And when she looks in the mirror, there is a very brief moment where her eyes are the green of a fisherman’s float, when it catches the sun, and she wonders if it is possible that she can be beautiful again.

Comments

[meltedcandle.livejournal.com]

No, it's not. :D