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When Briar Rose wakes up for the 285 time in her existence, it is raining outside.
She always wakes up so quickly, snaps into awareness like if she doesn’t do it right now, she might never get the chance (she hates sleeping. She hates everything that makes her feel afraid). She wakes up ready to fight, to run, to fly – to live, in any way possible.
But Cinders’ arms are warm around her, and so Rose doesn’t move. She stares up at the ceiling of their sleeping quarters, nearly invisible in the dark, and listens to the sound of the rain.
She had missed the rain.
Can you miss a thing you’ve never known? With eyes that had never seen it, skin that had never felt it, ears that are now hearing it for the first time? But Rose had known that rain, and she has missed it.
Rose misses so much.
They told her she is not Rose, but what is a person but a set of memories, a still unfinished story tied in bones and blood? Briar Rose remembers the falling rain on Zantine, remembers running hand in hand with her sister as the sky cried above them, remembers the water pouring over a raging battlefield as if it could wash away the blood. Remembers the smell of it, the feeling of it in her hair and on her clothes –
Rose knows who she is.
She turns over in the bed, restless. She feels the urge to get up, to shake off the last vestiges of sleep so they do not drag her back down, into the unescapable –
But Cinders hates waking up alone. Rose will not make her.
Her hair tickles her back as she moves, and the feeling is strange. It is one of the few things that remind her that this body is not quite her own – she had always kept it short (the other is the scars. A map of the battles she has fought, ever present, suddenly gone. It makes her uncomfortable). She could cut it, but… this feels right. She is Rose, and still she is different.
Rose the soldier kept her hair cropped short. Rose the fugitive lets it fall down her back unbound, a waterfall of blood. Cinders runs her fingers through it when she kisses her, plays with it when they sit together through long, empty hours in their tiny ship. She had offered to braid it, once, and Rose agreed, and it was wonderful until the moment she looked up at the mirror and saw Snow looking back.
Rose doesn't think about Snow. She doesn’t, because every time she does she wants to kill someone, and there is no one left to kill.
She wills away the memory of that broken body and tries to think something else, something productive. She brings up in her mind the list of things that ship needed, making sure they have not forgotten anything. They must leave this morning – they have been here for too long. In the 278 days since she and Cinders stole this ship, they did not stay anywhere for more than week. Rose wonders if they ever will – if they’ll ever dare.
It has been easy, disappearing into the wide space – easier the Rose would have ever expected. The broken empire is full of refugees – sometimes it feels like the entire galaxy is one great orphan, left nameless and lost in the wake of the war.
There are people trying to make order out there, Rose knows (she doesn’t know who. Cinders keeps track, but Rose run away from the capital’s politics forty years ago and will never look back). There are people spilling blood out there – maybe there always will be (and maybe Rose will be one of them again someday – she knows what she is good for. But never for a king or a lord or a crown – never again).
There are people out there doing a great many things, in this broken, lawless galaxy, and they might be interested in someone like Cinders, in someone like Rose. But fading away is easy. Most people, seeing a well-armed once-noble and a woman who is not a Rose Red, look away. Nobody cares for the trouble.
And so they wander from world to world, and though they are wary, they are not running. They are just… living.
It is odd. In all her memories, in this body and in another, Rose has always lived for something, worked for it tirelessly, some goal greater that her. She does not know how to live for herself.
She is learning, though. She thinks she might be quite good at it, someday.
*
When Cinders wakes up, Rose is there.
It never stops being a wonder. Cinders had known rose for less than a year. She had searched for her for three decades. She had grown so used to loving a ghost, sometimes she almost wondered if there had ever been a living, breathing woman at all.
Cinders has never woken up with her love in her arms, not once. A hundred, a thousand nights, she had woken up with rose's name on her lips, a desperate plea with no answer.
Cinders knows how to miss, how to long. Sometimes she wonders if she still knows how to love.
And then Rose turns around to look at her and smiles, just a little, and she know they’ll be okay.
“Good morning.” She says warmly. “Sleep well?”
Cinders did. She doesn’t always – there are nights when she wakes up breathless and terrified, reaching for a woman she does not believe she will find (there was one night she was gone – woken up early and left the bed – and Cinders had known in her heart that she will never see her again, that she had never been there at all, and almost broke right then. Rose had always stayed after that time). Her sleep is full of the sights of that throne room – the piled bodies. The three pigs. That glass coffin. The shriveled, laughing king. And always, always Rose, falling with a bullet in her back. Laying lifeless on the floor, in that cursed, beautiful dress. but those nightmares come less and less, as the months pass, as the distance between them and Zantine grows, for every planet they visit hand in hand.
There are two glass rings left in a dark hall deep beneath the ground in New Constantinople, and Cinders will never marry her love under this sky or any other. But she will wake up with Rose in her arms every day until she dies, and that is enough.
That is everything.
They get up slowly. They have to leave today, but they can afford to take their time. Cinders is not as young as she used to be, and she lingers in bed, takes her time getting ready for the day. Rose, with her restless nature and habit of a soldier, is organized in two minutes and moves to the kitchen to start making breakfast. As they eat, they discuss where they will go next. The galaxy is wide and endless, and full of things they haven’t seen. They bought new supplies yesterday, and the food is fresh and warm.
The rain stops about an hour after they get up. In the cockpit Cinders hums to herself as she sets course for somewhere else, a new verse for an old song. Briar Rose sings along.