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Cross's room in the guards dormitory is mostly bare. He has a bed and a nightstand, with the bed on the south wall beneath the window, and the nightstand next to the head of the bed on the west wall. There's a dresser with a small mirror and some drawers on the east wall. The door is on the north wall, across from the window.
It's more than he expected to be provided, frankly, especially considering the culture he had left. While he'd had rooms at home, they were rather utilitarian, as Nix's culture encouraged. He had a bedroom, with, of course, a bed, and a small dresser, and a sitting room with a couch and a small desk in the corner.
His room in Arbre is perhaps the size that his bedroom was at home, and somehow it contains much more, and feels bigger. Maybe that's why it already feels more like home, even barring the fact that people seem to actually like him here.
In a month, however, he's hardly accumulated anything to fill the space. He has clothing, obviously, and his boots, but the drawer in his nightstand is empty. His dresser is only half full with his clothing, and there's nothing on the surface of it except for the mirror and either his sleeping clothes or his clothing for the next day, depending on what time it is.
But it's been a month since he left Nix and arrived in Arbre, so Cross feels like he can finally start unpacking the very few sentimental items he has. Most of them are from his mother, or from the small memorial he had set up for her in his rooms at home.
Monsters aren't generally religious, and most kingdoms have no form of organized religion, aside from general beliefs in the Angel and Fate and the stars. There are some small areas where the human inhabitants have formed small, organized sects, but even the human-ruled kingdoms don't force that on everyone.
(He thinks he remembers of hearing one that tried, in the north, but its people had promptly overthrown their ruler, and the land had been absorbed in Osphron.)
Cross isn't exactly spiritual, and he hasn't believed in the Angel since he was young. But sometimes he thinks the stars listen, maybe.
The memorial he'd had was hardly enough to be called spiritual anyway, but his father had described it disparagingly as such on one of the very few occasions that he had visited Cross's rooms. It was just a small portrait, and a candle. Apparently, that was religious enough for his father to criticize it.
Nonetheless, Cross had brought it with him, deconstructed, when he'd left Arbre. He pulls it from his inventory now, in pieces. The portrait, the candle, some bits and bobs.
When Cross's mother died, they had hung a large portrait of her in one of the banquet halls, and Cross and Papyrus had each received a small copy of the portrait to keep. Cross's is framed with wood, worn a bit on the edges of the frame, but he takes care to make sure the portrait itself stays in good shape.
His mother was a skeleton, like his father, but she had come from the Sands. She was the sister of a prominent nobleman, and had been sent to Nix to marry his father. She was tall, with white eyelights like Cross had had before his right eye had gone red, and she wore scarfs and kerchiefs on her skull most days.
("Ah, I'm not made for these cold days, my dear," he thinks he can remember her saying more than once, looking at the snow from the safety of her lap in their rooms.)
Like his father, she was tall and lithe, so it was a wonder where Cross had gotten his stouter stature from. He thinks he remembers his mother saying that he looked just like her brothers. He could remember feeling tall in her arms, surrounded by the scent of her perfume like a barrier.
Toriel had once told him that it wasn't uncommon to see him with smudges on his skull, from where his mother's kohl had transferred when she nuzzled him. His mentor hadn't known his mother well, but Cross guarded every tidbit that she knew jealously, because his father never talked about her.
(Not that he really talked to Cross very much anyway, but he knows that Gaster never spoke to Papyrus about her either.)
Cross sets her portrait on the dresser very carefully. It's a nice portrait, all things considered. She's smiling, dressed in white shawl over a long-sleeved dress in nearly the same shade of pale lavender as was used on Nix's flag. Her skull was wrapped in a black kerchief with the tails hanging behind her.
"Hi, mom," Cross says quietly, sitting back on the edge of the bed. It's close enough to the dresser that it's almost like sitting at a desk. He doesn't say anything else — he's not crazy enough to be holding full conversations with someone who died over twenty years before, but…
Well, he misses her.
Toriel said that his mother had loved him more than anything, and she had guessed that his mother would have hated how he was treated after his eyes changed. It was one of the first things she had told Cross when they met, and Cross held onto that fragment of his mother like a lifeline.
Sometimes, he still wonders if she would have agreed with his father, but he thinks Toriel was probably right. His mother came from the Sands, where Gracelings were a blessing and beauty was prized. It was said by some that Gracelings were the most beautiful of all, and their eyes had been the inspiration for the stained glass that the Sands was well-known for producing and exporting.
It's comforting to think that his mother probably would have thought that his eyes were beautiful instead of cursed, comparable to sunsets instead of blood.
He sighs as he places a candle in front of the portrait, half melted already. The sound of the match being struck is loud in the silence of his room, but it's short lived as the wick takes the flame eagerly.
With that, the memorial he'd had at home is remade. He has other things from her — notably the dagger he keeps in his boot or on his belt — but he'd never wanted to leave them in the open, fearful that his father would take them. He's still unsure if that was a rational fear or not.
Still, now that he's living elsewhere…
Hesitantly, Cross opens his inventory, and takes out one of the more delicate things his mother left him. It's a vase, handmade in the glassworking furnaces of the Sands. It's transparent glass, except for a pattern of pale blue flowers.
("My brother gave this to me as a wedding gift," he remembers her saying as he filled the vase with wildflowers he'd pulled from just outside the courtyard. His hands had been covered in dirt, and many of the flowers had roots attached, but his mother had smiled at him all the same. "He told me he picked forget-me-nots for its prevalence north of the sea I would be crossing, and because its color reminded him of my soul.")
("Forget-me-not is one of the flowers considered to be Nix's flower," Toriel had told him once during his lessons. "They symbolize devotion, remembrance, and true love. It's mainly the devotion aspect that concerns Nix, as it's often used as a military emblem to say that our troops are devoted to the protection of our kingdom.")
Cross places the vase next to the portrait carefully. The flame on the candle flickers a bit as he moves past it, but holds steady. Idly, he thinks that he'll have to find a general store on his next day off, to get a new votive before the old one burns out completely.
And maybe he'll see if he can find a florist, too, and buy some forget-me-nots for his mother's vase.