With Or Without You

Roza is difficult. She always has been. She is difficult to teach, difficult to tame, difficult to resist. She is more like a flower than she realises: she can't be forced, but under the right conditions, she blossoms. She holds back. She thinks. She softens, even though her beauty will always be hard-edged, always sword blade sharp.

She blooms.

Lissa, the queen, calls me to her when she's finished greeting Christian. This greeting has gone on for a day and a half, but I don't begrudge them their joy. I understand it. I take a share in it, just as Rose does, happy that they're happy.

"Dimitri," she says warmly, her natural charisma making the austere room feel comfortable. "Please, sit."

I do. I sit in the chair opposite hers, which is no less grand. Vasilisa Dragomir is not a queen to stand on ceremony, which is why she is the right choice. I want to look around for Rose, but I know she isn't here. I don't know why, just that she isn't. It wouldn't even be her welcoming smile, a change in her orientation, her, 'you too, comrade?' It would be her power that told me she was near, the power she has over me, something like a scent and something like a feeling. Rose sometimes seems to give off heat, and I feel the burn before I turn a corner and see her face. My love for her has branded her into me, and neither water nor air nor earth can temper us and make us be cool with each other again.

"I wanted to ask you something."

The queen isn't comfortable with titles, so I bow my head and wait for her question rather than addressing it myself. Anything less than 'Your Majesty' or 'Your Highness' would feel wrong to me, and anything more than 'Lissa' or, at the most, 'Vasilisa' would feel wrong to her.

"Are you going to marry Rose?"

"I…"

She smiles knowingly while I consider just how much of the truth to tell her.

"We've discussed it."

"And she shot you down?"

"She thinks she's too young."

"Now she thinks she's too young?" Her jade green eyes roll towards the ceiling. She's wearing a skirt suit of the same colour, a smart choice, a diplomatic choice. "I never thought I'd see the day when Rose Hathaway wanted to play by the rules."

I raise an eyebrow. "You and I both know it's not the rules she's worried about. It surprises even me how firmly she believes in traditional gender stereotypes, that male dhampirs who aren't guardians affect her even more than females do. She has certain ideas about the word 'wife'." I do too. To me, it means partner – comrade, even. She'd like that. "Perhaps one of those ideas is that if she marries me, I'll lock her in a kitchen and expect her to cook and clean for the rest of her life."

Lissa gives a tiny, delicate snort. "Don't ever let Rose cook you anything. Ever." Almost as quickly as she became amused, she becomes serious again. "But why do you want to marry her?" She leans forward in her chair, genuinely curious. "Forgive me for stating the obvious, but it's not like you two can have children."

"No," I agree. "We can't have children." And I don't even mind. She's enough, my Roza, childlike and innocent and older than her years at the same time. "But I was brought up in a place where marriage is the ultimate expression of your love for someone. It's not a commitment contract, as it seems to be for most Americans. It's throwing down the gauntlet in front of everyone you care about and making promises to each other. I know she'd do anything for me. She has. She knows I'd do anything for her. It's still not the sort of thing that comes up in everyday conversation."

It wouldn't be right to share the things Rose tells me late at night, or very early in the morning. She's sleepy, her glorious hair tangled, and she tell me things that make me want to wind my fingers into that hair and never let go. If I could lock her in a kitchen and keep her safe forever, I would – but I wouldn't love her as much as I do if she didn't have that fire inside her, that awe-inspiring skill, the passion and perseverance. She is the only woman for me because of all that, and she sets me at war with myself trying and failing not to love her any more than I do.

Rose's best friend looks more confident in my powers of persuasion than I am. In fact, she looks close to being complacent. "I hope," she says, and her voice is truly regal, but still amused. "That you're not planning on giving up on your endeavour?"

"Of course not."

"Good." Her smile just keeps getting wider. "Because she will say yes, you know. When you least expect it, when you're ready to drop the topic and never talk about it again, she'll say yes. Then you can make your promises, although I can't see her in a white dress. Sorry."

I smile back. "I can't either."

She doesn't dismiss me as such, but I can sense when she needs to retreat and go back to Christian, my charge who's off the clock for now. I'm never off the clock, and nor is Rose, which is why I'm not shocked to see her standing in the hallway. She's the picture of innocence in her white blouse, the picture of sin if I allow myself to dwell on what's underneath.

"It's rude to eavesdrop," I inform her.

"I wasn't eavesdropping."

She can't look me in the eye, of course.

"You," I tell her sternly. "Should be in bed. Your shift patterns have been all over the place since we came back."

Her dark eyes flash. "And whose fault is that?"

She's incorrigible, bringing up our private life in the heart of Court just because she can now. I don't mind. I rejoice in it. I'll never be as bold as she is, but I do the same sometimes, just to see her hair swing forward and hide her face. It means she's blushing, and Rose barely blushes.

"Go to bed."

"I'm not tired." Her mouth gapes open in an impolite yawn, and she claps a hand over it. "Oops."

"Roza…"

"I can handle myself. I'm an official adult now and everything."

"Yes, you are."

That makes her old enough to marry me, of course.

I don't point this out.

"Will you go to bed if I tell you a story?"

Diverted but a little embarrassed by idea, she laughs. "What? The Good, the Bad and the Strigoi? Dimitri Belikov and the Sundance Kid?"

Her laughter makes the light pour out of her, not absorbing it like the flower I compared her to but exuding it, more like a sun. I would orbit around her every second of the day if I could, if duty and honour and a dozen other things which appear irrelevant at this moment weren't in the way. There's nothing I can do, nothing but kiss her. I become her student when I kiss her, practising moves I've never tried with anyone else, learning to attack but never to defend myself from her.

Rose is compassionate, fierce, sarcastic, reckless, but above all matter-of-fact. Her kiss explains what can't be explained in less than several thousand words – at least, not by me.

"I love you." She leans her forehead against mine. It's a promise, of sorts.

"I love you."

I won't ever give up on her, on the faintest chance that she'll stand up with me someday. Someday, she might make more promises. She might stare me down, offering me even more of herself than I already hold in my heart like the most sacred of relics. I begin to doubt that more is possible, but she always surprises me.

She always has.

Fin.