perfect enemy
Apr. 6th, 2015 01:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
clairelutraPreface
perfect enemy
In your darker moments, you find it amusing that everyone is so afraid of you turning Strigoi while Rose Hathaway walks the halls of St. Vladimir.
It makes sense, though. After all, they've never seen Strigoi.
You have.
And you know that you will never, ever turn.
You saw how the eyes of your parents had changed after they turned. It wasn't the red rings. It was the emptiness, the chill, the almost lackadaisical indifference as they spoke of killing your aunt. It was their smiles for you, calculating and cold and empty empty e m p t y.
You saw how they moved, too, how they gestured and how they spoke. How unearthly grace had corrupted them, how bloodlust and nonchalance and had come together to create something so utterly, completely, unnaturally wrong.
(They cared about you, even after they turned. They had loved you so much in life that they had little desire to kill you in undeath. You aren't sure if you're grateful for this or not. Perhaps it would have been easier to lose them if there had never been anything to lose.)
(Little desire, though, not none. They would have harmed you, maybe even killed you, had you moved out of line, or annoyed them, or had simply become too much work for them to bother with. You know that. You could see it.)
You care too much. More than that, you care far to much for the simple feeling of caring to ever even consider it.
But Rose?
As far as you can tell, Rose doesn't care about anyone.
Not about the novices who chase her heels like puppies, not the authority figures who try so hard to help her understand she's throwing her future away, not the boys she fools around with, not the girls who sigh after her figure and her grace, not her grades, not her future, not her health, not even her beautiful, brainless best friend who floats along in her wake like a good-natured dandelion puff.
You aren't even sure she cares about herself.
You know why people like her. She's funny, clever, beautiful, but none of those traits automatically preclude goodness, and it scares you.
You remember once, at the end of some shared class, she was sprawled over a desk in the middle of the room, at the epicenter of an adoring crowd, laughing loud and free. She'd made a remark, something you can't remember now, but at the time had made you laugh aloud.
She'd heard you, turned and grinned at you, a grin that made you think fire-wildcats-uncut-diamonds, sharp and bright and hot and untamed and uncaring.
The boy whom the joke had been made at the expense of looked crushed, for those few seconds. He'd meant whatever he'd said to her, and the sentiment had been thoughtlessly used for a quip, and she. didn't. care.
You'd turned away from the tableau she made by simply existing, chilled to the bone.
She's got status and rep and all the skills to back it up; she's good with people, like you never will be; she's the rebel, the queen bee, the prodigal child, all in one. She laughs and she jokes and she parties, and she walks the road of broken hearts like she was born to it.
All inhuman grace, lust for life, without a care in the world.
(And it wasn't nearly as romantic as the poets painted it.)
And then she steals the Last Dragomir away, shocking not only their school, but the whole Moroi world.
You can't find it in yourself to be surprised.
You'd always known Rose Hathaway was trouble.
