ANTONY: What bad habits do you need to break?
“Does having a heart count as a bad habit? It seems like it does in Verona and lately it’s been giving me more trouble than it’s worth,” she laughs, hollow and cold with an exasperation that had yet to leave her since the tragedy of the Palio, since the ruined opulence of the Masquerade, since the realization that this was the reality she had been part of for far longer than she had let herself be aware of. Harshly shaking herself awake, bursting the bubble of her life with her own hand had left her with a cynical streak that constantly waged war with her natural predisposition to look for the silver lining. “I would say giving people the benefit of the doubt could be a bad habit. I’m not sure that it’s really the way to go anymore; people make you promises, they show you one face when they’re really preparing to stab you in the back... it’s getting tiresome. Oh, and I suppose I really ought to stop being so mean to Vivianne, but...”
ORSINO: If you could have any material thing in the world, what would it be?
“I’m inclined to say dresses. I know I have far too many in my life already, but it’s my firm belief that a girl can really not have too many dresses.” She smiles sweetly, desiring to be honest but not quite ready to give up a part of her just yet, choosing instead to give a shallow answer to a question that was much too impossible. Most all the Capulets were aware of her affinity for art, the regularity of her visits to the museum made sure of that, but the history, the depths of it, and her own dabbling in the activity was all her own. Speaking of it could only really open her to more criticism at this point, she thinks, and it was a refuge to come home to, more than anything. A hopeless promise of an alternative life, the road not taken, to be part of a world that didn’t have mobs and members constantly at each other’s throats. “Or maybe I’ll ask to have contracts with all the businesses in the world... or is that too cliche?”
ROSALINE: Which people from your past haunt you?
“Mammina.” she whispers it instinctively like a night time prayer, one that had been recited with all the pleas of the world weighing upon it, willing some sort of response that she knew would never really come. The pet name itself is a reminder of how stuck in the past the woman had become, but a stout heart and even more steadfast love for her mother had made her grow stubborn with age, adamant to keep calling her as a child would even now, even at old age, even at her death bed. It was one thing to finally be called to be part of her father’s world, but how much of it can she stand without letting go her old one, the one where her mother had nurtured her to be loving and soft, trusting and kind, the complete opposite of what she needed to be to grow into a crown that was rightfully hers by birth and by name? With each passing year, Juliana fears the flickering of her memory to the point of nonexistence, making her visits to the grave even more frequent as if to will her face, her figure, her disposition to showcase itself once more from beneath the cold hard ground that was now her home. She would cry for all that she had seen that the other had not, ask for advice that she knew the other would have given had she been there to offer it freely and unbounded, reach for forgiveness for every turn and every moment that she had acted as the daughter that she hadn’t been raised to be.
“Maybe it’s better she never got to see me like this,” she concedes. “Either of them.” The little sister that had been buried in forgetfulness but oh, not to her, never to her. As much as she wants to believe that her father still thought of the other, how could she keep fooling herself when he’d been dismissive of the one still in the land of the living? The two of them hadn’t talked about her then and they sure as hell never would now, not when such a show of affection would be chalked up as an offense against her. Sometimes she thinks that her fondness for those in their ranks younger than her - Maeve, Bunny, Catherine - had been borne out of that loss and the compensation, the craving to establish a relationship that paralleled it... but then that would be a disparagement of the importance such friendships have come to be in her life. “I wouldn’t want her to have to be torn like I am right now. Would I have loved to have a little sister? Sure, I still imagine it sometimes, what I would have called her, how I’ll do her hair and teach her how to do her own, her make up, how I’ll-...” her voice cracks, her eyes sting, but she swallows it down like she has swallowed down all the pain that had come from the loss of two important people in her life at once. “It’s better this way. They’re free.”
