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Her mother and Ben’s mum, Dahlia, tell her that she looks gorgeous.
She feels like a caricature of herself.
“Having fun?” Andreas asks her, and she turns to look at him. Her best friend is still wearing his suit jacket, dark green like Ben’s, and he looks as tired as she feels. He’s still nursing the broken rib from two weeks ago and when he walks closer, she can see how he tries to not shift his right side as much.
- rose and andreas thru the years, at a wedding, a funeral and a first date.
Just murder me now and save yourself the trouble. 😂
3. a kiss goodbye - [ also on AO3 ]
Their marriage begins with a kiss.
It’s a formality, maybe; it’s far from the first kiss they’ve shared, but there’s an underlayer of solemnity to doing so in front of friends and family and stepping briefly away from the war they’ve both become hopelessly embroiled in to acknowledge this step. The sobriety doesn’t last long — couldn’t, in the face of Andreas’ raucous catcall — but before Ben can pull back to protest Rose has lifted one hand to flip the specialist off even as the other fists in Ben’s tie to pull him closer, and the assembled crowd quickly dissolves into laughter. This, thinks Rose Wheeler — Rose Harvey, now — isn’t at all a bad way to start the next phase of her life.
There’s no time for making a proper start on things, no honeymoon or even visits to either of their family homes. They celebrate late into the night in the company of those who’ve been able to come to Alfea for the wedding, but even with life marching on the war does too, and in the morning reality intrudes once again. Rings and kisses exchanged may have sealed their vows, but none of those prevent him from being called back to the general’s side, leaving her to a greenhouse filled with medicinal orders to fill. She battles the endless stream of injuries, front-line and civilian alike, and tries not to think too hard of what her husband and their friends are facing out there, or of the all-too-real possibility that one of them may one day be carried through her infirmary door.
When he does return, however, it’s on his own two feet, exhausted but physically unharmed. The kiss he gives her is distracted, as though his body may be here but his mind is still in the field, and she cannot entirely blame him — not when she has her own concerns, her own distractions to attend to. Supplies are running low and she needs to get back to the greenhouse and the plants due to be forced into bloom for the next round of replenishments, just as strained as she feels these days. It is only the space of a moment before he is gone again, it seems, and though they spend the nights together, she can hardly remember them. Perhaps, she thinks, they had been hasty, but surely after nearly ten years together she knows him well enough to be sure of her choice.
I’m pregnant, she writes him when her periods do not come for several months. Once could be stress, hardly surprising with the state of everything, but a second time is unlikely when she’s always been regular as clockwork, and a third is long enough for her to confirm it. He does not reply, but letters get lost all the time in the chaos beyond Alfea’s barrier, and it does not surprise her when her announcement is met with silence. She is eight months along, short-tempered and increasingly ungainly, by the time he comes home again. “Rotating out,” he says tersely when she asks, his own irritation plain, though he apologises once he has slept and showered and eaten, kisses her hands and her stomach and murmurs softly remorseful words. He had always wanted children, when they’d discussed it before; the timing may be far from ideal, but they aren’t getting any younger, and with everything ahead …
“If you get yourself killed out there, I’ll murder you,” she tells him as he prepares to leave once his reprieve is over. Sam is swaddled against her chest, a tiny bundle; Ben laughs, kisses his downy head, drops another on her brow before he lets her pull him in for a more solid one. “That goes for both of you,” she adds over his shoulder to Andreas, who just grins and blows her a kiss of his own. For a moment she can believe the levity is real but then they go, leaving her to sleepless nights and increasing strain, and she once again feels as if the world is drawing tight about her.
(He returns again, ten months after Sam is born, but this time the tension does not ease. There is a desperation to the press of her mouth against his in the dark, trying to find something of who they had been. Afterwards she lies there sleepless, wondering if she’d found it or if that, too, has been lost on the battlefield.)
When he walks through Alfea’s gates at the end of the war, it should have been a triumph, or at least a relief. He is home, after all, and that should be that. But their cottage feels too small, crowded with everything he will not speak of and all she bites back, and she is tired — tired beyond reason, beyond what her pregnancy justifies, even this close to term and with a child not yet two still demanding so much of her attention. He is not the boy she had met across the greenhouse benches, not the man who’d awkwardly courted her with flowers carefully chosen for meanings and plant he knew she’d appreciate; the tenderness is perfunctory, nearly an afterthought, and though she does not think he means it she is not sure what he means. She is not sure she knows him at all anymore.
When he holds Terra for the first time, smiling down at her with eyes gone soft, she thinks: maybe I do, even after everything that’s happened. He kisses her gently as he hands their daughter back to her, and she finds herself hoping that what they once had is not lost.
But nothing is the same. Everything has felt off balance since he returned: Andreas’ absence is a void she cannot ignore, Farah and Saul changed even more than Ben by whatever had happened out there, and the secrets that stretch between them form a veil she cannot pierce. She watches, trying to puzzle out all that goes unspoken, but in the end it is to no avail. She is drowning in his silences and, whether it is a matter of will not or cannot, all that matters is that he does not speak.
(She tries. Their children are too young, and so she tries and he tries, but it is not enough.)
She kisses him for the last time with her bags packed, car keys a leaden weight in her pocket that is still less than the heaviness in her heart. Neither of them can live like this — and she knows that she is the one who no longer fits here. He will not admit it, but he knows it too.
“I still —”
She sets her fingers against his mouth to silence him, and then her mouth, an even more fleeting touch, before she turns away. He does not stop her and she does not look back. Not until Alfea is little more than a pinprick in her rearview mirror does she put her fingers to her own mouth to press back a sob with the last of his touch.
He had tasted like the death of dreams, the end of an era. (He had tasted like goodbye.)
Heir to the Ice Flame
Rose HarveyThe Book Reality Experience (2023)ISBN: 978-1923020276Reviewed by Michaela Gordoni for Reader Views (12/2023)
In the enchanting world of “Heir to the Ice Flame” by Rose Harvey, a disguised princess has been on the run since the tender age of seven years old. Constantly in fear for her life and being hunted by her parents’ killer, Princess Nina goes by the…
in which before sam and terra, there was another baby. one that only rose and andreas knew about. a baby that rose never spoke about, not even to her own ex husband. but when a letter and a copy of a long forgotten birth certificate arrives at her house, rose finds herself contacting her old best friend as he is the only person other than her who knows the truth - and the only person she trusts.
AU where Rose Harvey is both alive and well and still with Ben post-Aster Dell 😌
But is it really an AU? Is it really? I guess we'll never know. Thanks, showrunners. 😒
1. She knows there are things he saw during his time in Rosalind’s battalion that she won’t ever be able to understand, because she's been a soldier but the battalion was a different thing entirely. They'd always talked in the past, though, sharing as much as they could; that promise had been in their wedding vows, codifying something she'd always thought they were in perfect accord on ... but the man who comes back from the war is not the man who swore to always open his heart to her. (She is not sure if the woman he finds waiting is the same, either, though she does not examine that thought too closely.)
2. They had talked about having children when the war was over. Her pregnancy in its final years is unplanned, the failure you never think will happen to you of all people, and she thinks long and hard before deciding to keep it. The why is more complicated, a thing she isn't entirely sure she understands sometimes, but once she decides that is that, and she does not know if he is relieved or resentful when she leaves the front lines.
3. She has made herself a home and a life by the time he comes back, battered and bruised but with the truest wounds inside. There is space for herself and the son who clings to her leg and looks at him with uncomprehending eyes and the infant who does not know hands that had once been warm and steady and always so ready to reach. He tries to fit into it, and she tries to make space for him too, and for a few years it very nearly works. But their home is full of ghosts and secrets and unspoken wounds, hers as well as the multitudes that have followed him back, and by the end their fracturing feels all but inevitable.
4. “I’m your wife!” she all but screams at him, when he says that he can’t explain things to her for what feels like the hundredth, thousandth, millionth time. It would be easier, she thinks, if he were to explode in response and they could give vent to all that remains unspoken, but he only looks at her like some sad kicked animal and that just makes her more irritated in turn. How dare he, when she keeps reaching and reaching and he only withdraws into his secrets and into himself? She knows he is hurt, but what is she to do about it when he won’t let her in? (What is she to do when she has her own wounds and pain and scars and it feels like he doesn’t even see them? What is she to do when she shares a house and a family and a life with a stranger?)
5. “I still love the man I married,” is what she tells him when he finds her packing a bag, “but that's not the person I see in front of me — and I have to take care of myself, Ben. No one else here will do it.”
(He has Farah and Saul, both as changed as he is, bound together in their shared secrets. She has no one within Alfea’s borders and she needs someone to turn to, someone who can help her find her footing again. She can’t wait any longer.)
“I love you,” he says, like it can solve things, but she can see that he believes it as little as she does right now, no matter what they both might want.
(She doesn't tell him that there are days when she looks in the mirror and doesn't recognise herself either. She may not have seen the same parts of the war that he did, but it left her no less changed.)
6. Distance helps. She has to be Rose before she can be anything else — before she can support anyone else — and without having to worry about what she is for others, she can for once focus on herself first of all. She hopes he can learn the same lesson, though she is doubtful when he remains trapped by a past he cannot seem to let go of. But, however much they both do or do not change, the space makes things easier for her, and for now, it’s what she needs.
7. There was a time when he had meant home to her, and she had been the same to him. She hopes, despite all that has happened, that some day she will be able to find her way back home again, whatever that ends up meaning.
I'm very attached to this character that absolutely doesn't exist.
As far as canon goes, the only alternative that makes sense to me is Rose being alive and divorced from Ben, thus she stays in Alfea when Ben leaves in s2 and that explains him not taking Terra with him.
Now in fandom. Oh the amount of headcanons I have with her, I will romanticize the shit out of this woman in the walls.
