The woman in the mirror… (WoD)

The door shut behind him with a strange air of finality.

Katharine sighs. She was starting to feel her age, and evening discussions like the one she’d just had didn’t help. Damn, that man was difficult! Whatever happened to him, a tiny spiteful part of her secretly believed he had it coming to him. She fights the urge to throw her coffee cup, sets it down before it takes flight. Random acts of vandalism wouldn’t do any good, she thinks, as she turns away from the sink. All it would get her is a broken mug and a mess to clean up. As if she needed more work.

Rubbing her temples with slim fingers, she walks into the small personal bathroom she’d had attached to her living quarters when she’d built the bunker. She felt no shame over having a private bathroom when so many living down here didn’t; in the calculating depths of her mind she figured she’d sacrificed enough for humanity. A little privacy was her due.

She stares into the mirror, at the reflection of a slimly pretty woman with a long aquiline nose and high cheekbones. She raises a slender eyebrow at herself, noticing the few silver hairs streaking her chestnut hair at the temples and the dark smudges under her eyes. She sighs again, exhaustion overwhelming her. This was all too much, all these secrets, all these worries. Suddenly feeling selfish, she wishes someone else would pick up the burden, take the load from her thin shoulders and let her rest. Damn that man! And damn Jack, and Amelia, Jake and Jason and all the rest of them. Damn them for not letting her go, letting her leave this world to rejoin Vasily and be at peace.

Loneliness washes over her. The bruises on her left arm, left behind by the passage of a multitude of needles, seem much more prominent this evening, the bones of her face and limbs more stark against the paleness of her skin, and the thought of her decline depresses her. It’s your own damn fault, she thinks, gloomily staring into the mirror as if to force the woman looking back to turn away. You did this to yourself. No one forced you to overdose on enough drugs to kill a rhino, no one poured the pills into your hand and made your swallow them, made you drink the fifth of brandy to chase them down. You did this. You.

Tears well up in the blue eyes of her reflection. If she was so bent on damning all of humanity, then she’d better damn herself as well. It was her own lack of foresight and overconfidence that put her in this position, and it would be a cold day in hell before Katharine Zergeyev Romanov, daughter of Nicholas and Anna Zergeyev and widow of Vasiliy Romanov, would lay down and quit in the face of her own failings. She had made mistakes. It was her job to put them right.

She slides one hand down over the ever-so-slight swell of her belly, her hand so pale it near matches the cream silk of her nightgown. There was much she had to do, much she had to remedy. She stands motionless, feeling her breath moving in and out, feeling herself grow light, unfettered, connected to this world only by the spark of life dwelling deep within her, a spark created by the desire to save a lost soul and a moment of thoughtlessness. Connected by hope.

The tears spill over and she falls to her knees on the tiled floor, her face in her hands.