Mirror, Mirror

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> Mirror Mirror Chapter Thirty Four
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> Disclaimers Apply
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> A/N Goddess Foxfeather, Queen of Mad Plotbunnies, BUSIEST WOMAN ALIVE ™, Prophetic Muse, Hamster Witch and Uberbeta… I think I’m overdoing it on the writing, lol. InterNutter, TC, Maxwell Pink, Dracena and Greywolf are loverly and wondermous for archiving/hosting. J ProPhile: I’ll send more tonight. Morgan: *sneakyglomp* Readers/Reviewers: This weekend I’m taking some time to work on some indfic and other things so updates will likely be slow getting out. It’s not because of neglect, lol, just reorganizing! Thanks for reading/reviewing as you can!
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> Amara pushed her hair back behind her ears and stared into the flat surface of the bathroom mirror. She was already late for class, she thought, so what’s the point in rushing? She looked the same as she had that morning, and the day before, and the day before, but, she thought, she did not look like herself. Gone were the proud eyes of the Princess of Nova Roma. Instead she looked simply haughty. Her skin did not glow as it had at home. Here, she lacked the servants to massage her with oils and make sure she was perfectly attired, draped in silks and linens and adorned in the gold of her father’s coffers. Her body had grown thinner in the time she had been at Bayville. She lacked the pleasing softness that Nova Roman nobles prized. Not corpulence, she reflected. Just a certain curve of hip and tenderness of belly that indicated your status, that you did not lack for simple things wrapped in finery. She was old, by the standards of home. She should be married, a mother with a household of her own. She should be waiting in line to be ruler, but that, she scolded herself bitterly, was a fantasy that would never come true. Her gods had come with her and what shreds of home she could recreate, she did, but here, like at home, she was hated. Her powers were vile to those who filled the world. She was insulated now, hidden away behind iron gates and thick ivy curtaining them from the outside but she knew it was more like Nova Roma than she wanted to imagine. She was dead at home, thrown to the fires then thrown to the sea. Here, she was not even given the mercy of that. She had no Tacitus to walk her to the shore and leave her there. She had no bronze knife to slit her own throat when the starvation became too much. She had no rescue as she drifted closer to death, no awakening thousands of miles from home, away from death and sacrifice.
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> Carefully, she reached up and dabbed at the mascara-streaked tears that had fallen onto her cheeks, frowning at the childish display of emotion. “You are a Princess of Nova Roma,” she whispered. “You do not bow to this.” With swift, sure fingers, she twisted her hair back into a harsh bun and jabbed a stick through it, one ornamented with gold and onyx, the finial formed into her family’s namesake eagle.[1] She heard Rogue calling for her down the hall but she did not respond. She waited until she heard the other teenager’s booted footsteps pass the door before letting out a pent up breath and glaring at herself sternly in the mirror. “You are not one of them. You are not something to be hidden. Your abilities are a gift of the gods, given to you by Mars and Bellona. You are not meant to live in fear, to live apart.” She froze then as someone rattled the doorknob. “Occupied,” she barked when the footsteps did not retreat down the hall.
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> “You’re late for biology,” Rogue informed her through the door. “It’s a quiz day.”
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> “I’ll make it up later,” Amara replied tersely. “Tell Beast I’m having female problems and must attend to them.” She stared straight ahead, watching her face in the mirror as she spoke, not so much from vanity as from determination. She straightened her shoulders and for one moment, she saw herself as she once was, clad in the orange and gold silks of her family, wrists and throat bound in gold. The fiery diadem of her family crest rested on her brow and she was powerful. Then Rogue sighed loudly and dragged her attention back to the present.
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> “It doesn’t take an hour to change a tampon, Amara,” Rogue pointed out. “If you’re going to bail on class, at least have the cojones to tell me, kay?” She rapped once on the door and her steps disappeared down the hall, leaving Amara alone again.
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> Rogue, she thought, was her best friend besides Lance. Rogue understood her and did not care. She was honest with her, told her she was a bitch or told her it was okay to cry. She did not treat her with kid gloves. That’s why, Amara thought as she opened the door to slip out into the empty hallway, it was going to be hard to do this without her. On swift, silent feet, she hurried to the stairs and up to her room. Kitty had promised she would wait for her but she was not so sure the other girl would not renege out of some misplaced sense of loyalty to Logan or out of some need to do good in the eyes of the world. It’s not so cut and dried, the Nova Roman thought as she shed her school clothes, cursing having classes on a Sunday, and pulled on her jeans and a heavy sweater that she hated for making her look bulky. The gold hair pin shone in her dark strands and she hesitated to remove it. Leave it, she decided. Remind yourself of who you are. Kitty’s voice did not startle her so much as annoy her at that moment, breaking into a private reverie.
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> “You ready?” Kitty asked softly, ghosting through the door. “We need to hurry up… they think I’m taking the train this afternoon and I can’t find Kurt to tell him bye…”
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> “Don’t worry about it,” Amara ordered. “If it goes as I plan it, we’ll see him before the night is over.”
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> [1] Amara’s last name equates to “eagle”…roughly.