"To Dimitri!"

Olena Belikova raised her glass of vodka high in the air, and the crowd of neighbors, coworkers, guardians, and family tightly packed into her house and back lawn mimicked her with the drunken gusto a group can only achieve at a celebration or a wake.

"To Dimitri!"

Unfortunately for Olena, this was not a celebration – this was a wake for her only son. And that realization, which had been making its sudden appearance on and off throughout the last month or so, sobered her and sucked out all the enjoyment she would have otherwise had at being at a gathering of people she hadn't gotten a chance to see in a long time. A brief moment of silence as the crowd threw back their drinks, and then the requisite coughing crackled through the air as the liquor blazed a trail of fire down the throats of some of the individuals unused to the afterburn of real Russian vodka.

Namely, Rose Hathaway.

Olena smiled as she glanced at the dhampir beauty sitting on the outskirts of the crowd and watched sadly as the honeyed highlights of Rose's long, full, chestnut hair glinted in the sunset as she tossed back her shot of vodka and immediately started coughing, dainty, yet dangerous hands coming up to cover her mouth.

The girl wore no makeup. She had on a pair of worn, ripped blue jeans, and battered, second-hand Converse, and was swimming in what Olena believed to be one of Dimitri's old hoodies, one with his name on the back he'd received as part of his schooling at St. Basil's Academy. It was mid-summer in Baia, and although the temperature had dropped down to the mid-sixties as it got later in the day, she knew Rose must still be sweating a bit in the bulky fabric. But she admired the girl – no, woman – for sticking it out and memorializing her son the way he should be memorialized.

Olena wasn't a fool, no matter how much Rose emphasized the mentorship part of her and Dimitri's relationship in the states. Olena had known something was up when Dimka had called her soon after he'd found her and the princess in that foggy college town and dragged them kicking and screaming back to St. Vladimir's. She could hear the desperation in her only son's voice as he spoke only of Rose – this headstrong, but promising, yet also uncontrollable girl – while keeping his assignation to the last Dragomir princess as almost an afterthought. In the past, Dimitri would have been crowing about his prestigious assignment, excited about the future possibilities if he could stay with the young royal.

Instead, Dimitri spoke only of Rose.

And Olena knew, in the way all mothers know, that Dimitri had found his partner. In this case, it was quite literally the dhampir with which he was supposed to partner to guard Vasilisa after they graduated this past spring. The irony was beautiful while it lasted.

Baia is not the remote wasteland everyone seems to think towns are outside of Moscow and St. Petersburg and Omsk, cities where the lights never turned off and only got brighter as the sunlight dimmed and a different sort of atmosphere took over the streets. But it is a bit more rural in that people don't just drive through it on their way to someplace else. One would actually have to have Baia as their destination to get to this town, which made it ideal for ex-guardian dhampir and their children to congregate as a community.

Blood-whore communes, they were called. There was truth to that, but for almost all the women who lived in this community it wasn't a choice. Most women, like Olena, had had abusive male Moroi partners who took blood and sex – sometimes by force – and left the women to deal with the regret, shame, and children that came as consequences. Some worked hard, honest jobs during the day…but occasionally would venture into town because they needed a little something extra to keep the lights on.

And then there were the women – and men – so hooked on the bite they made stereotypes of the rest. Olena and the others tried to help these people, but sometimes the individual had to want to be saved. These were the stories that bled out into their world at large, and so people painted all these communities with a single brush and taught their children that willingly walking into a dhampir commune and shrugging off their guardian duties was the peak of shame.

So, when Rose was brought into the community by one of Zmey's nice town cars and delivered to Olena's doorstep looking haggard and forlorn, Olena had immediately assumed Rose was going through things that wouldn't mesh with the risky life a guardian led. Less than an hour later, it turned out, Rose wasn't on Olena Belikova's doorstep because a Moroi had sweet-talked her into sex and left her pregnant and alone. Rose was here, cuddling her son's prized silver stake, to do what no one else had bothered to do and inform her that her only son – her pride, joy, and protector – had become the very thing he'd been trained to kill.

It hadn't taken too much longer after that for the news to make its way around the town.

Rose had, apparently, made an impression upon both a young Alchemist named Sydney Sage and Zmey, and so the town – full of women who liked to gossip – had quickly found out Rose's purpose when word started creeping in about the battle at St. Vladimir's. The only reason Rose Hathaway, a hero of the battle and best friend and guardian to the Last Dragomir, had to be in their sleepy little town without Dimitri Belikov as because something bad had happened to Dimitri. And, based on the news they could gather, dying would have been a much preferred fate than being turned into a Strigoi.

Regardless, the community supported its own. Almost exactly a month later, arms filled to the brim with food and bags filled to bursting with Russian vodka, the town made its way into Olena Belikova's house to celebrate Dimitri's heroics and mourn his fate. And when Rose showed up wearing his hoodie, shadowed eyes flecked with red, and cuddling his prized silver stake, no one at the party treated her like they would if she had simply been his former student.

Instead, they followed Olena's lead and treated her like his widow.

Somewhere between her crying, Karolina and Sonya's bawling, Yeva's silence, bringing home Viktoria from St. Basil's and then her crying, Olena found time to observe Rose closely. After informing Olena of her son's fate, Rose had been directed to bunk in his old room and then moved herself into the background of the environment at large, helping the Belikova clan grieve the loss of their family member from the shadows. She cleaned, helped make the meals, played with Paul for hours, kept Zoey occupied, went and got groceries, and trained in the old gym space Dimitri built for himself in the outside barn to use during breaks in the early hours of the morning and in the late hours of the evening.

Once or twice, when Olena's nightmares of what she imagined her son's final moments to be had startled her awake in the middle of the night, she happened to glance out the window only to observe Rose walking the cobbled streets of Baia, stake out, on the lookout for danger.

Looking for Dimitri, the little voice inside Olena's head clarified.

But Olena knew her son too well – the insanely dangerous, nightmarish animal he'd become would hightail it back to Russia where it was familiar and comfortable, but he would never come near the town where his only remaining family lived to ensure their safety. Strigoi, Olena believed, were just hedonistic humans without a moral code turned up to the highest setting. They did what they want and took what they want, which made them extremely dangerous creatures, but deep down there was still something in them that wanted to be comforted by the familiar, wanted to belong, and cared just enough about certain things to dictate their actions.

Olena and her daughters had asked for details, of course, after the crying finally stopped. Rose had been the last person to see him as human, and Olena, Karo, Sonya, and Vika had all wanted to know what happened in Dimitri's final moments. But Rose refused to talk about it.

Instead, Rose had focused on his actions during the battle – described how he'd saved countless students and teachers and guardians, how they'd worked together, fighting back-to-back like true guardian partners and – along with Christian Ozera – cutting down any Strigoi in their path until the Strigoi themselves were running back to their hideout in the woods in fear for their un-lives. Olena and her daughters – and Yeva, sitting in the large family room – listened, desperate for the details, but also watching how Rose's eyes lit up with when she talked about him and how her voice took on a breathy, wonderous quality as she described the way her son pulled the vulnerable out of harm's way before taking on Death itself.

Olena expected there to be a bit of hero-worship coming from her son's pupil, but she didn't expect to see the pure love shining brightly from Rose's eyes as she talked of Dimitri's passion for his work and how much people admired him at the school and at Court. Then again, Olena thought, she should not have been surprised. The clues were there the entire time, but Olena couldn't put them together in her grief.

Rose had done a masterful job of hiding her feelings – up until that point.

She'd faded into the scenery, allowing the family time together to wallow while keeping herself busy with menial tasks where she didn't have to interact meaningfully with anyone except little Paul. She'd made her home in Dimitri's room, and on more than one occasion when Olena had peeked her head in to check on their guest, had spotted Rose curled up against a pillow and covered in nothing but socks and an oversized hoodie with her legs tangled up in the comforter. When Olena had caught a whiff of Dimitri's cologne one morning while folding wash, she'd whirled around with hope rising in her chest only to burst into tears all over again when she realized it was just Rose who had scurried past the door on her way to get coffee. Olena realized Rose must have sprayed something she'd found in the bathroom on either his clothes or his bed (or both) to grieve him in her own way.

Coming to the realization Rose was in love with Olena's son triggered something in Olena's memory, and a hundred different conversations with Dimitri over the course of the last 10 or so months through text, email, and call suddenly took on different meaning.

In the span of a month and a half, or maybe a little less, Dimitri had gone from complaining about being saddled with this headstrong, reckless girl to becoming one of her biggest supporters, defending her actions to his mother and being both awed by and afraid of this girl, who had somehow gotten under his skin in a way no one ever had been able to do before. He'd talked about how he wanted to train her the way he'd been trained so he knew she was going to keep herself safe (oh yeah, he'd added as an afterthought, and keep Vasilisa safe, too), and how he was proud she was really caring about her studies – even in the classes that didn't involve combat training or guarding theory.

Sometime after the winter break, toward the spring months, Dimitri started laying groundwork for a meeting. They'd be about to get off the phone, and Dimitri would ask if Vika would have to go to summer training – again – and if they thought she'd be OK with another person staying in her room for a couple of weeks. He'd wanted to bring "his Roza" home so she could meet his family and see his hometown. Olena knew something must have changed in their relationship for Dimitri to even consider bringing a woman home, much less a dhampir…much less one who is still in high school! Olena had many misgivings about that, especially the whole 'keeping it a secret part' though she understood, but Yeva – in her own way – had told her there would be no one else for either of them and they had to get over it and move on from there.

So Olena had, despite her own misgivings, begun working to accept her son's chosen partner. By the time summer hit, Olena was even getting excited by the prospect. When she opened the door to find Rose, she had been over the moon, but that was before she realized this was not the meeting she had envisioned.

At all.

"Roza should speak!"

Olena was jolted out of her memories by the sudden yell and craned her neck to find the culprit but gave up relatively quickly to refocus on Rose. The girl was uncharacteristically silent, looking out into the crowd with a somewhat confused look on her face before shaking her head in a silent decline.

Well. That wouldn't do.

"Please Rose," Olena pleaded. She needed to hear for herself how the woman felt about her son.

Rose, unable to deny Olena anything at the moment, hesitated before acquiescing. Rose took a hefty gulp of her vodka, shuddering minimally and hesitated briefly before drawing in a breath.

"For the longest time," Rose began, laughing a bit, "I hated him."

A pause. The silence in the crowd was deafening.

"That huge brick wall of a man tracked me down, humiliated me, dragged me back to that hellhole of a school, and tortured me until I couldn't feel my teeth. He was stubborn, mysterious, and his Zen life lessons made me want to punch holes in cement. He infuriated me to no end, and there were days where I wished he hadn't stepped inside St. Vlad's at all." Another pause, this time to take a small sip from her glass while she contemplated her next words. "And then, I realized he was saving my life."

Her lips quirked into a small smile, as her chocolate eyes became glassy with tears and she enraptured the gathering with her words.

"The person who is standing here, in this wonderful town in front of all of you beautiful people wouldn't be here today if it wasn't for Dimitri Belikov – either because she would have been brutally killed by a newly-turned Strigoi or she would have failed out of school and been exiled. Within just hours of meeting me, actually knocking me flat on my ass, he stood up for me against my headmistress. Something no one else had really done for me before. He put in hours of his own time before and after classes and in between guarding Lissa and the school to train me – to teach me, really – how to use my head and how to keep myself and my loved ones alive."

Olena's tears were falling with abandon now, and she could see from a quick glance around the crowd no one else looked much different. But Rose wasn't done yet. She straightened from her position leaning against the fence and addressed everyone with gusto.

"I had my own petty high school dramas with friends and teachers…and the student body at large…and it couldn't have been easy to go what he was going through after Ivan and then suddenly have to be responsible for another high-profile charge and the success of someone like me. But he never let his frustrations get in the way of trying to be the best possible person he could be for Lissa, for the school, and for me. He would sit and listen to my problems and give what I called his 'Zen life lessons,' he would help me with my homework if he could, and he would stand up for me when one of the teachers was being particularly unfair, but also take time to make me see reason as well. And even though he had saved me countless other times, it's because of Dimitri's kindness that I was able to save my friends and myself when we were held hostage by Strigoi in Spokane and again when I had to fight for the lives of my friends and myself when Strigoi invaded campus. And if that wasn't enough, Dimitri spent the few crucial seconds he could have used to get out of the caves and save himself by tossing me out into the sunlight as the Strigoi surprised us from the shadows."

Rose's tears were falling freely now and creating big, fat lines down her olive-toned face. She knocked back the rest of her glass with a shudder, and then looked around again. "Dimitri meant so many different things to me, but before anything he was my best friend. He saved me so many times and continues to save me even though he's gone. I miss him every day…and someday, I hope to get the chance to repay the favor by saving him."

Olena dropped her glass in her haste to get to Rose, tears also falling down her eyes. She made her way to Rose in a couple seconds and enveloped the crying girl into a deep embrace.

If things had been different, Olena would have been over the moon to welcome this girl into the family as Dimitri's wife. But, for now, as the two women clung to each other in their grief, Olena would embrace Rose Hathaway as her son's widow.