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The roses of her childhood were simple flowers, large and fragrant with five pale petals and a riot of yellow stamens at the center like gleaming suns. They grew wild in the mountains, sprawling tangles of vines taller than Dios with shiny green leaves, and even the muck and moisture of the swamps was no obstacle to their ambitions. When they bloomed, which was once a year in summer, they were swarmed by fat, fuzzy bees that rolled drunkenly in the flowers before woozily taking flight doused with pollen and repeating the same ritual at the next flower over. She gathered them up, tore them ragged from their stems and braided them into crowns to play prince and princess with her brother, the two of them laughing and giddy as they inhaled the distinctive musky scent. Whatever these roses lacked in terms of elegance, they more than made up for in vitality; even dormant, they pulsed with life just beneath the surface, waiting for the opportune moment to burst forth and begin anew as the days warmed and the year approached its peak.
Somewhere along the way, the roses changed—as she changed, as everything changed. Now the roses Anthy tends are entirely different creatures—weak, delicate, fragile things that must be carefully managed if they are to survive. Inbred and incestuous, their beauty exists solely in the bud, pure unspoiled potential ruined in the moment of realization, dissolving into a mess of scattered petals. Deliberately cultivated for their sole asset, they can thrive only in carefully controlled stasis, raised up and cossetted only to be ruthlessly snipped at just the right moment.
The roses are as aristocratic and European as Ohtori Academy, dazzling in their elegant foreignness, interchangeable, endlessly renewable, and disposable. She cuts them for bouquets for her brother's conquests and arrangements for his apartment; pins them to the chests of duelist, or hangs them upside down to mummify in place. She mixes perfumes and potpourri to numb the senses to the inevitable, but they can never quite mask the cloying scent of rot infusing everything. She does all this alone—her brother avoids the the greenhouse, which is hers and hers alone.
In the old days, the calyxes of the wild roses reddened after they bloomed and swelled into fleshy hips the color of blood. As a child, she made a game of gathering them, the sweet-sour taste of the raw fruit washing over her tongue and the seeds crunching between her teeth, wincing at the stinging hairs inside the fruit that made her mouth itch. Even back then, it was the mingling of pleasure and pain that appealed to her, the lure of the mature and the forbidden, a dangerous impulse that would ultimately lead to... well, this.
There are no fruits now, and wouldn't be even if the roses were allowed to mature. No bees find their way into the glasshouse and even if they did, the flowers here are so tightly wound, there is no room for insects to penetrate their depths. The flowers die as they live, sterile and unloved, and she does not mourn them. There is no place in her heart left for pity.
There are advantages to being a witch, though. No black spot, no powdery mildew, no pests dare alight upon the Rose Bride's charges, or at least no for long. She sprinkles the powdered poisons anyway, another meaningless ritual the Rose Bride is obligated to perform; brews potions of blood and bone (usually but not always animal) for the roots to greedily absorb, along with heaps of steaming compost and manure. It doesn't matter what you call it, it's still shit, but the roses devour it all and never complain, always greedily reaching upwards towards the light even as she ruthlessly prunes them back into obedience.
Speaking of pruning—for all their weaknesses, a wildness lurks within the rootstock of these decadent roses that cannot be entirely extinguished without destroying them. Most of the time that energy is safely channeled into lush roots and the foreign cultivars grafted to them, but every now and then one of them sends up a rebellious shoot, which must be quickly pruned back lest it take over completely. Anthy cuts quickly and decisively without conscious thought, because the alternative is too dangerous. What's done cannot be undone and hope is crueler than swords; even if the girl she once was is still there inside her, it proves nothing except the persistence of memory.
Her brother cultivates people, and Anthy cultivates roses to match them; each for a duelist in the latest round, whom she forgets immediately as soon as they are culled and replaced with their successors. Her brother seeks a miracle from the castle that holds eternity in hopes of reclaiming what once was, not realizing that eternity is already here in the artificial world of glass where there are no seasons, only an endless stream of flowers—eternity is the Rose Bride, always giving, yielding, suffering, forever and ever with no end. She has shielded Dios so thoroughly from the consequences of his actions that the noble prince who once was has disappeared as thoroughly as her younger self, and yet his ghost lingers in that drive for victory now turned to vastly different ends. Does he mourn the wild roses of their youth the way she does, or is he too zealously focused on the future for regrets?
And if by some miracle, he obtains what he longs for, what then? Even if they could go back to what they once were in those halcyon days, they would have learned nothing; it would only be a matter of time before history repeated itself. Perhaps it already has, and she has already forgotten; perhaps time is a flat circle, and all choices converge in the inevitable, round and round forever without end.
But if this is the case—though how can she prove it?—one forlorn comfort still remains: that somewhere, on a distant hillside once upon a time and far away, the roses of her childhood are blooming still, now and forevermore.