♦ Black Rose ♦

Well, WELL, if it isn't the consequences of our actions!! - Is what I would say if Rick didn't look so absolutely miserable in that second pic T.T I seriously can't help feeling bad for him man, but he got his ass served back to him for a good reason. Also they're so young on that first drawing, it makes me sob whenever I think about it and see how much years demolished them UGH

I gave you guys one of these paragraphs before, but since I was going through a bit of a writer's block a few days ago, I was editing to get back in it and gotten these stitched up for contrast <3 they're both from the Kostrov Traces, but the first one is from book 1, and second from book 2, so these are some years apart. They are also pre-professional edit and in draft II, so they may be a bit clunky haha

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For some context, Rick is talking about his wife in the first half of the text. The rose garden was originally hers before her tragic death, and one of the goals she had was creating a perfectly black rose. It's something she never achieved entirely, but the roses still remained very important to Rick for the rest of his life. Those rose bushes were basically the only thing besides Maggie he didn't give up on after Loretta died and cared for them vigorously, even when he hadn't had a first clue about flowers beyond what he saw Loretta do during their few years together.

Second paragraph happens just prior to that sketch where Rick is in the car I did a while back. It's a few days after he had a significant fight with FJ, one that, albeit, came from a mixture of a slowly escalating nervous breakdown mixed with alcohol and a lot of unresolved trauma, but it hurt FJ nonetheless, and he was justifiably still pretty upset. It was the first time Rick's charm and deeply loving personality wasn't enough to overshadow how much he was destroying himself and how much he was hurting the people around him along the way </3