30 reasons why - Roger Taylor

-REASON SIX-

June 6th, 1972. 

Dubrovnik, Croatia.

"This is it," Rosie says, standing in front of the door of her childhood home. "This is place I grew up in."

In a small apartment building in Dubrovnik, Roger Taylor and Rosie Špiljak stood in front of the home that raised her up until the age of eighteen. It's not a very spacious place, just enough to fit two people—her mother and herself.

Roger was terrified. He was going to meet the girl's mother, and they had only been dating for less than a year.

This wasn't part of the deal. She asked him to come to Croatia with her for vacation before he was to return for rehearsals and a few concerts Queen had. Meeting the person who birthed her into his world on June 20, 1951 wasn't part of it.

But there was no going back now. Rosie had already fished the keys out of her pocket, opening the door and being hit with the smell of alcohol.

She groaned at the smell of it, her eyes immediately focusing on a beer bottle sitting on top of the coffee table.

He pretends he didn't see it. "It's a nice place. Cozy."

"Yeah," she said. "Apart from the fact the same couple from three years ago yelled at me to go away, I'd say it was a good eighteen years here."

It's true. The same elderly couple she knew as Mr. and Mrs. Rajković that used to yell at Rosie every time she came home because of how she would always come home late yelled at her and Roger. Just like the old times.

She missed Dubrovnik. She missed Croatia.

She missed playing football with her friends at the empty lot down the street. She missed the late night walks to the beach even though it was a hell of a walk back. She missed the small flat that she called home for eighteen years.

Roger found himself to wander around the flat, taking note of yet another beer bottle sitting on the dining table.

The place is clean and tidy, as if Rosie had just left Croatia yesterday. The couch is the same, television remote left in the same spot she left it three years ago, even the little succulent still sat at the window in front of the sink.

This was home.

"You look like your mom," Roger stated. His eyes had found themselves to look at the line of picture frames down the hall. Rosie wasn't a complete carbon copy of her mother, who in turn, had blonde hair and blue eyes. "You have her smile and her eyes—not the same color, but you get what I'm saying."

Rosie smiled. "People say I look more like my dad. I think we still have a photo of him around here, if we didn't burn it."

She left and looked around in the drawers under the television, putting aside scrapbooks as Roger came to sit on the floor next to her. There were a lot of scrapbooks, dating from 1956 before abruptly stopping at 1962 only half-way through the pages.

He opened one dating the year 1957, and his lips curled up to the sight of a six year old Rosie. She was so small! So cute! Roger would die if their kids would look anything like her because honestly, it would be a blessing.

"Here." She pointed at a photo of her next to a man—presumably her father—and she was right. Her father was like a splitting image of her, only the tiniest differences between them. "This was when I was five, before he left."

"You're cute," he said. "Our kids better have your looks because I'm sure they don't want to be walking around with my big nose."

Rosie chuckled. "We haven't even been dating for a year, and you're already talking about having kids?"