“My father is a serial killer. Sometimes I… saw things, when I was a kid. He’d drug me with chloroform to put holes in my memory and confuse me, then tell me I didn’t see them. That I imagined them or dreamed them. Eventually, I figured that out and he lied about that too,” Malcolm tells her.
She's not horrified by this the way she thinks she might have been once; murder doesn't really apply much in her life anymore, not in the same context it did before the world ended. But children should still be able to trust their parents, especially when survival isn't on the line.
"I found out he murdered people for fun when I was ten and found a woman locked in a trunk in our basement. I called the police, but when they got there, the girl in the box was gone. They found lots of other evidence, though, for the other twenty-three murders he committed. I never understood where she'd gone in the few hours between finding her and calling the police, until last year when I realized my father had been drugging me and it was probably... more like a few weeks. I still don't know how long, exactly. My memory of that time is still fragmented. But that did explain her magical disappearance," Malcolm tells her. "My father, meanwhile, has been living in a maximum security psychiatric facility for the last twenty years."
"Where was your mom during all this in the first place?"
Traumatized, probably, if she knew anything. Any piece of shit willing to drug his own kid to cover up his murders and the girls he keeps locked in trunks probably doesn't have many lines.
“She found out when he was arrested. She thought something was going on, but… she thought he was having an affair. She tried to keep us away from that. She didn’t know the truth until the police came,” Malcolm said.
Rosita isn't really sure how the jump to affair was made, but then, people will tell themselves anything they want to hear. The likelihood of Malcolm knowing his mother's rationale is low, so she goes back to what she was originally angling towards.
“No, I’m a profiler. I used to work for the FBI, but more recently I was consulting on homicide investigations for the NYPD’s Major Crimes division.” he explains. “What did you do before the world ended?”
It's an answer that makes her smirk, but it also means she's finally comfortable enough to look away and start paying more attention to the plants around them.
"Paralegal. Working my way through law school." Which was pretty much the most useless thing she could have been doing for the way the world turned out, but there's nothing for it.
"Those two fields are very close in America," Malcolm observes. "I don't know if your world ended before or after the kids in cages at the border debacle but you wouldn't have been short of work."
"I know the feeling," Malcolm tells her. "Not on an apocalyptic scale, obviously, but... things I wanted as a child just... slipped away after I found out what my father was. Whoever that boy could have been never had a chance after one event changed everything. When Jesus told me about your world, I just thought... imagine that but... for literally everyone."
The raise of an eyebrow is about all the warning he's likely to get.
"Actually, you don't," she says, stopping abruptly in the aisle to face him. Her voice is tense but calm, and very, very even.
"Just like I don't know how it feels to be abused like that by someone you should have been able to trust. You can't imagine it. Even if I stood here and told you every detail about it you still couldn't fucking imagine it, because you weren't there. You didn't lose everyone you know. You didn't walk until your feet were raw, you didn't starve until you were eating pine bark for days, you didn't lose feeling in parts of your hands because they froze, just to name a few things. And, quite honestly, fuck you for trying to bridge it over to being the same."
God she hates this. She hates all of this. And every time she thinks maybe she misses the old world enough to try to remember how to be that person again, she runs facefirst into a wall that's invisible, apparently, for everyone else.
She shakes her head, and turns to go back the way they came.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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"Gaslit how?" she asks.
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She's not horrified by this the way she thinks she might have been once; murder doesn't really apply much in her life anymore, not in the same context it did before the world ended. But children should still be able to trust their parents, especially when survival isn't on the line.
"How long have you known?"
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She glances sidelong at him, but if anything she's more thoughtful, not more wary or put off.
"They put you in the foster system after that?"
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Traumatized, probably, if she knew anything. Any piece of shit willing to drug his own kid to cover up his murders and the girls he keeps locked in trunks probably doesn't have many lines.
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Rosita isn't really sure how the jump to affair was made, but then, people will tell themselves anything they want to hear. The likelihood of Malcolm knowing his mother's rationale is low, so she goes back to what she was originally angling towards.
"Are you a therapist back home, then?"
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"Paralegal. Working my way through law school." Which was pretty much the most useless thing she could have been doing for the way the world turned out, but there's nothing for it.
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"But Dallas."
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It feels like it happened to someone else.
"Immigration."
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There are no human rights, no countries, no governments where she's from. No laws, and no rooms in which to argue them.
She shrugs. "That girl is only a little less dead than the rest."
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"Actually, you don't," she says, stopping abruptly in the aisle to face him. Her voice is tense but calm, and very, very even.
"Just like I don't know how it feels to be abused like that by someone you should have been able to trust. You can't imagine it. Even if I stood here and told you every detail about it you still couldn't fucking imagine it, because you weren't there. You didn't lose everyone you know. You didn't walk until your feet were raw, you didn't starve until you were eating pine bark for days, you didn't lose feeling in parts of your hands because they froze, just to name a few things. And, quite honestly, fuck you for trying to bridge it over to being the same."
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“That’s not what I was trying to do. But. I’m sorry for it anyway, because that’s how it affected you, regardless of what I intended,” he replies.
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God she hates this. She hates all of this. And every time she thinks maybe she misses the old world enough to try to remember how to be that person again, she runs facefirst into a wall that's invisible, apparently, for everyone else.
She shakes her head, and turns to go back the way they came.
"Fuck it."
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“…Are you hanging up on me now?” he asks.
He’s really asking, because it seems like it would be rude to go after her if she just wants away.
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But just in case: "I'm done."
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