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This is Rosita. I'll hit you back when I can.

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~~I just told you~~

Is it going to make a difference somewhere you can't hang up on me?

I was trying to respect your boundaries. We can go somewhere else if you want. The deck is nice. The greenhouse smells good. The library is a nice quiet place to chat.

[Well if he can't hang up on her, that puts her in punching range too, so.
Whatever.]

Greenhouse. Whenever.

I’m free now. I’ll see you there.

__________

He’s waiting outside the greenhouse door when she arrives.

“Hi. Thank you for coming.”

She turns up shortly, wearing baggy pants and an oversized blue long-sleeved shirt with dark stains at the back and breast, her hands hidden. She's wary, and watching around her with blatant suspicion, and looks him over with more of the same when she sees him.

She doesn't smile. There are no marks on her face that indicate this is anything unusual for her, but she nods anyway.

"If you're actually trying, can't fault that," she says instead.

“I always try,” Malcolm tells her, then tilts his head slightly. “Don’t always succeed,” he admits. “Have you been in here yet?” he asks, opening the door.

"You hang up a lot for someone who's always trying," she comments, dry, but it's not worth arguing.

She shakes her head instead. "Not officially."

She has definitely scoped it, but that's different.

“One whole time. That is… sure a conclusion you’re drawing, but okay,” he remarks, letting them in and holding the door for her to go first. “I suppose you can only assume, with the evidence you have, that your experience is everyone’s experience. I did assume that your ‘go away’ cues were like everyone’s ‘go away’ cues.”

He gestures to one side. “Ornamental gardens are that way and food production is that way. Which would you like to see first?”

"You've hung up on me twice in two conversations," she points out to him. With a 100% track record, she's not really sure what else she's supposed to think.

"And no, I'm not that stupid. I'm sure there are people you get along just fine with that you keep talking with, and can even disagree with without bailing. But that's not really trying." She glances at him, then around the area as she steps through.

She heads, immediately, for food production.

He looks over at her. “I was hanging up on Jesus the first time, strictly speaking.. Intentionally. Disconnecting with you was sort of collateral damage,” he explains. “That’s why I contacted you to apologize. When you didn’t accept the apology, it seemed like you didn’t want that. But when you texted back, it seemed like… you just wanted more trying, so here I am.” He glances over. “I will admit that trying with you has been thornier than with most people. But I came here,” he points out. “A lot of people would just avoid someone whose responses to their overtures had only been aggressive, regardless of whether they were responsible for the initial misstep. But.” He shrugs. “I try.”

She raises an eyebrow at him, and while she won't deny that indeed, she's thornier than a lot of people - she always has been - she does stop for a moment.

"Alright, let me be clear on this," she says, turning to face him, meeting his eyes head on.

"An apology - a real one, meant to acknowledge a mistake and repair damage - is on the terms of the person being apologized to. Right? Otherwise it's just smoothing over your own feelings, whatever they are." It seems to her to be a fairly universal truth so she doesn't actually wait for agreement or not before continuing.

"You said you were sorry and said it was partially miscommunication. Then I tried to tell you why I was upset in the first place, to fix the miscommunication, and you hung up on me. We hadn't even gotten to accepting or rejecting. Now, I'm still deciding if you're actually trying and just not sure what to do with me in general, or if you were just smoothing over your own feelings, so here we are."

She folds her arms, drums her fingers once on her own biceps, and says, "Is that clear enough?"

"That's very clear, thank you," he tells her sincerely. "I find that I tend to miss boundary setting in that context sometimes - what some people might refer to as 'trying too hard', so I've been trying to be particularly mindful of going away when it seems like that's what the other person wants. So. Sorry about misreading that. But the issues you mentioned... those were the reasons I thought I owed you an apology in the first place. ...We can go through the ones you didn't get to now, if you want," he offers.

She watches him for several long moments, considering. She has no interest whatsoever in trusting this man with either her 'redemption' - whatever the fuck that means - or with a concept she already regards with wary suspicion at best, but it doesn't necessarily means she won't talk to them. Means they can't be friends, even, if she decides she wants any kind of friends at all - which right now she really doesn't.

So she just nods, willing to drop it where it is for the time being, and turns her attention back to their surroundings.

"Let's just... leave it where it is for now. Do you do work in here?" she asks instead.

Okay, then. He glances around. “No, I work in counselling. I walk in here,” he jokes. “It’s the closest thing we have to real nature on board. The Enclosure can be fun and it feels real, but… somewhere in you, you know it’s not,” he explains.

"This place feels more real to you than visiting home in the Enclosure?" She shakes her head, looking around the greenhouse.

"I keep waiting to wake up."

He shrugs. “Everyone’s different, but I spent a lot of time being gaslit as a kid, so… things that feel real but also too.. perfect or good to be true but I know are fake just kind of… give me a vibe that this place doesn’t,” he explains.

Mm.

"Gaslit how?" she asks.

“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.

"Wow. What a piece of shit."

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?"

"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."

"Well. That probably explains a lot."

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?"

“No. My sister and I stayed with our mother. And the police officer that arrested my dad used to look after me. He’s a good man,” Malcolm tells her.

"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.

"...ah."

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?"