handleyourshit | Duplicity Inbox

"It's what we do, J," she points out, more gently than she'd said the rest. "If there's no one left to do for us, we do for ourselves."

"Does that mean you're going to help?" Help find the books, if nothing else.

She tips her head, watching him.

"Always. Unless you don't want me to," she answers, "And honestly probably even then too."

Probably even then too earns her a little smile.

"I'm glad. Thank you." He breathes out slow, relaxing slightly. "We're more than the things that went wrong."

"Yeah. We are."

She still has her head tilted, watching him, but she smiles too.

"You would've made a good therapist." She's never been to one herself, but even without the training Jesus manages to get people to trust him, to tell him things. She can only imagine what he would do with a bit more knowledge.

"Tell me some things you've learned. From your book, or from Jean."

"Reframing some things has helped. Finding reasons to be glad I came through something bad. That's...been hard for me. It's harder to reframe parts of my childhood than it is to reframe things I've done since the world fell apart. Maybe because after I was an adult I had choices, and it still feels like I didn't when I was a kid." He shakes his head slightly. It's hard to even talk about being a kid, but he's trying to do it anyway in places where it's safe.

"And breathing. But you know that trick already."

Rosita doesn't believe in this the way Jesus does. It's not the first time this has happened between them, but it is the first time that to her practical mind, there's relatively little on the line. No one dies if they fuck this up, unless they really fuck it up. It's just the two of them, and there's already trust here.

She doesn't believe in it, but he does, and he needs her. She listens, and when he starts to trail off, she folds her hands in her lap where she's cross legged on the counter now.

"I don't know about you, but I would think it's also - for me, just to keep moving forward, I had to write everything before the virus off. It's like it happened to a different person, someone who died with that world. That makes it hard to connect to the things that happened back then, too."

"There were things I kept. I had to." It's a choice, being the way he is. It didn't just happen.

"If I let go of everything about myself I wasn't sure what would be left. I knew I wanted to see the new world that emerged. I knew I wanted to help it be better and to do that I couldn't let go of the things that really mattered to me. But maybe that would have been different if I'd had family. If I'd had anyone counting on me, anyone I was afraid of losing."

"You've always been strong that way," she says, quiet, respectful. She can never trace this piece of him back to its root, partially she knows because it just is him.

"But I mean - I had to make myself believe it was all gone. Every place I'd ever been or lived, every person I'd ever talked to or loved, every goal I'd ever tried for. I had to cut it out and focus on staying alive. I only came back to any of it later."

"And now you're getting some of that back. But you're not who you were when you let it all go." It has to feel on some level like dragging open an old wound.

"No. And I don't want to be."

It's not a conversation that she's ever had to have, not with the way people are back home; and she doesn't owe an explanation to anyone here.

"I like who I am now. I know I can take care of myself now."

"And you can let yourself enjoy some of the things you used to like. Spa days for one," he says with a little wink.

"Can you let yourself be happy?"

"Spa days for one," she agrees, chuckling. Then he asks that and she drops her eyes down to her lap.

"For a long time? No," she answers, honestly. "I mean I wasn't unhappy or anything, but I didn't get too comfortable either. Not until -"

Well. It doesn't bear talking about. She picks at one fingernail with the others.

"That was a new one. I didn't think I could anymore."

"Me, either," he admits. People view him as a generally happy person but it's all down to how his perspective. "I viewed happiness as happening in small moments. Little...tastes, almost. Nothing that lasted, but I enjoyed it while I had it. That way it didn't hurt to lose it. But coming here those moments are longer. And they help pull me through the bad moments."

"Yeah. They are."

She'll give him that much: she recognizes the bits and pieces of happy moments, things it does no good to try too hard to hold onto, except in the ways that they're all trying to hang onto them here.

"Does it ever feel too easy to you here? Like. At home, you could protect people by scavenging or harvesting or patrolling harder. But here if I want to make sure we have food for the night, I just swing by a store or restaurant on the way home." It feels like cheating. Feels like love should be harder to prove.

A breath that's almost a cynical laugh. As close to cynical as Jesus ever comes. "All the time. It's why I was so glad to move out of the city. Broken Hollow is easy, but the windows keep me sharp. And when I want to have someone over for dinner, I have to plan ahead. I still just go to the store but I can get some things out of my own garden. It feels more...real that way."

"Sometimes I think -"

She shrugs, trying to work out how to put what she's thinking into words. How to make this emotion make sense when it's outside her own head.

"Sometimes I think that's part of what was wrong with the old world. What I don't trust here. It's too easy to pretend to care about someone. There's no effort in it, not like there is back home."

He nods quickly. "No, I get that. I don't work for the relationships I have. They're there, they're easy--most of the time. And it scares me. I've had to work to be good at the things I can do. I've suffered to learn some of the things I know. But here it's not painful."

"I earned Rick's trust at a word," she says, remembering the first time she laid eyes on Rick Grimes: in the sweltering, sun-heated, choking dark of that railway car, Eugene cornered behind her and Abraham in front of them both

They're our friends, Maggie Rhee said, looking back at them. They helped save us.

Now they're friends of ours, Daryl agreed, smiling in that rough-edged, warmbrittle way he has.

"But to do that, we had to scrape Tara and Glenn up off the road, we had to put him back together and backtrack to find Maggie and Sasha and Bob, we had to keep everyone in one piece and get them to Terminus. For Maggie to speak for us, to be accepted into that group just like that, we had almost a month of hard work behind us. We earned it."

"The first time I really saw Maggie, Rick thought I was taking them into a trap. But he's such a good man he was going to check it out anyway. Some of my people were in a crash, they holed up in a building to escape the walkers. I asked Rick to help. He told Maggie to shoot me if he gave the order." He smiles, warm by the memory. "She said, I will. Somehow, though, she let me go from that moment to listening to me argue with her about how to treat prisoners."

God he misses her sometimes. Misses all of them.

He'll never see any of them again, but maybe Rosita will.

"Why did you decide to help Glenn? Weren't you trying to get Eugene to Georgia then?"

"That's how she is. Tougher than nails, but she pays attention."

It feels like an infected wound somewhere in her chest to think about the others, to think back to that time when half - more than - the people who she traveled with back then are gone.

She wouldn't, normally. Not for long anyway. Jesus is asking her to, though, and she doesn't have a good enough reason besides that she doesn't want to, and when has that ever flown?

"You find some strong, like-minded comrades, and you stay stuck together like wet on water," she quotes, even letting a bit of a drawl creep into her voice before returning to fully herself. "That's what Abraham used to say. Glenn had a concussion when we found them, but he was wearing body armor and carrying a rifle, and Tara was fighting walkers off them. First thing she did was call us a bunch of assholes. There were three of us, two of them, and plenty of room in the truck, so we took a chance."

That sounds just like Tara, he thinks, missing her acutely. "I'm surprised Abraham was willing to take the break from the mission."

Knowing what the mission was back then, that they didn't know it was all a ruse yet.

"It was just down to the two of us to protect Eugene," she answers, quiet.

"We had almost two dozen at one point. Moving at the clip we were, trying to make the distance we were? It ate people alive, and we were running out of fuel." She hates how that sounds, but for all that Abraham was protective and could be warm when he wanted to be, she knew how his mind worked too.

"He knew if we ran into one more decent sized herd, we'd either get overtaken or have to detour who knows how long. Glenn and Tara were strong, you could see that at a glance. He wanted them to join us."

"So better to pick up two more strong people and maybe a wife, than to go on alone," he says, nodding slightly. It makes sense.

"What did you think of the detour?"

"No, he tried not to pick up the wife," she chuckles, shaking her head.

"But Glenn wouldn't stay, and while they were arguing about it, a bunch of walkers came out of the cornfield next to us. Eugene tried to shoot some of them and shot the truck in the process, so after that, sticking together meant going with Glenn to find Maggie instead. I -"

She hesitates a moment, because she isn't a woman that has spent a lot of time reflecting on the past, but she's had reason to think this one over. A pivotal moment, one of many, that shaped the trajectory of her entire life - sent her away from Washington for the first time in over a year, and put her with the group they'd end up staying with in place instead.

She's thought about it before, which is why she can admit fairly quickly now, "Eugene shot the damn truck on purpose. So we'd have to go with them. He lied, but he was never good in a fight so we believed he'd panicked and misfired."

What did she think? Not much that she actually said, but: "I was just trying to keep the peace. Keep us moving forward. That's how we'd gotten that far. That was our mantra then: We don't stop. We never stop."

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