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

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"Should I be?" she asks, her eyes raising to his.

He pulls her to him, holds her, chin tucked over her head. "No. Not after that. Not if you aren't."

Usually - for Jesus anyway - Rosita is deceptively easy to hold. She craves closeness, soaks up human contact like it's sunlight, keeps it stored close to her heart against the likelihood that it won't happen again.

Now, though, she doesn't actually resist but she doesn't relax into him either. It's difficult to hold onto her, joints at angles and muscles tense, but she doesn't resist.

She just also doesn't know how to even begin to let this go - and she is, maybe, just a bit afraid of what would happen if she tried.

"I get by," she finally says, softly, eyes open but unfocused over his shoulder, dry despite the tightness in her throat. "I have to. I'm the one still here."

"I'm here now," he points out. She doesn't resist so he holds her, will keep holding her while she allows it. "You're allowed to hurt a little right now. I'll keep us safe."

"I don't -" She stops, swallows, but she does twist her fingers around to find his instead.

"I don't think this is the kind of hurt that stops once it starts."

"Grief might not stop." Losing someone doesn't ever fully stop as far as he's seen. "But it won't destroy you. You'll come through it stronger if you can make sense of it."

It's not just grief. Not by now, not years later when she still doesn't let herself think about it too much. The surface points, sure - she can gloss over the majority of it and even talk about some of it with people, but she can't dig into it like she knows a therapist would have told her to do.

She can't. So she tucks her chin into him a bit more, closes her eyes, and says, "Some things you just know you'll die with."

"...Yeah. Some things you do." There are things he didn't tell Jean. There are things he'll never talk about, too. He gets it.

So he just holds onto her because that's all he can offer. He knows she's been through hell, and he wants her here anyway.

It's not something she has any faith in them ever being able to say to normal people and just have it dropped. People who have, by and large, not had to confront the darkest parts of themselves, and don't know which way they'll jump in a situation that could kill them or someone they love.

But it's valuable to her now. That he can say that, and still hug her to him, and still be glad she's here, glad they know each other now. Glad they're close.

"I want better for you though," she says after a long few moments of steadying herself. "I want to help. You deserve better."

"You make it sound like you don't deserve better. And you do." She deserves better than what Abraham did when he left her. She deserves better than what Negan did when he took Abraham from her. She deserves better than she's had here.

"Yeah, I do," she agrees, because that's part of what she's learned in the interim years. What she's been learning over her entire life.

The problem is, she doesn't see what she can do differently to get that at this point.

"But you're willing to put your neck out and work for it."

This is hard for him. It always has been. He suspects it always will be. "I'm trying. I don't know if it's working. You'd have to ask K or Drake or Vrenille. I still don't know what I'm doing, Ro."

"Hey."

She leans back a bit so she can meet his eyes, so she can reach up with the hand he doesn't have hold of and smooth back some hair from his face.

"I don't think they'd all three still be coming around if you weren't doing something right."

"How do I keep that going? Things change, they're always changing, and that's where I make the worst mistakes with people," he says, searching her face for the reassurance there.

"What's changing?" she asks.

He hasn't failed her; maybe it's just a byproduct of the two of them being here out of everyone, being here instead of there, but it doesn't matter. This is what is, so she can say with confidence: he has not failed her.

But she also knows she's safe for him in a way the other three aren't, just like he is for her. So, start there: what comes to mind for him that he's most worried about?

"Well," he draws a breath, readying himself to just talk. To get it out, to let her help him make sense of it. "Things are good with Drake and K. I think they're both getting used to the idea that I meant it when I promised I wouldn't bail again."

He leans against her slightly. "A while ago, Vrenille and I took a drug that made us both forget we'd ever had sex. With anyone. It made us teenagers again basically and so it meant that when we fucked, it was our first time."

Rosita hasn't knowingly used any of the aphrodisiacs that Duplicity has to offer, even though lately she's been considering it; all the same she knows how hard they can hit, and how real they feel while you're in them.

She raises an eyebrow, but straightens up to settle in now that he's talking.

"Intentionally?" she asks. It surprises her - but then again, maybe not. "How'd that go?"

"Yeah, they were formulated for the party at Marked." Jesus has a light drug history, which probably doesn't surprise many people when they get to know him. Weed, shrooms, natural things. All of that went away, of course, after the world fell apart and he had to keep his head about him.

"He let me pick which one. I couldn't tell you why I picked that one except that my first time wasn't that much fun and I wanted to see what it would have been like with someone I could still be friends with after. It went really well. But I have two sets of memories now when I think about my first time: one where I was frantic and afraid of getting caught, and one with Vrenille. And it changed things, a little."

She and Jesus, she realizes, have a lot more in common than even they realized; her first time was with a boy, of course, so she didn't have the social stigma to worry about until much later, but there was a different one for her. It wasn't that much fun for her either, and she can see immediately the appeal of trying again with a trusted partner.

But then there's the rest. "For both of you? Or just you?"

"Both of us," he says, and there's a real relief in being able to say it and know it's true. Vrenille liked it, too. "It made us closer. But we're both...skittish around being closer, you know? And I'm afraid of what that might do to us over time."

She nods along, because she does see the problem; sees, even without being as familiar with Vrenille as Jesus is, how committing is a worrisome area of overlap.

"Have you been doing the same things you did before that?" Whatever that is for them - but she's thinking, specifically: "Has the sex changed?"

"Yeah. The tone has, even if the things we do haven't. It's still mostly just us having fun, fooling around, playing with different ideas--but there's something underneath it that wasn't there before." For him, at least. But he suspects it's there for Vrenille, too.

"Mm," she says, and she can't help but smile a bit anyway, because as it turns out she never stopped being a romantic.

"Do you like that part?"

She struggles to admit her feelings sometimes; so does he sometimes. Like right now. It's terrifying to put it out there, to give words to it, to let anyone else know.

"Yeah, I really do," he says with a huff of a laugh. "It's so different, having that with someone I care about. Someone I love."

The ways he loves each of those men are different and unique but that is what it is.

Edited Date: 2023-07-30 04:25 pm (UTC)

Rosita has a sliding scale in her head of the three main men Jesus talks about to her; Drake being the first and the safest, at least until his partner disappeared; K in the middle, with his steadiness but his own baggage and trauma; and Vrenille out on the end with his own commitment issues, though she couldn't have said why that was her instinct before now.

So he's hesitant, but she grins at him now.

"You've already proven you know what to do with love though, Jesus. You know how to fix it if you make a mistake. And I know he cares about you, so - maybe just trust yourself. And if you can't, then trust me saying so."