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

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"It was good when I was growing up. Lots of people around to teach me things."

His smile fades a little.

"It didn't matter that I wasn't part of the tribe. Until my grandma died, and then it did."

"...yeah," she agrees, gently, because that's why she's not close to hers. His grandma was part of the tribe, and he came with her. Without her - without her own mother - the tie is broken, and the obligation gets forgotten if there ever was one.

"How old were you?"

"Twenty-two. My mom'd died during my first tour."

He shakes his head. He'd been a kid still, but old enough to go to war. Old enough to think he knew everything.

"I got leave to go to the funerals. Only, I couldn't get back in time for my grandma's. I sold her house, her truck. Gave the dogs away. And then I back to Afghanistan."

She nods. Older than she was thinking, younger than she'd hoped. But he has his military tribe by then.

No wonder he was easy pickings for Pope.

"I'm glad you were able to get her affairs settled at least." That's a shitty thing to say. "I'm sorry."

Better but only just.

"I squared everything away," he agrees softly. "I owed her that."

He tried his best to be a good grandson. But after, there was no playbook. No one waiting to tell him what to do next.

"She never forgave me for enlisting. But, I thought I had to do it. What'd you know when you're eighteen, anyway?"

"I'd bet rations she understood," she says quietly after a moment. Carefully.

"I'm sure it still hurt and she was still upset, but I don't see how she couldn't have understood. That's how it has to go. The first generation wants things better for the next."

She guesses. It's trite and it feels like something placating, but it's one of the things she hopes can still be true. Like Carver wanted better than fighting and starving and hurting for Matthew.

“Yeah,” he agrees, soft and a little sad. “She didn’t want history to repeat itself.”

But their family was a line of soldiers and alcoholics, and Carver knows he ended up mirroring his mother in more ways than one.

“But I had a good start. Not everyone gets that, you know? And I tried to remember those parts when i was with Matthew.”

"It shows, Brandon," she promises him, swallowing quietly.

"I know it's hard for you to hear sometimes, or believe. But even when you don't know how to do something, how to be something -" As he's often said hi smother didn't know what to do with him, or how to be a mother. "- you try. Even if you're not perfect, even when it's ugly, you try, and that shows who you are."

She doesn't look away when she talks. She wants him to know this is exactly what she sees.

It’s a careful thing, the way they’re watching each other. They’re trying to be people, Carver thinks, trying to be decent to each other even when this place makes it so goddamn complicated. It matters.

Breathe out, Carver thinks, and he does. He meets Rosita’s eyes, and he nods. Maybe he can’t always hear it, or believe it, but he’s trying. They both are.

“Thank you,” he says, very softly.

Her lips twitch, a larger smile hiding behind the smaller one, cautious. She isn't ashamed of it, not really, but it's still complicated. Still tenuous for her, still almost directly on one of few weak spots capable of bringing her to her knees.

But she's trying too. She smiles, he says thank you, and nothing hurts - or at least nothing hurts too much to bear.

"You're the one doing the hard work," she points out. Then she picks up her empty plate. "Literally and figuratively."

Carver huffs at that, watching her with a quiet sort of fondness. “Careful—she’ll go for your crumbs.”

Indeed, the kitten is giving Rosita’s plate a very careful look.

“It helps having something real to do,” he adds, a little more seriously. “And it’s not so loud here.”

That helps, too.

She glances at the kitten, waggling her fingers in front of her to distract her, to give them each something to focus on when she asks, "How's that been?"

She already knows. He's here for the quiet. He can answer or not and she won't push, but sheal asks, just in case.

Yeah. There’s that part, too. Carver doesn’t answer immediately, just breathes out slow and watches the kitten on Rosita’s shoulder. Centering himself. He doesn’t always explain things well, Carver knows. Sometimes, he says more than he means to and crazy shit just comes out.

But they know each other, in the end. They’ve built to that—earned it.

Carver scrubs a hand through his hair. He doesn’t reach for the bruises on his throat, though part of him wants to. “Whatever I got dosed with, it wasn’t a sex thing. Or it was, but it made it feel like there was grease on my skin, in my throat. Like I’d been running through the fires all over again.”

It comes out quiet. Mostly focused, though.

“And then everything was ramped up to eleven, every sensation. So.”

Carver shakes his head.

“I didn’t know the guy—that helped, too. Thought it’d just be a moment. Whatever, right? Wasn’t like we didn’t have fun. But it just—it’s a lot, after. If that makes any goddamn sense.”

The thing is, they've had some reports like that. Not official ones, the LIERs almost never willingly talk to the guards, but they hear things nonetheless. She hears things because she's listening.

So she nods, just a bit, just to encourage him. And then she does understand - as much as she can without having been there anyway - because it does make sense to her. She's been using sex to distract herself for years, so yeah, it makes sense and she nods.

"Takes some time to wind down when you get your head back," she acknowledges, collecting her dishes to put in the sink. It can just be a moment, here and now. It doesn't have to be anything major.

"And he wasn't an asshole?"

"No," Carver replies softly. "And I was pretty bad, after. Lost."

She's seen him like that more than once. Drifting too far over the edge, the ghosts following close.

"He watched over me. Didn't have to do that. Thought he'd cut my throat and take my shit, but he didn't."

"I'm surprised you let him," she admits. She's seen him like that more than once and it was touch and go each time, a wrong move away from a knife's edge for both of them. Maybe it would have been easier before they knew each other like they do now.

Maybe - "It's easier with a stranger?"

Carver nods slowly, meeting her eyes. Mostly, he looks tired. It worked out okay after the lighthouse bullshit but he knows that was the exception and very far from the rule. Pope have called it a sin, and made him answer for it.

It could’ve gone wrong. The fact that it didn’t is still catching him sideways now, in the aftermath.

“Sometimes,” he admits, very quietly. “When they don’t know a thing about me, they can’t ask me things in the middle. And then whatever happens isn’t anyone’s fault. It just happens.”

Edited Date: 2023-09-26 04:10 pm (UTC)

She watches his face, petting Dulcinea almost absently to keep her close, to let Carver breathe. She doesn't look away.

"But not this time." Not this time, for an assortment of reasons. Not this time, because someone showed mercy for once, and whatever just happened wasn't something he seems to know what to do with in the end.

Carver just shakes his head. No, not this time. And what is he supposed to do with that now? You can’t ask someone not to hurt you when it’s bad, that’s practically begging them to do it. But you can go reckless and empty and walk away when it’s done and that’s nobody’s fault. It’s just a moment. It means nothing and it’s not worth remembering after. But this?

They talked about their ghosts. And so this is the part he carried. Is carrying, now.

“It ever like that for you?” Carver asks finally.

She knows there's something, but survivors often carry so much silently and alone; she can't threaten a woman to back off and accept never knowing when she won't do the same herself, and it's been a survival tactic for a while now. Everyone has their own shit to carry. There's no space to add more.

So she just nods. "Yeah. Sometimes." Is it really that surprising? She breathes in, slow and shallow, and on the exhale says, "After - realignment. I only wanted to fuck strangers."

She's almost always down for a one night stand, the last thing she needs here is quota problems when it's so easy, but it had been different. Sharp toothed and angry.

"I didn't care if anyone hurt me or not. That was the point: they hadn't rattled me hard enough to make a difference. And this time, if they hurt me, I just hurt them right back. Easy."

Yeah, Carver thinks, distant and a little sad. Yeah, she knows. They have that in common. Maybe not for exactly the same reasons, but it bleeds true enough.

He exhales. "Sometimes I want it to hurt. Just to prove I won't flinch."

It comes out soft. He's never said it out loud before.

She hadn't admitted it before now, either; none of the people she was closest to were people she was sleeping with anyway, not then, not since she'd been so angry with Carver. So hurt. No one had noticed - or at least, Sara probably had, but she certainly wasn't going to be the one to tell her otherwise - until she fetched up against Rhys anyway.

So she'd just done it and moved on, like so many things she's done over the years. So yes, she gets it. And she gets what he says next even though it hurts a little to hear, watching him, lowering the kitten down to the floor so she can entertain herself without risking falling off the counter.

"Do you feel like it helps?" she asks, earnest. "Or is it just familiar?"

The kitten mews, tail waving like a banner as she explores the kitchen. Carver takes a steadying breath, watching her. Focus, Carve, Leah murmurs in his ear. Stay here.

He watches Rosita. It's a fair question.

"I don't know," he says finally. "I think sometimes it keeps me from getting worse, but that's not the same thing as helping."

"No, it's not." She has her hands folded together now that there's no plate or fork, no kitten; she rubs at the nail of one thumb with the tip of the other, thinking. Chewing the inside of her lip as she decides what to say.

"That's how we survived. There's no happy ending, but there's not getting worse. Not doing worse. If that's where you focus, it's doable. If that's where you live, you're still alive." Once you know how that feels, you don't ever forget it, no matter what the current baseline is. No matter if there's no reason to be stuck in survival mode now.

"For me, it hurt at first. It hurt bad." She swallows. "But then it became something else. I can take a punch, and if I can, then it felt better. It felt like I have what it takes and they don't. Now if it happens, it just happens."

Everything comes back to survival in the end. What you can take. How hard you can fight back. Carver nods slowly, watching Rosita. Wondering what would've happened to them if they hadn't been made into the kind of people who can take a punch like it's nothing.

They probably would've died when the world ended, he thinks. But they didn't.

"First time someone hit me, I mean really hit me, was bootcamp." He shakes his head a little at the memory: it's not a good one. He knows, now, that the instructors weren't supposed to hit them. Not like that. But it was necessary, he thinks. "I learned how to take it. That felt - better. And then later, it was proof I could survive. That I wouldn't slow the others down."