handleyourshit | Duplicity Inbox

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

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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."

She's thought about that a lot, how the things that hurt her most before were the things that helped her live to now; how now, she's found out it's fairly common for someone to assume she had training before she had to face the world without grocery stores or cars or anywhere reliable to live.

"It was one of the few things I could feel good about," she agrees, voice dull. "I wasn't good for a lot, especially early on, but I could suffer better than a lot of people around me. I could take it and get back up. When it felt like no one would ever be happy again, I had that, and it made me feel something like good."

She shakes her head. "It's not a mystery, why it still feels good now. We know, now."

“That counted for a lot,” he agrees softly. Being able to take it, to endure. “Especially at the beginning.”

When the ground was constantly shifting underfoot, the world not yet settled into its new shape. Being able to endure was the same as surviving, as keeping your people going. Nothing mattered more.

“I think it gets twisted sometimes,” he adds, in that same quiet tone. “‘s why it’s harder with people I care about: they know me.”

"They care."

And isn't caring always the hardest? To experience, to body. To lose. She's not condemning him; she already agreed that she does, or is capable of anyway, something similar.

"I didn't... want anyone to worry. It was just something I needed to do right then, so I could be someone closer to who my people know. I didn't want them to worry, and I didn't... want anyone to be ashamed of me for needing it." His voice is quiet; hers is almost toneless, but she fights through anyway, tries to find the words. Tries to find a bridge to offer, in case he was thinking or feeling the same things, so they can get back on the same side of it. So they won't be alone.

It’s not something Carver talked about back home: it just was. He was part of the command structure, responsible for the others, part of a larger mosaic. He had a part to play and it was his job to ensure that he never slowed the others down, never became a burden to them. Otherwise, their deaths would be his fault—a sin to carry until the end of days.

Their deaths are his fault, Carver knows. He got caught. He got stupid. The only kindness was he didn’t have to live with it for long.

He swallows hard. He would have been crippled if he’d lived: maybe not forever, but for long enough. Out of the fight one way or another, and a burden to the others. Yet another sin.

“I care about you, Rosita,” he says, very quietly.

Wherever her mind was, wherever her thoughts were spinning and trying to get to, he chooses something to say that stops her cold.

It's not that it's a surprise; she knows he does, she's known it for a long time. They're important to each other. They've done things that prove they both know that, they both have shown it. It's easier to shoulder some times than others, for different reasons, but it is true. It's not even the first time they've actually said something along the same lines.

But never so simple, so straightforward - and never in this context. This most shameful corner of who they are, who they had to be to survive to get here, the marks they're left with after. Her hands are still clasped with each other on the counter, and she's not entirely aware of how she digs her thumbnail into her skin when she's not paying attention to it.

Don't say shit you don't mean, she thinks, vicious even to her own mind. Luckily, her throat is too tight to say it, and she breathes in past it, harsh.

"What?" she manages instead, stupidly, the only point at which the questions she has intersect. What does that mean? What does that have to do with what they're talking about? What is she supposed to do with it? What now? What next? What does he want from her in turn?

The problem, Carver thinks, is that he never says this shit at the right time. He blurts things out and then the consequences echo—he should’ve shut up, let the moment breathe until they’re both steadier instead of while they’re still bodying the aftermath. All these things they don’t talk about until they are, and then he adds this to the mix?

It doesn’t matter that it’s true. That’s besides the point. Time and place, Carver thinks quietly, and unhappily. Now look what you did.

He watched how Rosita clasps her hands, how tightly she holds herself. As if braced for impact. Who could blame her, given the givens?

“I just—you were here when I needed it,” he says finally, lowering his gaze. “And I want to be there for you, when you need it. I know I don’t get it right all the time, but I—I just wanted to say that.”

These, she'll think later, are two separate issues; there's the abuse, a word she knows now that she's out of it, past it, more than it, and then there's the loneliness and its attendant grief. They both hurt. They wrap around each other and grow into shapes around one another, become indistinguishable. But they are different.

She was aimed at one, she was ready and willing for the one, but this blindsides her and she's quiet for several long moments, feeling much smaller and weaker than she is. Every time she thinks she's gotten her feet under her for this, got her head on straight, she ends up fucking spun.

She sets it aside. She does her best to set it aside and hear him, hear how it ties in, hear exactly what he means by it and no more and no less.

"I'd... like that," she says finally, softly. Didn't she just say that he tries? He doesn't get it right all the time, but no one does, and he tries and so she tries too: "I care about you, too. I -" She swallows. "I want us both to be alright. I want us both to make it."

To survive in this new way. In this new life that's come after after.

The silence stretches out. Carver doesn’t break it, just holds there and watches Dulcinea as the kitten totters around the kitchen and chases after shadows. She’s fearless and bold. Nothing’s ever hurt her—not yet. Maybe that part comes later. Maybe she ends up just as brittle and mean as him, infected by proximity.

Maybe not, though. That’s the hope, isn’t it?

Carver lifts his head, watching Rosita carefully. “I want that, too,” he admits.

It doesn’t feel like a safe thing to admit, or to want. But he does.

Want is such a strange thing, she thinks; alone it doesn't mean anything at all. But without it, nothing else can mean anything either. Not like this.

It's a spark off a flint, something that goes nowhere and dies immediately without anything of substance to catch on to grow into a proper fire - but without it, everything else is just a stack of wood and lint, is only what it always was. So tiny, so negligible, but so vital.

She huffs a sound that isn't quite a laugh at the realization, wry and self-deprecating; she has never wanted to live a life completely devoid of passion. It was how she justified a lot of her early decisions, her early mistakes. And now it's... whatever this is.

"You were there," she tries to explain. "After the pit. I needed someone then, someone - exactly like we said." That she didn't know, that might hurt her and she could hurt back and they could just go on their way after. "And the next time you... weren't an option."

He was part of it, and she was half out of her mind, barely herself at all. Feral and rabid and willing to make others bleed for the mistake of being close enough for her to do it.

"But since... yeah."