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

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He cups Dulcinea in his hand and she chews on his fingers with her little needle teeth, purring away. Brave girl, Carver thinks fondly, and he follows Rosita quietly. He smiles when she speaks, though - it has been a while.

"You want me to?"

He'd like that, Carver thinks.

She does. It's a little embarrassing, maybe, how much she craves the simple, soft things, even if she never acts on it. Even if when she chooses to ask, it's usually for something that could be cast as practical.

Could be, but isn't. "Mmhmm," she hums, leading him to the couch, glancing at the kitten, before she's reaching to pull her pack over from where she dropped it. There's a comb in the front pocket, always. She pulls it out as she folds down to sit on the floor.

"I'm going to have to cut it again soon, but I wanted to enjoy it long for a bit first."

Carver hums a little, setting Dulcinea down on the couch and then sitting down next to her, holding his hand out for the comb. “It looks good like this. Always does.”

There are practical concerns, always, but sometimes they can enjoy these small indulgences. Feel human for a bit.

She hands it over, and then gives him her back; it's easier this way, she thinks, and while she's not done with what they were talking about before she can let them breathe into this for a while.

"I've always liked it long. Mama used to braid flowers into it for fiestas." She smiles when she says it; it was so long ago, the memories are nothing but fond. "Had a rough few months while I was learning to cut hair myself, but I'm pretty good at it now. I used to do it for a few people back home."

Like before, Carver starts at the bottom and works his way up. Careful of any tangles, to make sure it doesn’t pinch or snag as he works Rosita’s hair smooth. It’s a methodical process and he falls into it easily, readily.

It means something, he knows, that Rosita trusts him at her back. No matter what else is between them, that hasn’t changed.

“I had it long when I was younger. Not as long as yours, but down my back. Cut it off for a long time when I was enlisted.”

For obvious reasons. And then he grew it out because there hadn’t been any reason not to by the end.

“Leah’d cut it sometimes.” He huffs a little. “She wasn’t great at it. I bet yours’d look nice with flowers in it.”

"Mine looks nice however it ends up," she teases, just a little. Vanity doesn't put food in the belly or strengthen a wall so she hasn't prioritized it in a long, long time, certainly not over other things, but a taste of it survived with her.

Anyway: "You'll get to see soon enough." She hasn't forgotten about the only fiesta she cares enough about to try to do something about still; it was small and private last time, and it won't be much bigger this time, but she has a few things in mind. Flowers definitely factor in.

In the meantime, "I could do yours, sometime. If you want."

Day of the Dead is coming up soon, Carver remembers, and he nods slowly. He didn't celebrate last year, not really, not beyond the altar he already set himself to maintaining, but it could be different now. Maybe even something shared.

"Yeah?" He squeezes a hand to her shoulder briefly. "I'd like that."

He would, he realizes. No one's done anything to his hair for a long time.

She's been keeping an eye on it, honestly; it was one of those things back home that always fell by the wayside, but was something simple that could make people feel human again, so she liked doing it. She may not be starting a salon any time soon, but she has some tricks.

And Carver's hair is forgiving, like hers. He certainly doesn't look bad with whatever he's been doing up to now, but she smiles when he accepts. She nods, and focuses on the steady rhythm of his hands, his fingers, in her hair now.

"Then we will sometime. Whenever you like."

He works her hair steadily, getting it smooth, watching how it lays against her back. It's meditative in its way. Something soothing - for both of them, he thinks.

Something human.

"Okay," he agrees, just like that. "I'll come around after work sometime."

She nods, just a bit, not enough to disrupt what he's doing. Her hair is still damp from the shower, but drying the longer he works with it anyway. She likes it. She likes it more than she's willing to say, really, so for a time she doesn't say anything else.

She just lets him work, closing her eyes and leaning into the inside of his knee, listening to him breathe and knowing that for a time anyway, neither of them is hurting. For a time, neither of them will hurt someone else.

That's important, she realizes. Knowing they won't have to hurt someone else any time soon. At least as important as the reverse, not having to brace not to care, or to be put in the position to have to do that to another person. To fight.

She hasn't forgotten where they were before. She's quiet, savoring where they are now for several minutes, but she hasn't forgotten and she doesn't want to just leave it where it was, so eventually she says, quietly, "I was sixteen the first time a boy punched me."

The quiet stretches out as Carver works. Neither of them move to break it and for a little while, things settle back into a rhythm. This is what he wanted, Carver thinks: to feel like a person, to feel safe enough to believe he could have that for a little while without everything going so goddamn wrong.

Then she speaks again, and that’s in the air between them. His hand stills on the comb for a moment before he remembers to breathe and wishes, with a quiet sort of bleakness, that it wasn’t such a familiar story. But that’s the trouble with knowing a person, telling them your truth. You both have to live with the knowing, after, and it has a tendency to go both ways.

He sets the comb aside and begins sectioning her hair into two braids. Not too tight, but careful. Methodical.

“I’m sorry that happened to you,” he says, very quietly. It shouldn’t have, but the world doesn’t work the way it should. You take what you’re given and you assign meaning to it. You take strength from what you survive because you have to.

That, they have in common.

He goes still behind her, and she realizes she's gone still, too. Her eyes are open again and staring at the wood floor in front of her, studying the fibrous grain of the planks, waiting to find out which way he'll go. Her throat is dry.

His fingers on her hair when he starts moving again are certain and gentle, and she just stops herself from shivering under them.

"I never told anyone," she says a moment later. Clears her throat, says, "Not then or since. I never told anyone." She remembers it so much more clearly than a lot of things from before, though. Than other, worse injuries she's sustained, she remembers the shock and the pain of that punch.

"His name was Luis. I'd left home to move in with him, I had nowhere to go, and it was so - he said he was sorry, afterwards. Said I just made him so mad sometimes, and other people had said that before too, and I was arguing, so yeah. Maybe. And where was I going to go anyway? So I just stayed."

She stayed, because she was young, and stupid, and afraid.

"It was a couple months before it happened again," she continues, quiet. "And a year before he really beat the hell out of me."

Yeah, Carver thinks. He knows pieces of this from his brothers, his sisters. The quiet sort of melancholy in remembering. Pain is a lesson, Pope used to say. Only, sometimes Carver wonders if that's really true. If maybe pain isn't just pain, and then you make something of it in the aftermath.

"I never left," Carver says after a moment, very quietly. "I don't think I ever would have."

There was nothing left. No place for him except in the Reapers. Who else would have him?

He shakes his head, and keeps braiding her hair. Keeping it smooth, and even.

"He only hit me once," Carver adds. Quiet, like before. "Pope. Really hit me, I mean. And the rest was just what we did."

She nods, slowly. Closes her eyes against the heat behind them, grateful that it stops. Grateful that she has somewhere else to aim the things that twist up in her then.

"He had no right," she says, low but sharp edged. Piece of shit. "And it says more about him than you that he would."

He loved us, Carver almost says, he wanted us to live. But the words catch sharp in his throat. He just takes a steadying breath, and lets it go. He focuses on the braids, on getting everything smooth and neat.

"Luis didn't, either," he replies quietly. "No one had any right to do that to you."

It shouldn't have happened. But it did. And he tries to fight back the brittle, hurting part of himself that says it needed to. That it made them strong enough to endure the true test.

"Yeah, well." She didn't believe that then. Not for years, and she's discovered that she still doesn't, not really.

She doesn't have to say it though. He loved me. He wanted to have a family with me. She knows how it goes, how it sounds.

"I think it's bullshit, how easy it is to believe that they made us strong. They didn't. We were already strong, Brandon." It's easier to put strength behind it when it's we, not just I.

He finishes the first braid and lays it down gently against her shoulder, breathing out as he begins the second. Working slow, and steady. It helps, having something to do with his hands. Having something to focus on outside of his own racing, brittle thoughts.

"I want to believe that," Carver replies, quiet and sad. "I'm trying to."

It catches on him, though. All the things they both learned to take that become the things they could survive when the world ended. And that was a skill. That made them valuable, didn't it?

She takes a deep breath, and twists to look up at him when she feels him finish with the first braid. She makes herself look up at him, makes herself say what's easier to believe when she looks at him than when she looks in the mirror.

"No matter how hard you hit it, you can't make aluminum into steel," she points out. "We were already strong."

I want to believe that, he almost repeats. Sometimes he can believe it for other people. That they were just chewed up and spat out and what came after was because of their grit, their ability to survive, and it says very little about the people that hurt them. But sometimes -

Yeah. That's the trick, isn't it? Because what if it hadn't happened, and then they weren't strong enough to survive what came next?

Breathe out, Carve, Leah murmurs, and he does.

"I never would've let him do to it to Matthew," he says instead, meeting Rosita's eyes. That feels important. He needs her to know that. "Never, Rosita."

Edited Date: 2023-09-29 12:19 pm (UTC)

"I know," she answers without hesitation. And she does - but more importantly, she knows too that him saying it, believing it and needing her to, means that he at least knows on some level that it was wrong. That it's not something you do to someone you love, someone that trusts you, someone you're supposed to protect.

She rests her hand on his knee, still twisted around to face him, still looking up at him.

"Just like I won't let anyone here do it to you, now. Or Jesus."

This is the hard part, Carver thinks. Being able to wrap your head around something for another person, but not yourself. Even now, part of him thinks he deserved it - needed it, on some level. Otherwise, would he have been strong enough to survive the fires?

But Matthew survived. Matthew made it six years and they never drowned him, never hurt him. He was just a kid, and he made it until he didn't. Maybe that's just how it was supposed to go.

He swallows hard. Watching Rosita, even as he braids her hair neat and smooth, and so careful. "I won't let anyone do it to you, either. I swear."

It's dangerous to promise things. But part of Carver thinks he needs that: to lay something out that remains true no matter what else happens. That they won't let each other be hurt like that again.

Protecting herself from her ex was the only reason she had a gun at the end; the only reason she kept it with her at all times, so she had it when the world ended, when it finally gave. Without the gun, she wouldn't have made it through the early days, the chaos of it, the sheer brutality of terrified people squeezed in too close to one another to get out of the way.

She can't answer the questions, but she can't just let him think he's weak because of what other people did to him, either; she won't. And then he promises, and the heat behind her eyes is back. She smiles, lips quirking - sad, pained - and she turns back around to let him work. To let him find his rhythm again.

It's such a small thing to offer each other on the whole - now that they both know how to defend themselves, now that they're both strong. A few moments later, though, she loops her arm around his leg beside her, like she might his arm if they were sitting on the couch together, and leans her head against his knee.

This is always going to hurt, Carver thinks. Exposing a wound to the air always does, even if it helps things to breathe in the long term. Stops them from getting twisted up inside. He can’t say if this will or won’t, not for sure. But he wants to believe it matters that they can name these things at all, that they can hear each other in moments like these. Not many people in his life can, not unless they’ve lived through a version of it themselves.

He works quietly, and steadily. Rosita is warm and solid as she leans against him, resting as the silence stretches out. And when he’s done with the braid, Carver lets it fall against her shoulder and leans to kiss the side of her head.

She doesn't break the silence again. She was trying to do something when she started, but she's not sure if she helped or not, not sure if anything can; she holds on, and she breathes slow and even, and she leans against him, and she might have fallen asleep except that she's keeping herself perfectly balanced where she is.

She might have fallen asleep except when he finishes, when he leans in close to her, she reaches up behind her with her other hand to cup it to the back of his neck, gently, to hold him close to her - the two of them knotted up together like loneliness and grief and damage.