handleyourshit | Duplicity Inbox

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

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only | Expand All

"Because I trust you." So that vouched for her on Vrenille's end. "And because I think he's a good man who could use someone who can tell him when he's doing something stupid. You're good at that. Maybe he'll listen to you now that you've proved you know what you're doing, and he ended up dead."

There's a gentle jab at himself in there, yes.

The jab is at him but she's the one who flinches.

"He already said he would listen better next time. We'll see how that goes." Contract or not, she does mean to keep talking to him - or at least not avoid him.

"What else should I know?"

"That I think he could make a good part of our group. As long as he can listen to you." Rosita, it turns out, has become the de facto leader.

At least as far as Jesus ever truly accepts a leader. When pushed he does his own thing; but on his own he's happiest following her lead.

She's noticed that fact. She's not sure how she feels about it after successfully dodging leadership positions at home. At least between the two of them they can trade it back and forth as necessary.

Start adding others and it starts getting tricky though.

"Maybe. We'll see. Contracts are a whole different problem." She casts Jesus a look, because he knows that, too.

"What are you going to put in your contracts?" He uses the plural to make it a general question, not anything specific to Jacob.

"The least amount of requirements I can manage," she snorts, but moves over to the coffee table to pull a stack of papers out to offer to him. They're rough drafts of a contract.

"Housing, accounts, quota - none of it has to come from me. The government does need my permission to exact any punishments on anyone contracted with me - don't know if that'll hold, but at least maybe I could come for any assholes that try."

"I'm curious if that will pass." It opens all kinds of doors if it does. at the very least, it might mean she'll get a heads up before anything happens.

He looks over the rest of the contract and sets it back down. "You're okay that I didn't contract with you?"

Ah. There it is. She didn't know if it would ever come up again, considering how hit and miss they both are with being willing to talk about anything that can be looked past, and she hadn't figured out how to bring it up herself without being a total bitch. That, and the whole Veracity thing.

But she pulls the paper across the island to herself and looks it over for a moment before she answers.

"I'd have to understand to be okay - and if I'm being honest, I don't."

Edited Date: 2022-10-23 04:02 am (UTC)

"It's hard for me to explain." He's going to try, but he warns her so she knows she'll probably still have questions.

"You're family to me." And that's the reason he couldn't contract with her.

It's a warning that alerts her to the fact she's going to need to really listen, to really try; she doesn't notice herself bracing to be hurt in turn, especially since it happens so often and so casually in her experience.

So she waits a few beats to see if he's going to continue, but when he doesn't, she shakes her head again. "I don't understand." She knows they're close, that it goes both ways, so it's not as surprising as it could be that apparently he's willing to label her family; she'll address that in a moment, or maybe just keep it with her in silence. One hard thing at a time.

"If I had ever had family in the old world, they would have had to sign papers for me. Stand in front of a judge, tell the whole nation I belonged to them." To. Not with. He's past the point of thinking he ever would have belonged with a family back then.

He shrugs. "I don't have that with you or Maggie or Aaron. We're family because...we're new world family. We fought for it. I didn't want anything here to change what we almost died for."

"Nothing can change that because we almost died for it. Period." Just in case that was in question - Jesus himself can change that, if he fucks her over badly enough, but as far as the city itself is concerned she refuses to give it that kind of power over her.

But she has to work hard to put herself in the position of an orphan - not the literal definition, that she's as familiar as she wants to be. But the legal status that would have required papers, and judges, and a court.

"I still don't - so, what, you'd rather have that with some stranger you've only just met?"

"I like Drake." A lot. More, perhaps, than he'd planned on when he agreed to this. "But it won't hurt me when the contract ends and he doesn't want to renew. I don't want to be owned by someone who can hurt me. I want family to just be family. I don't want all of my mistakes to fall on you because you're my Dominant. I want you to get to choose how involved in my problems you are."

"And you don't want me watching your back." And, the tension in her voice adds for her, part of the hurt for her: he doesn't want to watch hers.

"I get that it's complicated. I get it means different things to different people. And maybe we could have worked like, any of this out before Drake was in the picture and I thought we had a gameplan, but that's not how it went down."

"I do want you watching my back," he says, quick, stung that he's done anything to make her doubt it.

"Someone who is legally forced to care about me-" It just hits a nerve, an old one. "I never thought I'd have to think about it after I aged out, Rosita. It isn't just complicated, it's in my head."

The phrase they all use, quietly, when someone breaks. When they might break.

She isn't actually trying to hurt him - she definitely manages to do that more often than not when she is trying - so it takes effort to stop herself short, to think about an answer rather than spitting out the first one that comes to mind.

It's not about her. She's trying to understand him, and if he thinks there's something that might drag him right under, if he's telling her that, she needs to sit up and pay the fuck attention.

"That's what it is to you? That's what it feels like?" Earnest this time, not a ramp up to something else. "That a contract overrides anything anyone might actually feel or think about you?"

How many foster families had he been certain liked him? But wave the concept of real adoption papers, and they vanished. Couple the daunting reality of commitment with his behavioral issues and, well...

"Yes," he says. Quickly he follows it up with, "And I know it's not entirely rational. But that's how it is. He's obligated to care about me. I'll never know now if he comes to help me because he wants it or because we signed a contract."

Which isn't fair to Drake, who cares so earnestly about people. But like Jesus said: it isn't rational. It's an old world problem he had no reason to think he'd ever have to face again.

"I'm sorry I hurt you."

"This -" She taps the papers with one fingernail, keeps her voice even, "Says nothing at all about caring. About loving. It obligates one party to be responsible for another, because that's what anyone outside of it is going to act on. They can't police emotions, just actions and consequences."

Her eyes search his, like she can find that fear in him, that scar, that wound, that hurt - and drag it out where one or both of them can get a fair shot at it.

"You'll know, if it's something you want to know. You're smarter than that. And none of this - none of it, not one piece of it, not one law or person or mark of it - changes what you and I are because none of this can touch what we've been through."

He listens to her. He watches her, watches her hands and then her eyes. "Does me contracting with Drake change what you and I are?"

Which is as big a fear for him as the other one. He hadn't meant to hurt her, only protect them both, and he only realized in coming here that he'd made a mistake.

"Do you want it to?" she asks, not because she thinks she doesn't know the answer, but because she does.

Her hurt over it is different, and in its way as irrational as his, but she meant what she said: nothing about this place changes them.

Only the two of them can decide to do that, so in the end the answer is important after all.

"No," he says, soft. "I don't want anything to change this."

He needs her, as much as they let themselves need anyone. She could be taken from him at any time; that's no different than at home. He doesn't want the time they do have together to be filled with any regrets.

She nods, accepting this, agreeing. Her eyes drop back to the contract although she doesn't read it again. It's just a distraction.

"I think it already has," she admits. "I know we didn't talk much, back home. I don't feel like we needed to. You had Hilltop to run and I had people in Alexandria to look after, and if something happened - we've already seen how we both react to that. I doubt a lot of people but if another Negan showed up, I wouldn't have been surprised to see you there to stop him with me."

A lot of this, of course, is speculation. She doubts either of them thought much about each other, back home in a place full of other survivors. "But here - I need you, in a way I don't anyone else. In a way I never will, because no one else makes me feel like I'm not insane. No one else reminds me that it all happened and there are reasons I am the way I am, and they're good ones. Even if I start caring about people here as much as I care about you, none of them will ever be able to do that for me like you can."

And it scares her, too, because that's a lot of pressure to put on someone - a lot of need. But she can't change it.

"I trust you," he says, looking at that contract, too. "More than I trust anyone. That's what I don't want to change. We get to have different lives here than we did at home, and adjusting has been- it's been hard. But it feels easier when I'm with you."

"That's the only reason it did... hurt." And it did, but she let it slide at the time because he'd already made the decision. No changing it, and no sense risking making things worse when he still felt safe enough to come stay with her afterwards.

"Because I don't know the first thing about how any of this is going to go, and neither did you, and now we both have to work it out with strangers. Now I'm going to be held accountable to a stranger, and their priorities are probably going to be different from mine."

"Everyone is entitled to their priorities," he says, which he still believes despite everything. But. "But we know what's really important. Survival, family." In that order sometimes; sometimes the other way around.

"I never want to be used to hurt you, Rosita." And that is what his choice came down to. "I was trying to protect us both."