handleyourshit | Duplicity Inbox

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

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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."

"I know." If she truly thought otherwise, if she was confident that what she assumed was correct, her reaction would have been much different.

She's used to just carrying whatever hurt happens to her while what's necessary is done. She knows how to keep going until it's safe to hash it out, even if that's never.

"And we are. Family." Hopefully he knows that. Hopefully she didn't need to say it but she will anyway. "It just worries me sometimes when that's... all people are."

Her own irrational side of things.

He shakes his head slightly. "What do you mean?" That it worries her when all people are, are family?

"In the old world, family was enough, but not to survive the fall. You had to be more - partners, allies, fighters together. Like Rick and Michonne. Like the rest of us. People you can take outside the walls and know will watch your back, or help you build up the community."

And Maggie and Glenn, and Ty and Sasha, her and Abraham. At least until -

"We lost the most people when we settled down too much, tried to get back to the old world. This is the next world, J. Not the one we fought for, sure, but we're here and the rules are different. I'm just not sure they're different enough that family is enough on its own again."

"Hilltop was never safe. Before the walls went up, we were on a full rotation keeping walkers away. After the walls went up, there was Negan." He looks at her, looks away briefly, looks back. "I love the Hilltop. Everything I did was for it, even when I was gone. But they were never family for me because everyone there...they were farmers, they were suburban families. They weren't fighters. I was the only one there who knew how to fight, before Maggie came along."

He gets it, is what he's trying to say. "Family for people like you and me isn't what family means to people here. Not anymore."

Her eyes are there to catch his when he looks back, steady and dark; Negan and the Saviors will never not be complicated, especially between her and the man who got Alexandria involved with them, but she's long past resentment if ever she felt it. She finally just nods.

"That's what worries me," she says, offering it in turn for his fears: this is hers. "That we grow into what we need to be for this place, and leave behind what we are together."

"I don't want that." It worries him, too. He's thought about it, too. How could he not? Every time he goes shopping and the food is simply there, how can he possibly remember all the time how important each calorie is?

"How do we make sure that doesn't happen?"

"I want out of this city," she says, immediately - and, surprisingly, even a little fiercely.

Not Duplicity in general, she's already given up on that for the time being, but: "As soon as I have enough money, I'm getting land or a house or something outside the limits. Somewhere we can hunt, somewhere we can set up to run even if the city grid fails."

"I can help," he says immediately. "Adrian is going to give me a tour outside the city limits," which is illegal but what isn't? "I can scout some places and show them to you."

She nods.

"Find us a place," she agrees, because that's what Jesus does best, but also - it will be theirs, no matter what. If he ever has need of it and it comes right down to it, the SIN guards will have to fight through her tooth and nail to get to him. Fuck their laws, which are ideas, which are words on paper, which mean nothing to an appropriately stubborn will.

"We'll make it ours. All of this is nice, but I'd rather have home."