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

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He nods. He looks down, brow furrowed. "I have moments where it starts to feel like that. Too much. Usually at night, but sometimes, lately, it's at the grocery store. It's when I'm getting ready for work. It's like I'm always waiting for something and sometimes it's just exhausting."

She nods, turning her empty glass in a slow circle on the countertop in front of her.

"You remember when it all first went down? Not the first month, but the few after that?" She knows she does, though she has to dig a bit more for it every year: "Did you have panic attacks or anything then?"

"No. But most of the people I met those first few months did." And it got them killed. By the end, by the time he met Rosita, it was rare to meet anyone whose post traumatic tics were incapacitating. "I dreamed a lot, though. More than I ever did in the old world."

"I did. Only a couple times, but." Small, quickly heeled, thank god. She saw the same.

"Did the dreams eventually stop?"

"I don't have them as often," he hedges. But he frowns because that's not entirely true now. "They're back. They came back six, eight weeks ago. They're about this place now but the rest is the same."

"Growing pains," she still insists, reaching out to cover one of his hands with hers.

"We're still adjusting. Keep going, and if it gets too bad? Call me."

It earns her a smile, and his thumb brushes hers in thanks. "I will. But it's nothing I can't handle. So far. I was on the road for a little while with a man who started hallucinating his dreams while he was awake. Mine have never been that bad. I still wake up quietly."

Instead of jolting awake, the way so many other people did--and all it got them was the attention of walkers. Make noise, end up dead.

"I know," she offers with the faintly guilty note of someone who knows they've been waking up hard lately.

She's a quiet one too, thank God, but she's still glad it's only been by herself or beside Jesus.

"I'll be better, too, once this cast is off. I've never been a good patient."

"No, you haven't been," he agrees, chuckling. He looks at his own cast. "Just a few weeks. Then we can get back to training, strengthening the muscles."

"What, and you think you're any better just because you just run off instead of arguing with people?" she snorts, but she's smirking when she does.

"You hungry?"

"I'm starving," and he reaches out to playfully poke her good shoulder. "And I don't run from arguments. I don't have to argue when I'm right."

She brings a hand up automatically to push his away, turns it at the last moment into a light swat instead of something more defensive though her smirk never wavers.

"Running," she insists, but it's light. "Let's go shopping and grab some lunch."

"I need something to wear to the next party. It'll probably be Halloween themed." A little grimace. Going out around people dressed as monsters is going to be a trial.

"You need a lot of things to wear," Rosita snorts, and dumps both their glasses before dropping them into the dish washer.

"Come on. Tell me what your last Halloween costume was, or I'm dressing you as a Care Bear."

"Oh, God," he sort of huffs a laugh at the idea.

"I think I went as a new vampire. Marks on the neck, cheap fangs. A cape." He hadn't been trying to win any contests. "My boyfriend went as Frankenstein's monster, another friend went as the mummy. What about you?"