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

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"Yeah," she is. He smiles slightly, knowing that it's possible to believe it and also believe you don't deserve the things you have.

"What role do you see yourself in, in my life?"

"We're..." An array of things hits her when she thinks of Jesus and in this moment, her thoughts and inhibitions clouded and muddied, she can't decide which of them to lead with.

"Family," she hits on first, foremost, like he's told her over the past few weeks. When they've been talking more in the past few months than they have the rest of the time they've known each other. "Friends, but the kind of friends we are, not like there used to be. If you need something, anything, I'm the first person you can expect to step up. I hope, anyway."

He nods, wondering if she has any idea what a word like 'family' means to him, when he's never had it and thought he never would.

"Nothing can replace that."

She starts to reach across for his hand, stops herself and takes that hand through her hair instead.

"I'm sorry, I don't know what's wrong with me. I haven't done this in a long time. I don't do this, I promised myself not to anymore."

He reaches for her instead and just rests his hand there, palm up. "Why? We're not at home anymore. Maybe the one good thing that comes from this place is we get to experience all of life again. The parts we locked away."

The anger that had simmered in the center of every one of Rosita's bones when she got here isn't gone, it wasn't false in any way, but it's the part of her locked away now. Part of that is because it's Jesus across from her, who knows her, who she does not doubt cares about her.

She promised to follow his lead. She has reasons for why not, for being the way she is, and she likes who she is. But she looks at his upturned hand and remembers her promise and sighs.

"I don't like this part of life," she huffs, but she reaches to tangle their fingers together. "But I'll try."

"Which part? The part where we're forced to talk about our feelings?" He jokes, but it is a real question, too. Everything he's saying here is real. "Or the part where we aren't fighting for our lives?"

"Because everyone super loves being forced." There's a spark of that anger, but she sets it aside fairly easily.

"I like having feelings. I just also like being busy enough I don't get bogged down in them. So both."

"You and me both." Most of their friends run as hard as they can from their emotions. That or they pick the strongest ones they can and cling to them--usually this is anger, because the other one is despair and no one lasts long once they let that one in. "But there's a lot we've been too busy to deal with."

"I like being busy," she repeats, plaintive, but she doesn't switch back on herself to anger. She doesn't contradict him.

"You start. I already did."

Hoo boy. He breathes out a little sigh and nods, that's fair.

"Well, every issue I thought I'd dealt with around family has started to come back up on me. Like...do you remember the day you were all back in the Hilltop? The day Rick decided to fight Negan?"

"The day he finally got on fucking board?" she asks, because even though she has come to peace with it, even though she agrees with how Rick handled it in the end, turns out there's still some residual frustration.

Largely because she was still deep, deep in the claws of blind rage at the time, and her worst nights, and grief so sharp she could taste it every time she saw Sasha or thought about Hilltop. She can't say more without admitting to any of that though, so she swallows and nods.

He sees it. He doesn't ask because he knows the pain that group went through, and this isn't about deflecting from himself and back onto her.

"I had just brough Daryl back from the Sanctuary. And I remember watching you all and seeing how you all love each other, and I was happy just to witness it." A soft sound. It's not a laugh, it's sort of helpless sounding. "It's as close to a family as I wanted to be."

Which is to say, not in one at all. A bystander. A helpful neighbor at best.

"But I learned better. I came to care about you all." To love some of them. Like Rosita. "Because of everything we went through together, everything I know you'd do for me. I don't know how to relate to people on 'old world' terms anymore. And the contracts... I told someone not very long ago that the way I feel when I think about contracts is the same way I always felt when I was being carted off to another foster home."

There aren't many people from outside the walls of Alexandria that would describe those inside it as loving; they're a tightknit group though, and that does mean love. It means loyalty and shared heartache and suffering, and pulling through it in one stubborn, single-minded, united front.

Her hand tightens ever so slightly before her brain has even fully caught up, and she frowns.

"I don't understand."

He doesn't want to talk about this. He starts to change the subject, to deflect, to put it off until they aren't here in group therapy.

"Most of my foster homes sent me back. I'd get in trouble and sometimes it was because I'd get caught doing something, but sometimes it was just the kids already there being jealous, making things up to blame on me." When a foster kid, even a well-behaved one, is pitted against a 'real' child, the foster kid always loses. Every time.

"I don't know how to explain it so you'll understand. But I don't want my family to be a matter of paper. You and I earned the right to call each other family." He doesn't want to be sent back when he fails at whatever criteria make him a good Submissive.

She wonders if it would be easier for her to understand if he were talking to a twenty-year-old Rosita Espinosa, who had never heard of the Wild Fire virus, who was hellbent on changing something in the world, anything, and feeling like she never would. A Rosita who threw herself into causes when they landed in front of her and lost interest just as quickly when she hit a wall.

She's not that Rosita anymore. She tries.

"I told someone that words written on paper don't even register to me anymore," she leads with; you can't eat money, can't do anything more valuable with reams of paper that laws are written on than burn them to start a fire. "We are. What place do you think you hold in my life?"

He'd been glad to live in a world without paper dictating things like who you could live with, or where, or for how long.

"I think I'm someone you know you can trust. Whatever you need, I'd try to see it done." He has killed for her. He would die for her. There is no question this goes both ways.

"I want you to know that even when we disagree, I'll care what you think. I trust your judgment as often as I trust my own."

She doesn't have an argument; she's someone who doesn't think she can trust anyone at first glance or even second, but sometimes she does Jesus without even thinking. Instead it's just that she wishes love had come into that explanation; he stood outside their group and wanted to be outside of it, just like he stood outside of Hilltop by choice.

Remembering that, some of the punch goes out of wherever her thoughts were going originally and her dark eyes soften.

"If this place really is bringing that back, maybe you can put it to rest with the right backup this time."

"I hope I can. I made a lot of stupid mistakes because of it for a lot of years. Sometimes I think I was always better suited for the world we ended up in instead of the old one." It's a thought he knows most survivors, maybe all of them, have had.

"If I ever hurt you--just know it's not intentional. And I'll do whatever I can to make it right."

And indeed: "Me too," she agrees, because she knows - she knew before Duplicity - that she doesn't have it in her to be comfortable in a stable community anymore. She does better than some, worse than others, and she hasn't had to find out what happens when a simple scouting or hunting run, a quick fuck, won't scratch the itch enough to keep it quiet.

But she recognizes that specific regret, too, and later she'll wish she hadn't heard herself in his words, hadn't had an immediate kneejerk response to his declaration, because she doesn't even think about not saying what pops into her mind then.

"I can't ever quite believe that. I mean, I can sit here and tell you I do, and I would mean it, and I would give you that chance, you've earned it. But I always have this moment -"

When I first met you I thought you were the last woman on Earth. You're not.

She shakes her head.

"You're allowed a moment. More than a moment," he says gently, even though it sets off a clamoring alarm in his own mind that he can't let her down, that he can't ever risk it.

He shuts that down. It's not reasonable to pretend that two people won't hurt each other, in lots of ways over time, if they decide to let themselves be close. He will hurt her someday. He won't mean to, or at least he won't like doing it. It will be up to her to forgive him and give him another chance.

Rosita knows the same thing: people will hurt each other, and sometimes they'll mean it because it's the best option for whatever reason and sometimes they won't. Sometimes it's just not being a mindreader, not paying enough attention, being too human.

That's not what she's talking about.

"I know most people are just... being people. Just trying to live. But I cannot handle another person leading me on and using me while they swear I mean anything to them, J. I barely survived the first and second rounds. I'm not tough enough for another."

Edited Date: 2022-11-02 09:02 pm (UTC)

That opens a whole host of other questions, but it feels significant, and like something he shouldn't ask about here. He'd normally save the questions for a more private space. But this place doesn't allow it.

"What were the first and second rounds?"

Similarly, this is normally where she'd deflect, turn the conversation on to something else or just leave. She could get up and go but Jesus still has hold of her hand. Jesus is someone she might have told on a bad day anyway. Jesus is one of few who even remembers.

She wouldn't normally be that dramatic but it's a factually true statement: she almost died between the two men she was closest to for years.

"Eugene and Abraham," she mutters, looking away, then down. "Eugene twice." Abraham... Petty, and deep.