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

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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.

"You've always seemed so close to Eugene..." And Rosita has never seemed like the sort of person who lets someone cut her twice. "What happened?"

She isn't. Eugene redeemed himself and saved them all, and that means she has let him pick up whatever pieces there are but she never forgets. She can overlook it in him because he is who he is, but it doesn't mean she'll easily let anyone else close again.

She has to take her hand back to continue though.

"Abraham and Eugene were already with the same group when I met them. I was just trying to keep it together with another group in Dallas, I didn't have a plan at all. We were starving and we were losing half of us every day, and then here comes this giant asshole in this giant truck with this man who says he's a scientist and talks like no one talks. And he said -"

She remembers having hope still. She remembers how it burned.

"He said he knew a cure for the virus. He knew what it was and how to stop it but he had to get to the rest of the team in Washington DC. He knew how to save the world, and they needed my help to get him there."

There is no cure. Jesus knows this. And Eugene, smart as he is, certainly never had it. But yeah. He can see Eugene pretending he did, just to get people to gather around and protect him. Everyone is always protecting him--dying for him.

But what a fucking thing to lie about.

"How did you ever forgive him for that?"

Jesus gets to know that from this side of it, after the truth came out, after he met the man knowing who and what he is - and isn't. Rosita still remembers the gutpunch of it, standing on a sweltering, cracked highway in Georgia, trying desperately to keep Abraham from killing them all by refusing to compromise, Eugene screaming that he's not a scientist and Abraham's face -

She shakes her head. "I didn't, for a long time. I was furious. I was done with him. I told myself - and him - that I didn't care if he lived or died, after all those people were killed trying to get him to DC. We lost... so many good people, Jesus. We lost them when we didn't have to because they believed he would save everyone left. And I helped make those decisions."

It's a long way from the middle of Texas to the East coast on foot, day by day in a truck they had to repair as best they could, scavenging as they went. They grew close despite themselves, just not as close as Rosita had thought they were.

"But... you know Eugene. He's just Eugene. It's just the way he is, he can't really help it. He saw a way to survive and he took it, and isn't that all that any of us do? And it kept Abraham alive, for a while."

Isn't that all any of us do? He wonders if she realizes how alike the two of them sound in that moment, how many times Jesus has argued those same words to spare other lives. He holds nothing against Eugene, but people have killed for far, far less than what Eugene put Rosita and Abraham through.

"I think it was his bond with you that let him turn on Negan in the end." And without that, they'd all be dead now.

"That was the second time that little shit did something that showed me how little we all meant to him," she says first. That was the second round she mentioned, even if it worked out in the end. She fully believes Eugene would have felt terrible if they'd all been killed. She also believes it would only have hit him after they were dead if she hadn't intervened.

"Daryl and I grabbed him out of the Sanctuary. I hit him with everything I had, I was so disgusted and done with him." He'd hurt her so badly. "I told him we'd keep him alive but only because we needed what he knew. That we'd stick him in a hole in the ground and only let him out when we needed something." And she'd meant it.

"I called him a worthless coward, who turned on the only family he'd ever had for a little comfort and a little praise."

"He wishes he could be brave." But he never will be, probably. Jesus knows this about him. Eugene tries to mimic it sometimes, but the tough love Rosita shows only comes out timid and cruel when Eugene tries it.

"What did Abraham do?" He knows now about Rosita's history, some of it. He knows she was there before Sasha had been.

"He does try, now. He helps in other ways." Like the guns, like the radio. He's still strange and that's offputting for a lot of people, and a few people still remember that he went with the Saviors when he didn't have to; it makes Rosita protective over him. They are close. She does care about him.

Abraham is at the heart of that, too, and she flinches at his name. Eugene is hard to talk about, but it's easier for not having to explain anything about why what he lied about was so terrible; for not having to explain what happened to end the Savior wars. Abraham though?

What did Abraham do? She stares at the edge of the table, a muscle in her jaw tense, and tries to think of anything but.

"I'm sorry," he says. "Because I don't want to make you talk about this and I don't think this place," and whatever is in the air they're breathing, "Will let me change the subject."

"I want to say something terrible to make you stop," she finally says, because she knows. She's noticed by now. She knows it's not Jesus.

None of that helps either of them though. "If I thought it would work I even might." That's how much she doesn't want to talk about this, and her voice is ragged and she's sorry, but apparently they both know the score.

Her nails dig into her arm, and she stares at them.

"I saw you straighten out that necklace Sasha was wearing, before they closed the coffin. The red one, with the silver chain."

There are, despite his careful nature, things she could say to him that would cut very deep. He gives her a look that's apologetic and softly pleading; it isn't his fault. He doesn't want her to hurt him over it.

"It was with Abraham when we buried him." It had been such an odd sight on someone as grizzled as Abraham was. It had clearly meant something, and he'd seen Sasha's face as they dug the graves. So he'd pocketed it while he tried to decide what to do with it. Ultimately he'd given it back to Sasha.

She doesn't want to hurt him, but she doesn't want to be hurt either - not like this hurts. She doesn't let herself think of it to avoid exactly this, doesn't let herself be as angry as she had been then.

But like him, she can't stop it. She can only decide what to try to do with it, and she nods, because she knows.

"I made it for him. I gave it to him, the week before the run on the Savior outpost, that first one," she says, quietly, almost a mumble to hide how brittle her voice sounds. "You know what he said to me? He smiled, not that big stupid one when everyone groaned about making dick jokes. A different one. One I believed could mean he was happy, and he looked at me and he said -"

She swallows, her throat dry and full of glass shards. "He said, Rosita Espinosa, you are damn near perfection, you know that?"

"You are," he says, the words out when he might normally have held them back. The point of hearing this isn't to reassure her, exactly. It's to let her tell this story and all its very clear, very sharply precise pain, so that they don't have to linger on this topic any longer than necessary. He won't make her tear this wound open any wider than it already is.

But.

But he knows that a month or so later, Abraham was with Sasha. So he has a sense for how this story ends.

She almost flinches again, but manages to catch it; this is the root of the part of her that can simultaneously believe that she's an asset to everyone around her in whatever community she's standing in, and that everyone else is more important than she is. Everyone else is more precious to the people who mean the most to her.

She wipes angrily at her cheeks, still dry and viciously determined to keep them that way. She clears her throat and forces her voice steady for something she's never told anyone and knows she can't stop now.

"Night before we head for the outpost, I come up to bed to find him packing. And not just his road kit, I mean he is shoving entire dresser drawers into his Army duffel. When I ask what he's doing he says he's leaving." She hates the way the words twist on her, the way she has to work so hard to keep it going, to not linger.

"I ask him why, and he says he just is. That's the way he wants it. I ask him why and he says why are dingleberries brown? It's just the way shit is. I ask him why and tell him I won't let him just leave after everything, thinking he's just panicking, he's just afraid - and he grabs me -" She was never afraid of him. Even then she wasn't. It just hurt more than anything had ever hurt her in her life.

"And he says when he first met me he thought I was the last woman on earth. I'm not. And then he just leaves."

A week, she'd said. A week to go from practically perfect to that.

Jesus is a runner. He left multiple boyfriends bewildered, he'd had two who came home to find him packing, too. He can't judge Abraham for running. He won't let himself judge him for the cruelty in it, because there's no point. Abraham is dead. Rosita will never have closure.

"I'm sorry," he says, meaning for so many things. It explains some things, though. Her doubts about herself, how specific they seem to be, and how contrary to her knowing how much good she brings to a group. Abraham made use of her and left her when she was letting herself, the domestic part of her, show.

Eugene saw and heard everything, but Rosita never told anyone any of this, and she never would have, not willingly. She feels so stupid still, for being so blindsided, so completely caught off guard - for believing in him, in them, enough to think she'd had anything to do with how Abraham had seemed to be settling.

But no. Not her.

"He'd been so lost and out of place ever since we got to Alexandria. He wasn't good at being inside the walls, being part of a community. I could see it so fucking clearly - and then all of a sudden it was like he settled. All of a sudden he was happier, and saying nice things like that, and - I was so stupid, Jesus. I was so goddamn stupid and I didn't want to see what it meant. I thought it meant we could - that he'd -"

She swallows, shakes her head. "He was happier with Sasha than I'd ever seen him outside of a fight. How do I cross half the fucking country overrun with walkers and psychos with two people I loved so much and be so fucking oblivious about them lying to me?"