handleyourshit | Duplicity Inbox

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

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"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?"

Because love makes people blind. It's one reason he has never really minded that he doesn't get deeply attached to people. He sees the good in everyone; he also sees every bloody-minded, insidious, deceitful part of them. He chooses to focus on the good.

Love, though? Love takes away that choice.

"You trusted them. It was their responsibility to live up to that, and they didn't. It isn't a failing in you, Rosita. It's in them."

She still loves Eugene, he's still one of her best friends, but she will never trust him again the way she did when she thought she was escorting him across the country to save the world; she will never trust anyone that way, not if she has a say. Even Jesus makes her nervous sometimes, Jesus who has never given her reason to doubt him and who got in just under the wire before Abraham trashed the cornerstone of her confidence the way only someone she loves can.

She pinches the bridge of her nose, hard, and smears away the dampness she finds there. She's turned sideways in the chair by now, barely staying in it, one foot drawn up onto it so she's smaller and harder to hit.

"They made me feel like nothing. Like no matter what I did, how good I was, I would always be nothing. I'm not nothing. And whoever's fault it is, I won't ever let anyone make me feel like that again." She won't ever let anyone that close again.

"When Maggie was awake again, long enough to get up and move around, I moved her and Sasha into my trailer." He'd wanted them close by, and not just because Gregory refused to give them anywhere else to be.

"She sat with me one time," Maggie had often needed to sit. "And she told me it was worth it to get close to someone. To love someone the way she loved Glenn."

He wants Rosita to know this. He wishes Maggie had told it to Rosita instead; it had felt compelling coming from a widow. (In a way, he thinks, Rosita was also a widow.)

He would normally leave it there. He can't in this room and the words come, simple and inevitable and against his will. "But I don't believe her."

"Glenn," Rosita echoes, delicately sad in a way that is completely different from how she feels when she thinks about Abraham. She loved him too, but everyone did. Everyone missed Glenn. Everyone talked about Glenn. She was never surprised Maggie had to move to Hilltop, mostly by herself.

She sees nothing of herself or of her relationship with Abraham in the marriage of Glenn and Maggie Rhee. Glenn didn't choose to leave Maggie. Glenn would never have chosen to leave Maggie.

Glenn loved Maggie. "Why not?"

"Because I've never been in love, and I've been happy anyway. I watched her change through the war, without Glenn. I never want to put so much of myself in another person that I can never get it back when they're gone." Whatever joy Maggie felt with Glenn, he's happy she had it. But he doesn't see himself in that life.

Everything Rosita just said, everything she believes about not opening herself up to be hurt again the way Abraham casually cast her aside, is true. Is honest. She sits with these words from Jesus for a moment, catching her breath, and hears the sense in them.

But also: "It shows you things about yourself you didn't know," she says, slowly. Her fingers spread subconsciously, protectively, where she has them hugged across her lap - her belly.

"And god, Jesus, when you're in it - nothing can touch you. That was so important to me, when I had it. Everything was shit and everything was hard but at the end of the day I had someone beside me I knew I could lean on. Even if that didn't turn out to be true - I'm not sorry, either." She won't do it again, but she's not sorry she did. "Maggie's right. And you're right: you can be happy without it. It's not something you get to choose, in the end, to have or to not have - but it's worth knowing."

"The lack of choice worries me," he admits. They call it 'falling' in love for a reason, he supposes; you don't choose to fall and break your arm on the sidewalk, it just happens.

"Why aren't you sorry? After it was over...? Or is it ever over?"

"I still miss him every day," she says, soft, a confession. She's not proud of it, but she's not ashamed of it either. She just normally doesn't talk about it.

"And every day I know I did my best. And I know, now, what being in too deep feels like. I know when to get back. But I know that because I was in the middle of something, then, that brought me to where I am."

He has no regrets for the life he's lead. He respects people who view life the same way: not as a series of regrets, but as events that have brought them to a better place. Or at least a place they know they're better suited for survival.

"So when do you know 'that's it'? I've had boyfriends. I know what it's not. I know when it's time to end it because I'm not feeling what they're feeling."

"He made me feel safe," she says, a bit heavily, given how it ended. But even then, Abraham died instead of anyone else in that circle. She knows for a fact that's what what he would have wanted. That he died happy to be able to do that.

"Not because he had to protect me, it wasn't about that. It was something else. Space beside him maybe. I wanted to see him again as soon as he left. Even shitty situations felt better just knowing he was there."

"Have you felt safe since then?" Because that seems like the worst part: having had it and never again.

"Not like that," she admits. "But we live in a dangerous world, Jesus. Any of us can go at any time. I'm no different and I've known that for a long time. If I die, I die."

"But you weren't talking about that kind of safety," he points out. And then, "I feel safe with you. Here. I can do things with you and tell you things I can't with anyone else."

She smiles then, finally looks back up at him. She's glad. She is.

"Not that kind of safety, but - this kind. Abraham made me feel physically safe, but he also made me feel like someone knew me. Like someone would miss me if I were gone, someone needed me to be here. You know me. You would miss me. But you don't need me to survive."

Turns out Abraham didn't either. "Turns out I don't need Abraham. Knowing that is part of not regretting it, too."

"I'm glad you don't." It would be such a heavy thing, he thinks: having Abraham walk out on her the cruel way he did, then watching him die the brutal way he did, and then having to hate that any of the good parts ever happened.

"I try not to regret anything I've done. I'm good at that. But the things I couldn't do anything about, that's...harder." And you can't control when a loved one is just done with you.

"Yeah," she agrees, smoothing her finger over the wearing edge of her splint for something to distract herself. It is harder.

"It's why I'm so protective over you here. I don't want you to ever know what that feels like. I want you to have the chance to love and be loved, you deserve that, especially now. But I will fucking murder someone again if they hurt you the way Abraham hurt me. If they lie to you like Eugene lied to me."