assassin_daddy | Duplicity Inbox

"They aren't learning anything. They're dead, mindless. They walk straight into walls and keep doing it until the wall breaks down or they're shifted in a new direction. The groups happen because they're attracted to sound so they pull towards one another if there's nothing louder, or they all get trapped in a corner. That, or they were all together when they died, which is why the cities aren't safe."

This is all so standard for her that she barely has to think about it; like someone else describing how to put gas in a car or sharpen a pencil.

"The big group I saw was because they all kept getting trapped in a stone quarry and couldn't get back out. We had to break it into smaller groups to deal with so they wouldn't - there was a big truck blocking the exit, so they would have moved it enough to get out eventually and a herd that size would have rolled right over us."

Because no, the communities aren't that big. All they could have done was move out of the way and who knows what that would have meant in the long run, if they even had enough warning to get clear in the first place.

"It's been - it's hard to know exactly, but ten? Twelve years? And yeah they'll thin out over time. But they don't die if they freeze over or get stuck in mud, they just sit there waiting to be turned loose again. They're trapped in mines, and rivers, and houses. Plus we're all infected. Anyone that died as we go turns into one too, and that's fine if you see it, but - we had one man who had a heart attack or something in his sleep. He tore his wife apart asleep next to him because she didn't even know he'd died, got two of the kids before their screaming woke the rest of us up to help.
It's... A mess, still. "

He takes in that information, the way that walkers behave, the way they gather, the fact that they don't seem to have anything but instinctive drives behind them, and no ability to work things out. And perhaps that's what makes it all the more horrifying to think about, that they can get you, even without thought, even without logic, even without any of the usual abilities that animals have.

And the only way to put them down is to destroy the brain stem, which requires a very strong blow or the like to the base of the skull. Not easy. And probably not something many people knew about in the early days of the disaster.

"Fuck," He breathes out, the story about the man and his family far worse than what she'd described in the cities or anything else so far. It's just far too common, and too easy to imagine. It'd be a bad enough thing to have your spouse die next to you but to then... The rest makes his stomach churn. There's not much that does that anymore.He takes a breath, slow in, slow out, trying not to imagine it. Trying not to think about it, push it away. It's not here. That's not his world. And for the moment, it's not hers either. They're here, and while here isn't pleasant, it isn't that.

For the moment it's not hers, but she lived through the fall; she doesn't let her guard down anymore, not ever. That's why she carries the knife everywhere. That's why she dresses in layers, why she checks for windows and doors, why she has stashes of supplies and food in a couple different places throughout the city.

That's why she sticks with Jesus, with Carver. They know what she's been through and vice - in broad strokes if not details. They know without having to talk about it that, like Jacob is discovering now, the daily cruelties are sometimes worse than the more widespread horror.

She lets him sit with it a moment, sips her water, doesn't apologize. At the very least, she needs him to understand why not to sneak up on her, why to wake her up if he's around rather than try to slip past her sleeping. When she finally speaks again, she says, "There's someone from my world that's been here a lot longer than me'n Jesus. He says we're not contagious here. Whatever they did to us in that first exam -" Her voice goes hard; she hates them for it, even with the advantage of being at least temporarily cured as a carrier of the virus. "- it neutralized it. We won't spread it here."

There is no need for her to apologise. There's nothing she's done wrong, merely explained some of the truths that she lives with every single day. It's a horrible thing to have to live with, to always have in your mind. There are things he knows people here can't accept or understand about his time, but he thinks her reality is all the more difficult to come to terms with.

"Do you trust him?" It seems a fair question. She's mentioned Jesus, but hearing that there's someone else from her world too- three of them, the lucky buggers- makes him wonder why she hasn't mentioned him yet. Maybe she doesn't trust him, but what she says the other man has told her, it fits with his understanding.

"They do something to us, when we arrive. They make a clone of us, do God knows what else, and they heal us of things we're carrying." He gestures to his eye, which they certainly had a hand in sorting out. "So I think it's likely. I only wish that we could find out how, for you all."

They heal us of things we're carrying. She literally just told him about the virus and logically she knows that's what he means but it's not where her thoughts are, so for a moment it's not what she hears and she actually flinches ever so slightly and a muscle in her jaw tenses so hard her teeth grind together.

She jumps on the question to move past it, definitive: "Yes and no. He's not from one of the communities I know. His group stays out on the road." It would be all she had to say to anyone from her world - all Jesus had to say to her - but she grasps after how to explain it. "We have an alliance here. If anyone he has a closer alliance to turns up, or if we all go back home, that's over. We all know it."

It's a precarious kind of trust, but one that's entirely doable even to wary, standoffish Rosita Espinosa. She understands the ways in which Carver has lost his grip, mostly, and why. She can work with that.

He doesn't miss the flinch, the way her jaw tightens, as if she's trying her hardest not to show her hurt. Nor could you miss the way she charges in, needing something else, a distraction for both of them, something that takes her mind off whatever it was, something that distracts him from asking about that flinch. It doesn't work exactly, but he doesn't press her, doesn't ask her what is wrong. He knows she won't tell him, knows that she doesn't trust him, and if she ploughs on, avoiding the subject, she clearly does not want to talk about it. At least, not with him.

"If you all go back home, you won't remember this place." He says it gently, because he doesn't want her labouring under the idea that she will, doesn't want her thinking any good memories here, with people she cares about, will bolster her in her life at home, any future she has to endure. "I didn't. Other people who went and came back, it was as if nothing had happened for them. I didn't remember anyone here, or anything that happened. Not until I got back again."

So any alliance she would have made, it wouldn't mean anything at home anyway. That's what he means to say, although he realises he's not done it well. "What I meant is that he won't remember spending time here, and neither will you. It won't change the lives you go back to. I'm sorry."

"Yes, Jacob, I caught that part," she tells him stiffly. She did. And she'd even carried it a bit further to draw conclusions, but that doesn't mean she's interested in sharing them. Worse, he means it to be kind, and it's anything but.

She has to leave Jesus here; she can't take him home again, safe, with a future of his own. The only place he has to go besides here is a coffin, despite whatever plans they've made to stay sharp, be ready. Carver is a whole different issue because he has his own group and they've chosen to roam, chosen to let the new world have them wholesale, but they know the score on that one. Their alliance is short lived, and very specific.

He means it to be kind. She holds up two fingers: second question. "Forty three."

The words are so much like his sister that he almost laughs, but he knows full well that if he does, it'll be worse for him. At least, it would be if Ro was anything like Evie. Still, he doesn't take her tone to heart, giving a one-shouldered shrug. All he can do is tell her his experiences, he doesn't know she's already well aware. If she's going to have a strop about it, that's not his fault.

"Why did you keep count?" He knows that the next question is why- but that's why did you kill them, and he imagines the reason is the same as his - because there was no choice, kill or be killed, or your friends and family will die instead. He's far more interested in how she knows that number so exactly.

She's already well aware because of him; because he told her he didn't remember anything while he was home, that it all hit him when he came back. When he was already here. She extrapolated from there, and still doesn't like the conclusions she came to in the process.

She drops her hand back into her lap, picking at the edges of her splint where common use has begun to wear at it.

"At first it wasn't something I was doing on purpose. In the early days it was just... panic more than anything, and I can still remember each of them. I can tell you when and where and why and how. Then I think it was... kind of a way to rationalize, you know?" She smooths her thumb over the velcro strap across her palm.

"'I'm not a monster, it's only been six people, I had no choice.' Then I didn't want to be a monster, so I decided I would always remember, so I wouldn't lose something. Now it's people who tried to kill me or my people and couldn't get the job done, or maybe a mix of all of it." She looks up, unashamed, calm. "It's just something that helps me."

Edited 2022-11-01 14:39 (UTC)

"You aren't a monster." He says it carefully, so she understands he means it, that he's considered it. He can't tell her he's seen what monsters look like, seen them change from normal children into devils, he can't say that because he can't bear to think of Jack like that yet, as a boy beyond saving.

He swallows a little thickly but resists the temptation to reach for the glass again and down the rest of the booze.

"If it helps, to remember why and who, when and how, keep doing it." He tells her, and gently, slowly reaches across to touch her hand.

This is not an area of her life that Rosita has any doubt about these days; it helps that they're years removed from the last time her community had to actively go to war, helps that she's learned that she can set it down when she doesn't need it and pick it up when she does. She doesn't crave it. She doesn't leap to killing as a way to solve every problem. She can still work as part of the right group.

The moment his hand moves towards her she's watching it, first just her eyes ticking up automatically, then a faint furrow of her brow as she registers there's a note of something more in his voice, something pained as she works out what he's doing. In the end she leaves her hand right where it is, and looks up to meet his eyes.

"It does. Sometimes I look at someone I'm thinking about going through - one of those guards in the pit, for example - and I think, are you worth being number forty-four? Mostly the answer is no." She presses her lips together, taps her fingertip gently against his knuckle. "The number was thirty-nine before we went into the pit. So sometimes the answer is yes."

He let's his hand stop there, before meeting hers. It rests against the couch cushion, blunt nails catching on the fabric. It's not her job to offer him any comfort, she's not Vrenille or Chris or Vanessa who would take his hand in theirs, bolster him with that kindness. Not when, in truth, he should be trying to bolster her. That makes him take his hand back and try go push down the thoughts away, focus on her.

"Sometimes it has to be yes. And sometimes you can just knock someone out for half an hour and that'll do the trick," He agrees, "But sometimes you don't want them getting up again."

More often than not in his experience, because he knows he'll likely have to fight them a second time if he let's them get up. If he finishes the job they stay down and donr stab him, or anyone else, in the back.

"Vrenille told me. What you did, he was... I don't know if impressed is the right word. But you got the job done with what you had. You didn't mess around. That's... that's not always easy."

She lets him withdraw, certainly, and pulls her own hand back into her lap too. She has no idea what he's thinking, what he wants; she doesn't need bolstered about something she's learned to accept as not only necessary, but much preferable to the way a lot of people in her world live. There are people who never leave the community walls.

Those people will die the moment any hardship hits them. Not Rosita.

She raises an eyebrow, and the expression she makes then is the shape of a smirk except this one doesn't quite reach her eyes either.

"This was the fourth time I've been held prisoner by one group of assholes or another. You should see what I can do with my belt buckle if I have to." Some of her fashion choices aren't fashion choices at all in the end. This time, though, they gave her back a better weapon. "That's what I learned when I had to grow up: the world doesn't give a shit. It just moves on, always. You can lay down and die or you can go with it, and I'm not ready to go yet."

He thinks about that. What would you do with a belt buckle.

"I'd use it like a knuckle duster, myself. With the prong between index ad middle finger. That's a punch that'll send someone reeling." It's a good idea too. "The belt itself? Depends how thick it is, how strong. Good for strangling someone. And obviously as a makeshift restraint."

The options are listed, ticked off. Anything and everything can be a weapon. The fork she used to eat her cake, take an eye out or stab them in the neck, or the thigh where the major artery is. The sofa cushions can be used to smother someone. The cake shoved into their mouth to choke them. It's easy, really. Especially easy when you've been taught since childhood to think that way.

She had to grow up, she says. He wonders what she was like before, when she was training to do all this legal work. Does she even remember that old life?

"Why did you choose to be a paralegal?"

She flashes something that's almost a grin, miming a bullseye with a finger pistol pointed at him and her thumb on the trigger: "That's exactly what I did. I just needed it to work long enough to put someone down and get my hands on their gun, and that's what happened. Back when there were still bullets anyway."

Rosita is not a large person so her belt is lightly functional at best; it holds her knife in place but that's about it. All the same it's always double-pronged and sturdy, with a buckle the width of her palm.

Then he asks a question that catches her... not completely off guard, but the way she blinks about it when she's readily fielded other questions about walkers and survival and things most people would consider much harder subjects is probably more telling than she'd like. Most survivors don't talk about the old world anymore. There's no point unless it's a skill that carries over.

Although apparently, now it does. "Oh, uh. It's... it might be complicated. And feels stupid now," she hedges while she tries to find her metaphorical footing again.

The finger-gun has him smiling too, despite the darker thoughts that previously consumed him. "Great minds think alike."

But then as she considers what he's asked, he sees the hesitation and the uncertainty. He's not sure of she simply doesn't remember or if she's embarrassed about it, which is what her words indicate, but she is playing for time. And he decides its not something that she has to share, not something pressing.

"It was an idle thought. You don't need to worry. I... never had the choice, right? Most people in my time don't. You get a job in the local factory or in the mine or your dad's bakery and that's what you do." A shrug, to brush it off. "I just wondered why you picked that. It sounds more interesting that factory work. Or bakeries."

She's not ashamed, although it does feel two steps past obsolete these days. If she wants to make a difference now, she does it directly, by picking up a weapon or a tool and going and doing it with her own two hands. She doesn't read through five dozen obscure volumes of local law and ten dozen failed briefs and try to find the one phrase that will make a difference that hundreds of people before and along with her couldn't find before.

It feels really stupid to let a government take someone she loves, someone hard working and who will be in danger if they're sent back to where they came from, just because 'it's the law,' and to try to make it stop by using words written on paper.

"It was interesting," she allows. She'll give it that. "But I would have liked something that I could use when the dead came back." Dismissive, glad to have something to move onto, to not have to try to explain her mother or immigration laws or racists - although god knows this last isn't new to him by his own admission.

"It's worked out, but I'd like to know what kind of witchcraft makes a freaking cake happen."

"I suppose that to have been better prepared, you'd have needed to know it was going to happen." Jacob muses, "And by the sounds of it, no one did."

Just like a lot of diseases, people can't know when they will hit. Some things are ticking bombs: a thousand people using the same well and without proper sanitation? A butcher's shop without refrigeration. But you can't predict everything.

"There's a lady here, Persephone. She could tell you. She's good with all sorts of bakery things. Used to make biscuits and cakes a lot, back when we both worked for the same bloke." She probably still does, but not on that sort of scale any more.

"No," she says, quietly. "No one did."

But that's water under the bridge now and they just have to deal with it, which she's excellent at doing. She smiles at mention of Persephone, but chances of her actively seeking this woman out and asking about baking are low. Not nonexistent, but especially right now when Rosita feels at capacity with people she doesn't know and asking them for things, baking doesn't seem that important. She's not likely to have ingredients available anyway when she goes home, and won't remember it regardless apparently.

"Is there anything else you want to know?" He skipped the third question, she realizes, which could be a mistake on the road; in her case though, he's right about her reasons, and they're not on the road.

She can't put her existence on hold while she's here. She could be here for months, or even years. So what if she isn't going to remember it when she goes back, that doesn't make it worthless. He'd argue that, if she made her thoughts known, but she doesn't, so he can't.

He appreciates he's getting to the point of staying past his welcome, and she probably wants to attend to things that aren't answering his questions.

"No, I think you've covered everything." He says, casting an eye back over the papers on the coffee table. "And dinner was delicious. I'll look forward to the spicy version next time. And maybe... well, maybe before then I'll take my turn in sorting out a meal."

It's not that she's completely unwilling, so much as she's not willing to just throw herself in yet. She's been tricked too many times, she's been fooled into giving over pieces of herself she never had before, she's been convinced to relax and then dumped on her face.

So she doesn't seriously entertain learning to bake from anyone, but he compliments her cooking and she chuckles as she pushes up to her feet and crosses back to the kitchen.

"Let me pack some of this up for you to take with," she says, not a question, but a gift. It would have meant more, back home. "We'll ease you into the spice, just to be safe." And then she glances over and smiles; it's novel, having someone else offer to cook her anything, even if it's not the most solid endorsement or offer she's ever heard.

"I'd eat it," she promises. "I'd like that."

"Oh. Thank you. You don't have to." He says, pleased with the kindness that he wasn't expecting, getting up to take the empty plates and the glasses into the kitchen. He csn at least make himself useful by setting them in the sink and beginning to wash them. "Sharing food is a kindness people don't understand much here."

He smiles, shaking his head.

"I won't cook. But I know some great curry places in the Down. It's not quiet Indian food, but it's very, very close."

"They've never had to wonder where their next meal is coming from - not really." Even poverty, just outright not having the money to buy food that still exists nonetheless, is different from there being nothing. Rosita holds the tupperware out to him when she's done loading it up with what she thinks she and Jesus won't eat between them.

"I haven't had much curry, and not for a long time. That'd be... nice."

He nods, because that is what he understands the future is like. Food is in abundance, something that seems to him incredible, woth the population being as big as he's told it gets. Here is like that, the shops always seem to have food. The unsettling thing is that no one knows where it comes from.

Its part of the reason he wants to try to grow something. Keep some chickens. Something. If they sign this contract, if he gets Hollow, then perhaps that's possible.

"Thank you. For the food. And the company. And talking the contract through. When we sign it, I'll bring curry."

And woth that, he will leave her, give her some privacy and walk back to the Down, turning over the events of the evening in his head.

It's two more days before Rosita sends him another text - Bring the curry. I have the final copies. - and a time to meet up at her place again.

She's there, a bit more put together herself - dark hair sleek and brushed back out of her face into two low ponytails, a loose but feminine cut henley, tailored jeans and her ever-present knife - when she lets him in but the apartment no messier and largely unchanged, which would make the one change there is a bit more glaring in comparison even if it weren't brightly colored and completely different from everything else about the decor. On the coffee table where they'd gone over the contract before is now a very small, very limited collection of items including half a dozen marigolds and skulls cut out of neon orange, blue, and pink paper on a string around a shot glass half-full of amber liquid and a lit tealight candle.

"Hey - come on in. I hope you were serious because all I have is chips and canned corn."

Edited 2022-11-05 07:00 (UTC)

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