assassin_daddy | Duplicity Inbox

"Yes and no," she answers, running her fingertip along the top edge of the glass. It was a test, once, but Jacob has people here who won't let him die if they have any say in it. He has resources, and they don't revolve around whether or not Rosita lets him stay near her. But its important to her nonetheless.

"And it's not a right or wrong thing. It's -" She shakes her head. He'll see.

"First one doesn't really apply here, but. Well. How many walkers have you killed?" She lets it hang anyway so it can be ridiculous for him, and obsolete for her.

Interesting question, he imagines its very relevant to her world, but he can see in her face she knows it doesn't translate to here, or his own. But he can at least answer it.

"None. But I haven't met any yet so it's not for lack of trying. If we translate that to non-human monsters bent on attacking me? Five. They were creatures from Vrenille's world that turned up here. I don't know how many people I've killed."

He knows that sounds bad, but he's telling the truth. As an assassin, you can't carry that with you.

She meets his eyes squarely while he answers - on the road, it was important to watch for tells, for lies, for uncertainty or infirmness. She meant what she said though: the communities make it a bit obsolete. She knows he's not insane. She doesn't know him well enough to know for sure if he's lying to her.

But she does believe that answer, and doesn't correct his definition of what walkers are; if that's what it translates for him as, then that's as important as the number. Besides, there are those who define them as exactly that.

The corner of her mouth quirks. "That's the second question: how many people have you killed?" Because they are, indeed, two different questions where she's from. They tell two different stories, and this is where the lies usually show up.

"Prempted that one, then." He says, with a little shrug. He assumed that the questions might be about how good at finding food you might be, if you had any medical training or had some sort of useful training, like in engineering or something more relevant to the future she lived in.

But maybe these questions are also a lot about the people who ask them what they needed. What they had survived.

"Like I said, I couldn't tell you. I wouldn't even want to hazard a guess." He's serious about that too. There are, unfortunately, some lives that are more important than others. Maybe he could remember how many missions the Council had sent him on, how many gang leaders he'd had to take out. But ordinary bastards that would kill you for your shoes? Men or women that were cruel by nature and killed because it was easy money? He doesn't know.

Scavenging can be learned, and also there's a certain merit to someone simply surviving long enough to be discovered by a larger group; their physical condition is telling, too. Training can't be changed, and who a person was in the old world rarely matters in the new. Not enough not to be able to find a way to be useful, anyway.

But character? Honesty? Real desire to be a part of the group rather than taking advantage of them? These matter. Rosita nods, accepting the answer. It's not about the numbers, really.

"Why?" He's already told her once. She asks anyway, calm and even rather than accusing, straightforward and simple rather than an obvious trap.

"Is that the third question, or just curiosity?" He asks, intrigued. If she's curious, she knows at least some of the details already, if it's the third question, then she's asking it because that's the game.

"Because there wasn't any other choice. Sometimes, you can knock someone out, if you don't think they deserve death, but if they're working for the bastard you're after, then they're likely to be just as much of a bastard. So you put them down before they do it to you, or before they do it to someone else."

That's all there is to it, in the end. Sometimes, you have to kill or be killed.

So you put them down before they do it to you, or before they do it to someone else.

She almost laughs even though it's not funny, because it is; because she thinks of creeping down dimly lit cinderblock hallways and carefully opening doors to stab the men and women behind them as they sleep in their beds. Because if they wake up, if one of them sounds the alarm, all of her own people are dead. If her people die, Jesus's are next.

We don't want to kill. We don't like it. It happens.

She nods. "It was the third question," she says, and: "Thank you."

"Did I pass?" He has to ask the question even though he doesn't know how relevant it is really, if she still wants to sign with him based on what he's told her, if she has concerns. Frankly, if she did he's sure she'd air them, but maybe she needs a little while to think. He wouldn't be upset with that either, he appreciates it's... a little much.

"What about you? What are your answers?" He has no idea of numbers, although he supposes it's probably pretty high on the monster count, and less so on the human. But he's not sure, not really. He also has no idea if he'll view her differently, but she did say she'd answer.

She chuckles, shakes her head a bit at herself, at the concern; like she said, she's a different person these days. A wildly different person who does not shy from certain things she would have once avoided the same way most people in a functioning society avoid it still.

"You did," she assures him, not knowing how else to explain it. Then she holds up a finger: number one.

"I don't know an exact number on walkers. It's... a lot. When I first got here there was a thing where I was given a piece of paper with three facts on it for someone else, and they were given a piece with three facts on me. One of mine was a kill count, and the other two were true even though there's no way for anyone here to know them, so it's possible that one was too. It put me over five hundred."

Which is not out of the question. She hesitates a moment and adds, "I've worked with explosives a couple times. They aren't all directly or by hand."

The number doesn't seem to shock him, horrify him or impress him. He accepts it as a fact, because he has no reason to disbelieve what she's saying.

"Explosives are a very useful tool to have at hand," He agrees, because he's used them himself. They are messy though, and not ideal for a setting where there's innocent people who might be wandering around. Or children.

"So are traps, if you can rig them. That's not always a luxury I had time for." He pauses, and then because he realises he's not actually even sure, at this point, he's just got a vague idea, he interrupts her in giving the rest of her answers.

"What actually... is a walker? I know it's a body, with a virus. Walking around. But... how?"

This is a question she's gotten enough times here now that it doesn't visibly surprise her, but it's still a bit odd to her; it would be like someone asking what a tree is, or the warmth of the sun. They're always there, they're always a consideration, there is never a day when the wind doesn't carry their scent or the sound of their shuffling and gurgling, when she doesn't have to deal with one for one reason or another.

But she nods to show she understands while she tries to work out how to pack over a decade of near mundanity into an answer he has to ask about.

"They're people who died, and then the virus reanimated them," is the short answer. "There's a sickness that goes with it, that killed... Most of my world. But even those of us that didn't get sick have it, and when we die, it'll bring us back up unless our brainstem is destroyed."

She's put down so many of her friends at this point it doesn't even bear thinking of just one. It's the reason she sometimes checks the side of Jesus's head, because the last time she saw him, Aaron had already done them all the favor and now she can't stop herself.

"They're not human anymore though. There's nothing left of whoever they were. They chase down noise, and movement, and fresh meat. They decompose but until everything literally disintegrates they walk and walk and walk and never stop or get tired." Which can take years, depending on the climate and the weather. "And they're everywhere. Sometimes they group up in bigger herds and just mow down everything in their path. Biggest one I ever saw was easily several thousand strong."

Edited 2022-10-29 20:47 (UTC)

He listens, fascinated and mildly horrified, uncertain what sort of strange disease can so that to a person, what can make a body move like that and act in such a way once life is extinguished. Or where such an illness came from. But he's no scientist and neither is she, he may well not understand a more complex explanation.

"It sounds almost top incredible. It only effects humans? No other animals?"

And indeed: "I don't know a lot about it. It moved too fast and by the time any of us might have been able to stop trying to survive it to ask questions, all the people that could answer them were dead."

But she's friends with Eugene, who comes closest; she does have some answers that others don't.

"Just humans. It didn't even hit primates like it did us. Walkers'll still eat other animals if they can catch them, mind you, so we're fighting for resources with them across the board even though they're not capable of thinking or planning or... anything that isn't walking forward and tearing something living apart."

Except - but she doesn't know what was wrong with the last herd she encountered, the one that almost killed her. That did kill Jesus. She decides not to mention the ones that were whispering to each other.

He can understand that. A disease hitting so hard and fast across the planet that no one had time at all to work out the source, or a way to combat it apart from, well, combat.

"I suppose that's one thing to be glad of- that you aren't also fighting animals." He pauses a moment, thinking on what she'd said abut the massive group of them.

"Are they... learning that is a better way of attacking? The communities you mentioned all sounded like villages, nothing that big." How could they fight so many? Explosives, perhaps, but you'd need a lot. And even then...

"It takes a long time for a body to properly decompose in most circumstances. How long since this disease first hit? If you can keep them at bay, maybe at some point it will be over? Every walker would have decomposed?"

"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."

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CW: undead and sundry to do with them

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