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[assassin_daddy]

Jᴀᴄᴏʙ Fʀʏᴇ "I'm no criminal. I just do as I please."

 

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[handleyourshit]

"It's not always religious," she answers, and when she looks up from where she's knelt to be able to reach it better and sees him watching but coming no closer, she tips her head in invitation. Yes, it's personal. It's also meant to be shared, and the people she has to share it with is extremely limited.

"I mean obviously it is for a lot of people, but it doesn't have to be. It isn't for me." She doesn't have the luxury of right or wrong, heaven or hell, sin or virtue. She just does the best she can and tries to stay alive. "It's just... nice, to think of them again, and think that maybe they're thinking of me too."

The little tea light is almost out, and Rosita has a new one sitting nearby ready to light. It makes the whiskey shine beside it.

"They can still come, if everyone wants it badly enough. They're still who they were in life: it's easier for some, harder for others. We ease the way because we love them. When we can't, they understand because they love us." It's a bit of a rationalization, but she says it anyway, and hopes it's true.

[assassin_daddy]

Jacob sees the gesture and gets up, using a paper napkin to clean his hands of any crumbs before approaching. She says it isn't religious, but it does seem sacred, and he knows those are two separate things.

He kneels with her, between the sofa and the coffee table, still watching as she changes over the candle.

"It is. Good to remember them, I mean. And hope they are happy." Healthier than they were. What sort of man would Jack be, if he hadn't been so ill? If the madness hadn't consumed him? Happy. Wild, a bit like Jacob had been, charming too. Probably in trouble every other minute.

He finds that there's gathering tears in his eye, and he doesn't trust himself to speak again before he wipes the moisture away.

[handleyourshit]

Rosita has absolutely no idea what happens to people after they die; she has never pretended that she did, and before she came to Duplicity she was ever more certain that it was nothing. This place, of course, blows it all entirely out of the water but she hasn't been able to work that in yet, so she ignores it for the time being.

She feels the heaviness beside her before she actually consciously registers that he's wiping tears away, but she knows what to do with that. She sits, and she makes space, and she acknowledges that no matter how many people she's lost she does not know what he's feeling right now by not saying a single word about it.

When his grief has risen to the point he might make some kind of noise, sniff or cough or something else, she starts talking in a low, steady voice.

"When I was a girl, Mama had what felt like entire photo albums of our ancestors, and we'd build our ofrenda together, and she'd tell me stories as she set out each picture. Some of them were stories that had been told to her by my abuelos, her parents, and to them by theirs. Some of them were her own. It let us keep our family close, which is really the point even if you don't believe in the dead being able to find their way back in any real way." She wishes she'd had more patience for it, then, but children rarely do, and then her mother's picture was added to the display.

"I've lost... so many people. It's hard to think about them all so I usually don't. I just keep going because if I let myself miss them, I think I'd lay down and die too. It's the same for most people back home. But I still think about those stories Mama told, and... I think maybe there's space for it, now. Here. If we want there to be."

[assassin_daddy]

He's glad of the distraction. He wasn't so caught up in his own thoughts that he'd forgotten about her there, and Victorian sensibilities mean that he needs to get a handle on himself, calm down, stiff upper lip and all of that nonsense. Her words are enough to pull him back from memories of his son, and he takes a deep breath and turns his attention to her.

He doesn't know anything about his own family, not really. He knows what his father was like. He knows a little about his mother from what his grandmother would tell them when they were small. But other than that, he doesn't know anything. They don't have photographs. There was only one sketch of his mother, but he doesn't know what happened to that when his grandmother passed. All he knows, really, is that they were assassins. That's how they lived, that's how they died. He always wanted something else, something normal, but maybe he can have that through the stories she remembers. And maybe it will help both of them.

"I would love to hear them," He says, voice soft and a little unsteady before he fully gets a grip, "If you want to tell them."

[handleyourshit]

It would be easy to say that she doesn't - and true, too. She's spent a lot of time learning to never linger, never wallow, but to keep going. Don't ever look back. Don't yearn for what no longer is and never can be again.

She looks sidelong at him though, searches his face a moment, and thinks maybe she can make an exception this once.

"I'll try," she says, "But this holiday isn't about just one person. It's about the living, too. About the people we still have beside us." Just say it, Ro, she chides herself, and so: "Will you trade me? We can work through it together. Remember and honor together."

[assassin_daddy]

Not looking back and not lingering in the past is one thing, but shoving it out of mind entirely? He doesn't know if that works either. Who they are and where they came from is something important to most families, and it seems it certainly was for hers. To forget everything they did, all the things they achieved? That doesn't sit right with him.

He nods, when she speaks to him, taking another deep and calming breath to try and control himself, get a grip on himself.

"I... I think that sounds like a good idea." He says, and looks from her to the ofrenda. "Is there a set way to do it? A way to tell stories, or something like that?"

[handleyourshit]

She thinks maybe in some families there were, but as for hers? She shakes her head: "No. It's whatever you want to share, whatever's important enough to you to remember. Mama used to take each picture from its place on the wall one by one, and as she arranged them on the ofrenda, she'd tell me the story that went with it."

Which is not the story she'd like to tell about Reyna Espinosa, but she thinks her mother would approve that it's her legacy now anyway. They don't have pictures. Even if Rosita had had time to grab them out of her apartment in Dallas, she would have lost them a dozen times along the way from Texas to Alexandria, where she again has walls to hang portraits on - or here, if she had a mind to do so.

She presses her lips together a moment, wiping her palms down her thighs where she's knelt as she thinks, sifting through the years to find the thread to start.

"My favorite was tío Humberto. He had his mule with him, Guapo, his back piled high with packs and his tongue hanging out around the bit, like this." As a child she'd mimic the animal's face with her own, and her mother would do the same, and they'd laugh. Rosita sticks her tongue out now and smiles a moment after. "They worked for the miller in the town, carrying goods to customers and carrying back whatever was traded for them. There were chickens running between Guapo's hooves, and Humberto was trying to look serious but there was always mischief behind his eyes."

[assassin_daddy]

Pictures are nice, they put faces to names and stories, but they aren't the be all and end all. The important act is the repeating of the stories, the memory, the sharing of it, or so he thinks. Those are what keep people alive in the hearts of those that come after.

They've not known each other long, hardly any time at all, and the times he's met Rosita they've talked seriously, and she's been sometimes a little reserved. So he's not expecting her to stick out her tongue like that, a wonderful impression of a mule, and he can't help but laugh as she smiles. That is clearly all part of the story.

"I can't help but think Guapo and Humberto were a well-matched pair. All the donkeys I've ever known have had mischief in mind."

He's not sure if there is more to her story, but he thinks he has something he can tell her, something in a similar vein.

"My grandmother- we called her Nani, because she was Welsh- she had this little cottage on a hillside in the middle of nowhere. The hills around were covered in scrub, heather and thorn bushes, and you couldn't grow anything. But she had this little garden at the back, with flowers and vegetables and whatnot, and she'd spend every sunny moment out there, messing around with something, weeding something else, or talking to her bees."

[handleyourshit]

"Donkeys are assholes," Rosita agrees, chuckling. She hadn't known any then. She's known one now and the two of them learned to avoid one another, but she still loves the memory of Guapo who died two generations before she was born.

"Did you spend a lot of time with your Nani?" she asks, because his at least is an active memory, while hers is a hand me down in this particular case.

[assassin_daddy]

"That's what I said," He laughs, "But maybe that one was better behaved than most. Do you have any more stories like that?"

He nods, in reply to her question. "She raised us. Until we were six, and my father got back from India." He's not so hurt by it any more, but the fact Ethan didn't come back immediately after his wife died, never came back for his children... it had made him hate the man for a long time.

"So we played in that garden, helped her in it. Not very well, because we were too small to be much use." He says, and he smiles a little more. "She used to get me to help her plant Daffs. Daffodils. And in summer we'd all cwtch up in the evening under the apple tree, and she'd tell us stories."

[handleyourshit]

Every family, she thinks, should have had a grandparent that tells stories in the evenings. It makes her smile go a bit sad to think that most families - stitched together in a world overrun by the dead - won't have grandparents at all.

"If I can find a daffodil, I'll add it," she promises. An apple if she can't, she decides.

"We had five Marias hanging on our walls," she continues, to answer his question. "Abuelita Maria Consuela had the best garden though. She grew dahlias in every color of the rainbow and enough nopales to feed the entire village, which she did. She married abuelito Rodrigo when they were fifteen, in the little church in the town square, and then again thirty years later with Maria Conseula's dahlias in a carpet down the steps."

[assassin_daddy]

They might not have grandparents who share blood, but they may well have those who love them just as much, who don't care about who caried those children as long as they can do right by them in whatever way they can.

"Thank you." He says, and he means it. He's not seen any daffodils here but spring in Duplicity normally means you have to be careful of fertility drugs. And nothing grows in the Down anyway.

"She married him twice?" He asks, not sure if he's got the wrong end of the stick there or if it's someone else with the same name, as she said there were five Marias.

[handleyourshit]

"Yes," she nods, smiling. "They didn't get to choose it when they were young, but later they did. A repeating of vows."

He'd never seen her goofy like she was a moment ago over Guapo; now, there's a peculiar, soft note of warmth in her voice for two people who lived their entire lives together and only loved each other more as they went. It blends away into her tone a moment later, a drop of white paint into water: not gone, but no longer discernible.

"Abuelito Rodrigo was the mayor of their town for a month when he was twenty. He was voted in by a show of hands in the cantina across from the church, and quit rather than admit that he couldn't read. No one remembers why any of that worked, but it was probably a prank from his best friends, Joaquin and Lito."

[assassin_daddy]

"That sounds wonderful." He says, echoing her smile. It really does sound like dream, even if they didn't get a say originally, growing to love each other, being happy enough to proclaim their vows again? Even though he never knew those people, he is happy for them. Happy that their love is something that is remembered and passed down, and that Rosita has knowledge of it now.

"I suppose not being able to read might be a hindrance." He admits, although he's living in a time where so many people can't. He's sure there are good men and women who could run their village without a need for literacy. "Sounds like a good man though, giving it a go for that amount of time."

He wonders if he got the other pair back for their prank.

"My parents met when they were training. My mum hadn't ever been to a big city before, and my father showed her around. She went from not knowing it at all to knowing it the best out of their group in the year they were there. Before they were all disbanded, took him to the places he'd missed on their original tour, just to show off. But she made up all the historical stories she told him. He caught on pretty quickly, but I think he'd fallen for her by then. That was how my Nani told it, anyway."

He pauses, wondering not for the first time how much like his mother he was, and how much like his father.

[handleyourshit]

Grandmother to parents meeting - Rosita doesn't talk about the past much, but she recognizes circling when she hears it, knows how sometimes it takes easing into something to be able to talk about it. It's still so strange to her just hearing someone talk about being an assassin - casually mentioning training into it, not just themselves but generations before them doing the same - but she can deal with strange.

She smiles. "Did you have any aunts or uncles? Or was it just him, just her?"

[assassin_daddy]

Rosita would be right about circling around a topic, trying fo warm up to it. His grandmother and his parents aren't who he wanted to talk about, but their deaths are long ago, less raw, less unresolved in his heart and in his mind. A way of easing himself into talking about Jack, as well as way of giving all of them their due.

"My father had some siblings, I think. But I never got the chance to met them. My Nani only had my mum, before her husband died."

Families tend to be big, for one reason or another. But assassin Families don't tend to stay that way. He thinks his grandmother was one of many, but he isn't sure, he certainly doesn't know of any stories about them.

"You said there were five Marias? Were their stories about the others?"

[handleyourshit]

"There are," she allows. She remembers some better than others.

"The fifth Maria was my mother's mother, Maria Alondra. I actually met her, although I don't remember her very well - we only visited the once, and she let me help her make tortillas. I remember rolling them out on her countertop, flour up to my elbows and down my dress and in my hair, and she let me sneak bites of mazapan and horchata after dinner. I don't remember her face outside of the photo, but I remember how she smelled, and I remember her hands warm over mine showing me what to do, strong but gentle."

She smiles while she talks, running her thumb over the face of one of the marigolds.

"My mother was Reyna Espinosa," she says, softly. Lovingly. "She's the one that moved us to the United States. She had a green card at first but my father had told her it didn't matter, that he'd marry her and care for her always, but he never did. So she worked and worked and worked to stay, always moving us around, always taking me to different jobs with her. It was just the two of us - she died when I was nine years old. Pneumonia."

[assassin_daddy]

Jacob has a lot of feelings about what he's just been told, sadness over the fact that she only got to meet her grandmother the once, something softer about the way Rosita describes the woman. There's anger too at the man who said he'd be there for her mother and never was, and then shock that in the wonderful future world Rosits lived in for a time people still die of pneumonia.

He takes a moment, processing all of it. He knows his own experiences are very different, and that there's nothing anyone can do about the things that have been and gone but even so, he feels for her.

"I'm sorry. What happened to you, after she passed?"

[handleyourshit]

It's been so long since Rosita let herself think about the life that was - to really think about it. It feels clumsy to her, something she knows how to do but that she has to feel her way through at first, like walking after her leg has fallen asleep or seeing through bright light when she first wakes up. It feels like old pain, familiar and dull.

No one where she's from really asks questions about the old world anymore. If this were Jesus beside her, if it were Carver, they'd take the information and move on from it just as simply; they'd know she doesn't expect anything from them in return. That she's venting something she needs to let go of, or that she's been thinking about, and then they'll all refocus.

Jacob isn't from her world; she doesn't know, just now, if she's more or less grateful for that, only reminds herself of it and clears her throat before she answers.

"She had - I don't know if they were actually her brothers. I doubt it. I called them tío anyway, and they moved me between them when they could, but they had kids of their own. I saved up the money I got from work I did when I wasn't in school, and - did some things I probably shouldn't have, and I moved out on my own as soon as I could." She looks over at him, trying to see what he thinks of any of it, bracing for pity or embarrassment or maybe even judgment.

"They did their best. They really did. But I always knew I wasn't really their kid, and they knew it too, and it was easier for everyone when they didn't have to take care of me anymore."

[assassin_daddy]

She has mentioned that people don't talk about the before times. He knows that it's hard for her, but he thinks it might help him know her a little better, to see where she's come from. What she tells him might be shocking to a future person who thinks there should be some sort of social services in place, but Jacob has never know that sort of organised charity. The experiences she had were the same as thousands of kids on London's streets, and he's not going to hold what she did to survive against her, nor will he judge the men who tried to help her but couldn't balance everything. It's not easy. Not when you already have mouths to feed.

"I... I never lived through that myself. But I saw it. Jack... he was about seven, when I first met him. On the streets, picking pockets. He was the fastest little thief you ever met." He says that with fondness, woth a hint of pride. "And he didn't trust me as far as he could spit. Not for a long while."

Maybe, a hurt, broken little part of him says, Jack never really did trust him.

[handleyourshit]

She fared a lot better than those kids in her time that did fall into those programs, for the most part; people who weren't able to take care of her but did, in fact, care for her is more than kids like Jesus had a lot of the time. And then of course the world ended and she's learned to be grateful she grew up the way she did - people who never had to look out for themselves are mostly dead now, but not Rosita.

People who had a steeper learning curve cut part of themselves off completely to survive, but not Rosita.

She presses her lips together, shaking off the fragments of memory that try to latch onto her like fingers trailing on her sleeve and focusing on him instead.

"Seven?" she echoes. "You didn't know you had him?"

[assassin_daddy]

He shakes his head, glancing at her again, turning towards her and then looking away again. "He's my son. Was. Was my son. But I don't think I am his father. Not... not in the normal sense."

He might be. God knows he went to bed with enough people, but he doesn't think that it's likely.

"It didn't matter. Not to me. We were close, similar in a lot of ways. I took on the role of being his father gladly."

He doesn't know exactly how she will take that news, but it doesn't make a difference. Jack was his son, a brother to Sammy. He was a good kid, despite what he became.

[handleyourshit]

She understands at once, and doesn't think anything more of it in turn. Not that actually birthing - or fathering - a child isn't important or means nothing, but she's watched Michonne raise Judith as her own for years now and seen no absence of love. Hell, everyone raises Judith as their own now that Rick is gone, and she's far from the only one.

Kids need love and care. Everything else is negotiable, so she nods.

"But he didn't trust you for some time," she prompts, putting them back on the path of the tale he was telling.

[assassin_daddy]

"No, and that was smart. It probably helped keep him safe- not trusting people who offered him things." He looks to her again, not asking her about her own experience, but from what she said he imagines there were a number of adults who pretended to have her best interests at heart.

"We worked together once. He picked the pocket of one of my targets, who caught him at it. Knocked him down and tried to beat him in the street. I stepped in and after that we worked together to put an end to him. Jack managed to sneak keys from the man's butler and I did the rest."

He smiles slightly at the memory, how pleased Jack was to have been useful, a hero of a story he could tell his friends.

[handleyourshit]

Even now, Rosita doesn't trust people who offer her things; she and Jack are on the same page with that much.

Her brow furrows at the story though, and she realizes she's being a hypocrite when she wonders why he'd involve a seven year old boy in an assassination; after all, Judith carries her father's revolver, and she damn well knows how to shoot it. Hershel does, too. Some worlds don't have room for children to be children anymore.

"The man was - what's the group you're fighting against called again?"