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[assassin_daddy]

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

 

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[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?"

[assassin_daddy]

"The Templars." He says, "And yes, he was. He was a nasty piece of work that would probably have beaten any pickpocket he caught half to death. And winter would have done the rest."

He knows some people would say that thieves deserved the noose. Jacob doesn't believe that. He never has and he never will.

"He was a quick learner. Wanted to climb every rooftop in London, learn all the secrets the city had. I'd find him outside in the middle of the night practising his aim on bottles lined up on the garden wall, have to shoo him back to bed. And even then he'd want to know about missions I'd done or that Evie had done, stories you know."

[handleyourshit]

"The Templars," she repeats after him like he had the Spanish words she'd used earlier; she's every bit as much learning a foreign language as he is.

Whatever reservations she might have - whatever context she lacks - it doesn't survive being able to vividly picture a boy someone like Jacob might become attached to, and the corner of her mouth tugs upward.

"Better to learn with a teacher than get in trouble by himself, hm?"

[assassin_daddy]

"Better to have a teacher that remembers getting in trouble and can help get you out." Jacob says, the obvious fondness in his tone and the smile on his face only tempered by the recent loss of the boy.

"That's when I first started saying he was my son. There were policemen in the pay of the Templars who would try to get him charged with this or that, and without a parent, those kids end up in prison or debtor's jail. I would go pay the fine and sign a docket to say I'd make sure he didnt do whatever made-up crime theyd pinned on him. And then... well. Then I just adopted him."

[handleyourshit]

That isn't how it would have worked in the old world, but it would have been even simpler in the new; no more documents, no more IDs, no more policemen or bribes with dollar signs on them. And a lot of no more parents.

She settles back against the couch, leaning her shoulders into it and stretching her legs under the coffee table.

"How old was he then?"

[assassin_daddy]

"Nine, almost ten by that point." It had taken time, for Jack to fully trust him, to spend more time at Jacob's home than on the streets, but Jacob had known better than to push too hard. Street kids were smart, they were tough. That's how they survived. Much like Rosita.

He falls quiet, for a moment, letting thoughts, memories of what seems like a simpler time occupy his mind. It wasn't simple of course. Not with Jack getting in trouble, trainees to manage, and not long after that Sammy. But they'd managed it, somehow.

[handleyourshit]

She waits for him to go on, leaving him space to talk about whatever he's thinking about behind his eye, but she's not terribly surprised that he seems to have stalled out for the moment. She watches the candle flame for a few silent moments, considering for herself what - if anything - she wants to offer in turn. More anecdotes of long dead family members? A rainy day memory of her mother?

She breathes out. "For years after the virus, I didn't even know what day it was, let alone have time to do anything like this. I didn't want to do anything like this - we were losing people in droves, faster than I could meet them or learn their names. When shit really hit the fan, I went from cities to camps to groups to just me and one other person for a while, and still people were dying all around me. I hardly wanted to think about it."

A tactic she still uses, though not quite as mercilessly as she did back then just to stay alive.

"But if I'm honest, I could have the last couple years, if I'd wanted to. I didn't. I don't like to think about anyone whose picture I might add to my ofrenda these days. I don't like knowing that I don't have anyone to build it with me. I guess this is me sucking it up." That, and this:

"I chose whiskey as an offering for... a friend. That saved me, and was killed. And I hope that if he can make it through, if he can find me here, that he enjoys it."

[assassin_daddy]

He lifts his head when she speaks, glad of something else to think about. It's worse, far worse, than what Jack did and what he became, but it's not his grief. It's removed, it's not stabbing him in the heart over and over. He knows that makes him sound callous, but it is the truth of the matter.

"It's something I don't think anyone else could understand unless they lived it too. I can't even imagine all the different ways that hurt. And no one could blame you for shielding yourself from that hurt."

"And no one would be prouder than you than your family. For doing this now. It doesn't matter if you could have done it before, it wasn't right for you to do it then. You were taking care of yourself. And like you said they love you. They understand its been hard."

He looks back to the whiskey, and nods, smiling slightly.

"It's a long road. I think whoever it's meant for will be glad of a drink at the end of it."

[handleyourshit]

Like you said, they love you. Rosita swallows, because it was easy when she decided to pour the whiskey that it didn't matter what anyone else thought, she was the only one that knew; she didn't give Jacob any details but she knows them, and she knows there's very little chance Abraham who walk a long road now any more than he had when he was alive just to see her. Just to be anywhere near her.

She swallows again and closes her fingers more tightly around her bent knee.

"I hope so." That her family would be proud, even though she doesn't think they would. That it doesn't matter. That they love her and understand. That he would be glad.

[assassin_daddy]

But the point is, she's still doing it. The point is, maybe he regretted doing what he did. There's so much she can't know. But it's still something she does. And that's the important part.

He reaches out, slow, like he's trying to pet a cat, and then gently puts his hand on hers.

"I hope so too."

[handleyourshit]

She's not expecting it. She doesn't jump, doesn't startle, he moves too carefully for that - but her eyes still dart down the moment he actually touches her, and the lightness of it actually makes the thick feeling in her throat worse for a moment.

But even if she's surprised, even if she wouldn't have instigated, she is a tactile creature after all; she turns her hand over under his, and takes his hand properly in hers.

"I'm... happy you asked. And spoke."