how can you change what is altered

[forthsofar]

Somehow, she manages to stop the bleeding, that strip of sailcloth turning into as close to a lifeline as it's possible for a thing to be. A group of them get Jamie to the ship, to something approximating safety; the pirates have seen this kind of injury before, and know more than the rest of them what to do. It's so easy to let them take control of the situation, to salvage from it what they can.

Clothes splashed with blood, Rosie wanders belowdeck, passing hammocks and coils of rope until she finds a hidden nook in the ribs of the ship. It's narrow and shadowed, barely large enough for her to fit inside, but she climbs in and sits, folding her arms around her bent knees to make herself just that much smaller. She stays there, numb and silent and waiting for whatever happens next. Her eyes close, just for a minute.

When they open again, it's to the sight of a stark white ceiling and a fluorescent light so bright it almost shocks her. There's a slow, steady beeping coming from somewhere nearby, the strange sensation of tape against the back of one of her hands keeping something in place. She lies there in confusion for another moment more, then tries to sit up, the motion slow and full of so much effort she shakes with it.

"What..." she starts, looking to one side of the bed--the hospital bed, she's at a hospital now, somehow--and then the other. "What happened to the ship?"

Comments

[signed_sabrina]

"I can't be angry with him," Sabrina assures her. "I won't be. I know what it's like to have the place you're from," because she can't manage to call it home anymore, "wrap around the people you love here, to try to hurt you by hurting them."

She's quiet as she listens, stroking Rosie's arms, her shoulders, her back.

"Do we need to check on Jamie? He-- he's still at the Home, right? They'd take care of him. And it seems like this place, just-- to have you all afraid and in danger, but safe here, like a bad dream." She tightens her hold on the other girl. "Salem's been beside himself. They won't let him in here. He could go to the Home."

She blinks.

"Did you all fight Peter Pan?"

[forthsofar]

Rosie nods, thinking of the long month that last August had been--for all of them, but Sabrina and Nick especially--and the way one of the worst parts of Sabrina's world had come quite literally to Darrow to roost, to walk a new land in the skin of someone they all cared for. If that never happened again, it would be far too soon.

"Poor Salem," she murmurs, her mouth curving in a small and fond smile at the thought of his concern for her. Even before she'd known quite what he was, Rosie tried to treat him with as much affection and respect as she felt a witch's familiar deserved, and clearly the sentiment was reciprocated, in Salem's own way. "If he can find any news about Jamie, make sure he's..." She trails off, her throat gone tight with worry and misery again. "Make sure it really was all a bad dream, that nothing got...left behind on that island, I'd want to know." Sabrina's arms are tight around her, holding her fast, and Rosie feels more protected than she has in days.

She loves them all, so much.

There's disbelief in the question Sabrina asks next, and that's understandable; despite blundering back home into what she's still certain was some manifestation of the Professor's lifelong work of fiction, Rosie still hadn't thought Neverland or Peter Pan could be real until she'd felt the dirt of the place beneath her feet and seen that hideous, horrible boy go soaring through the air. "Yes," she says simply, because there's no other answer it's possible to give. "Jamie doesn't know it's all a...a story to a lot of us, of course, but for him it was real life. Peter Pan, Neverland, the Lost Boys. All of it."

[signed_sabrina]

"I'll have him do that," she promises, knowing that Salem is likely in the tree nearest to this very room, feeling very surly about being stuck in cat form again. "He likes Jamie, I think, or at least never complained about him."

Sabrina can't really help the way she continues to fuss over the girl in her arms, pressing kisses to her face, smoothing her hair from her neck to kiss her there too, almost feline herself in the need to make sure Rosie's alright.

"I can't imagine," she murmurs, not knowing the depth of dramatic irony in her words, "what it would be like to find out so many people know that about you."

[forthsofar]

"It'd be terribly unnerving, wouldn't it?" she agrees, sounding just a bit more like her old self. "Finding out that you weren't anything but a character in some book to people. I wouldn't like it at all." She wonders again about Anterwold, recalling the headache she'd caused herself afterwards, wondering if the place existed because Lytten had written it or the other way round. Maybe it didn't matter, if both ideas were equally as disquieting--and they were, on a certain level.

She lets Sabrina kiss her as much as she wants, leaning into each brush of her lips or touch of her hand as if to reinforce the contact, to assure her friend again and again that her Rosie is back and alive and completely safe.

"Thank you all for staying," she says, nestling against Sabrina's chest. Her eyes close for a moment, and she just lets herself breathe. "For making sure I wasn't alone."