forthsofar | how can you change what is altered

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how can you change what is altered

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?"

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She fits herself against him, around him, chasing that need just to be close and pull what reassurance she can from the contact. Even having been told by everyone who'd been through something like it before that it was only temporary, that it would end and they'd be returned home, she'd felt the loss of this more keenly than she'd fully realized until now. "I missed you so much," she murmurs, looking first up at him, then over to where Sabrina and Charlie are sleeping. "All of you."

A tiny, pathetic sob finds its way past her lips then, and she buries her face against Nick's chest, her eyes closed tight against the tears that threaten to fall.

Nick waits until she's comfortable, until she's settled, shifting his legs so that she's almost curled into his lap. He drops a kiss into her hair, holding tight to her when she starts to cry.

"We missed you too, Rosie," he says. "Like a part of us."

What he says is true, and only makes her cry all the harder. She is a part of them, and they of her; something finely-tuned that had been thrown out of balance the last few days as she'd lain unconscious. And as she'd suffered, a world away from them. "I'm sorry," she mumbles at last. "I'm getting you damp." Sniffling again, she moves just enough to scrub at her eyes with her free hand before she settles against him once more.

"Have any of you heard about the others?" she asks, once her voice is a little steadier. "Where I was, I wasn't alone. There were other people from Darrow there. Some people Sabrina or Charlie would've known from the Home, along with a few others. If I'm awake, maybe...maybe they are too."

She thinks of Jamie first, of course, hope and fear mingling low in her gut. He had to be just as safe as she was now, and just as unharmed by all that had happened. Darrow was cruel, but she doesn't let herself wonder at what the limits of its cruelty might be in this instance.

"You can get me as damp as you like, babe," he says, gently, his own eyes stinging as he presses kisses against her hairline, her forehead. Once she settles, he combs his fingers through her hair.

"I haven't seen anyone, but I've heard they're all starting to wake up," he says. "Everyone's home. Everyone's safe."

It's the kind of soft, gentle reassurance she needs right now; enough to make her smile even though there's been precious little to smile about the last few days. She nods, breathing easier as he runs his fingers through her hair. "Good," she says, believing him without a second thought. Trusting him, in the way she has ever since the snow and the dark and the way he'd come to find her because she mattered to people who mattered to him.

"As long as we all made it back safe, that's...that's all I suppose we can ask for."

"Everybody safe, nobody hurt," he says, softly, reassuringly, letting that knowledge sink in as he plays with her hair. "Can I...can I ask where you've been or...if you don't want to talk about it, we don't have to."

To hear that nobody had been hurt, and to hear it said with such calm confidence, lets that small bit of hope within her blossom a little more. They were all okay, no matter what had happened back on the Island; Peter's power was confined there, unable to chase them back into the world they'd all begun to call home. Though she still needs to see Jamie with her own eyes, there's less of a frantic force to it now, and Rosie's able to feel a little more like herself again because of it.

"Of course you can ask," she says, moving just enough to look up at him as he keeps playing with her hair. "Talking about it might help everything feel less..." Rosie shakes her head, snagging her lip in her teeth for a moment. "Maybe it'll make it seem more like a bad dream that way." Everyone who'd been through it before, waking up someplace new and terrible, had told her it might. Rosie's still not entirely sure they're correct; still all too able to remember the way Jamie had screamed as she tried to staunch the bleeding ruin of where his hand had been.

"It was an island," she says, starting with the bare facts, the easiest part. "The place my friend Jamie had been, just before he came to Darrow. It's run by...there's a boy, Peter, it's his island, he's in charge. Or believes he ought to be."

"That sounds...ominous," he says, his fingers still moving calmly through her dark curls, twisting them around his fingers, lightly scratching at her scalp. He knows how soothing she finds it. He's known that since before they'd even known what they were doing with each other.

"It was," she says, the simplicity and directness of it almost making her answer sound ten times worse. "He and Jamie had been friends for a time, but then something happened, Jamie grew older and saw how cruel Peter could be. How he'd tire of people, and send them away. Sometimes to be...to be killed." Even talking about it is enough to settle something leaden and cold in the pit of her stomach, and Rosie's glad for that calm stroke of Nick's fingers in her hair.

"While we were all there, he and Jamie fought, and...and he cut off Jamie's hand."

Nick makes a soft sound, proof that he's still listening, proof that he's taking it in. He knows that the life he was used to back home is a more brutal thing than Rosie was ever used to. Not for the first time, it strikes him how different they all, all of these different worlds.

"But he's okay here. He's okay now."

"He'll have to be," she says, and it feels a bit like a stubborn and foolish protest, something the city may use against her or Jamie or the both of them someday. "I'll...once I can go home, once the doctors say I can leave, I'll have to go see him. Just to be sure."

Rosie goes quiet, resting against his chest, feeling the gentle rise and fall as he breathes. It's nearly enough to make her start crying once more. They stay just like that for a minute, then another, before she speaks again. "Nick, is it..." She turns her head, looking up at him, her eyes dark and sad. "Is it too soon to tell you I love you?"

It's something she'd been thinking about for a while, wanting to say it but wanting more to find the right time to do so. This moment now--the two of them as alone as they can be under the circumstances, after a separation neither of them had chosen--feels like it.

She says it and it feels like warmth and light floods through Nick's body. He presses a kiss against her forehead.

"Too soon? Rosie, I think I was in love with you before we came down off that mountain. Of course it's not too soon."

She lets out a soft, relieved breath, unable to keep herself from smiling. "Oh, thank goodness," she says, moving up just enough within his arms to kiss him properly. "I'd wanted to say it for ages, but I was never sure if it was the right time." Admitting that aloud sounds like a much weaker excuse than it had felt within her own head, and Rosie tries to let go of the faint embarrassment of having confessed as much.

"Though now the challenge might be in saying anything else."

"I think I could live with you using it like punctuation," he says, huffing a laugh against her mouth, taking another kiss. "In between every other thought." He squeezes her close. "Of course I love you, Rosie. How could I not?"

She giggles at the thought of it, sprinkling every conversation with declarations of her love for him. Though she knows they ought to be careful given the wires and everything else still attached to her, Rosie allows herself to sink into the way he kisses her and holds her close. "I suppose it's much the same way that it's impossible for me to do anything but love you," she says, a bit nonsensically. The sentiment is still there, though, and more than genuine.

"Because I do. I love you so much."

"Good," he says, holding her close for another moment, still idly playing with her hair. "Have the doctors given you any sense of how long you'll need to be here?" He suddenly really misses Sabrina's aunt Hilda and her knack for healing.

"Some sense," she says, though the last she'd spoken to anyone they'd seemed a little harried, even irritated she was even there at all. "Since all it was, at least in their view, was that I'd fallen asleep for a few days, I don't think they're overly concerned."

It's annoying, having it chalked up to just one of those things Darrow does sometimes--as though that mattered, when she'd been so frightened!--but it's understandable too, in its own way. "They'll probably want to check me over and make sure, but I should be able to go home before the end of the day."

"I'll wait so that I can drive you home," he says, stroking her hair. "I'll drive all of us home." He's not sure when he started thinking of his apartment as home for all of them, but he does. No changing that, now.

And when he says home, she knows instinctively, immediately, what he means. She'll want to go back to Candlewood before too long--to see Neil and reassure him she's okay, to find her phone and hopefully a word from Jamie or any of the others that none of the Island's horrors had pursued them into Darrow--but for right now, the only home she wants to see is Nick's; the only people, him and Sabrina and Charlie.

She loves them all, more than she ever thought it possible to love even one person. More than she ever dreamed she'd be loved herself.

"That sounds perfect," she says, her eyes closing as he strokes her hair. "We'll all go home, and be together."

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