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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Mostly, he's been staying where Sabrina needs him to be. She's dozed off, tucked in alongside him in the chair but, when Rosie speaks, Charlie is still awake, cradling a cup of shitty hospital tea in his hands. Relief floods through him like water, his eyes stinging.

"Oh, thank God," he says. "I didn't know what I was going to do with the two of them if you didn't come back."

Though she's groggy and confused, her heart pounding a little as she takes in the rapid change in her surroundings, Rosie knows that voice. It's one she's missed more than she knows how to quantify, and one that she didn't think she'd ever hear again. For a moment, she just stares at him, taking in the hunch of his shoulders, the way his hands curl around that paper cup, how his eyes grow bright with unshed tears.

"I didn't..." she starts, the words coming out in a froggy croak. Rosie coughs, grimacing at the roughness she can feel in her throat. "I didn't want to stay away. Or leave in the first place."

"I know that, Rosie. We all knew that." A tear rolls down Charlie's cheek and he wipes it away with his sweater pulled over his hand. He takes another sip of his tea and then makes an unconscious face, putting it to one side. "That's so gross."

"Oh no, Charlie," she says, her heart breaking a little as she sees that tear spill down his face. "Please don't cry." She could handle it from Nick, and nearly expects it from Sabrina once she wakes, but somehow seeing her best friend brought to tears over her plight is almost too much for Rosie to take. Her own vision goes momentarily blurry, and if it hadn't been for the way he pulls that face at the taste of his drink Rosie thinks it all might have dissolved into the both of them weeping in each others' arms.

Instead, all she does is breathe out a half-strangled little laugh as he sets the cup aside. "You haven't had to put up with it for...for ages, have you?" she asks, trying hard to make the question sound light. "The tea. Or Nick and Sabrina being...how they are when there's a problem, really. You know what I mean." She smiles, and though it's faint it's also mostly steady. A small victory. "Where I was, where I went when I fell asleep, there were other people from Darrow there. Some of whom had experienced something like it before, and they said that it was only going to last a few days. No matter how long it felt while we were...away."

"It's only been a few days," Charlie reassures her. A few days had been more than enough. At least they'd had her physically here, as proof that she might return. He doesn't know what he'd have done if she'd disappeared without trace. "Long enough for all of us, though."

"More than long enough," she agrees quietly. She looks a little past him, at the curve of Sabrina's body and the pale curls of her hair as she dozes there next to Charlie. She looks at peace, or at least not as frantic as it sounds like she'd been over the last two days, and Rosie's glad she won't have cause to feel it again. At least not for this particular situation.

"I wouldn't have wanted any of you to go through it," she says. "It was...do you remember Jamie, from the Home? We all woke up in the place he came from. Neverland, if you can believe it, but don't tell him it's only a story to the rest of us, it...I don't think it'd be polite."

Charlie nods.

"Neverland? Like...Peter Pan Neverland? Lost boys and all that?" Charlie's eyes widen. "That's...wow."

"Yes, exactly that," she says, a chill going down her back when Charlie speaks Peter's name. She'll never look at that story the same way again, knowing what she does now. "It sounds mad, but maybe no more so than anything else that happens here." Look at what the city had just done, after all, bringing her and so many others to a land nearly all of them had assumed to be fictional.

She thinks again about Anterwold, just for a moment. Wondering, before she pushes it all aside again, fearing another headache if she contemplates it too much.

"In the story, it all seemed so much nicer, a place for adventures with fairies and mermaids and all that, but the...the reality of it, since it's apparently very real, isn't anything like that at all. Peter isn't anything like it. He's..." Another, stronger shiver runs through her, and her stomach lurches unpleasantly before settling again. "He cut off Jamie's hand."

"Wait." Charlie's eyebrows draw together as he thinks it through. "Peter Pan cut his hand off? Wasn't...Captain Hook's name James?"

"Oh, for god's sake, you can't be serious," she says, as that last piece of information slots into place. She waves a hand at Charlie. "Sorry. Not you, you're right, it was James, I just...I always assumed Jamie was one of the Lost Boys, not Captain Hook."

Rosie has to sit with that new information for a moment, everything coming together at last in a way that only makes her feel even sorrier for Jamie. It was one thing to simply be a character in a storybook; another entirely to transform into the villain. At least in Darrow, he had the chance to be something else, to bring about an end that was entirely of his own making.

"Well," she says at last, "I already wasn't going to breathe a word of it to him, but now I'm really keeping my mouth shut."

"Yeah, I think that's...probably sensible, right?" says Charlie, letting out a short huffed breath. "That's a hell of a thing to live with, isn't it? Though, from what you said about Peter, it's not that difficult to see how it could happen..."

"Definitely sensible," she says, shaking her head as though the motion will somehow make it all clearer. "It was all...topsy turvy from how I always assumed the story went. Peter wasn't mischievous, just a horrible little tyrant, Captain--I mean, Jamie, he isn't some wicked pirate king, he's just my friend."

She sighs out a long breath of her own. "But you're right. It's not difficult at all to understand why Jamie...becomes that. Peter's enemy. Not now that I know the things I do."

"Maybe that's how all stories work," says Charlie. "Just depends on who's telling them." That makes sense to Charlie - who's always been the hero of the story in his own head, after all. "You don't know who the villain really was unless you're there."

It sounds enough like some of the conversations she'd had with the Professor about Anterwold and the importance of storytelling--if far less pompous, coming from Charlie rather than Lytten--that Rosie's briefly and quietly amused as she takes it all in. "No, that's true," she says. "It's all about perspective. How things change, depending on whose story's being told, or what's happened to influence everything."

She looks away, towards the window on the opposite wall of the room. "Doesn't make it any less strange when it happens to you, though."

Other than the time he'd spent held captive, Charlie has been pretty lucky with Darrow bullshit. He's escaped mostly unscathed. He reaches out for his cup, takes a sip of his terrible tea.

"I'm sorry it was you again, Rosie."

"Me too." It feels like it's always her, that so many of the terrible things that come to the city end up touching her or those she cares about or both at the same time. Unmarked and unblemished though she is now, as she clearly always was here in Darrow, she remembers the feeling of Jamie's blood drying sticky on her skin. She remembers it as clearly as she does that slick and bloodstained bar floor and the way she and Charlie had held cloth after cloth to Nick's wound only a few months ago.

She doesn't know how to say any of that, not without causing Charlie pain she doesn't think he needs, and so for a moment she says nothing at all.

"If..." she starts, watching him sip his tea and taking in the gentle rise and fall of Sabrina's chest as she dozes next to him, "if you can move without waking her, would you just hold my hand for a bit? I think I need that."

It takes a moment of maneuvering but Charlie manages to extricate himself from the chair, carefully draping Sabrina in the blanket that had been over both of them before he pads over to Rosie's bed. He sits down on the edge of the bed and, gently, takes her hand in his.

He does it the same way he does so many things, gentle and sweet and kind, and even though Rosie had expected it--asked for it--she still has to shut her eyes tight for a moment so she doesn't simply dissolve into tears. "Thank you," she says quietly, her fingers curving a bit against his as they sit there together.

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how can you change what is altered

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