forthsofar | 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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"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."

how can you change what is altered

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