forthsofar | go get your ribbon box, go get your wounded heart

Caleb hates leaving things unresolved. Sometimes, like now, he thinks that's more of a character flaw than anything else. He hadn't wanted this to ruin his friendship with Rosie. He'd said so in... almost every single one of his voicemails.

The flowers that Neil had brought are still in the glasses he's using for vases, but they're wilted, petals littering the counter top along with whatever pollen they're dropping. He's kept them watered, but their appearance matches his state of mind pretty well, of late. (Yes, that's pathetic, and yes, he knows.) He debates clearing them out plenty of times, but it seems somehow rude or disrespectful. They're a gift from Neil.

When he gets the text from Rosie, he sits bolt upright on the couch. He'd called off work to pitifully wallow on the couch, thinking and overthinking about all of this, and he's pretty sure he's been crying, because his face feels tight and a little itchy. There's a cowardly part of him that wants to tell her no, that if she wants to talk, they can do it over the phone. He's honestly not sure if he can handle the full brunt of Rosie's emotions. But he's just going to have to.

He doubts she'd oblige him, anyway. Right now, she's Neil's friend, and he's Neil's ex boyfriend. If Rosie is still his friend, it's not today, so she's not going to be pulling any punches. He responds to her text with I'm home and debates for way longer than he should on whether he should thank her for finally saying something to him. He opts not to, leaving the message feeling short and unfinished to him.

But he changes into somewhat presentable clothes, and wipes his hands over his face. The apartment doesn't look too bad, at least. It doesn't look like he's been wallowing in his own stupid misery this whole time... even though he has been.

The anger that first fueled her lessens a bit in the walk from her building to his, but there's still enough of it left by the time she's at the front doors and heading inside. She knows the way to Caleb's apartment by heart, cutting through the lobby and down the hallway, stopping in front of his door. It's only then that she takes her phone out of her pocket.

"Well, good," she mutters, putting it away again. She raises one hand, and knocks.

She's angry, alright. It's an irritable, knife-point feeling pressing against his sternum from beneath. It's hot, but not the lava-rage he'd been expecting, and not the thunderstorm he's felt from her before. While he waits for her knock, he takes several, centering breaths, so that her feelings down crowd his out. Like most people's, they don't fit in his body properly, because they're not his. And angry like this, Rosie's feelings jab and poke into the corners they don't fit into. But a few deep breaths, remembering what first Dr. Bright and now Obi-Wan have taught him, he's able to push it aside. He's aware of them, but they're not taking him over.

He walks over to the door in time to hear her mutter something to herself, and he pulls the door open the moment she's finished knocking, even before she can lower her hand.

She is, maybe, a little startled when the door opens so quickly--though of course he'd be able to feel her. And of course he'd want to get whatever's about to happen out of the way as quickly as possible. Awkwardly, she puts her hand down, folding her arms, then unfolding them again, looking up at him with something sharp and flinty in her dark eyes.

"Caleb."

"Hey," he says. "Um. Come on in." He steps back, so she has space to enter. He really, really doesn't want any part of this to happen in the hallway. He doesn't really know many of his neighbors, but he doesn't want any of them to hear this, and then start, like, pitying him, or something.

Or, fuck. Call the cops on him.

The invitation was both necessary and not, a permission granted even though Rosie wonders if it wouldn't have been more satisfying to barge in anyway, shoving her way past despite his miserable little protests--but he invites her, and she goes. She can tell at a glance that the apartment's a mess, dead flowers drooping in clumps all along the counter, the pillows on his couch carrying an indent that could only be from his head, a short stack of dirty dishes on the table like he'd started to gather them up and run out of energy. It's pitiful, but Rosie allows herself only a brief moment of pity before she rounds on him again.

"When you said you liked him, I told you one thing," she says, her voice flat and cold. "One thing that was important to me that you do. Do you even remember what that was?"

He looks down when he feels that pang of pity. He doesn't want it. It settles like toffee in his joints, makes him feel sluggish. He takes a slow breath through his nose and breathes it back out again.

"Yeah, I remember," he says. "You said 'be kind to him.'" He feels his chin tremble and he clenches his jaw to stop it, because that's not what this is about right now. He's not going to let himself cry, no matter how much he wants to as he remembers that night.

"Oh good, you do remember," she says, and there's an acid bite to the words. "So what was kind about not telling him about Adam until...you'd been together for months, Caleb! In all that time, you didn't think that he had the right to know about someone you cared about?"

She pulls herself to a momentary stop, staring at him, deliberately not focusing on the tremor in his jaw or the liquid woundedness of his eyes. "And to call it cheating on top of it."

"I wanted to tell him, so many fucking times, but I never knew how, or, or something would come up, a-and..."

These are just excuses, and he knows it. This is nothing like telling someone about his ability. That's a secret people can understand. Keeping Adam from his boyfriend — ex-boyfriend, he reminds himself — is very different, and it'd been hard enough trying to talk this through with Neil, and he'd been as understanding as anyone could be in that situation. Rosie doesn't want to understand, at least not yet. She wants to be angry with him, and she's going to be, until it's burned itself through. But he still needs to explain. He hugs himself, making sure to focus on his breathing so that anger doesn't sweep him up. He doesn't want to fight with her. He wants to just talk.

"I said it feels like cheating because it does feel like cheating," he says. "Even if he's not here, Adam's still my boyfriend. I can't just pretend he's not. I... I honestly thought I could. You wanted me to be kind to him; how is it kind to stay with Neil when I can't break up with Adam? When I find myself thinking about Adam instead of Neil, of missing Adam when I'm sitting right beside Neil?" How is he supposed to be with anyone when Adam is a ghost hanging over them, always?

By now, he's crying, and he's trying so fucking hard not to, fingers clutching at his arm to ground himself, because this isn't a pity play and he doesn't want her to think it is.

"Because saying back home I've got a boyfriend, his name's Adam, and I feel a bit weird about the fact he's not here but I still want to date you, Neil, so can we talk about it? is so bloody hard."

It's easy to snap at him like this, to dispense judgement she knows, in a corner of her mind she's not acknowledging now, she ought to apply to herself in a slightly different form. At least her anger and righteous indignation, combined with Caleb's own sadness, should be enough to mask the twist of guilt she feels just for a moment as he continues to speak. Her expression still set and hard, she looks away as he starts to cry, giving him that little bit of privacy--for the sake of their usual friendship, if nothing else.

"It would've been kinder to be honest from the start, Caleb," she says. "To...I don't know, let both of you go into it knowing that it wasn't going to be permanent. That if Adam showed up one day, it would be over. That there were things you couldn't...be to each other. Something."

It was, actually, he wants to say. It'd been so fucking hard to say. He'd wanted to, so many times, but it'd been so hard, and there's no way he can really drive that home to her. Besides, she's right. It shouldn't have been hard, and it wasn't kind to keep that secret, even if he'd never meant to.

He wipes his hand across first one cheek, then the other, composing himself as well as he can. His careful breathing wavers, and her anger flares inside his chest before he shoves it away again.

"I fucked up," he says. "I know that, Rosie. From the fucking start, I fucked up, but I can't change that." He wipes his face again, sniffles, and angles his body slightly away, like that will help shield him from her feelings. Of course it doesn't. "So I tried to fix it, the kindest way I could."

"I know you did," she says, wearily, the faintest of cracks appearing in the chilly veneer she'd tried to keep up. She sighs. "I know you did. But it wasn't right I knew about him and Neil didn't. Maybe I should've said something before now, but...that wasn't my place, either."

She moves a short half-step, following the turn of his body. "I mentioned Adam without thinking and it was like I'd said something horrible. Neil was...I've seen him hurt, more times than I should, but not betrayed like that. And all because you didn't have the courage to say anything about him."

"I'm sorry," he murmurs. He's run out of steam. That short, aborted step she'd taken had pushed her feelings at him, and he'd only just stopped himself from flinching. He takes another breath and tries not to sigh it out. He's worn and tired, and he wants to bite back at her. Nothing she's said is wrong, but it's also not anything he hasn't been saying to or about himself for the last several days. It's exhausting to hear and feel, and it's not getting any better any time soon.

"I'm sorry you had to experience that," he says instead. The weariness she feels — that they both feel — is bleeding into his voice, but he still means it. He sniffles and wipes his face again.

"I shouldn't have been put in a place where I had to," she says, with less bite to the words than they might have carried a few moments prior. She knows that, and knows he knows it too. "But I did it, I...took that on, because Neil's my friend and I love him."

Rosie sighs again, looking up at Caleb. "Kind of like how I came here to shout at you because I love you and you're also my friend. Even though I shouldn't have had to, because you shouldn't have been an idiot."

He nods, body still angled away from her. Her anger is cooling, slowly — too slowly for his taste, honestly, but at least it is. He has the urge to snip at her for the name calling, but that's not productive. And maybe he's not great at maintaining productive thought patterns when he's alone and wallowing, but he's not going to risk further damaging his friendship with Rosie by being petty and wounded.

He's done enough damage to it already.

"I know," he says, voice soft and quiet. The truth is, if she does feel any love for him at all, he can't feel it under everything else. That's probably the most depressing part.

"Okay," she says, and doesn't try to pull him back as he turns further away. It hurts, and the fact that it hurts is irritating--why should she be the one punished, when it's Caleb who's in the wrong?--but Rosie senses it's not the time to push much more than she already has.

"Neil said you wanted to be friends," she says after a long silence. "I hope you can be, eventually."

Caleb nods again. "Yeah, I hope so, too," he says. His voice is still pathetically wet, but he's mostly stopped crying. "I, he asked, if we could, and I want to, too."

He wants to tell Rosie that he still loves Neil, but he's afraid of the scoff, the roll of her eyes, the 'you've got a nice away of showing it.' He's still breathing carefully, still making sure her feelings don't sweep him up — but that doesn't mean they don't still hurt. He feels bruised, and he doesn't know how to make it stop.

"At his pace, though," he adds softly. "I'm the one that hurt him, so. His pace."

"Of course, at his pace," she says. "He deserves that much. Everyone does."

Rosie watches Caleb hunch and sniffle, standing in the middle of the pathetic ruin of his living room. Though there's still a hard nugget of anger resting at the pit of her stomach--at him, and at Neil, and a bit at herself, along with all the situations where simple honesty might have solved a problem before it began--even that is fading quickly. "You'll...sort it out," she says, awkward as she loses hold of a little more of her fury. "Whatever it has to be from here. Both of you."

He nods again, but he's not looking at her — hasn't looked at her for more than a glance or two since he'd half-turned. A part of him is trying to erect a wall between them, to soften the steady, uncomfortable fit of her feelings in his body. He's never felt her like this before, and it makes him feel weak and heavy as emotions that shouldn't belong to her muscle their way into his limbs and his chest.

Slowly, like it's painful, he steps the short distance to his table and sits down.

He should ask her to leave. He should be alone right now, so he can get these feelings out of him and be more himself again. Then, maybe, he can clean his apartment and air it out of the stink of his misery — literally and empathically. He should ask her to leave.

"You're my first friend here," he says instead, staring at the tabletop. The whorls of the wood grain remind him a lot of the different feelings Rosie's feeling the longer this conversation goes on. "I've known you longer than anyone else in the city. I've known you longer than most of my friends back home, at this point. Is... is that ruined, now?"

He doesn't mean to sound so small, so pathetic and afraid, but he is. His green eyes are huge with tears as he finally looks up at her. It's no less than he deserves, he thinks, for his own cowardice, his own idiocy, to cost him not one, but two friendships. He's just lost Neil. It was his own fault, but it was still a loss. He's not sure he can handle losing Rosie, too.

He starts to walk away, and it takes effort not to chase after him, follow him the short distance to the table. She always would have, before, without even thinking about it; they existed peacefully in each other's orbits because they were friends, closer friends than they ever expected to be, and that had meant something to them both. But Caleb walks away, and Rosie doesn't follow, and the distance stretches out between them.

It doesn't get any better when Caleb actually starts talking. Rosie bites her lip against a flood of words, forces herself--again, always again--to listen even as her stomach clenches. "Caleb," she starts to say, and then he looks up at her with tear-filled eyes and she's closing the space between them after all, leaning down to seize him in a tight, fierce hug.

"I wouldn't be this mad at you if you weren't my friend, you stupid boy," she says, her voice a rough and shaky whisper in his ear. "Shame on you for thinking otherwise."

He breaks down, this time. She hugs him tightly, and he reaches his arms up, clinging to her. The angle for him is a little awkward, and he sort of clutches to the back of her shirt, but he can't care right now. He starts to sob; the sick swirl of everything from the last half hour — the last week — finally pours out of him. This time, when she calls him stupid boy, it doesn't hurt, it doesn't ping that self-deprecating part of him that'd drank up 'coward' and 'idiot' so readily. This time, they're almost fond. The words make a crack in Rosie's feelings, and now, there it is. Her love for him, that gentle, silver warmth bleeds into him and slowly begins to wash against the aches that everything else had left behind.

He's babbling, he realizes too late to stop, telling her he'd never meant for this to happen, it'd all just gotten away from him, and he's so sorry. The words just spill out of him until they don't anymore, his regret and his sorrow and his confusion tripping over each other to be heard until they finally peter out, and he just clings to her instead. Maybe he's expecting too much — maybe she's still too angry with him to accept any of this, but she's hugging him, and right now, that's all he can let himself focus on.

It doesn't matter what he says, or how much of it she's even able to understand amid the sobs and sniffles. Rosie holds onto him, and listens, and lets him cry--just like she'd done for Neil far too many times before, and for Sabrina, and allowed other people to do for her when she needed it most. It isn't forgiveness, and it isn't agreement, and it doesn't wipe away all the reasons she has to be upset with him or with herself. But holding onto him helps them both.

He doesn't let go until his breathing has settled from the hitching, post-sob panting into something a little more natural. Even then, he's reluctant, like if he does, she'll start yelling at him again. But he has to, eventually, if only to grab a napkin from the holder in the center of the table so he can wipe his face and blow his nose.

"Sorry," he mumbles once he has. He feels cored, now. Not just empty of his own feelings, but actually carved out. Bits have remained behind, like meat clinging to bone, but mostly, he just feels... numb.

It's not better.

"Don't apologize," she says, an echo of her conversation with Neil the other week, though the context had been both different and the same. When he lets go of her to blow his nose, she takes a small step back, going to the chair on the other side of the table and sitting down. Her hand rests on the table's wooden surface, an invitation he can take or reject.

"It wasn't fair to put me in the middle, and it wasn't right to keep Adam from Neil, and I know you know both of those things but I'm saying them anyway," she says. "And I forgive you."

He grips her hand, wanting, needing that anchor, and he's so fucking grateful that she's offered it. He listens to her, then takes a slow breath and lets it out shakily.

"Thank you," he whispers. There's someone else he wants to forgive him, too, but he feels like that's too soon. Eventually, he and Neil probably will be friends. Eventually, Caleb will be able to think of Adam and not feel haunted by him. But right now, he's just glad that Rosie doesn't hate him, and isn't disgusted by him.

He feels like it takes a long time before his feelings start to trickle back into his body. There's that familiar shame he's felt all week, guilt, too, and sadness — a unique mix of sorrow and depression, tinged with regret. But he still believes he made the right choice, as hard as it was at the time and as hard as it is now to deal with the consequences of that choice. He needs to work on himself, really and genuinely, before he can be with anyone the way that they deserve.

After another moment or two of sitting quietly, he sniffles and looks at her.

"Can I ask... um. Why did you feel guilty? Earlier. You don't— you don't have to say," he adds, fingers tightening almost imperceptibly on hers, like he's afraid she'll pull away. He is.

She squeezes his hand when he thanks her, giving him the space he needs to sort through everything he's feeling, to put it all in its proper place and let go of what needs to be discarded. She can see it settle in his face; not contentment or some kind of naive hope, but something like quiet resolution. When he finally speaks, Rosie looks back down at the table, a rueful smile on her face. She sighs.

"You're really too good at that," she says. "I'm not...I've been over it with more people than is really right for it to have taken already, so it's no use going into details again. Basically, I realized I was judging you for something I maybe, a little bit, ought to judge myself for too."

It's the way she says it, not the way she feels about it, that tells him she doesn't want to talk about it, so he doesn't ask if she does. He nods, though, and so she knows he's there if she changes her mind, he says, "If you ever need, like, an ear, I'm here for you, okay?" Maybe he's not the top of her list, right now, but at least he's put the offer there, and he means it, genuinely.

"I know that," she says, shifting her hand in his to graze her thumb along the side of his hand, gentle and affectionate. It's a kinder offer than she might deserve, after all the shouting she'd just done, but it's one she's more than willing to accept. "And I appreciate it. Really. I'll let you know if I need to talk after all."

She laughs, soft and mirthless. "Well, I do, but it should be to Sabrina and not you. But you know what I meant."

"Yeah," he assures, "I do." He takes a slow breath, feeling himself slowly begin to normalize. Soon, it's enough to say, "Hey, d'you want some tea? I... really need some tea." He's hesitant to let go of her hand. It feels like a lifeline, an almost literal olive branch, and he doesn't want to lose that just for the sake of making tea, so he doesn't move until he knows whether she wants some, too.

It's clear Caleb needs the tea more than she does--and that he needs the excuse to make it even more. She nods, squeezing his hand again, gently. "I'd love some tea. Whichever one you're making for yourself, I'm not picky."

He nods, and it takes him another minute or so before he moves. When he does, it's with a deep breath and some reluctance as he lets go of her hand and goes into the kitchen. He putters around a little slower than usual, but eventually gets the water boiling, two mugs of herbal tea side by side on the countertop. He sets out the things he knows, by now, that Rosie likes in her tea.

He leans against the counter while he waits, and watches her.

"I'm not trying to be pathetic for pity points," he says, sounding a little more like himself. He sounds a little wry, but his expression is still drawn and miserable. "I'm just actually this pathetic."

"I know. I've seen your apartment in this state before, remember," says Rosie, echoing his wry tone as she turns in her chair, watching as he sets out the tea things. It feels like getting back to normal, letting go of more of the righteous anger she'd been carrying on Neil's behalf and allowing her usual affection to return in its place. "At least there's not one of those microwave pastry things down the back of the sofa this time."

Caleb makes a little face — at himself, not her — and looks around what he can see of the place. "Yeah, I... tried to be a little more conscientious, I guess."

It helps that this was just a breakup — 'just,' like it isn't that big of a deal, but compared to what happened to Michael, Caleb isn't sure it is. Or maybe it's just a different kind of big deal. He doesn't really have a frame of reference for 'my best friend was kidnapped by a secret lab and then cut open' vs 'I broke up with my boyfriend because I'm hung up on a boyfriend in a different city.'

"This city is fucking weird," he mumbles, shaking his head.

go get your ribbon box, go get your wounded heart

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