shadows_have_offended | The mortifying ordeal of being known

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ig,
rosie wilson

The mortifying ordeal of being known | for Rosie

Neil calls out of work for the following week, citing the flu.

He thinks about quitting, but that seems awfully rash. He thinks about a lot of things on the long walk back from Caleb's apartment to his and Rosie's. But the brutal agony of feeling broken and fundamentally second string is so familiar that he almost wears it like a coat. The worst part of it is that nobody knows. Nobody in the street understands what's just happened or thinks anything of it, and he goes about the walk in utter, unobtrusive silence.

His whole world has shifted, but it's just his world. Isn't that always how it is?

When he gets back to the apartment, Mercy Beau is almost instantly on him, trailing right behind his heels as he heads into the kitchen and looks for a bottle of scotch and the pack of cigarettes that he's carefully avoided touching since his and Caleb's little argument about it at Christmas. He puts one between his lips without lighting it as he pours himself a drink and then just stares at it.

In the end, he sinks down onto the kitchen floor.

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Caleb texted her shortly after it happened, a message she'd responded to after a long silence with we will talk about this later, Caleb, leaving all his subsequent--and increasingly hysterical--replies essentially unacknowledged. In the last few minutes, she's considered everything from having him soundly killed to forgiving him utterly out of the strength of their friendship, but none of them seem like enough to heal the depths of Neil's sadness. Maybe there's nothing she can do on her own to fix it; maybe all she can do, really, is be there for him like always.

It isn't fair, how good she's gotten at that.

She hears the front door unlock and open, Beau jumping down from where he'd been curled up with her in her bed at the sound. At first, she stays in her room, giving Neil his space for a bit as he moves through the common spaces of their flat. As things go quiet, she steps out into the hallway and heads towards the living room. It's a surprise to find it empty, but the clink of glass against tile a moment later has her moving towards the kitchen.

She doesn't stand over him, doesn't try and say anything, just takes a seat on the floor across from him and waits.

For a moment, after she joins him, Neil doesn't say anything. He sits there with his undrunk drink and his unsmoked cigarette. Rosie's unerring patience feels almost too much for a moment, but more than that Neil feels like maybe he ought to be waiting for another shoe to drop.

It's just that sort of day, isn't it? Might as well.

"I feel like an idiot," he finally says, just this low noise of acknowledge of his feelings. That was the whole problem, wasn't it? He laughs about the irony of it, pulling out his wallet and the flattened matchbook in there to light the cigarette. "Do you want one?"

"You're not an idiot," Rosie says, but she understand the sentiment exactly. She'd felt like that enough before, times where she'd more than earned it and times it never really applied except in her own head, when the weight of her feelings or someone else's was too much to keep hold of. It hasn't even been that long since the last time she felt that way. Barely a month, although that's a different matter than the one in front of them now.

She dithers a bit when he offers her a cigarette, but ends up nodding her head. "Thanks." She's only ever smoked a handful of times, trying it out and ending up largely disappointed, but it feels like the time for it now. Reaching for the pack, she takes one out. "He texted me about it," she says, watching Neil strike the match and light his cigarette. "I haven't said anything back yet, but he let me know once you'd left."

Neil hands over the matchbook to Rosie after he's done with it so she can light hers as well, and he's not sure if he's relieved or wounded that Caleb told her after he left. He's not sure if he's relieved or wounded that she hasn't said anything back, either. They were friends long before he and Caleb were, and whatever's going on right now, that shouldn't effect her.

He knows it doesn't work like that.

"He said he still wanted to be friends," he says softly. "Gabriel said that too, when we broke up. I guess we were, just...not like we were before everything started out. So at least I know what to expect when he moves on to someone better."

Rosie lights her cigarette and rides out the vague disgust that always comes over her with the first puff or two. At least this time, she doesn't end up coughing. She listens as he keeps talking, aware she'd only ever known Gabriel vaguely, as someone who'd been with Neil sometime before taking up with Mr. Blunt. It's a decision she now wonders about, whether it was some kind of catalyst for Neil spending time with Guy, or even Harry later on. Not that any of it matters now, with all of them gone.

"Is that what you want?" she asks. "To be friends. You don't have to just because he wants to. And whoever he moves on to, if he moves on to anyone, they aren't worth comparing yourself to. Now or...whenever in the future it happens."

The worst part of it is that Rosie doesn't even pretend like Caleb might not just move on. That's fair, but it feels very reiterative, and not at all what Neil wants to hear right. But he can't--he can't demand that of her. She's his best friend, and he can't make her say things that don't make sense to say.

"No," he says. Then, quickly, he says, "Of course I want to be friends with him. But I mean, I don't want to be just friends with him. I worked...I worked so hard to not just let myself feel a lot again, but to...to tell him? To tell him I love him."

He wipes his nose and sniffles even though he's not overwhelmed and he hasn't cried this whole time.

"It just sucks to find out that I was a replacement this whole time. Like, what..."

"No, I know you did, I'm sorry," she says, realizing how cold she must've sounded then, how steeped that question had been in everything she's been going through with Sabrina. "It meant a lot to be able to say that, and now..."

She trails off as he sniffles, and whatever she'd been about to add is gone again when he keeps talking. For a moment, it doesn't make sense. "What do you mean, found out? You mean Adam?"

Neil smokes for a moment, just lingering in the comfort of a gesture that he's picked up and that he's so deliberately avoided over these months as much as possible. The question that Rosie raises freezes him. It's not the question, per se, or maybe it is, but the way that she asks it.

He looks up at her, and it's with such a wound, such an absolute betrayal of the spirit of their friendship.

"Did you know?" he asked, soft and devastated. "Christ, Rosie, if I'd known he was all hung up on his boyfriend back home--that's a different thing, I could have worked with that from the start if he'd just told me, but nobody told me--!"

She had asked the question in confusion, in the hope of clarification, but as the shock and hurt break over Neil's face Rosie realizes what she's done. No--not what she's done, because the blame for this can't be placed on her, though the twist of guilt she feels is still there, sick and heavy and aching. It's tempered soon enough by her own surprise, and no small amount of anger at the absolutely idiotic boy at the center of all of this.

"I knew about Adam," she says, holding up a hand to stave off another interjection. "But not...not that Caleb was still hung up on him, just that he'd had a boyfriend at home, and sometimes he'd come up as a point of conversation like anyone would. But are you...you're not saying he never told you about Adam at all."

"Not really," Neil says, agonized. If it weren't such an absolutely gutting moment, he might have laughed. He was no better though, was he, never talking about Charlie and Todd back home, never talking about Gabriel, or Harry. But it's different.

Well, not as far as Caleb is concerned, clearly.

"I think he actually said his name maybe twice this whole time. I got to actually hear anything about him tonight. About them." And then, then Neil does laugh. This miserable, wheezing noise without any humor in it. "He called the whole thing cheating. Said he felt like he was."

"Oh my god," she says about halfway through Neil's explanation, and by the time he's finished Rosie wishes she'd said something stronger. Anger mixes with incredulity, and maybe the slightest twinge of guilt--for this situation as much as another entirely of her own making, just as steeped in not saying things that ought to be said, or saying them too soon--and the resulting combination makes her feel more than a bit ill. "How dare he? He's not...it's not cheating, and even if it was, it's...he should have said something. He should have told you about Adam."

She takes another savage drag on her cigarette, blowing out the smoke in a long stream. "If I hadn't half-ruined things with Sabrina already, I'd ask if you want me to see if she can put a curse on him or something," she says. It's a joke, and it's not, and the honesty of admitting even offhand what she's been going through is a kind of relief in amongst everything else. "Nothing horrible, just inconvenient."

"It's not cheating to miss someone, right?" Neil says, trying to focus on that for a second. He needs to focus on that because he couldn't even think about having that part of the conversation with Caleb. He couldn't think about it. But it can't be cheating just to miss someone, to long to be around someone you loved--or Neil's screwed for the rest of his life.

And then he smiles a little, stretching his leg out across their little kitchen to nudge Rosie's ankle. The offer is everything, more than he knows how to handle. It's all that matters at the moment.

"What do you mean half-ruined?" he asks. It's easier to not worry about her than himself, right now. Especially since he realizes he's been doing a pretty piss poor job of that recently.

The question is soft and sad, more than a little miserable in how Neil looks asking it. Immediately, Rosie's shaking her head. "Of course missing someone isn't cheating," she says. "Not anywhere, but especially not someplace like Darrow. If you'd left someone behind at home, and if you'd not been like Caleb and kept it secret like an idiot, then maybe it's...complicated to fall in love with someone here if you still miss whoever you'd been with before Darrow. But even that's not really cheating, I don't think."

She looks down when he nudges her ankle and smiles, the angle of it shifting into something regretful and wry at the question that follows. "She's been calling me her girlfriend," she says. "For...a few months now. She didn't ask, she just did it one day. I thought I could manage it, but I can't, and she finally cornered me to ask about it and now..." Rosie sighs and leans forward, hooking a finger onto the rim of his glass and pulling it towards her. She hates the taste of scotch, has every time she's tried it before, but something in the unpleasant burn of it feels necessary for tonight.

"Now I've disappointed her."

"All I've done is miss people while I've been here," he says with a sigh, and then rolls a shoulder into a shrug.

But Rosie--Rosie's more important than his own bemoaning something that's fallen apart for himself. He hands over the glass of scotch without a single protest when she reaches for it.

"I'm sorry I haven't been around much," Neil says, not offering any excuse for it. They've both been busy, and they both know that he has a tendency to get too caught up in the person he's with. So this is good, isn't it? Some time for them to get themselves back together again.

"She shouldn't have just decided for the both of you that that's how it was." But he sort of makes a face about it too, before, delicately, trying to say, "But I thought that you two were dating, so is being called her girlfriend wrong?"

"Don't apologize," she says when he starts to, with that same kind of unspoken understanding. He'd been wrapped up in Caleb, with school and work, and the last thing she'd wanted to do was spoil any of that contentment. Not to mention she'd thought--for a while, anyway--she could manage it all on her own.

Rosie can almost see his question in the face he pulls before he asks it, and she nods. "No, we are dating," she says. "And that's fine. I sort of wanted that, after Nick left. But actually calling it something feels different."

Like he'd said, it isn't wrong, not at all, and she feels the same guilt in hearing it from Neil as when it'd been Sabrina asking, or after seeing the flash of confused surprise in Eponine's eyes when they'd talked over coffee. It's no less unpleasant a feeling, really, being familiar with it now, but it makes it easier to lean a bit further into honesty.

"We used to be two girls with the same boyfriend, who had sex sometimes because we figured out we liked it. And so did he. That didn't make us girlfriends, and saying it now is...it feels like deciding something I'm not sure is true, outside of Sabrina."

Neil nods his understanding. He doesn't want to compare it to his own experiences, but the way that she describes it sounds a bit like how he'd navigated his and Harry's relationship. They were seeing each other. It was a good time and they cared a lot about each other. But neither of them was going to call each other something they weren't.

He does giggle, just a little bit, at the way that she describes it. He thinks of the two of them, shyly kissing under the mistletoe at Kagura, and the fumbling of their first and only romantic date, and then there's all this now.

And anyway, it's sort of nice to focus on Rosie instead of on his own miserable situation.

"I don't think it's deciding anything, for what it's worth. It's calling your relationship with Sabrina something, but it's not calling you anything." He shakes his head a little bit. "You call yourself whatever you want, Rosie. I'm sorry she didn't talk to you about it before she just decided though."

She blushes a little bit when he laughs, though it's not hard to see why he would. It's neither the most delicate nor the crudest way she could've said it, and goodness knows that given where the two of them had started--and the kind of places they came from, along with it--it's a mark of how the two of them have grown that she's able to say anything like it at all.

"Maybe I'm making it more important than it is," she concedes, the advice sounding enough like what she'd already heard to weight that side of things more heavily. "Especially since it's Darrow, and Darrow's different. We both know Darrow's different. But it's not unimportant, at least not to me. You're also right, though. She shouldn't have assumed, and I..."

She sighs then, a rueful huff of breath, and shrugs. "I have to figure out where to go from here."

Neil hums a little bit, leaning his head back. He dumps his cigarette butt into the half finished drink and then sort of leaves that between them as he starts a second cigarette. Having the liquid makes a neat and convenient ashtray for the moment.

"I didn't mean whether it's important or unimportant," he says thoughtfully, looking up at the ceiling. "Of course it's important, no matter what. Because it's you, no matter what it is."

But he nods, though, blowing smoke up and away from them.

"I'm sorry," he says after a second, low and solemn. "That I always get so caught up with whoever I'm with that I just...disappear on you. I should be better. I should know when things are wobbly for you, just like you know for me. But I...I'll get better. I want to get better." He looks down and smiles a little. "And if you want a little advice on figuring things out, I do have a lot of practice at that."

"I appreciate that," she says, and means it. Because it's you, no matter what is quite nearly the definition of their friendship at this point, the thing they both try--and sometimes fail--to live up to. As he starts to apologize, Rosie turns a little, the better to look at him.

"You disappear because you're happy," she says. "Which you deserve to be, as much as anyone else. Maybe more. And with this, I didn't want to...it's partially my fault you didn't know, since I thought saying anything might spoil how happy you were, with everything with Caleb going so well and all." Rosie takes in the fog of smoke clouding the kitchen, the abandoned glass of scotch and the way they're sprawled on the kitchen floor, together in a common kind of misery. "But I won't stop you from trying to be better. Or giving advice, because goodness knows I need it sometimes."

He has been happy, but he's happy with Rosie, too. His dearest friend in Darrow, possibly one of his dearest friends in his whole life. There's no reason that he should be so incapable of maintaining at least checking in and making sure that she's okay in her day to day.

"You're never going to spoil things, Rosie."

He leans against her shoulder gently, quiet for a moment. Even he doesn't think his advice would necessarily be very good, but he certainly does have a lot of practice at this point, if Rosie ever wants to bounce her concerns off him. And, more than anything, he'd rather help someone else with their relationship concerns and focus somewhere else than his own tragic failure.

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The mortifying ordeal of being known | for Rosie

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