Chapter 31: The Request
The knock was Jason’s —two quick, one slow, a relic from their first apartment.
Rosa paused, the wide-toothed comb suspended halfway through damp hair. The evening was quiet, the usual hum of the hall muted behind closed doors. “It’s open.”
The door swung inward, and Jason slipped through, closing it softly behind him. He leaned against it for a moment, just watching her. She was in the wooden chair by her desk, facing the dark window, a towel around her shoulders catching the droplets from her hair. The LED strip above flickered once, casting a blue-ish ghost-light across her profile.
He pushed off the door and walked deeper into the room. The floorboards, old and tired, creaked under his weight. He came to stand behind her chair, his hands resting lightly on the curved back.
She didn’t turn. After a silent minute, she lifted the comb over her shoulder, offering him the handle. Wordless permission. A request, even.
Jason took it. His fingers brushed hers, cool and damp. He began at the ends, working methodically through the tangles of her hair, his touch careful. The only sounds were the faint crackle of the solar battery, the gentle snick of the comb, and their breathing.
He worked for a long time, the silence comfortable, laden. He knew she could feel the weight of what he hadn’t said yet. He sectioned her hair, his architect’s mind appreciating the simple, repetitive logic of the task.
Finally, his voice was quiet in the dim room. “Roy told me about the driver’s smile.”
Rosa went utterly still beneath his hands. The muscles in her shoulders locked. The damp air in the room seemed to thicken, charged with a memory that smelled like exhaust and asphalt.
“He shouldn’t have,” she said, the words tight.
Jason kept combing, the rhythm unchanging.“He was shaking when he told me. Not from fear. From rage.” He paused, choosing the next words like stepping stones across a dark river. “Because he saw it, too. He saw it, and he saw you were ready to die to make a point.”
Rosa let out a long, shuddering breath she seemed to have been holding for days. It deflated her, just slightly. Her head bowed forward under his gentle pressure. “It wasn’t about him. Not really.”
“Then what?”
“It was about the next one. And the one after that.” She stared at the distorted reflection of the flickering LED in the black window. “People like that… they run on a basic math. Can I take it? What’s the cost? I needed the cost to be absolute. Immediate. A bill presented in full, no payment plan.”
Jason set the comb down on the desk. He rested his hands on her shoulders, his thumbs pressing into the tight knots at the base of her neck. She didn’t flinch. “So you turned yourself into the bill.”
“I turned him into the bill.”
“Semantics, Rosa.” He echoed Roy’s word, but the tone was different—softer, a sad understanding. “You were the currency.” She was silent. His thumbs worked circles into her muscles, feeling the granite tension there. He leaned down, his voice close to her ear. “We need you. Not your message. You.”
“What if I am the message?” she whispered, but the defiance was gone, replaced by a hollow fatigue. “It’s the only thing that works anymore. Reason is gone. Decency is gone. All that’s left is the math. I have to be the worst variable in theirs.”
Jason straightened. He walked around the chair to face her, crouching so his eyes were level with hers. In the erratic light, his freckles were dark spots, his hazel eyes serious.
“Okay. Then let’s talk math. Your variable includes Roy, me, and everyone in this hall. If you are removed from our equation, it becomes unbalanced. Permanently. You’re not an independent variable. You’re a fucking coefficient for all of us.”
Rosa looked at him, really looked at him. She saw the concern etched in the lines around his eyes, the stubborn set of his jaw. He wasn’t lecturing. He was stating a fact, as immutable as gravity.
“He’s scared,” Jason said, meaning Roy. “I’m scared. Not of them. Of losing you to… to whatever this is inside you that thinks trading your life for a principle is a valid move. That’s an old-world luxury. We don’t get those anymore.”
A flicker of something painful crossed her face. She looked away, back out the window. “I know.”
“Do you?” He stayed crouched, a patient statue. “Because from where I’m standing, you’ve been acting like you’re alone in this since Silas shrunk Roy.”
The words landed, heavy and true. She let them settle. The quiet stretched, filled with the hum of the battery and the distant, lonely cry of a fox out near the science building pens. “It feels like I am,” she admitted, the confession quiet as ash. “Roy has always been my 6 o'clock, since shit hit the fan. Even before, he's… When I’m out there. In that second, it’s just me and the threat. The calculus simplifies. It’s clean.”
“It’s not clean. It’s desolate.” Jason reached out, taking her hand. His grip was warm, calloused from work. “You come back. You have to come back. And you have to be back when you do. Not just your body. All of you.”
She turned her hand, lacing her fingers with his. The anchor felt real, solid. “He’s been following me everywhere. Like a conscience with limbs.”
A small smile touched Jason’s lips.“Yeah. He does that. He’s building a new perimeter. Around you. It’s his love language. Really annoying, high-security love.”
The faintest hint of a smile ghosted across her own face. “I know.”
“He’ll stop. Or at least, he’ll back off. If you tell him you’re back.”
“I don’t know how to do that.”
Jason squeezed her hand. “Start by not handing him off like a parcel next time. Just say, ‘I need an hour.’ He understands direct. So speak direct.”
She nodded slowly, absorbing it. “And what do you need?”
He looked surprised by the question, then thoughtful. “I need you to let me be the one who reminds you that you’re loved. Not because you’re our protector. Just because you’re you. Roy… he shows it by building walls. I just want to remind you what’s inside them.”
Rosa’s throat felt tight. She blinked, looking back into the dark. “It’s hard to remember, sometimes. What’s inside.”
“Then let me—let us—remind you.” He stood, pulling her up with him.
She kept hold of his hand a moment longer, the rough texture of his palm a familiar anchor in the room’s electric gloom.
She eyed him curiously, a glint of her old, dry humour surfacing through the fatigue. “If you’re about to bed me, Markus, Roy’s gonna be mad when you can’t fuck him, since you’ll not have a cock anymore.” The joke was old and delivered in a perfectly flat tone, a relic from their shared past that usually earned an eye-roll.
Jason didn’t roll his eyes. He just shook his head, a slow smile softening his features.“Tempting, but he’d probably just engineer a replacement. More efficient, less moody.” He stepped closer, his other hand coming up to cup the side of her face. His thumb brushed her cheekbone, a gentle, grounding stroke. “I’m good with the current model.”
The simple touch undid something brittle inside her. She leaned into it, closing her eyes for a brief second, allowing the weariness to show. The mask, the calculus, the hard shell of the message—it all receded, leaving just Rosa, tired and cared for.
“He’s probably wearing a groove in the floorboards right now,” Jason murmured, his voice low and warm near her temple.
“He’s probably recalibrating the hall’s entire security grid based on my ‘suboptimal threat engagement,’” she corrected, a real, faint smile touching her lips.
“Same difference.” Jason dropped his hand, lacing his fingers back with hers. “Come on. Let’s go tell the guard dog his shift is over. Or at least that he’s got a co-pilot.”
He led her toward the door, their joined hands swinging lightly between them. The hallway was dim, lit only by the emergency runner lights Roy had rigged from scavenged LED strips. They cast a pale, blue glow on the scuffed linoleum.
From behind the door of Jason and Roy’s room, they could hear the faint, rhythmic scratch of a pencil on paper. It was a focused, agitated sound, the noise of a mind solving a problem it couldn’t quite pin down.
Jason raised their clasped hands and knocked on the door with his knuckles, a quick, soft tap-tap-tap.
The scratching stopped instantly.
Jason used his free hand to open the door. Roy was seated on a little wooden desk that Jason had whittled for him. He looked from Jason to their joined hands, then to Rosa standing behind him.
“Hey,” Roy said, his voice deliberately even “Everything okay?”
“Getting there,” Jason said. He pushed the door open wider and stepped inside, pulling Rosa in with him. He didn’t let go of her hand. “We were talking. We’re done now.”
Roy stood from his desk, watching them. His workshop desk was littered with schematics, stress calculations covering every margin. He’d been deep in it, the way he always was when worry chewed at him.
Rosa let go of Jason’s hand. She took a step toward Roy, crouching down so she was closer to his level. The floorboards creaked under her weight. “Your hovering worked,” she said simply. “It was annoying as hell, but it worked.”
Roy crossed his arms, his small frame held tight.“Yeah?”
“Yeah. I hear you. Loud and clear.” She held his gaze.“No more grandstanding. Not without running the full numbers first. Your numbers.”
The tension in Roy’s shoulders eased, just a fraction. He nodded once, a sharp, accepting gesture. “Good.”
Jason leaned against the doorframe, watching them. “See? Direct. Works every time.”
Roy glanced at him, then back at Rosa. A flicker of his dry wit surfaced in his eyes. “So does a properly set spring-trap. But I’ll take it.”
Rosa stood, the desktop & Roy now level with her hip. “I’m going to find Sandy,” she announced, the shift in topic deliberate.
Roy looked up, puzzled. “Why?”
“My hair.” She gestured vaguely to the damp, tangled mess hanging loose around her shoulders. “I need help with the braids. The two small ones behind the ears need precision. My hands are… shaky.”
It was a confession wrapped in mundanity. Roy understood immediately. He saw the slight tremble in her fingers she was trying to hide, the same tremor Jason had mentioned.
The aftermath. A quiet, physical echo of standing before the truck.“Okay,” Roy said, his voice softening. “Don’t take too long.”
“I won’t.”
Jason gave her a small, knowing smile.
Rosa left them there, the door clicking shut behind her, sealing in the low murmur of their resumed analysis.
The hallway was cooler, the air less charged. She walked down to Sandy and Lee’s room, the familiar scuff of her boots on linoleum a steadying rhythm. She knocked, twice.
Sandy opened the door, her kind face framed by flyaway curls. She took in Rosa’s disheveled hair and the tight set of her jaw.
Without a word, she stepped aside and gestured to the foot of her neatly made bed. “Sit,” she said gently, already reaching for her own comb and a tin of beeswax balm. “Let’s get you put back together.”
The simple act of someone else’s hands sectioning her hair, the repetitive, gentle pull of the braiding, began to unravel the knot in her chest. It was a quiet testament to a different kind of survival, one built not on math but on care.
Outside, the wind pushed at the windows, but in the small room, Rosa finally let her shoulders drop, preparing herself, strand by strand, for what was coming next.
The gentle tug of the final braid being secured was a grounding pressure. Sandy’s knobby fingers fastened the end with a worn bit of string. “There you are,” she said, her voice a soft murmur in the quiet room.
“Thanks, Sandy.”
“Anytime, honey.” Sandy patted her shoulder and began tidying her comb and balm. “Lee’s downstairs checking the rain barrels. Says we might get a proper storm.”
Rosa stood, rolling her neck. The weight of the intricate braids was familiar, a structured comfort. “We’re having a meeting after dinner. About what we found.”
Sandy’s expression sobered, her eyes missing nothing. Rosa moved to the door, pausing with her hand on the frame.
Sandy sighed, not with despair, but with a weary acceptance. “I’ll let the others know, go rest for now.”
The common room was a soft bustle of evening routines. Amie and Ally were at the low table, dismantling and cleaning a pistol component by component, their heads bent close together in quiet concentration. The sharp, clean smell of solvent cut through the air. Joan was reading by the last of the daylight at the window, her boot propped on a stool, leg healing from a ladder fall last week. “Anything?” Rosa asked, pausing by the table.
Amie looked up, pushing a strand of purple-streaked hair from his eyes. “Just maintenance. Ready for tomorrow’s perimeter sweep.” He nudged Ally with an elbow. “This one almost lost a spring.”
“Did not,” Ally grumbled, but she was smiling slightly, holding up the tiny, gleaming component.
Rosa’s mouth quirked. “See that you don’t.” She moved toward the kitchen nook, where the smell of simmering beans and rosemary greeted her. Jason was stirring the pot, his shoulders a familiar, easy line.
He glanced over, taking in her freshly braided hair. “Looking more like you.”
“Feeling more like me.” She leaned against the counter, watching his hands.“Roy still upstairs?”
“Yeah. Came down, paced for five minutes, muttered something about tensile strength, and went back up. He’s in the zone.”
“Good.” She pinched a bit of salt from a jar and sprinkled it into the pot for him.“We need him there.”
Dinner was a quieter affair than usual. The beans were passed, the hard flatbread shared. Conversation touched on the chickens, on the filter mesh that needed repairing, on the dull ache in Lee’s knees that predicted the coming storm.
Later, the hall settled into its nighttime rhythms. Showers were taken, final checks made. Rosa stood in her own room, the silence suddenly vast and vibrating. The bed seemed too large, the echoes of the day too loud in the empty space. She stared at the wall of scavenged tech, its dormant lights like distant, dead stars.
A soft knock came. It was Jason, Roy perched on his shoulder. “Can’t sleep?” Jason asked.
Rosa just shook her head, the words stuck somewhere deep.
Roy looked from her to her empty bed, then back to her tense face. He didn’t ask if she was okay. He jerked his head toward their room across the hall. “Come on.”
She didn’t argue. She followed them, the worn floorboards familiar underfoot. Their room was smaller, warmer, smelling of pencil shavings, old books, and them. Jason folded back the blanket on the smaller bed.
“We’ll make it work,” he said, simple and certain.
Rosa laid in Roy & Jason’s bed that night, her brother curled against the nape of her neck, a small, warm weight, and Jason spooning her, his chest to her back, his face pressing gently against his boyfriend’s shoulder.
The storm Sandy predicted began outside, rain sheeting against the window. Here, in the tight, breathing space between them, the wind meant nothing. The maps were just paper. For these few, dark hours, she was anchored, a variable held safely in the solution of their shared warmth.