Work Text:
Living with guilt is a difficult thing to manage. It seeps into every part of your life, corrupting your relationships, infecting your mind with poisonous thoughts.
Ros knows this fact intimately, every action of hers could be defined by that one instance in her past, a trail of mistakes all leading up to that horrific sight.
Could anyone really blame her for doing this? Could someone look at her, look at her and blame her whole-heartedly for doing what she thought would protect others? For putting her life on the line, for lying to save others the pain she felt, for wanting a piece of information that could potentially rescue her from the feeling of drowning?
She gave herself up.
Maybe it was dumb- maybe she could’ve done something smarter, like Sniff suggested, but she wanted to do this for herself. She wanted the right to make this decision for herself, she didn’t want others dragged into her mess. She couldn’t let herself do that to anyone.
The desire was selfish, she knew that. But wasn’t she allowed to be selfish for once in her life? Even then, it wasn’t like she was endangering anyone else, was she?
The only risk was her dying.
Which she had come to accept- even if the redness around her eyes suggests otherwise, even if she has a headache from tearing up, even if her heart hurts thinking of Sniff’s reaction upon coming back to another of her lives gone.
God- Juniper. What’ll she think? Will she be mad? Furious? Or simply sad?
She doesn’t know.
Thinking about it just makes it all seem too real, she wants to delay it, she wants it to be over and done with.