He considers that a moment. "...No. You're right. None of us should be telling you how to deal with him. But it is how a lot of other people choose to deal with it, and it does work for people like Sinjir."
But for the record, "It doesn't work for me. I'm not afraid of him because I've tortured and killed him and we reached an understanding. But I'm not laughing at his stories. Or at mine. And I do have them, Nina. I've done worse than he has and I don't feel bad about it--and you need to know that because I like you and I don't want you to feel like I'm lying to you about what I am."
She blinks, obviously surprised, going still and quiet like a startled deer. She had known about the murder, but not the torture... but then again, she hadn't asked. She hadn't thought to ask, but if there's a part of her that feels misled, there's a much bigger part that knows it's at least half her own fault. Even if she had thought to ask, she wouldn't have wanted to. He's her-- her ally, at least.
It's the same mechanism that lets her know he's a werewolf, know he's killed, and still not really think about that most of the time. At heart, it's the same mechanism that had let her fall just a little bit in love with Stan for real, amidst all the lies. Whatever dwells in her that had let her forget, for hours at a time, that he had put a gun to her friend's head and pulled the trigger for no good reason.
She can say she's always known Lark is dangerous, and she has. She does know that, very consciously; it's one of the reasons she wants him on her side. But there's a leap in her mind between knowing that and thinking of him as someone like Alfie Solomons. She swallows, touching her lips briefly, staring at him. Then she takes a deep breath and rubs her hand over the opposite arm, looking down as she lets it out slowly. "All right," she says quietly, a little defeated, but calm. Nothing has changed, after all, in the past minute or so. She still needs him as an ally.
And in a few minutes, he'll say something that will make her smile, and she can start to forget again.
He can see--and hear and smell--the shift of emotion in her. Part of him wants to back off and let them go back to smiling and laughing and ignoring the reality of things. But then she says 'All right' and in that tone. It hurts him in a way he can't define yet, it's too new, but he nods.
"I never forget who hurts my people, Nina. He hurt Tommy; that's not why I went after Alfie. But it didn't help his case, either. I always do everything I can to balance things when my friends are hurt. And I don't always tell them what I've done for them." There's a little weight on friends. Lark has many, many people he enjoys being with. Nina is one of perhaps four he would stand here and talk this way with.
If she needs him as an ally, she has him already. But it does come with Lark torturing people on her behalf, often in secret.
And so he gives her something else she can choose to be aware of or forget. She looks back up at him, her eyes dark, a little shiver running down her spine. For once she's not really trying to look small, but she does anyway, wrapped around herself like that, her shoulders hunched.
She's not stupid. She understands what he means. If she stays, it's with the tacit knowledge -- willfully suppressed or not -- that there might be a day in the future when someone gets tortured because of her. That if she stays now, she probably won't be able to stop it then. If she's really so horrified by Alfie and his talk, if she really cares that much about the morality of it, then she can leave his protection -- leave him, and maybe Alec too -- and know that she spared this hypothetical future person. That she's the sort of person who has mercy and empathy and what the Christians call grace inside of her.
But then she thinks about the people she actually knows here, and the fact that the sets of people she doesn't want to see on the other end of Lark's claws and the people that are likely to end up there because of her are almost two completely distinct circles. She thinks about Evi Sneijder, who had done much less to earn what might have been much more. She thinks about the fact that she stopped seeing any of those things in herself a long time ago.
So she goes to sit down next to him. "Why did you go after him?" she asks, still in the same quiet voice, maybe a little more detached now. "If it wasn't for Tommy?"
Lark still has his glass of water in hand, and he toys with it without drinking. "Because he and I got along. We had loose plans together, just to provide fun on the weeks or months between breaches. And then I was in the gym, about five feet from the battery they'd rigged. His bomb."
Lark shakes his head after a moment of silence and just sighs faintly. "I'm really tired of people turning on me. But that said, if I could go back, I wouldn't have done what I did to him."
He glances at her. "Because I think he really could have been helpful. And now we have to rebuild, and it takes time I don't know if I have. And because I normally never act just on anger, but I did with him. I don't like being someone who can't think past whatever he feels."
She takes this in with silence, adds to it something else she now knows about Lark: that when he does whatever he does to this hypothetical future person, it will have been planned. It will be in cold blood.
In her heart of hearts, it's still not a dealbreaker. In her head, it should be; she shouldn't be able to keep going along with this. But she stays, and reminds herself again that it will all fade to so much background noise soon enough.
"He didn't seem all that bothered by you speaking up," she notes. "And he said all the joking around -- this is how people get over things, to him. Maybe is easier to rebuild than you think it is."
"No, we get along alright now. But it's not like it was." Which bothers Lark but only a little. "It's harder when I did it mostly for myself."
He's killed before on the Barge, is the unspoken implication. And he has no regrets about that one.
"But what I want you to know is I don't find it funny. The things I've done have been for a reason--even if, in Alfie's case, I would have changed things if I could have. And if I seem to gloat, it's also for a reason."
She hears it and lets it go by; she can only deal with so much right now. She listens, instead, to what he says next, her eyes fixed on his face. She still looks small, curled in on herself, and now she looks young, too -- like a child listening to her teacher. Not for the first time, she thinks: He's so much better at this than I am.
Which is the other reason she's always been just a little bit afraid of him, and still is. She can't imagine what kind of long game he could be playing with her... but that doesn't mean he isn't playing one.
She doesn't say anything for a long moment. Eventually, she looks away, down at the couch, dropping her legs and fidgeting with her hands in her lap. "Maybe is like I said," she murmurs. "Different for you, if you can fight." But she doesn't mean it the way she did before. "I couldn't act that way even if I wanted to. I... have to be who I am." Little Nina. Poor Nina. Sad Nina, who has reasons for everything she does, too.
Lark is sharing a lot with her that he normally wouldn't. In some ways it's like a train building speed and he's not entirely sure when he'll be able to make it stop.
"I think it is different." He knows it is. He was a different person before he learned to kill--and before he learned to manipulate. A weaker person. And yet, "I like who you are. This way. I don't want you to have to change it. I know Alec has been teaching you to fight. There are other ways, too, ways he and I both know. And one way only I have."
She glances up briefly at him at that, but it's not like she needs to ask. "Even then," she says with a bit of a shrug, eyes dropping again. "Even when I know how to hit somebody, how to shoot a gun... Maybe down there, this would be enough, but up here? This is..."
Well, actually: "It's what's gotten me by so far," she notes. Six months in, and she hasn't been hurt by anyone, killed by anyone. That doesn't make her any less paranoid, but to her, it means that her approach has been working. She's not threatening enough to make anyone's radar, and she is vulnerable enough that the protectors have come out of the woodwork before the vultures could.
Even more than her pretty face, even more than her body, that vulnerability is the best weapon she has. She doesn't even mean to be using it on Lark right now, except as a general method of continuing to secure his sympathy -- but if she knew what was happening, it wouldn't surprise her much at all. People like to tell her things.
"Up here, with powers, you mean?" Lark studies her and then finally shrugs. "Even that can be changed. Some powers can be shared."
Nina is not the sort he normally even thinks about changing. She's too difficult to guide, and it would be giving her an awful lot of power. But it is still an option. It would still keep her quite safe.
Hypothetically, of course.
"And even if you don't have any of your own--well, you're right, you've found a good way of navigating everything safely."
She suspects she knows what he means by that, too, but she thinks instead of the powers she's already learning to share: the lessons with Quentin that no one else knows about. Someday, she thinks, the image of his little kitchen sitting warm in her chest. Someday, yes, even that can be changed. She stifles a brittle smile at the thought.
"You see, though? Even if I tried to do what they want me to, I can't. It wouldn't work -- wouldn't fit." Sweet, sad Nina can't be seen giggling at stories about boards with nails in them. Not that she especially wants to, because she still finds the whole thing foul, but now that she's talking about it, she realizes the constraint is there.
"I try to get along with everyone," she notes, and what she doesn't add is I try to be whatever they want me to be, "but I can only go so far."
Lark hums, understanding because he tries to do the same as much as he can. When people are wired to hate you, you have to be able to make peace with them. That or kill them all, but that's not even a fantasy to entertain here.
"What do you do when you can't get along, no matter what you've tried? When it's here, where you can't avoid anyone for long?"
If it were even just a few hours ago, she would be better equipped to handle the question -- but in the wake of her fight with Tiffany, she lets out a quiet scoff and shakes her head. "I don't know. It happens. Sometimes it's easy to move past, sometimes it's easy to avoid..."
It's a small boat, Tommy had told her once, with no idea how threatening it sounded. It's true nonetheless: for someone like her, who keeps her head down, it doesn't have to be that small. There are people here she hasn't interacted with in weeks, or even months, and she doubts they've even noticed.
But then there are the wounds that have taken a long time to fade, like Max and Furiosa -- there are the people she doesn't think about until they pop back up and she finds that the ache is still there. There are the fights she had to move past, people she really can't avoid, like Eggsy. There are people she fights with all the time and keeps coming back to anyway, like Tommy himself.
And there's Tiffany, who has been very easy to keep physically away from and very hard to ignore. She's not sure yet how it will all shake out in the end with her; even though she'd walked away calm, the hurt there is still very real and very present. "Sometimes harder," she finishes a little grimly. Some people are just gonna, like, clash, Tiffany herself had said -- though why she can't take her own damn advice on that, Nina has no idea.
"I don't know if I could avoid it here." Lark is a very social creature. His social circle is broad and overlaps a hundred others. But the reason he was really asking was for Nina, not himself.
"I know the point of this place is to make us think differently. Saying 'it was easier at home' means nothing now. We're not going to be allowed to keep to our old patterns, no matter how well they worked for us." He rubs a hand over his face wearily. "It scares me, Nina."
She blinks and glances over at him, a little surprised by the admission, and not entirely sure how to respond. Maybe it's because she tends to blur the two of them in her head anyway at times, but she can't help but be reminded of Alec again, and the way he had tried to insist that she should be only proud of all the maneuvering she'd done in her life back home. It's the same fundamental misunderstanding, geared by what she sees as the same underlying assumption: that change is the bad thing.
It hadn't gone well when she'd tried to explain to Alec, and so she hesitates to explain to Lark now, that it's not that she doesn't want to change -- she's not like them in that. She just doesn't know how. She's stuck to her old ways because she is, in fact, stuck.
In the end, she doesn't say anything, because she doesn't really want to have that argument again right now. She reaches across the narrow distance between them and touches his arm gently, offering comfort or sympathy or reassurance or whatever he wants to take it as.
"Become what is, or you will be what is not," he murmurs, almost to himself, and he rests his hand over hers. "Do you know what the Admiral brought you here for? Have you seen your file? And I mean really been able to read it?"
"Most people don't. I think even after reading their files, if they're allowed, most people have no idea." There's a pretty significant difference between the ones who don't and most of those who do, though.
"You don't have to answer this but I've been...wondering about this for a while, about a lot of people. How do you handle guilt?"
Maybe it's easier for other people to delude themselves, she thinks. Not that she doesn't -- but she usually knows she is, when she does. She's about to say something to just that effect, if a little less revealing, when he goes on, and then she stops.
How does she handle guilt?
"Bad enough that I got myself thrown in prison," she jokes, but in a tone of voice that clearly says they aren't going to progress much further into that topic. She draws away from him again, resting her hands back in her own lap, recrossing her legs.
"I told you why I was," she says evenly, if still a little flat. "I confessed." Which doesn't make it not bullshit, but she hasn't told anyone here the reason why it is, and she doesn't plan on sharing that much now. Not to him, not to anyone. Not until she gets her warden and ends up forced to figure out how to spin that part of the story.
Nor does she want to linger on the subject of guilt -- not when she still has very mixed feelings about her own. She knows she feels less of it than she should, maybe less than she wishes she did, but that's a hard thing to talk about. Especially here, where she suspects she knows what he'll have to say about that.
"How do you?" she asks, turning it back on him. She doesn't expect him to answer honestly, if at all; she's just proving the point that some questions are better left unasked.
Lark hums. Yeah, she did. But confessions are so often mutilated and manipulated that he doesn't believe them. He'll still use them, sure; but he doesn't believe them.
Besides, here's the point where he also hasn't figured out how to spin the truth. So he shakes his head slightly and goes with the lie he's rehearsed so many times it feels real. "I just try to focus on where I am, and if I'm where I want to be, and if it's worth it to be alive after having done what I've done."
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But for the record, "It doesn't work for me. I'm not afraid of him because I've tortured and killed him and we reached an understanding. But I'm not laughing at his stories. Or at mine. And I do have them, Nina. I've done worse than he has and I don't feel bad about it--and you need to know that because I like you and I don't want you to feel like I'm lying to you about what I am."
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It's the same mechanism that lets her know he's a werewolf, know he's killed, and still not really think about that most of the time. At heart, it's the same mechanism that had let her fall just a little bit in love with Stan for real, amidst all the lies. Whatever dwells in her that had let her forget, for hours at a time, that he had put a gun to her friend's head and pulled the trigger for no good reason.
She can say she's always known Lark is dangerous, and she has. She does know that, very consciously; it's one of the reasons she wants him on her side. But there's a leap in her mind between knowing that and thinking of him as someone like Alfie Solomons. She swallows, touching her lips briefly, staring at him. Then she takes a deep breath and rubs her hand over the opposite arm, looking down as she lets it out slowly. "All right," she says quietly, a little defeated, but calm. Nothing has changed, after all, in the past minute or so. She still needs him as an ally.
And in a few minutes, he'll say something that will make her smile, and she can start to forget again.
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"I never forget who hurts my people, Nina. He hurt Tommy; that's not why I went after Alfie. But it didn't help his case, either. I always do everything I can to balance things when my friends are hurt. And I don't always tell them what I've done for them." There's a little weight on friends. Lark has many, many people he enjoys being with. Nina is one of perhaps four he would stand here and talk this way with.
If she needs him as an ally, she has him already. But it does come with Lark torturing people on her behalf, often in secret.
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She's not stupid. She understands what he means. If she stays, it's with the tacit knowledge -- willfully suppressed or not -- that there might be a day in the future when someone gets tortured because of her. That if she stays now, she probably won't be able to stop it then. If she's really so horrified by Alfie and his talk, if she really cares that much about the morality of it, then she can leave his protection -- leave him, and maybe Alec too -- and know that she spared this hypothetical future person. That she's the sort of person who has mercy and empathy and what the Christians call grace inside of her.
But then she thinks about the people she actually knows here, and the fact that the sets of people she doesn't want to see on the other end of Lark's claws and the people that are likely to end up there because of her are almost two completely distinct circles. She thinks about Evi Sneijder, who had done much less to earn what might have been much more. She thinks about the fact that she stopped seeing any of those things in herself a long time ago.
So she goes to sit down next to him. "Why did you go after him?" she asks, still in the same quiet voice, maybe a little more detached now. "If it wasn't for Tommy?"
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Lark shakes his head after a moment of silence and just sighs faintly. "I'm really tired of people turning on me. But that said, if I could go back, I wouldn't have done what I did to him."
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She toes her high heels off and draws her legs up onto the couch, hugging her knees loosely, her skirt just long enough to cover them.
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In her heart of hearts, it's still not a dealbreaker. In her head, it should be; she shouldn't be able to keep going along with this. But she stays, and reminds herself again that it will all fade to so much background noise soon enough.
"He didn't seem all that bothered by you speaking up," she notes. "And he said all the joking around -- this is how people get over things, to him. Maybe is easier to rebuild than you think it is."
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He's killed before on the Barge, is the unspoken implication. And he has no regrets about that one.
"But what I want you to know is I don't find it funny. The things I've done have been for a reason--even if, in Alfie's case, I would have changed things if I could have. And if I seem to gloat, it's also for a reason."
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Which is the other reason she's always been just a little bit afraid of him, and still is. She can't imagine what kind of long game he could be playing with her... but that doesn't mean he isn't playing one.
She doesn't say anything for a long moment. Eventually, she looks away, down at the couch, dropping her legs and fidgeting with her hands in her lap. "Maybe is like I said," she murmurs. "Different for you, if you can fight." But she doesn't mean it the way she did before. "I couldn't act that way even if I wanted to. I... have to be who I am." Little Nina. Poor Nina. Sad Nina, who has reasons for everything she does, too.
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"I think it is different." He knows it is. He was a different person before he learned to kill--and before he learned to manipulate. A weaker person. And yet, "I like who you are. This way. I don't want you to have to change it. I know Alec has been teaching you to fight. There are other ways, too, ways he and I both know. And one way only I have."
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Well, actually: "It's what's gotten me by so far," she notes. Six months in, and she hasn't been hurt by anyone, killed by anyone. That doesn't make her any less paranoid, but to her, it means that her approach has been working. She's not threatening enough to make anyone's radar, and she is vulnerable enough that the protectors have come out of the woodwork before the vultures could.
Even more than her pretty face, even more than her body, that vulnerability is the best weapon she has. She doesn't even mean to be using it on Lark right now, except as a general method of continuing to secure his sympathy -- but if she knew what was happening, it wouldn't surprise her much at all. People like to tell her things.
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Nina is not the sort he normally even thinks about changing. She's too difficult to guide, and it would be giving her an awful lot of power. But it is still an option. It would still keep her quite safe.
Hypothetically, of course.
"And even if you don't have any of your own--well, you're right, you've found a good way of navigating everything safely."
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"You see, though? Even if I tried to do what they want me to, I can't. It wouldn't work -- wouldn't fit." Sweet, sad Nina can't be seen giggling at stories about boards with nails in them. Not that she especially wants to, because she still finds the whole thing foul, but now that she's talking about it, she realizes the constraint is there.
"I try to get along with everyone," she notes, and what she doesn't add is I try to be whatever they want me to be, "but I can only go so far."
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"What do you do when you can't get along, no matter what you've tried? When it's here, where you can't avoid anyone for long?"
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It's a small boat, Tommy had told her once, with no idea how threatening it sounded. It's true nonetheless: for someone like her, who keeps her head down, it doesn't have to be that small. There are people here she hasn't interacted with in weeks, or even months, and she doubts they've even noticed.
But then there are the wounds that have taken a long time to fade, like Max and Furiosa -- there are the people she doesn't think about until they pop back up and she finds that the ache is still there. There are the fights she had to move past, people she really can't avoid, like Eggsy. There are people she fights with all the time and keeps coming back to anyway, like Tommy himself.
And there's Tiffany, who has been very easy to keep physically away from and very hard to ignore. She's not sure yet how it will all shake out in the end with her; even though she'd walked away calm, the hurt there is still very real and very present. "Sometimes harder," she finishes a little grimly. Some people are just gonna, like, clash, Tiffany herself had said -- though why she can't take her own damn advice on that, Nina has no idea.
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"I know the point of this place is to make us think differently. Saying 'it was easier at home' means nothing now. We're not going to be allowed to keep to our old patterns, no matter how well they worked for us." He rubs a hand over his face wearily. "It scares me, Nina."
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It hadn't gone well when she'd tried to explain to Alec, and so she hesitates to explain to Lark now, that it's not that she doesn't want to change -- she's not like them in that. She just doesn't know how. She's stuck to her old ways because she is, in fact, stuck.
In the end, she doesn't say anything, because she doesn't really want to have that argument again right now. She reaches across the narrow distance between them and touches his arm gently, offering comfort or sympathy or reassurance or whatever he wants to take it as.
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Just because she'd like to be better doesn't mean she has any illusions that she is. She's not a good person. She knows this.
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"You don't have to answer this but I've been...wondering about this for a while, about a lot of people. How do you handle guilt?"
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How does she handle guilt?
"Bad enough that I got myself thrown in prison," she jokes, but in a tone of voice that clearly says they aren't going to progress much further into that topic. She draws away from him again, resting her hands back in her own lap, recrossing her legs.
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"There are a lot of reasons people end up imprisoned," is what he finally says. "And most of them are bullshit."
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Nor does she want to linger on the subject of guilt -- not when she still has very mixed feelings about her own. She knows she feels less of it than she should, maybe less than she wishes she did, but that's a hard thing to talk about. Especially here, where she suspects she knows what he'll have to say about that.
"How do you?" she asks, turning it back on him. She doesn't expect him to answer honestly, if at all; she's just proving the point that some questions are better left unasked.
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Besides, here's the point where he also hasn't figured out how to spin the truth. So he shakes his head slightly and goes with the lie he's rehearsed so many times it feels real. "I just try to focus on where I am, and if I'm where I want to be, and if it's worth it to be alive after having done what I've done."
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