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."
She wasn't expecting to get an answer at all, but the one she does get doesn't surprise her in and of itself. It sounds rather like what she was picturing, in fact -- like something Alec would say. Why feel bad over doing what had to be done?
"Should I change?" she supplies quietly. "Should I have changed before now?" Or do the ends justify the means?
She shakes her head a little, tucking her hair back. "I came here to yell at you," she jokes mildly, trying to divert the subject. "Not for so much introspection."
"I know. I hate being yelled at, I have to distract you," he winks. "And if you want my biased opinion...no. You shouldn't change. You should never change the things about yourself that you can find peace with. If there are things that keep you up at night--those can go. But don't change for other people. Not even the Admiral."
And there's just what she's been expecting, and trying to dance around, this whole time: no guilt, no shame, no change. Because she can live with herself. There are times she thinks about Evi or Vasily as she's drifting off, times they appears in her dreams, but she sleeps. She can live with everything she's done.
It's just not always a very happy life.
She does not want to have this argument again, though. She'd pushed it with Alec, but this time she simply side-steps. Redirects. She glances at him out of the corner of her eye and smiles slyly, reaching over to brush the back of his hand with her fingers. "You are biased," she murmurs. "But you're good at distracting."
"I am," he agrees and he manages a smug look. In reality, Lark is not a smug person at all. Proud, sure; arrogant, sometimes, though he's been soundly humbled over the past few years.
He knows she's uneasy about something, but he has no idea what, and the topic feels comfortable to him which is why he's kicking it around again. He hardly ever gets to talk about this with anyone but Alec, and Alec's rules are very different to Lark's. "Anyway, that's what I was told my first year. But there's nothing that I dislike about myself enough to want to give up. I don't want to change, and that's the only thing I have in common with Arthas but it's significant. But unlike him, I don't want to stay here just to prove a point."
His thumb catches her fingertips, runs gently against the very tips. "What I really think is that we should just make the most of whatever time we have, wherever it is. In prison, in a dog pound. In hell. In Paris."
She nods. What was it they'd talked about, that one time? The balance between looking too far down the road ahead and getting mired in the potholes. "Your new philosophy," she offers, her smile widening. "I remember."
And he can stay here as long as he likes with that. Nina hates the Barge less and less by the day, but she still has every intention of bending to the Admiral's will. She just needs to figure out how.
She's still pushing on the inconsequential, though, and so she raises her brows, teasing: "But if I remember, you don't have all that many vices for somebody trying to live in the moment." Just not going to mention the killing, here.
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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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"Should I change?" she supplies quietly. "Should I have changed before now?" Or do the ends justify the means?
She shakes her head a little, tucking her hair back. "I came here to yell at you," she jokes mildly, trying to divert the subject. "Not for so much introspection."
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It's just not always a very happy life.
She does not want to have this argument again, though. She'd pushed it with Alec, but this time she simply side-steps. Redirects. She glances at him out of the corner of her eye and smiles slyly, reaching over to brush the back of his hand with her fingers. "You are biased," she murmurs. "But you're good at distracting."
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He knows she's uneasy about something, but he has no idea what, and the topic feels comfortable to him which is why he's kicking it around again. He hardly ever gets to talk about this with anyone but Alec, and Alec's rules are very different to Lark's. "Anyway, that's what I was told my first year. But there's nothing that I dislike about myself enough to want to give up. I don't want to change, and that's the only thing I have in common with Arthas but it's significant. But unlike him, I don't want to stay here just to prove a point."
His thumb catches her fingertips, runs gently against the very tips. "What I really think is that we should just make the most of whatever time we have, wherever it is. In prison, in a dog pound. In hell. In Paris."
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And he can stay here as long as he likes with that. Nina hates the Barge less and less by the day, but she still has every intention of bending to the Admiral's will. She just needs to figure out how.
She's still pushing on the inconsequential, though, and so she raises her brows, teasing: "But if I remember, you don't have all that many vices for somebody trying to live in the moment." Just not going to mention the killing, here.