[ She halts, Severus doesn't. Arms still crossed he turns around, taking steps backwards and raising his eyebrows at her.
Nnnoope he's not going to stand there in the middle of a public walkway and talk about anything. But especially not this. C'mon.
He leads her to somewhere more dense, off a path, but still pleasant - if the gardens can be described as such; he supposes they can. He sits down on a grassy slope under a tree, and if not for the distant shimmer of metal walls, it might feel natural. ]
[ Somewhat begrudgingly, she follows him, eager to just have this conversation out and started and over and done. Every step they take further into the green makes her feel heavier and heavier, every spot in which they don't stop and pop a squat makes her feel like nothing good can come of it. She briefly wonders if it's too late to turn around and just run back.
She keeps her arms crossed until she has to brace them under herself as she sits down, legs folded underneath of her. Several pieces of grass find themselves plucked up and shredded into the beginnings of a pile in front of her. At his comment, she raises an eyebrow. ]
[ He sits with his knees up, arms rested atop them, neither at ease nor tense. Severus decided before the jump to tell her; he's made enough peace to compartmentalize, if not actually be at peace. He senses her discomfort but he doesn't stop or change his mind.
Claire's the one who wanted to know. ]
The war in our world was instigated by a faction of witches and wizards who wanted to eradicate non-magical humanity from the earth. [ His low voice is quiet, emotionless without being flat. Just distant. ] It didn't start as that so plainly. It was against the institution of the Ministry of Magic, which is weak and corrupt, it was for the rights of all magical people to not have to hide and twist our society to better fit into the blind spots of the world. It was for sentient magical beings who are seen as animals by that same Ministry, just because they aren't 'human'.
[ It almost sounds all right. ]
But mostly it was about the leader of that faction gaining personal power, and his followers using dark arts. And genocide.
[ Claire can put the pieces together without having to have her hand held or all the steps explained to her. The blades of grass that she had been shredding have formed a tiny colony for themselves in the bowl of her knees and thighs, jutting out at rounded angles, but the latest addition to the fold doesn't ever meet the others, braided through her fingertips and knuckles. A muscle works in her neck, and her teeth grind together, trying to find purchase in her molars and jawbone. On the one hand, she isn't surprised, just as she doesn't find it impossible to line up the dark figure across from her and layer him over the picture that he paints. On the other, it's almost as hard to believe as it is easy to, given what she's experienced in knowing him.
She knew. Of course she knew. It was just sitting there the whole time.
She's never experienced it but she knows it's a possibility, but there's no room in the moment to wonder what if. Nathan had come close, but. It's still different, hearing it spelled out. At one point, Claire opens her mouth to reply and then closes it again, knowing that she needs to pick what she says next carefully. ]
That's terrible. [ It's spoken plainly, because it is terrible, and it's the first thought that she can actually articulate in knowing that she needs to say something at all. Her voice is low, and she works her lip with her teeth. ] Before, what you said, back in the room. [ She looks up and meets his eyes directly, if he will. ] Whose side were you on first?
[ She says it without judgment, her common theme, trying to parse through what it means that he's telling her at all and how she feels about it while staying still under the scrutiny of his gaze. ]
[ Severus borders on expressionless as he looks back at her. The irises of his eyes are black, a different shade and texture than his pupils, but still dark enough to be unsettling. ]
I was eleven when I started school and my seniors approached me. I was seventeen when I began participating in the war. I wanted it. I believed in it.
[ He looks away briefly, a flicker of something passing over his face, only seen in profile. He hands curl into fists, flex, relax again. He's composed when he looks back at her. ]
I'm good at dark magic-- I'm good at all magic, but dark magic is something else. [ Something else; something so grand and deep it made him a target for political seduction as an eleven year old. ] The only people who were kind to me were people who followed that path.
[ She looks away, not unable to meet his expression head on but rather caught up in the motion of his fingers and palms, watching them expand and contract. Distantly, she feels angry at whoever was in charge of an eleven-year-old enough to let people like the ones he's describing scoop him up that easily. And then she realizes what a stupid line of thinking that is given what she can discern about him by perception alone.
A lot of things start making sense very quickly. Claire struggles to stay on top of them. ]
That answers that 'why.' Bigots and murderers and terrorists. [ She speaks wryly but doesn't smile, curling her palms over her kneecaps. The desire to touch him in some way, needed or not, swells in her, but she doesn't move her hands, paralyzed momentarily by the conversation. ] What made you switch?
[ He doesn't flinch. Bigots and murderers and terrorists, oh my.
Yes. He is. ]
It turns out I do not actually have the stomach for genocide. [ Flatly. Severus knows this isn't the complete truth, but it is enough of the truth; his stomach twisted itself into knots more and more each day as he saw the heroic facade melt from the Dark Lord. Riddle, in his eyes, went from the great Lord who saved him from the gutters of wizardkind to a monster obsessed with only himself. ]
I hate the people I've defected to.
[ Severus lets those words burn. Lets them feel. ]
I've done more for their cause than all of them put together. Because it's the right thing to do. [ He tries not to spit that out with viciousness, and mostly succeeds, but the bitterness bleeds through. ] I know it. And I know that I should have been executed. My life belongs to someone else now, because I've done what I've done.
[ It's out of her mouth before she can stop it, clipping the end of his sentence and running into the next one, which she shuts her mouth for. No good deed goes unpunished, is what she thinks, though she isn't entirely sure that's the right frame of mind to have. Never mind that the right frame is still currently escaping her. She feels blank, wiped clear, a hand drawn over a fogged bathroom mirror. She can't be sure what she's seeing on the other side of the glass, but she doesn't have any inclination to leave. It's depressing to think that his life has never actually belonged to him, that maybe this is the only opportunity he's had to exist without being under someone else's thumbnail. ]
It's not an easy decision to have made, though. Even if you look at something and objectively know that it's wrong, a lot of people don't have the capacity to sit back and stop the trajectory their life is on just because it's too hard. Doing the right thing isn't easy. That's why so many people just choose not to.
[ Look at Nathan. Look at how long it took him to stop using people that were just like him to gain political favor. She knows it wasn't one night south of the border and a bunch of tequila. It's a little worm that ate away at him until he had the conviction to do something about it. And it got him killed. No good deed. ]
People don't recognize that? People aren't grateful? I understand Sirius Black, just being ignorant, and you can't exactly walk down Main Street and spell out what you've done and what you're doing, but it just seems... I don't know.
[ She realizes without warning how naive she sounds. Her history of knowing him has been wrapped in glimpses of someone who has treated her with kindness and understanding and who has helped further knowledge about the ship and the people on it, despite being the way that he is. None of it seems very fair. ]
It's not for you to say. [ His voice is firm, bordering on harsh. He looks right at her. ] Everyone knows. I was named by others and the reason why I'm not in prison was headline news.
[ There is no real forgiveness for Slytherins. There never will be. Severus knows that. Even before Voldemort, Salazar was the one who left, the one who stirred up dissent and thoughts of segregation.
They probably could have eliminated the house. Made new ones, or done away with the system. But it's easier for all those 'good' people to have someone to blame for everything ahead of time. Who cares if someone is children. ]
Black and his friends hated me before the war. Because I'm poor and ugly and smarter than they are. He's in prison now and the rest of them are dead or vagrants. They were always too stupid to take the war seriously.
[ Claire looks right back, the line of her mouth set and the cut of her eyes just as unrelenting. The bite of his tone is intimidating, and a sharp heat spreads across her breastbone and melts down into her ribcage, but she doesn't back down or look away, even when confronted with the fact that she doesn't know what to say. To any of that. In the context of their interaction, and in the quiet tension of their conversation, it's no easy to feat to slip these pieces into their respective places when he's right there across from her and she needs to say something. ]
You always expect the good guys to be good and the bad to be bad, because that's the way that it's supposed to be. [ She looks away only to allow her eyebrow to arch as she starts braiding pieces of grass. ] It doesn't take very long to figure out that that's a bunch of crap. The good guys are never all good. There's always some hidden agenda, something they aren't telling you, something they're doing. And monsters don't turn out to be what you expected either. No one is all one way or the other, even though the bad guys are usually still pretty bad when you get down to it. But most people are just - [ She pauses and splits a green blade down the center. ] Gray.
[ She balls the little piece of grass up between her fingers and tosses it away, wiping her hands on her pants and pulling her knees up to her chest. ]
Why are you telling me all of this? Not that I don't want to know, just... it's more than I would have expected.
[ Not that she wouldn't have asked anyway, if ever given the opportunity. Her voice is full of open interest, genuinely wanting to understand and in no way shirking the responsibility of now knowing it. ]
[ He lets her talk. Her simple understanding of the difference of people is-- well, simple, but at least it exists. Some part of Severus wishes he could believe she felt it, but most of him follows the only routine he's ever known, and just sees it as her rationalizing something too awful and convoluted to make any sense of.
His steeled gaze, dull inside from resentment so strong it's burned him up inside, doesn't waiver. ]
This is why.
[ Why he can't have friends, why he hates people, why he doesn't know what to do with her at best and why he shoves her away at worst. ]
[ She's confused at first, trying to look more thoughtful than perplexed, and then comprehension blossoms and whatever expression had been written across her face drips down into nothingness. Claire allows herself to become blank, and when she looks at him, she feels like she's looking through him. That same internal conundrum she'd had in the lab resurfaces with sudden intensity, that self-fulfilling prophecy and knowledge that no matter what moves she makes, she runs the risk of cutting him off entirely. She doesn't even bother questioning why it matters so much. At this point, it's a tired argument. Her arms loop over her legs and cross there, holding her shinbones in place under her skin. ]
Do you want me to walk away?
[ She probably should before she ends up on the other side of another failed friendship or because what he's told her is dark and terrible and it's something that he's always going to carry around inside of him and that would be what a normal person would do. Stubbornly, she stays where she is, waiting. ]
[ Finally the iced-over surface cracks, anxious, frisson of tension twitching his shoulders as he sits up straighter. ]
What can possibly happen if you don't? [ Severus sounds just one side of strained strained. He can't make himself say yes or no. It's obvious. ]
Wanting-- why does-- [ He cuts himself off. Wanting doesn't matter. Not for him. Not anymore. Unusually, Severus doesn't even know how to articulate it. ] I don't want you to suffer harassment on my behalf, I don't want you to have to put up with-- me.
[ Lacking an affirmation, Claire continues as if he had just said no. And she doesn't feel like she has to stretch that particular conclusion too far, given the look on his face and the difficulty he has forming strings of sentences. That more than anything is quite a tell. Claire lets her hands fall to the grass and threads her fingers through it, pulling tight enough to rip up patches of it, but she just keeps them tethered. ]
Severus, you might think that you're a terrible person, and - alright, I'm not going to sit here and pretend that anything you were a part of at one point in your life is anything other than what it is. I can call a spade a spade. But you've been - you haven't been terrible to me. Sometimes you've even been nice. I told you what I was and you didn't think that I was a freak or something to be poked and prodded at, and you didn't run away. Do you know how much that means to me?
[ There's a rush of warmth in her cheeks, and she's instantly annoyed at herself for having such an obvious tell herself, but Claire hopes that rhetorical question will serve its own purposes because she really doesn't want to have to explain herself. ]
I don't need you to push me away in an attempt to protect me. You might not want me to suffer any harassment, and I appreciate that, but I want you to understand that putting up with you and whatever comes along as a result of that is my choice, even if you make it seriously difficult sometimes. If I didn't think it was worth it, even the slightest bit, do you actually think I would be sitting here right now? Or that I would have stuck around even half this long?
I don't know. You're bloody mental. [ --isn't hostile. Confused, slightly. At a loss. Severus doesn't understand it. ]
It's not me trying to make decisions for you, [ he tells her. His tone turns tired, in his bitterness. ] I've done enough harm.
[ Severus doesn't want people to suffer on his behalf. If he wants to hurt someone he'll hurt them, but he has so much weight pressing down on him from all the things he's done, it's just so hard to accept more.
(And he still doesn't really trust her. Why isn't she leaving? Who would be fine with all of this?) ]
[ She agrees, a little bit like she might actually believe it but with an expression that borders on sarcastic. Knowing that she should take her business elsewhere and actually following through with it are two very different things, and she has never been particularly good at doing what is probably actually best for her. Nothing good has ever come easy, though. ]
You aren't even giving me a chance to try. [ It's a selfish explanation, but she doesn't feel any less justified in saying it. ] I know that none of this is easy for you, and I know why, and I know even better now. I just don't know what I can do to convince you that I'm not playing any angles. The more I push, the more you pull back, and if I just walk away then that's just confirming what you already think, about me and about yourself. So what am I supposed to do.
[ He understands angles. He understands all of them enough to embrace plenty - he appreciates Nuala, and Nathan, and Kate, and his patients, and people who think he's useful and who treat him well enough so that they have continued access to his usefulness. He even understands Odessa who thinks she can fuck her way to power through him or William who hit his damn head on Arima.
[ Which is probably a lie considering 90% of the people that she has come into contact with have had some sort of an agenda. Zach and Gretchen may have been the only people to actually appreciate her for the person that she was and not what she was or what she could do for them. Even Peter, at first, to all of them she was just some object, some fundamental piece to the puzzle that needed to either be slapped into place or shuffled into some drawer, safe and out of the way.
She doesn't know what to say to him to make him understand otherwise, that she's not into using people anymore, least of all him, and that the only angle she's trying to play with him is the one that gets him to stop shutting her out all the time. Easier said than done, though, and Claire shrugs, letting her legs drop in front of her, stretching them out so that her heels dig into the ground. ]
[ She has this urge to laugh suddenly, to dispel some of the anxiety and nervous, twitching energy that lurks underneath her clavicles and behind her ribcage. She doesn't, stomping it out at the last second by trapping it somewhere in her throat, but the self-deprecating quality is there in her tone when she addresses him again. ]
What if I fuck it up? You can't think like that. There would be no point in even getting out of bed in the morning if everything depended on a 'what if.'
[ Is out of her mouth before she has the wherewithal to trap it behind her teeth with a sharp bite down. She stares at him for a moment, feeling her eyebrows crease in the center, and then looks out over what she can see of the gardens in her immediate vicinity. ]
Right before I came here, I exposed myself and everyone else who might be like me or Nathan or Peter to the entire world. I have no idea what there is for me to fall back on, or for anyone else who might be different, for that matter. My life has been running and hiding from people who want to study me or use me or kill me. In some cases all of the above. And here - I'm still trying to figure out where I fit in, here.
[ Severus listens, and hears it like some people wouldn't, and the look in his eyes is one of understanding - he doesn't quite make it to sympathy, but he's just bot that sort of person.
He does respect what she's been through. He doesn't brush it off.
But
he can't flip a switch and change a lifetime's worth of conditioning. She has Nathan and Peter and a home somewhere, and even if that all burns, she still will have had it. Severus can't even imagine what that's like, and he can't begin to articulate why it's such a privilege.
He doesn't know what to say. He's suddenly exhausted. ]
[ All of that has burned, in one way or another. Her life and her home and her parents' marriage and everything about who she was disintegrated when she was sixteen. Nathan and Meredith are dead, and Noah is responsible for putting the person who violated her more than Brody ever could have tried to into her biological father's body and sending him around to walk and talk and hold onto her. Now Peter understands that person. It makes her skin crawl.
Even so, she can recognize what she had and what she has and for as challenging as everything in her life has been and for as terrible as most things have turned out, she would take all of the ruin and heartache that comes along with it to feel as loved and warm and surrounded as she has, a hundred times over. Maybe that makes her stupid or masochistic, but what's the point if no one - if she - never tries? She might as well let herself roam the wasteland for the rest of forever unattached and wandering and eternal. ]
Anyway.
[ Although she knows better than to feel self-conscious, she still does, running her fingers along the backs of her legs to brush some of the shredded grass from her pants. Claire doesn't know what to say either. She can't articulate why, just as much as he can't. She can't rightfully say that she doesn't know because she does, but there's no way of enunciating it, no vocabulary she even really possesses for it. It's just there. ]
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Nnnoope he's not going to stand there in the middle of a public walkway and talk about anything. But especially not this. C'mon.
He leads her to somewhere more dense, off a path, but still pleasant - if the gardens can be described as such; he supposes they can. He sits down on a grassy slope under a tree, and if not for the distant shimmer of metal walls, it might feel natural. ]
You remember what I told you. In your room.
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She keeps her arms crossed until she has to brace them under herself as she sits down, legs folded underneath of her. Several pieces of grass find themselves plucked up and shredded into the beginnings of a pile in front of her. At his comment, she raises an eyebrow. ]
Yeah, I remember.
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Claire's the one who wanted to know. ]
The war in our world was instigated by a faction of witches and wizards who wanted to eradicate non-magical humanity from the earth. [ His low voice is quiet, emotionless without being flat. Just distant. ] It didn't start as that so plainly. It was against the institution of the Ministry of Magic, which is weak and corrupt, it was for the rights of all magical people to not have to hide and twist our society to better fit into the blind spots of the world. It was for sentient magical beings who are seen as animals by that same Ministry, just because they aren't 'human'.
[ It almost sounds all right. ]
But mostly it was about the leader of that faction gaining personal power, and his followers using dark arts. And genocide.
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She knew. Of course she knew. It was just sitting there the whole time.
She's never experienced it but she knows it's a possibility, but there's no room in the moment to wonder what if. Nathan had come close, but. It's still different, hearing it spelled out. At one point, Claire opens her mouth to reply and then closes it again, knowing that she needs to pick what she says next carefully. ]
That's terrible. [ It's spoken plainly, because it is terrible, and it's the first thought that she can actually articulate in knowing that she needs to say something at all. Her voice is low, and she works her lip with her teeth. ] Before, what you said, back in the room. [ She looks up and meets his eyes directly, if he will. ] Whose side were you on first?
[ She says it without judgment, her common theme, trying to parse through what it means that he's telling her at all and how she feels about it while staying still under the scrutiny of his gaze. ]
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[ Severus borders on expressionless as he looks back at her. The irises of his eyes are black, a different shade and texture than his pupils, but still dark enough to be unsettling. ]
I was eleven when I started school and my seniors approached me. I was seventeen when I began participating in the war. I wanted it. I believed in it.
[ He looks away briefly, a flicker of something passing over his face, only seen in profile. He hands curl into fists, flex, relax again. He's composed when he looks back at her. ]
I'm good at dark magic-- I'm good at all magic, but dark magic is something else. [ Something else; something so grand and deep it made him a target for political seduction as an eleven year old. ] The only people who were kind to me were people who followed that path.
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A lot of things start making sense very quickly. Claire struggles to stay on top of them. ]
That answers that 'why.' Bigots and murderers and terrorists. [ She speaks wryly but doesn't smile, curling her palms over her kneecaps. The desire to touch him in some way, needed or not, swells in her, but she doesn't move her hands, paralyzed momentarily by the conversation. ] What made you switch?
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Yes. He is. ]
It turns out I do not actually have the stomach for genocide. [ Flatly. Severus knows this isn't the complete truth, but it is enough of the truth; his stomach twisted itself into knots more and more each day as he saw the heroic facade melt from the Dark Lord. Riddle, in his eyes, went from the great Lord who saved him from the gutters of wizardkind to a monster obsessed with only himself. ]
I hate the people I've defected to.
[ Severus lets those words burn. Lets them feel. ]
I've done more for their cause than all of them put together. Because it's the right thing to do. [ He tries not to spit that out with viciousness, and mostly succeeds, but the bitterness bleeds through. ] I know it. And I know that I should have been executed. My life belongs to someone else now, because I've done what I've done.
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[ It's out of her mouth before she can stop it, clipping the end of his sentence and running into the next one, which she shuts her mouth for. No good deed goes unpunished, is what she thinks, though she isn't entirely sure that's the right frame of mind to have. Never mind that the right frame is still currently escaping her. She feels blank, wiped clear, a hand drawn over a fogged bathroom mirror. She can't be sure what she's seeing on the other side of the glass, but she doesn't have any inclination to leave. It's depressing to think that his life has never actually belonged to him, that maybe this is the only opportunity he's had to exist without being under someone else's thumbnail. ]
It's not an easy decision to have made, though. Even if you look at something and objectively know that it's wrong, a lot of people don't have the capacity to sit back and stop the trajectory their life is on just because it's too hard. Doing the right thing isn't easy. That's why so many people just choose not to.
[ Look at Nathan. Look at how long it took him to stop using people that were just like him to gain political favor. She knows it wasn't one night south of the border and a bunch of tequila. It's a little worm that ate away at him until he had the conviction to do something about it. And it got him killed. No good deed. ]
People don't recognize that? People aren't grateful? I understand Sirius Black, just being ignorant, and you can't exactly walk down Main Street and spell out what you've done and what you're doing, but it just seems... I don't know.
[ She realizes without warning how naive she sounds. Her history of knowing him has been wrapped in glimpses of someone who has treated her with kindness and understanding and who has helped further knowledge about the ship and the people on it, despite being the way that he is. None of it seems very fair. ]
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[ There is no real forgiveness for Slytherins. There never will be. Severus knows that. Even before Voldemort, Salazar was the one who left, the one who stirred up dissent and thoughts of segregation.
They probably could have eliminated the house. Made new ones, or done away with the system. But it's easier for all those 'good' people to have someone to blame for everything ahead of time. Who cares if someone is children. ]
Black and his friends hated me before the war. Because I'm poor and ugly and smarter than they are. He's in prison now and the rest of them are dead or vagrants. They were always too stupid to take the war seriously.
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You always expect the good guys to be good and the bad to be bad, because that's the way that it's supposed to be. [ She looks away only to allow her eyebrow to arch as she starts braiding pieces of grass. ] It doesn't take very long to figure out that that's a bunch of crap. The good guys are never all good. There's always some hidden agenda, something they aren't telling you, something they're doing. And monsters don't turn out to be what you expected either. No one is all one way or the other, even though the bad guys are usually still pretty bad when you get down to it. But most people are just - [ She pauses and splits a green blade down the center. ] Gray.
[ She balls the little piece of grass up between her fingers and tosses it away, wiping her hands on her pants and pulling her knees up to her chest. ]
Why are you telling me all of this? Not that I don't want to know, just... it's more than I would have expected.
[ Not that she wouldn't have asked anyway, if ever given the opportunity. Her voice is full of open interest, genuinely wanting to understand and in no way shirking the responsibility of now knowing it. ]
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His steeled gaze, dull inside from resentment so strong it's burned him up inside, doesn't waiver. ]
This is why.
[ Why he can't have friends, why he hates people, why he doesn't know what to do with her at best and why he shoves her away at worst. ]
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Do you want me to walk away?
[ She probably should before she ends up on the other side of another failed friendship or because what he's told her is dark and terrible and it's something that he's always going to carry around inside of him and that would be what a normal person would do. Stubbornly, she stays where she is, waiting. ]
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What can possibly happen if you don't? [ Severus sounds just one side of strained strained. He can't make himself say yes or no. It's obvious. ]
Wanting-- why does-- [ He cuts himself off. Wanting doesn't matter. Not for him. Not anymore. Unusually, Severus doesn't even know how to articulate it. ] I don't want you to suffer harassment on my behalf, I don't want you to have to put up with-- me.
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Severus, you might think that you're a terrible person, and - alright, I'm not going to sit here and pretend that anything you were a part of at one point in your life is anything other than what it is. I can call a spade a spade. But you've been - you haven't been terrible to me. Sometimes you've even been nice. I told you what I was and you didn't think that I was a freak or something to be poked and prodded at, and you didn't run away. Do you know how much that means to me?
[ There's a rush of warmth in her cheeks, and she's instantly annoyed at herself for having such an obvious tell herself, but Claire hopes that rhetorical question will serve its own purposes because she really doesn't want to have to explain herself. ]
I don't need you to push me away in an attempt to protect me. You might not want me to suffer any harassment, and I appreciate that, but I want you to understand that putting up with you and whatever comes along as a result of that is my choice, even if you make it seriously difficult sometimes. If I didn't think it was worth it, even the slightest bit, do you actually think I would be sitting here right now? Or that I would have stuck around even half this long?
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It's not me trying to make decisions for you, [ he tells her. His tone turns tired, in his bitterness. ] I've done enough harm.
[ Severus doesn't want people to suffer on his behalf. If he wants to hurt someone he'll hurt them, but he has so much weight pressing down on him from all the things he's done, it's just so hard to accept more.
(And he still doesn't really trust her. Why isn't she leaving? Who would be fine with all of this?) ]
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[ She agrees, a little bit like she might actually believe it but with an expression that borders on sarcastic. Knowing that she should take her business elsewhere and actually following through with it are two very different things, and she has never been particularly good at doing what is probably actually best for her. Nothing good has ever come easy, though. ]
You aren't even giving me a chance to try. [ It's a selfish explanation, but she doesn't feel any less justified in saying it. ] I know that none of this is easy for you, and I know why, and I know even better now. I just don't know what I can do to convince you that I'm not playing any angles. The more I push, the more you pull back, and if I just walk away then that's just confirming what you already think, about me and about yourself. So what am I supposed to do.
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[ He understands angles. He understands all of them enough to embrace plenty - he appreciates Nuala, and Nathan, and Kate, and his patients, and people who think he's useful and who treat him well enough so that they have continued access to his usefulness. He even understands Odessa who thinks she can fuck her way to power through him or William who hit his damn head on Arima.
Severus doesn't understand Claire. ]
I don't know.
[ No one's ever tried before. ]
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[ Which is probably a lie considering 90% of the people that she has come into contact with have had some sort of an agenda. Zach and Gretchen may have been the only people to actually appreciate her for the person that she was and not what she was or what she could do for them. Even Peter, at first, to all of them she was just some object, some fundamental piece to the puzzle that needed to either be slapped into place or shuffled into some drawer, safe and out of the way.
She doesn't know what to say to him to make him understand otherwise, that she's not into using people anymore, least of all him, and that the only angle she's trying to play with him is the one that gets him to stop shutting her out all the time. Easier said than done, though, and Claire shrugs, letting her legs drop in front of her, stretching them out so that her heels dig into the ground. ]
Looks like we're at an impasse.
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He doesn't know what that would mean for them any more than if they agreed on something, though.
For a while Severus is quiet. Arms linked around his knees, posture defensive. ]
What if I fuck it up?
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What if I fuck it up? You can't think like that. There would be no point in even getting out of bed in the morning if everything depended on a 'what if.'
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[ Severus doesn't.
If he fucks up with her, she's someone else that hates him, or pities him (which is worse), just like everyone.
Everyone. ]
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[ Is out of her mouth before she has the wherewithal to trap it behind her teeth with a sharp bite down. She stares at him for a moment, feeling her eyebrows crease in the center, and then looks out over what she can see of the gardens in her immediate vicinity. ]
Right before I came here, I exposed myself and everyone else who might be like me or Nathan or Peter to the entire world. I have no idea what there is for me to fall back on, or for anyone else who might be different, for that matter. My life has been running and hiding from people who want to study me or use me or kill me. In some cases all of the above. And here - I'm still trying to figure out where I fit in, here.
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He does respect what she's been through. He doesn't brush it off.
But
he can't flip a switch and change a lifetime's worth of conditioning. She has Nathan and Peter and a home somewhere, and even if that all burns, she still will have had it. Severus can't even imagine what that's like, and he can't begin to articulate why it's such a privilege.
He doesn't know what to say. He's suddenly exhausted. ]
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Even so, she can recognize what she had and what she has and for as challenging as everything in her life has been and for as terrible as most things have turned out, she would take all of the ruin and heartache that comes along with it to feel as loved and warm and surrounded as she has, a hundred times over. Maybe that makes her stupid or masochistic, but what's the point if no one - if she - never tries? She might as well let herself roam the wasteland for the rest of forever unattached and wandering and eternal. ]
Anyway.
[ Although she knows better than to feel self-conscious, she still does, running her fingers along the backs of her legs to brush some of the shredded grass from her pants. Claire doesn't know what to say either. She can't articulate why, just as much as he can't. She can't rightfully say that she doesn't know because she does, but there's no way of enunciating it, no vocabulary she even really possesses for it. It's just there. ]
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Wow this is awkward they're both so great at people. ]
You should work in Agriculture.
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