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. ]
It's not gardening. It's keeping the machinery running and making sure no one destroys anything. I think they might need to organize their own security soon, too, given how the security department is having endless fits over how hard walking patrols are.
[ Severus fidgets his hands, briefly, but forces himself to stop. This is a complete cop-out subject but also not. Secretly. ]
[ Coming off of that conversation, it's definitely not the best time to snort, but Claire still does, under her breath and turned away, something like the beginning of a grin pulling at the corner of her mouth. Her eyes fall to the motion of his hands, briefly. ]
I was thinking about doing a tour of all the departments, kind of like internships. I think security registered at something like a negative twelve on the desire scale. Next to comms.
[ Not that both departments don't have their merits, Claire just thinks she could be useful somewhere that doesn't seem to encompass the age old tradition of walking around with a flashlight, not to mention her personal opinions on their involvement in things. And she doesn't want to work under Nathan. For a hundred reasons. ]
I suggested that to Nathan. The woman he has working on it doesn't seem to like me. [ Said without any accusation. Severus is pretty sure Nathan forgets to add a disclaimer about him when the older man tells people to go talk to him. Merlin only knows why. If Clara doesn't want to talk to him anymore because he's too unsympathetic about other passengers, that's her business. ]
If the oxygen garden dies we all die. And they don't have enough people.
[ Because people think it's gardening and take it for granted that they have vegetables and breathable air. ]
[ She has the distinct urge to nudge him with the side of her shoe and say something like Imagine that, but the timing isn't really great so she just keeps it to herself, turns the tips of her toes inward instead and presses them into each other. Her voice, when she speaks up again, is the vocal equivalent of a shrug. ]
It isn't a bad idea. The have a whole major dedicated to being undeclared in college. Why not in space, too? [ As far as the idea of being in agriculture goes, it's true, she hadn't actually considered it, though now that he brings it up, it's with a whole different set of reasons outside of not wanting to be a farmer. ] I don't know the first thing about keeping an oxygen garden alive.
[ She doesn't mean to have a defeatist attitude; she just hasn't felt very confident about excelling at anything other than being a meat shield in a very long time. Also, this seems like a very odd turn in conversation, but sh still doesn't question it. ]
You're going to have to learn something no matter where you end up.
[ Gently said. Well. Gently for him.
He tries not to harp on people working and for the most part, he doesn't-- but with Claire he feels like she really needs to. Really. Because if she's working then he can find some way to be helpful, or talk to her about it, and then he'll feel less completely fucking insane about this whole thing.
(Also he just hates it when people don't work. On principle.) ]
You could figure it out. You're smarter than you seem to believe you are.
[ If she's being honest, there's a degree of self-aware embarrassment that comes creeping along every time she has this conversation with someone. In college, it had been sort of expected and understood - unless you were Annie - not to really have a direction, at least from the start. But here there's a sharpness to it that leaves her feeling somewhat inadequate despite her inability to make a decision. Her father runs Comms. Peter is in charge of Medical. Severus is so smart it's practically bleeding out of his eyeballs. Everyone she knows is exceptional at something, and she has not known what she was doing for the last two or three years as a general rule.
Is it bad to wait for something terrible to happen? At least then she feels useful.
And how the hell did they get on this topic anyway? ]
Thanks. [ She says it in a dubious way but doesn't seem any less grateful for the compliment. ] I know I need to find something. For something to do if nothing else. I just have no idea what I'm good at. I've never had much of a... trajectory, in that way. Do you know who's in charge of agriculture, off hand?
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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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I think the bald patches in the grass that I just made might have something to say about that.
[ Super great at people. ]
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[ Severus fidgets his hands, briefly, but forces himself to stop. This is a complete cop-out subject but also not. Secretly. ]
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I was thinking about doing a tour of all the departments, kind of like internships. I think security registered at something like a negative twelve on the desire scale. Next to comms.
[ Not that both departments don't have their merits, Claire just thinks she could be useful somewhere that doesn't seem to encompass the age old tradition of walking around with a flashlight, not to mention her personal opinions on their involvement in things. And she doesn't want to work under Nathan. For a hundred reasons. ]
Why agriculture?
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If the oxygen garden dies we all die. And they don't have enough people.
[ Because people think it's gardening and take it for granted that they have vegetables and breathable air. ]
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It isn't a bad idea. The have a whole major dedicated to being undeclared in college. Why not in space, too? [ As far as the idea of being in agriculture goes, it's true, she hadn't actually considered it, though now that he brings it up, it's with a whole different set of reasons outside of not wanting to be a farmer. ] I don't know the first thing about keeping an oxygen garden alive.
[ She doesn't mean to have a defeatist attitude; she just hasn't felt very confident about excelling at anything other than being a meat shield in a very long time. Also, this seems like a very odd turn in conversation, but sh still doesn't question it. ]
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[ Gently said. Well. Gently for him.
He tries not to harp on people working and for the most part, he doesn't-- but with Claire he feels like she really needs to. Really. Because if she's working then he can find some way to be helpful, or talk to her about it, and then he'll feel less completely fucking insane about this whole thing.
(Also he just hates it when people don't work. On principle.) ]
You could figure it out. You're smarter than you seem to believe you are.
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Is it bad to wait for something terrible to happen? At least then she feels useful.
And how the hell did they get on this topic anyway? ]
Thanks. [ She says it in a dubious way but doesn't seem any less grateful for the compliment. ] I know I need to find something. For something to do if nothing else. I just have no idea what I'm good at. I've never had much of a... trajectory, in that way. Do you know who's in charge of agriculture, off hand?
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[ ... Yep. ]
I have to do career counseling. For my students.
[ He sounds like he's not sure if he should make that a punchline. But: ] I get a lot of angry letters from parents.
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