He smiles at her little joke—it doesn't feel pleasant, likely doesn't look it. His eyes hard. He nudges the shot glass away, considering. He's known plenty of people like her, who couldn't feel like they were anything without reducing someone else to nothing. He'd known how many drinks it took before Logan's smile widened and got mean, and William—with his hangups, his desperation to please—became fodder.
He'd come out of that first breach loving her, for whatever the fuck it was worth—her idealism as the world died around her, the way she'd flung herself bodily into her lost cause. And the way she'd been with him, the way they'd held each other together.
He doesn't know if it's a choice, one or the other, or what he'd choose.
“Who else have you done it to here?” He catches himself. “No. Who else.” A glance—borderline frantic, like a moth trapped in a jar—around the confines of the room, a sorry gesture toward that half-theoretical place, the world beyond the Barge.
It's an odd relief to rake her mind over the initial question and turn up almost nothing; another fall to go over who else was collateral before that.
"I pistol-whipped Rags once when he broke into my cabin," she says. No one gave a shit, and that bothered her about as much as the needlessness of the whole thing –– Annie's flightiness, Kiryu's dismissal of it, her own overextended defence of her space.
"And before that, the day before I got here. Joel and I killed an old business partner. A few people before that, over the years."
His mouth twists at that first admission and then his expression smooths over. He scans her face, gaze keen and impassive. He doesn't think of Rags as a kid—where they'd just come from there hadn't been time for childhood, and on the Barge he can't allow himself to. Can't think of what it would mean for the sum of some dead boy's life to have already been deemed unworthy.
But still. “Pathetic,” he says quietly, meaning her. Picturing Rags' bloody face and feeling pathetic himself, whether through kinship or complicity. Briefly he lowers his eyes. “Did you get something out of it?”
Tess nods, slowly. It is pathetic. It has occasionally felt that way, at least in the transparent seconds before something bolstered her up: sighs or snaps at the slightest show of regret, a drink in her hand, a slap across the face. Reality checks she'd taken on smoothly, buried them under the righteous anger of her choices.
Her teeth graze the inside of her cheek.
"Nothing that matters now," she replies. She reaches reflexively to thumb at her eyes; they feel hot, they feel like a betrayal, they feel like a misdirection she doesn't want to veer into. There is no deserved woe is me here. She stumbles on: "With Robert I was just thinking about the assholes he sent to kill me, and how he'd stolen from us, how he'd fucked us over... we had to get our shit back. We never did it for the hell of it."
no subject
He'd come out of that first breach loving her, for whatever the fuck it was worth—her idealism as the world died around her, the way she'd flung herself bodily into her lost cause. And the way she'd been with him, the way they'd held each other together.
He doesn't know if it's a choice, one or the other, or what he'd choose.
“Who else have you done it to here?” He catches himself. “No. Who else.” A glance—borderline frantic, like a moth trapped in a jar—around the confines of the room, a sorry gesture toward that half-theoretical place, the world beyond the Barge.
no subject
"I pistol-whipped Rags once when he broke into my cabin," she says. No one gave a shit, and that bothered her about as much as the needlessness of the whole thing –– Annie's flightiness, Kiryu's dismissal of it, her own overextended defence of her space.
"And before that, the day before I got here. Joel and I killed an old business partner. A few people before that, over the years."
no subject
But still. “Pathetic,” he says quietly, meaning her. Picturing Rags' bloody face and feeling pathetic himself, whether through kinship or complicity. Briefly he lowers his eyes. “Did you get something out of it?”
no subject
Her teeth graze the inside of her cheek.
"Nothing that matters now," she replies. She reaches reflexively to thumb at her eyes; they feel hot, they feel like a betrayal, they feel like a misdirection she doesn't want to veer into. There is no deserved woe is me here. She stumbles on: "With Robert I was just thinking about the assholes he sent to kill me, and how he'd stolen from us, how he'd fucked us over... we had to get our shit back. We never did it for the hell of it."