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crystal // note // action

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Fitting.

Why's that?

You have destroyed so many other buildings, it makes sense for you to have started that way.

[ Nell snorts, but she sounds like she's smiling now. ]

Good point.

Why don't you want to see your family?

I do see my family. They won't go away.

[ Not the ones she means, obviously, and even he can't really say NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS after all that, so, shortly: ]

It's like when someone is kind to you, but it feels like they are trying to prove—they were never angry. They never let me see them flinch. I hate it.

[ That's the part of the big amorphous cloud of no that he can define, anyway. ]

And I could hardly look them in the eyes, after all the things I've done— [ not during the war, no; that was all the genuine feeling he can communicate for the week ] —with 'men and women of a certain age.'

[ Nell's gearing up for a serious conversation of the sort they usually avoid, but then he goes and makes her laugh instead. ]

That would be awkward.

[ But he's not getting off the hook quite that easily, after prodding her about her own family this much. ]

How do you know they're like that if you don't see them? Isn't it possible they've gotten past it? They've had twenty years.

Eleven. They visited for as long as they could buy their way in. And we write.

I'll go when the war is over, if we're alive and allowed. [ So never. ] You can come. We can drink all of their wine.