Welcome to Gaia! ::

He watched her, unresponsive to her pathetic attempts to hurt him, until finally he curled in on himself a little more in a dual attempt to escape her fists and her emotions.

"You don't need me," he said finally, quietly, with a half-hearted effort to knock her hands away. "You need someone and for some reason you've decided it's me. But I'm not my brother's keeper and every time I try to be I end up destroying people, so it's probably for the best that you only think you need me. You're sick of this s**t? So am I. I've been sick of it. You'll sit there and tell me that I'm not special because I'm going through a breakup, but you're not special because you're sick of s**t and damaged and need someone. Almost everyone here is sick of s**t and damaged and needs someone."

A hollow little bark of a laugh, totally insincere.

"Me too." A pause. "You make the mistake," he added, exhausted, "of thinking that you mean nothing to anyone because no one's unhealthily obsessing over you the way you do over them. You're gonna have to carry that around too."

"Maebe," he said patiently. "I don't even have the energy to feel properly sorry for myself, let alone enough to feel sorry for you, even if you deserve it."

"I had a sandwich instead."

He sighed, and it sounded so tired, and then, finally, he talked, like it was something he'd been thinking about for a long time. It was the most he'd said in a very long time, even counting his haltingly-dictated reports on his return.

"I have something to say too. Everything here is so broken. People regularly have Silly Movie Nights at the Unrepentant Murderer's Place. A would-be (censored word for Gaia) is running around with a white knight brigade even though he's also physically tortured and emotionally manipulated people and tried to kill them. People get sent on missions and the infrastructure's so broken they don't even realize that the mission's not official--it's so easy to just get... disappeared. Like they tried to do with me. Like they tried to do with America. My own boss told me it was good that I remembered what it was like to be human, and she said it like I was in this tiny minority, and that wasn't comforting, it was terrifying. We never know what we're doing or who we're working for. One of the leads decapitated a Hunter in a fit of rage, tried to shoot me to death for voicing my concerns about witch hunts, put out a kid's eye for--what, I don't even know.

"This is where we live. Before we started dating America and I watched a bunch of these old... PSAs we found in the school basement, and in one of them this girl was throwing around all this midcentury slang and she said ooh, that gives me the reds--made her mad, you know. Real funny. And that was an inside joke for us, for a while. And then America went to Russia, and everything that happened there--with the red eyes, with the--the--Jesus Christ, everything that happened to her there. And then I couldn't make that joke any more and it's just a joke, it's just a stupid ******** joke and it shouldn't matter given everything else she lost while she was over there, but she lost a joke too, and today it's a joke and tomorrow it's someone you love and the day after that it's your willingness to trust or believe anyone around you.

"And they want us to make a home here. They want us to watch each other's backs and trust each other. The man who tried to have my daughter killed, have me killed, stood by when he had information that could have saved innocent civilians in droves--he's running around the Island free as a bird and he'll probably be going to Silly Movie Nights at the Unrepentant Murderer's Place with a bunch of people who pretend he didn't commit the acts he did, because we don't have brains designed the kinds of monstrosities that unfold around here every day so we've forgotten the shape of a functional community. Everything's broken and I thought--I don't know. I thought I could help fix it. But I can't. I wanted to make a home here. She made me think I could. But really I was just trying to make homes out of people, and I kinda think that's what you're doing too--you remember what it's like to be human too, and you can't live that way in a place like this, so you try to make homes out of people. And you can't make homes out of people."

A pause. "I've been homeless before. It's not as bad as everyone says, once you stop trying to get out of it and just learn to survive."

"I promised myself that too but maybe my problem's just that I've never been good at keeping my promises."

Something she said there made him laugh, but it wasn't exactly clear what, and it wasn't a great laugh but it was more sincere than the last one had been.

"They'd probably let you go somewhere else, if you asked. But not to Australia. But you wouldn't want to. You pay a lot of lip service to how friendless and alone you are but as soon as they cut you off the grid you'd be pining for someone and they'd probably be pining for you for some--whether you think so or not. Anyway you told me I'd--motivated you, or whatever. I don't care what you do. I'm sure it'll involve palling around with killers and worse, do what the ******** ever you want. I've long since given up thinking anyone else here gives a s**t about that particular standard. Just makes it a little easier for them the next time they try to choke someone to death, but that's on your conscience, not mine."

"They're in my coat," he said listlessly. "There's a whole stack of cartons in the closet, if you need some for later."

"You can keep it. I have spares this time. Give me my phone back," he added, apparently unwilling to get up and get it himself.