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As far as reactions to learning who their new neighbor was, Nick thought Tallulah’s was pretty good. He personally felt like he couldn’t breathe.

She was upstairs. She was literally upstairs, right now, with Finn, where if anything happened--where no one could keep him safe from her. Just a wall away. Just a literal wall. Corruption didn’t work that way, he didn’t think, you couldn’t fake a purification like that, he was being irrational but he couldn’t not be. She was here. In this building. In his home.

He didn’t realize he was shaking until Tallulah pulled him into their apartment and locked the door behind them, but even once he’d noticed, he couldn’t make it stop. “Purification doesn’t work that way,” he managed, crossing his arms over his chest and tucking his hands away, where he couldn’t see them. “You don’t forget everything. Why did she forget everything? That’s not how it works. What if it’s a trick.”

He leaned into Tallulah’s touch, just a little, and let himself be moved. It would be so much easier to be an adult about this if he could just articulate why he was so scared of Avalon Page--even seeing her smiling civilian face, knowing she was Vanya Morgenstern, aroused this reaction to him. How was he going to live in the same house as her? On the couch, he gathered Tallulah into his arms and buried his face in her hair. It smelled sweet and floral and he could feel her breathing. Her chest rose and fell, and her hands rubbed tiny circles on his back. She was safe. He took a deep breath, and then another.

“I trust Kaatje,” he said. “I trust Finn. I don’t trust--I don’t trust her.” That sweet-toned alto pitch. What do you do with a drunken sailor? He must have stood stock-still in the hallway, staring at the girl--the woman--dusting the lobby entertainment center, for minutes. The song she sang had been one of violence. Slice his throat with a rusty cleaver, shoot him in the heart with a loaded pistol, feed him to the hungry rats for dinner--

That voice sent some kind of dread shivering down his spine, nameless and cold as winter. Even thinking about it made him want to gag. He took another deep breath. “I’m not sorry we got married,” he said, half-changing the topic. “I’m still happy. I wish she wasn’t here, that’s all.”

She was so sweet, she was. He loved her hair, her hands, her scent. With a sigh he let himself rest his forehead on her shoulder. “I love you,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

Outside, he heard a snippet of song. King Arthur, all those things, and still so creepy and quiet. It raked nails up the inside of his skin, as beautiful and clear as it was. “Finn won’t let her go,” he said, kissing along her jawline, knotting his hands in her hair to make them stop shaking. “You know he won’t do it. He’s wanted her to purify for so long. And here she is. Gift-wrapped. He can make her whatever he wants her to be, you saw how she looked at him.”

The same look he saw in his own eyes sometimes, during the bad times, it was there in Avalon’s. Arkady’s. “He can take the parts of her he remembers, and stitch them together to make someone who will do what he says and who loves him back. A perfect copy of his Tate.” He didn’t mean to be bitter. He owed Finn everything. But why did Finn have to bring her here? Where Nick lived, and slept, and--

“I’m being unkind,” he said.

“It’s not even stockholm syndrome if she chooses to stay and chooses to stay,” said Nick. He wasn’t entirely sure Kaatje wouldn’t just find somewhere else to put Avalon; surely she had some friends from when she was Order side. Like… who, though? Stories had been related to him about the things General Avalon had done. Not the things relevant to him, but the things that she had done to others. And he’d known. About the murder. “How can Finn even look at her,” he demanded suddenly. “She killed his father. In cold blood. Not because she knew she was gunning for Babylon’s father, she only knew he was Finn’s, didn’t she? She’s psychotic. She’s completely insane.”

His voice was muffled, from the angle at which he’d hidden his face, and he made a valiant attempt to pull Tallulah onto his lap and hold her close, protective and terrified. She was one floor up. One floor up and one wall away. “If she sings at night,” he said, trying to take deep breaths. In through his nose, out through his mouth, inhaling for a shorter period than your exhale period activated the parasympathetic nervous system, he had to calm down. His chest tightened and he couldn’t catch his breath as he imagined that voice, that beautiful awful voice, leaking through the wall into his bedroom. “She hurt me,” he said. “She hurt me. I don’t remember how but I remember I was terrified and that she laughed and she made me--she hurt me, Tallulah, and I don’t know if I can forgive her.”

He was a piece of literal s**t.

She was so smart and so reasonable, he thought. His wife. A smile ghosted over his face for a heartbeat, and he kissed her tenderly on the cheek. Maybe the panic attack would come back later--he could still feel it, in the tightness of his chest and the shaking of his hands--but he was alright for now. “I suppose--I suppose if our situations were reversed, and it was you coming back to me, I would be the same,” he said, pulling her closer into his lap.

They were close to him, here. If she tried anything on Finn, they could hear, and they could get to him before it was too late. And… it went the other way, too. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Just about ruined a good weekend there.”