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lily

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He was settling. He thought. Living with Eleanor was so different from constantly moving toward her, chasing her down, and before that, walking with her through the slowly decaying halls of Rapture in search of corpses, angels, blood... that could barely have been called living with. Life without needing to protect her. Just... life.

But it was happening. As with everything else, he was learning. They both were.

But sometimes he still needed time on his own, time to walk and think. So on a day when he had nowhere to be, and Eleanor was in school, he fed Eve and then took to the street and made his way to the park. Everything might be dead now, brown and gray and leafless, but he understood that it wouldn't always be that way, and if he was honest, he went there often now to look for a sign. The first green shoots. The first buds on the trees. Not reassurance. But something like it.

Watching life was what he did now. Watching life without needing to kill for it.

It felt good.

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They had the day off. Lily knew most of the other dancers were still at the studio, still working, pushing themselves as hard as they could. A new show would be cast soon, the potential for new soloists to step up, but she wasn't worried. The only person who would beat her out for any role was Nina and Lily was okay with that.

She was in the park, hands in the pockets of her coat, watching Delta. Smiling very faintly, she moved across the path to where he was standing, coming to a stop beside him. "Hi," she said, tilting her chin up to look at him.

He turned to her, recognizing her voice after a few seconds, smiling. "Hello." He hadn't expected to see anyone here that he knew, but he also wasn't surprised, and in fact - though he'd come here in part to think on things without too much distraction - the company was welcome.

"I'm glad to see you," he said, deciding that it was something worth being clear about.

"Is that so?" Lily asked with a hint of a grin, reaching up with one hand to tuck her hair behind her ear. It didn't necessarily surprise her to hear him say that, but she never knew quite how to read Delta, which she knew was part of why she was drawn to him. People who were difficult to read were that much more interesting.

"I'm glad to see you, too," she said a moment later, her smile growing. "Were you looking for something in particular or just watching?"

He gave her half a shrug, hands in his coat pockets. "Nothing in particular." He nodded out at the grass, the trees, the delicate monochrome. "I always used to like to come here, even when I first got here. There's..." He shot her a faint smile. "Nothing like it where I come from. Not really."

She thought maybe she should have been surprised by that, but she wasn't. Every city had a park of some kind, every place she'd ever known had green space, especially now, city councils often pushing harder for places like this, but some of the things Delta had said before led her to think he wasn't from the same sort of place she was.

"The last place I lived was pretty much all green," she said, her smile turning sad, though only for a moment. "Jungle and sand and water. So where is it you came from that it didn't even have a park?"

"Oh, it had a park." He shook his head. "But not like this. Nothing like this. It was all..." He waved a hand vaguely, looking for the proper words. "Not real."

Real enough, he supposed, for the people there, distant reminders of the surface - trees, flowers, grass, but never quite right. Now that he knew what right looked and felt and smelled like.

"It's hard to have something like this underwater."

"Underwater," she repeated, giving herself a moment to think on that before she asked too many questions. There was the implication -- it had a park -- that it was more than just a submarine or some kind of other submersible that would make sense to her.

"I would guess it's hard to have a lot of things underwater, but I have a feeling you're going to tell me otherwise," she said, looking up at Delta curiously.

"They made it work somehow." His smile turned faintly rueful. "For a while. I don't know if something like that can ever really work for long." He remembered nothing of before, when things were supposedly still good, those early days before the dissent and the war and the discovery of ADAM. But he had learned enough. Enough to know that for a while people had been able to fool themselves.

"Would you like to walk with me?"

"Absolutely, if you'll tell me a little bit more about this place," she answered, taking his arm, simply because she could. It was nice to walk with someone, too, and Lily always enjoyed touching people, even an innocent touch of her hand on his arm. She was trying to imagine living underwater like that, trying to find some situation in which it could work and she couldn't picture it.

Even if it hadn't lasted for long, she wanted to know what it was like.

"I will tell you whatever you'd like." He glanced down at her hand; it wasn't as though it was unwelcome, but he hadn't been expecting it.

It also felt good.

"I don't remember all of it. And apparently I was dead for some of the time. But what do you want to know?"

She was prepared to ask any number of the questions she'd been thinking of when Delta mentioned being dead and the words died on her tongue. For a moment, she could only think of Nina, but here was even more proof that death didn't have to be the end.

She smiled again, then pulled her lower lip in between her teeth, trying to remember what she'd wanted to ask. "It was a city?" she asked. "Or was it smaller than that? And all of it was underwater?"

"It was a city, yes. Under the ocean. I was never really sure where." Except... was that true? He wondered. Sometimes there were no memories, only a monolithic blackness, but sometimes things moved in the dark and he wasn't so sure.

He had been something before a Protector. Something.

"It was built for people who wanted to live differently. I think. And it didn't end well for anyone."

"Without the constraints of society?" Lily asked, because she couldn't think of any other reason to build a city under the ocean just to live differently. There had to be something they didn't like about the way they'd been living before, something they couldn't escape just by moving to another city or another country.

It was scary and appealing all at the same time.

"I can see why something like that might not end well," she said. "I mean, I've never been a huge fan of convention or rules, but when everyone starts to break them, all that's left is chaos."

"I think that was part of why," he said, nodding. He wouldn't have known how to put it that way, not exactly, but when she said it like that... Yes, that was a it. A great deal of it.

"I think at first it was meant to be a place without so many rules. But then there were too many rules, the wrong kinds of rules. And there was a war." He looked down at his hands, suddenly uneasy. "And there were things like me."

Lily squeezed his arm gently, catching the expression on his face as he looked down. "Protectors," she said, because he'd told her as much once before. And maybe that wasn't all of it, maybe there was a lot more to it than she understand, but she doubted he had any reason to be embarrassed.

"For the little girls, right?" she asked. It did sound like an awful lot had gone wrong down there and she shivered.

"Yes. The Little Sisters. My daughter was one of them." He sighed. There was nothing he could do to change this now, and in fact he wondered if he would change it at all... Because would he have met Eleanor otherwise? Would it have been worth sparing both of them the pain?

"None of us chose it. We did what we had to do. Some of what we did was horrible."

Everyone was capable of doing horrible things, she thought. Lily had seen a dark side of Nina, she had seen the things that went through her mind, but that wasn't everything that made up Nina. It wasn't everything that made up Delta, either, she was sure of that much.

"So it's better to be here, then," she said, smiling a little. "Away from it. A place where you can choose. I mean, this city might not be ideal, but at least it has that much going for it in your case, right?" There was still plenty of things they couldn't choose, things that were beyond their control, but it was something.

"I hope I never have to leave here," he said, and it was the truth. Here might not always be safe, and it might not always make sense, but it was a haven. It was a place where he could just live, and that was so much more than enough. "Me and my daughter. We can have a life here. We never could have back there."

"How old is she now?" Lily asked, tipping her head back a little to look up at the sky before her gaze was drawn back toward him. Originally she'd gone over to speak to him because he was handsome, because he'd stood out in the crowd, but as with most people she met, she was discovering so much more about him now. Everyone had something.

If there was one thing Lily liked about this place over New York, it was the stories people came with.

"Sixteen," he said, and smiled, feeling a flush of pride - new, since he'd arrived here. Prior to that, he couldn't remember feeling proud of anything. But Eleanor... smart, beautiful, and stronger than she yet knew. And kind, and he was beginning to understand how remarkable that was in and of itself.

"I thought I would never see her again. Until she came here."

"Then I'm glad she's here," Lily said, smiling over at him. He looked proud and although she didn't understand it completely -- and probably never would, she had no intention of being a mother -- it was still nice to see.

"You look much happier," she said. "Compared to the last few times I've run into you."

"I am happier." He hadn't really thought about it hat consciously, but now that he was made to, it was clear. He had been needing something. Had been empty.

"I was missing something, before she came. I had this... Hole inside me, that nothing else fit. Now it's filled." He looked over at Lily. "Have you ever felt like that?"

"No," she admitted, her smile turning a little more serious. She was lucky, she'd always known that, to have found something she loved as much as ballet so early on in her life. To have been good enough to do it professionally when there were so many dancers who loved it as much as she did, but could never perfect their technique or could never find the ease with which she danced.

And yet it was a lie, too. What she'd felt on the island with Sawyer was like nothing else she'd felt before. Now there was a place where he'd been and nothing could be the same.

"I found the thing I loved when I was really young," she said, because she didn't want to talk about Sawyer. "So I think I'm just an exception in that case."

"I don't remember being young," he said quietly, looking up at the bare trees. Had he been? He must have. All the Protectors had been someone before they were sealed into their suits. But nothing was there. It was as if he had been grown in there, and had only emerged on the train.

"What did you find?"

"Ballet," Lily answered, wondering why it was he couldn't remember being young. It had something to do with that city, she was sure, but she'd pushed enough for now. It was something, though, that she was going to remember for later, something to ask him at another time.

"I've been dancing since I was seven," she told him. "Started en pointe when I was fourteen and I'm still doing it." She knew it couldn't last forever, but she was holding onto it for now.

Unable to avoid it, he thought of women in rabbit masks frozen into poses that would have been graceful if they hadn't seemed to derive so much of their rigidity from terror. He thought of ice and sickly music, and he didn't want to imagine Lily that way.

So maybe he would have to fill his head with different images.

"I'd like to see you dance sometime."

Plenty of people weren't interested in ballet, she'd long since accepted that, but whenever someone expressed interest without being pressed, she was pleased. "We're doing Romeo and Juliet right now, it's in the last week of its run, though. I could get you comp tickets, for you and your daughter, maybe, if you think she'd be interested."

With a smile, she said, "It's not exactly a happy story, but it's beautiful."

"I know the story. I read it when..." He smiled, slightly self-conscious. "When I was reading everything. Trying to learn."

And then learning that there was only so much that books could teach him about anything.

"I would love tickets. If it's not too much trouble. Thank you." Eleanor, he was absolutely sure, would love it just as much. And there had never been enough beauty in her life before now.

"No, of course not," she answered. "We're given comp tickets for every performance, so it's nice to have people who actually want to use them. Just give me a date and I'll make sure they're saved at the door for you."

She paused, smiling, then said, "I'm glad you're coming." Lily loved to dance, but there was a part of her that loved to have people watch her, too. It wasn't always about having an audience, but sometimes knowing there was someone out there, someone who'd come specifically to see her that made the entire performance feel different.

"I'm glad, too." He smiled back at her, wider, than cleared his throat when something about the moment made him feel unaccountably aware of his own hands and feet. Strange.

"I don't actually go to many things like that. Not even movies." He knew that it was a thing that most normal people did, but he found them too loud, too full of rapid movement and colors, and they made him tense. As though he had to be ready to fight.

"Well, the ballet is better than a movie," Lily promised with a grin. She'd spent enough time around Kaine to no longer be surprised when someone admitted they didn't do something that seemed normal to everyone else.

"I'll be there, for one," she said with a teasing grin. "And, really, that's much better than a movie. Unless we were to go for a movie together."

"If you say so, I believe you," he said, and then paused, looking at her again. She was clearly teasing him, but he couldn't quite figure out the source of it. Or untangle exactly what she was saying.

"I... don't usually like movies," he said slowly, uncertain of his ground. "Why, would you like to go to one with me?"

"It wouldn't have to be a movie. We could go out for coffee or have dinner, maybe," Lily suggested, smiling, unable to help herself. He was sweet in a way she wasn't used to. He wasn't innocent, she believed him when he said he'd done horrible things, but there was something else to him she liked. Something she couldn't quite put her finger on.

"I'm asking you on a date," she said. "Just so we're both on the same page."

"I-" He blinked at her. "A date?" He knew what dates were. Of course he did. He had just, for whatever reason, never really imagined himself on one, even when talking to Russell about it, and he had definitely never imagined being asked.

But. Well. Okay.

"I've never been on one," he said, still a little uncertain. "Is that a problem?"

"Well, they're not very difficult," Lily replied, pretending to think about it, still smiling. "So, no, I don't think it's much of a problem. I promise there aren't very many rules to follow."

Especially not when it came to going on dates with Lily. In fact, if she thought about it, it had been a very long time since she'd gone on an official date at all. "Only if you're interested, of course," she added.

"I am," he said. And he was only a little surprised at the lack of hesitation. Uncertainty, yes, but... He was interested.

Even if he had no idea exactly what that meant.

"I think I would feel more comfortable if you decided where and when, though." She said no rules, and maybe there weren't formal ones... But he was still ready to follow her lead, at least for the moment.

"I have a show this Friday and Saturday, so what about next weekend?" she asked, smiling over at him. She would have to find a good restaurant, she thought, somewhere Delta would be comfortable, and a movie was definitely out of the question, but she was sure she could come up with something else for them to do, something they would both enjoy.

"It'll be fun," she promised.

"I don't have anything else to do." For the first time, he wondered what Eleanor might think of this. Not that he imagined for a moment that she would disapprove of any of it, or feel jealous of his time, but... it was new.

New all around.

"Anyway, like I said." He smiled again, faintly. "I believe you."

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