"Anya, wait," Gleb says at once, cutting off whatever she'd been about to say about her neighbor. It's too unfair to let her go on and too much, the weight on his shoulders, the guilt that’s been steadily welling up in him, more than he can or wants to bear. No matter how little he's looking forward to finding out what will happen when he tells her what he hasn't yet, he can't just keep taking advantage of her kindness, letting her help him without knowing what he almost did, what he could have done. If he'd been shaken before, barely able to so much as catch his breath after aiming his gun on her, that seems to have nothing on this moment — her smiling at him, offering the friendship he once offered her, before he let himself consider who she really was. Before he almost killed her, and a piece of himself along with her.
It’s another part of him that’s lost now instead, but it is — it has to be — a price worth paying. In this world or any other, she'll live. She'll represent everything he spent so much of his life fighting against, but she'll be alive. At some point, he's not sure when, either that afternoon in his office when she was brought in and he ignored what should have been obvious all along or mere minutes ago, that became the most important thing to him. He owes her honesty now. Whatever she chooses to do with that, at least she'll know the truth instead of acting on some sense of him that she got when he gave her tea and a warning.
If he could go back to that, he would, but he can't. All he can do instead is own up to what he did, the same as he would have if he'd been able to return to Russia, though in an entirely different way. At least this is less likely to end with him being shot, though he wouldn't blame her for a second if that were the response she had. That gentleness she offered in the moments after he dropped his gun was nothing he deserved, anyway.
"I — I can't," he continues, the same words he'd used earlier, that she apparently doesn't remember. "Not without — There's too much you don't know. That I need to tell you."
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It’s another part of him that’s lost now instead, but it is — it has to be — a price worth paying. In this world or any other, she'll live. She'll represent everything he spent so much of his life fighting against, but she'll be alive. At some point, he's not sure when, either that afternoon in his office when she was brought in and he ignored what should have been obvious all along or mere minutes ago, that became the most important thing to him. He owes her honesty now. Whatever she chooses to do with that, at least she'll know the truth instead of acting on some sense of him that she got when he gave her tea and a warning.
If he could go back to that, he would, but he can't. All he can do instead is own up to what he did, the same as he would have if he'd been able to return to Russia, though in an entirely different way. At least this is less likely to end with him being shot, though he wouldn't blame her for a second if that were the response she had. That gentleness she offered in the moments after he dropped his gun was nothing he deserved, anyway.
"I — I can't," he continues, the same words he'd used earlier, that she apparently doesn't remember. "Not without — There's too much you don't know. That I need to tell you."