"Is it bad that I-"
"Yes."
Her accent cuts through him like a blade, and he still can't bring himself to believe that he'll ever be its owner. She's so clearly his superior, confident and capable in her own skin and really damn sexy about it too.
It should feel so very, very wrong - this is him he's thinking about, a future him, who he's meant to become. This is the height of narcissism, to want himself this way. But she isn't him. She was him, and he will be her, but neither explicitly are the other. And somehow, he doesn't think he'll ever quite be as truly 'her' as she is.
This is how he justifies it to himself as he looks her up and down, making no secret of the lust he feels, longing to rip that beautiful dress off her and see what's beneath.
She's got brilliant taste in clothes, too.
"Does that make you afraid?"
"Not in the slightest."
She's so sure of herself as she speaks - her words are clear and crisp, each isolated from the others and emphasized perfectly to make her seem somehow even more appealing to him. He wonders if that's what she was going for - it probably was, knowing him.
"It's a… unique… situation, ours," she murmurs, moving away from him to run her hand along one of the support beams of the barn. "But then, they always are."
Her walk is one of a woman well-traveled, but it wouldn't at all surprise him if he hadn't seen half the places she's been to. He's excited to see what she has in store for him, both in the now and as the future dictates.
Sometimes, these prospects are the same - if he's lucky, they will be.
"We're a dangerous person, you and I. We can't be trusted."
She casts her gaze backward, finding his eyes from where she stands across the room, lowering herself onto the bench that rests there. Hay and dirt crunch beneath her polished boots, an eerie silence taking up the rest of the room.
Perhaps, the rest of the world.
"You can trust me," he says, and the way he does is deliberate, because he doesn't know her. She knows him perfectly, but he could never hope to understand how she works. She takes her hair down, coffee-colored curls falling down her back in glistening waves. She sits with her back to him as she shakes it out, staring out the window, the sun hitting her at an angle that almost turns her into art.
"No," she answers, her tone absent and her eyes unfocused, "I really rather can't."
"That's something you need to get through your head, before you're me… there are plenty of good people out there, but for every one there are ten like us. Ten who've gone down the dark road and aren't coming back. You can't trust anyone."
She turns her head, a bright smile coming to her lips that could be construed as a special kind of insanity. A kind he knows well - a kind he may be addicted to.
"And the one person you can never trust, under any circumstance… well, that's just yourself."
Before he can think, before he can process what she's told him, she's crossed the room in the time it would take to snap, her skirt flowing around her and her face decidedly flushed.
"Especially the female version."
And as he watches her face, her eyes, he begins to understand her, if only in the smallest of measures. It's with a recognition that he does finally kiss her, because he read in her face that it was what she was asking him to do. He kisses her, in the end, not for himself, but because she needs it, and because he's the safest person for her to go to. He's the safest for her because he's so dangerous, so insane, so cruel.
He's the safest for her because he understands how it feels to be the Master like no-one else in the universe ever will. And she'll take that - gladly.
It's all she has left.