Ah. Feeling better now.

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Knives looked over at her, at the soft outline of her profile, half-lost in the shadow. "I just thought we could talk."

"About what?"

"Things. Non-specific things. Safe things."

"I don't know that there are any safe topics of conversation right now. I'm a little pissy."

"I noticed," he said, grinning. She glared at him, pushing her hair out of her eyes.

"Ugh. I need to cut it," she said, pulling lightly on a few strands and grimacing at their length.

"Why? Your hair is pretty. I like how it's light on top and dark beneath. Plus, it's very soft. My hair is all stiff and spiky. Yours, and Ace's, you both have such soft hair."

"I hate long hair."

Knives blinked. "It's maybe three inches long. I'd still call that short."

"It gets in my eyes," she complained.

"So just cut the front part."

She shrugged, uncomfortable. "I hate the feel of hair on my head. It's a long, sad, boring story."

"So let's hear it."

She looked at him oddly. "Did I mention boring?"

"Do you want to look for another topic of conversation?"

"Sure. Um." She thought a moment. "Why do you wear your hair the same way? I mean, have you changed the style at all in 150 years?"

He looked puzzled. "It's easy to take care of like this. Should I change it; does it look odd?" He ran a hand through his hair, wondering if there was something wrong with it.

"You never have the urge to do something different with it?"

He thought for a moment. "No. Should I?"

"Men." The word was laced more with humor than scorn this time. She fell silent.

"So why do you like your hair to be so short?" he prompted after a moment.

She sighed. "You really want to hear this story, don't you?"

At his nod she shrugged her shoulders, then looked out to her left as she began her story.

"When I was in school, in my last year, my stepfather had taken to beating me severely. One day, I could feel one of the half healed welts on my back split open as I sat in class."

"I knew that it was merely a matter of seconds before the blood seeped through the shirt I was wearing. If anyone saw it, they might question just what was going on behind the closed doors of his house. And if that happened, I would definitely pay for it for months."

"My hair was very long, and as was the required style, it was piled in a bun on my head. I carefully reached up and let it down to cover my back, but that got me in a different sort of trouble. The teacher couldn't get me to put it back up, and school rules said she wasn't allowed to touch me. So, she pulled me out of class and into her office and called my father out of his class to discipline me. Then she left, sure that he would fix the problem."

"He came into the room, full of rage at the damage I was causing to his reputation. He yanked my hair back up into a bun, then saw what it was hiding. He slapped my face a few times, as I had obviously tried to make my back bleed. Then he shooed me back to my class, where everyone assumed he had beaten me for my stubbornness. No one noticed that the blood on my shirt wasn't fresh anymore."

"So, end result, in my mind, long hair is the same as needing to hide something. I hate it."

Knives stayed silent, and Kiley kept her face turned away. He reached out his hand and smoothed her hair away from her brow. "You don't like hiding anything, do you?"

"No, not really," she admitted, turning her head into the caress. "I figure that hiding is mostly the same as lying. And both of them are just admitting that you aren't strong enough to deal with the problems that the truth brings."

"And you pride yourself on being strong. Don't you get tired sometimes?"

"Of course I do. Sometimes, I hate having to be strong. But it's better to deal with what life throws you then it is to sit and let it roll you over. Don't you ever get tired?"

"I suppose I do," he said, shrugging.

"But you deal with it. Why should I be any different?"

Knives bit his tongue on the obvious answer, then tried to see if he could phrase it in some way that wouldn't get him into trouble. "Didn't you ever have anyone willing to help you through the tough times?"

"What? Are you asking if I had a guy to take care of me?"

He was glad the shadow hid his blush.

"I was married. Once. To someone I thought would be there for me when things got hard. I mean, that's why you get married, right? Well, when things turned sour in my life, he headed the line of people who betrayed me. Nothing like having your lover toss you out the back of an airplane to fall into the hands of your enemies that sours you on a relationship."

"He did that?" he asked, incredulous.

"Yup. In his defense, I had never told him that I used to be an assassin. And, with me out of the way, he was the man to head the Parameds. So it wasn't like he didn't have some perfectly good reasons to let me fall. But it did end up reaffirming my long held notion that I need to be strong enough to look out for myself."

"Do you hate him now?"

"On one level I do. The very hurt part of me that once trusted him. But mostly… he was looking out for his best interests. They just didn't happen to include me. I can't expect that people are going to act outside of their best interests."

"So you agree, that humans are self serving creatures."

She shot him an amused glance. "Anything that lives is a self-serving creature. No, my mistake was thinking that since I loved him, he would ignore his best interests because he loved me, too. I was naïve."

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