notfaking_it | (no subject)

The beach, he'd said, so she'd prepared for the beach.

Some of the plans she'd left to him. The food, in particular, she'd instructed him to bring, telling him it didn't matter what it was, that she'd eat anything. There was a red and blue striped blanket shoved in the back of her hall closet, not something she'd put on the bed, but she grabbed it for the two of them to sit on, stowing it inside a bag. This time of year, the water was probably still too cold to swim, especially in the evening, so she hadn't bothered with a bathing suit, instead choosing a light sweater over a dark grey dress, one of the first she'd picked up upon her arrival.

She remembered him telling her that he'd been drunk once, that he hadn't enjoyed it, so she'd taken care when choosing a wine, finding something she hoped he might like, especially since she had no intention of getting him drunk on it. She had a corkscrew, two plastic goblets, an extra sweater in case the wind was cold.

She couldn't remember the last time she'd put so much care into preparing for a date.

Pausing by the mirror near her front door, Lily ran her fingers through her hair before she lifted the bag with the blanket and the wine. A cab was waiting for her downstairs and she took it to Delta's, paying the driver before she got out and headed into the building to buzz his apartment.

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"I like all of this so far." He took another sip of wine, then set the glass down in the blanket and reached into the basket, pulling out a couple of small plates and the fruit and cheese. Fresh strawberries, and a container of blueberries that he'd selected carefully - just ripe enough to be sweet but not mushy.

"I think this is supposed to go well with wine." He paused. "I'm not sure how I know that, though."

"Just one of those things that's creeping in," she said, reaching up to brush the fingertips of her free hand over his temple before they drifted along his jaw. Then she smiled again and looked at everything he had brought.

"This is amazing," she said. "Really, this looks fantastic." It helped that Lily loved food, but he'd picked the perfect beach food and he was right, it all went well with the wine.

He froze when she touched him, but it wasn't out of any displeasure. His eyes drifted shut and he just... drank in the touch, letting it linger long after she pulled her hand away.

"Good." He opened his eyes, shook himself very slightly, picked out a strawberry and bit the end off it. "You know," he went on, leaning back a little on his hand and looking at her, "I still don't know very much about you. Tell me some things."

"Things about me, huh?" she asked, grinning a little as she popped a blueberry into her mouth. "Well, I'm a dancer, you know that. I grew up in San Francisco, you know that, too." There were things she kept to herself for good reason, parts of her life she didn't need to share with the new people who'd come into it, but she could tell him some things.

"I moved out with a couple other girls I danced with when I was only sixteen," she told him. "There wasn't anything wrong at home, I just really wanted to be out on my own and my parents were the type of people to encourage that rather than try and keep me back." She laughed and said, "Honestly, I think they just wanted to have their alone time back."

"Sixteen," he echoed softly. Somehow it fit what he knew of her - her obvious independent streak, the sense he got that she went after what she wanted.

If Eleanor wanted to leave, he couldn't imagine trying to stop her. But time alone... No, he didn't want that.

Maybe not ever again.

He took another sip of wine. "What parts of the world have you been to? I can't remember ever seeing anywhere but Rapture." But he had known somehow, even there - as bits of himself began to awaken - that the world was so much larger than Rapture could ever be. No matter what Andrew Ryan wanted his people to believe.

"Not nearly enough of it," she said, then laughed. "I've toured most of the United States and into Canada a few times. They have some amazing companies up there and I danced with one briefly, which was an incredible dream come true. I was in Europe once, but it was for work, too. There isn't a lot of free time for sight seeing when you're there with a company."

Not that she had any regrets. Being able to travel and being able to dance, she was lucky she'd been able to do the two of them together for such a long time.

He knew the place names by now, if he hadn't been at all familiar with them at first, but they still felt like incredibly remote places, alien and somehow unimaginable.

He shifted a little closer, watching her carefully. "What was your favorite?"

"That's a hard question," she answered with a smile, the tip of her fingers touching her lower lip briefly as she thought about it. "Greece was beautiful, but so was Russia, which my parents loved hearing. They immigrated to California before I was born, but they missed Russia."

She turned toward him a little and said, "Romania was amazing. We had a bit of time to ourselves when we were there and they have all these incredible forests, completely untouched, and these old castles towering over them. It's beautiful."

He listened, and if he tried he could almost imagine those places. But not really as if they were real. Not like anything he had ever actually seen or might ever see. They were like stories in a book. Nothing more.

"It sounds beautiful." He paused a moment, thinking. "I don't remember anything like that. It's like I was never anywhere but Rapture. And I know how lucky I am to be here at all. Where I came from, I was dying. But sometimes..."

He sighed. "Sometimes I wish I was back in that world. On the surface. Free to go to all those places."

It was the price they all had to pay for being here, but Lily thought it might be worse for Delta. To not remember, to have it taken from him once and then to never be afforded the opportunity was something entirely different than what had happened to her. And she could tell him everything she remembered, describe it all in great detail, but it would never be the same as being there himself.

But there was the PASIV.

"There might be a way," she said slowly. "It wouldn't be the same, it would be sharing it in my head, but... it's possible."

"Really?" He frowned slightly - not in doubt but in pure confusion. Sharing it in her head... He had seen a lot of strange things since he had opened his eyes on the train, but this didn't even seem to make sense.

"What do you mean?"

Had Eames still been in Darrow, she never would have shared any of this without his permission, but he was gone now and she trusted Delta. If she asked him not to say anything, she knew he wouldn't. More than that, she trusted him to go inside her head, which was a strange thought in itself.

"I had a friend whose job was to go into peoples' dreams, usually to extract information," she explained. "He had a machine they used to construct their realities inside their minds and he left it behind when he disappeared. We could use that, we could construct one of those places inside my head."

It still didn't make any sense. But in truth, he guessed it wasn't really all that much stranger than anything that had been his reality in Rapture. Fire and ice and lightning in his hands, teleportation, his daughter calling to him from a city away.

So he would just trust her. Which wasn't difficult at all.

"What would that... involve? Would it be dangerous?"

"No," she said, then thought better of that answer based on things Eames had said to her. "I think it can be dangerous, depending on what your intentions are, but we wouldn't be going in with the hopes of carrying out any kind of espionage, so I think we'd be safe." It would be simple, conjuring up those memories, creating one of the many places she'd been for him to see.

"No danger, just..." She trailed off, smiling. "Just sharing one of those places with you."

That threw him into even more confusion, but now it was a feeling he was getting more comfortable with. He didn't have to understand it, he supposed. Not if he wasn't the one doing it.

"I think... I'd like that." He smiled. "All the new things I thought you'd show me, I didn't think this would be one of them."

"No," Lily answered with a laugh, "Neither did I." And yet now that she'd thought of it, she couldn't stop. She'd had plenty of chances to introduce people to new things, but never to show someone a place like that, built the way she remembered. This was something entirely new for her as well.