“It never does,” Dick agreed quietly. All his life, throughout all the terrible things he’d seen and all the terrible things he’d been through, Dick still didn’t think anyone started bad. Even Tony Zucco hadn’t begun his life as a irredeemable murderer, despite how he may have ended up. And Sharon was certainly no Tony Zucco. No matter how frustrated Dick might have been, no matter how little he trusted her, he still knew that. “Then maybe you need to change your perspective,” he shot back. Then, with a sigh, “Maybe we both do.” They’d both been fighting, since Madripoor, and refusing to see things from the other person’s point of view. It hadn’t gotten them anywhere yet, and Dick didn’t see that changing any time soon. Alfred used to talk about doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result, used to remind them all in a dry tone what the very definition of insanity was. Alfred was very rarely wrong.
Dick swallowed, closing his eyes for a moment. He was frustrated — they both were. But he’d been so unfair to her in the past, and there was no way to grow from that. There was no way to change things without being willing to take a step in a different direction. “It matters,” he told her, and he meant it. “Look, if I ask somebody else? They’re gonna lie to me. They’re gonna cushion it, or try to paint themselves in a better light. You won’t do that. You don’t care enough about me or my opinion of you to bother with a lie. I know that. What I feel is on me. Not you.”
She said she couldn’t give him the truth, but Dick got the feeling she wanted to. This wasn’t her holding back because she didn’t want him to have all the cards, because she wanted a leg up on him. This was her trying to protect someone else. (Helena, if he had to guess.) And Dick knew all about that. He’d been fighting to protect everyone else for as long as he could remember. “A lot of things could be made better by people just… Having a conversation,” he agreed. Offering her a small smile, he let the implication hang that this was probably one of them. “I’ve never killed anyone,” he said, though he doubted it was something that would surprise her. “But I’ve come close. And just about the closest I ever came was Tony Zucco. Personally? I don’t think anything could convince me to team up with people like that… but I could see reasons why someone else might.” Someone like Helena, who had always wanted vengeance in a way Dick understood a little more than he’d like to. Things were starting to fall into place, just a little.
If they weren’t arguing about one thing — they were about another. It was a rotating track where they refused to agree with each other even when they did agree. So, when Dick said that maybe she needed to change her perception, she rolled her eyes again, about to tell him that maybe it was him that needed changing — but he amended. They both did. Maybe it was time to agree. “First thing you’ve said since I met your that actually sounds right.” A bold face lie, but an allowance. An agreement. She’d try if he did. (And if it fell through, then nothing was really lost, now was it?)
But that didn’t mean she was eager to violate Helena’s trust. The entire situation felt so far out of hand that Sharon didn’t know up from down anymore — and she was one of the best spies in the world. “That doesn’t mean that it’s my story to tell.” But he was worried. He cared. And Helena had shut out the entire world but her, and Sharon… she had been there. In Madripoor when she was throwing Steve on his ass and making enemies of nearly everyone in the city. She had a friend like Dick and she treated him the same way he said he would be if he went right to the source.
“She wants to take them on from the inside. Ruin their business and disrupt what she can so she knows what voids she’ll be leaving when she takes them out permanently.” It wasn’t a perfect situation, but it was the only way that Sharon could justify the length they had been doing this — there would be a giant void when those families collapsed, and any number of other games and families could step up to fill that gap and become even more powerful. At least this way they could measure how much trouble they’d be in. (She had to keep repeating to herself that they knew what they were doing, but it wasn’t lost on Sharon what all of this looked like on the outside.) “She could have done this alone,” Sharon added, glancing at Dick as she waited for his reaction, carefully deciding if he was going to attack her for this or not — she didn’t think so. Despite butting heads at every turn, Dick was a good person. Genuinely. And his hands were clean in a way that Sharon’s would never be. “I thought it would be safer if she had someone on her side with her.” Another beat. “That shootout you heard about, that wasn’t us turning on you or anyone like you. That was us making sure we didn’t get a bullet to the head on the way back in.” Another pause, another consideration. “If I wanted them dead, they’d be dead. I think we both know that.”
