Well. The man had a point. What's one more. It was a hard thing to argue with. And truthfully, Natasha didn't know what she'd expected his answer to be, what she'd thought she was going to hear, but this, at least, had the ring of honesty to it. Simple, maybe, but it was the truth. Amazing, really, how infrequently the truth was a thing that any of them got to hear. Just money, just a lie.
Those were the two tentpoles it felt like the entirety of her life had been constructed around.
"You aren't the only one who did horrible things on camera," she said, her voice quiet again and that same softer note back in it. "What you did for me, though, that was real, too. And I'm not going to forget about it." It wasn't that it canceled out the rest of it; nothing could. She remembered watching his Games, every moment of them. She remembered her own and the things from them that never faded, never disappeared even as time went on. The things that did fade, though, those could surprise you. She couldn't remember the name of the boy who'd been reaped alongside her in 7 that same year, for example, and there'd been a time when she didn't think she could have ever forgotten.
She shook her head once, as though she was shaking out the cobwebs, met his eyes again. "Okay," she agreed. He wanted company. "I'll stay for awhile."