Re: the lighthouse, inside.
"It sounds shitty," she admitted, because giving up did sound shitty. It didn't matter that maybe she should, or that maybe the lighthouse would finally crumble in on itself and do it for her. It felt like unendurable weight, living without any hope, and for all that it might be easier to just to surrender, the lightkeeper didn't think she had it in her. "A hypocrite? Why's one thing good for you, and another thing's good for me?" It was a demand, that question, one asked in a voice forced through wheezing lungs. The wet wasn't good, and that seeped into her thoughts somehow, though it shouldn't matter here, should it?
She stared when he said safer was enough. Stared, and stared, and, "bullshit." Safer wasn't enough for anyone, not him, not anyone. Soaking wet girl in a lighthouse--and all the signs did point to her being a young girl-- that was true.
His shirt wasn't enough, because the girl trapped within the bricks and mortars always wanted more. She pushed and pushed, and she wasn't good at stopping. Blame social ineptitude and a year locked in this place for the even greater lack of social cues than normal. She smiled when she felt his smokey fingers against the stays on her back, and she leaned into the fumbling touch. Accustomed or not, the trembling of the lighthouse was still the kind of thing that made her seek taction.
His shirt balled in her fingers, she harumphed when he said not trying wasn't good for him, like victory in this place that was disintegrating with increasing rapidity. The water was around her knees now, and she yanked at the shoulders of the weighty dress as he fought with the stays. "It's not good for you. I knew it. Why you got to not try? Can't you do something different? Try? Fight? Is there anything you want? Talking to strangers is more easy," she said with uneducated simplicity. To prove it, she considered his question about side effects, and then she pointed up at the creaking light. "The side effects are bad for the light," she said, and the strange comprehension of the situation was surreal, but valid. "It's like this," she continued, "the light gets bad, and when it does then everything else goes wrong. That person I said, we were fooling, and he wouldn't touch me, made me do all the work, and then he held my hands down. I don't do good with being pinned, and I got bad memories about doing all the work. I was sick already, and that made the light worse. The light gets bad, this place trembles like this and that makes parts die. Next day, I wasn't good. Didn't want to say, but he wanted to fool some more, and he got I wasn't fine, and then he forgot and I got sicker after. Can't keep getting sick. But the light goes crazy with the side effects. Won't dead me, but the crumbling will if this thing falls in anyway."
Inarticulate, all of it, part secret language and part not, but the lightkeeper understood all of it perfectly. "I make you talk, and I make you give me your shirt. I make you fumble at buttons. That's how you don't like me." She looked down over her shoulder, where the black from her hair dripped onto the smoke that encased his fingers. The tower trembled worse, and she looked. "You close? Tell me something real while you futz."