[She doesn't think he's weak or stupid or afraid, is the odd thing: only contradictory, too earnest and emotionally compromised to hold her to account for her sins, even when he loathes them. She chafes under his leniency; it feels like condescension to her, Charles's desire to avoid conflict translating in Anya's mind into the implication that she couldn't emotionally withstand the truth about herself as he sees it, as if she doesn't live with that truth, or as if she's still self-deluding enough not to understand the extent of her own moral failings, even when she's laid out her emotions as well as she can.

She wants to hiss through her teeth but she doesn't. She knows he's trying, is this worst part of it all, she believes that he believes that he cares about her, disrespect though his expression of it feels - he wouldn't mince so gently otherwise. Which means that if she attacks him on it, if she bares her teeth and demands a fight, it only makes her more the guilty party. She feels abruptly outmaneuvered, and she hates it. She takes in slow breathes and sips her tea, eyes falling to trace the table cloth.]

Did the kid gloves work on Erik?

[She asks it - clinically. Not cold, or edged, or disinterested or dubious. Just neatly hemmed in. She's actually a little curious, for all that it's incontrovertibly backhanded.]