"You don't have to be here, Nat. Just go do whatever," Ian said quietly, heading over to the next crack and starting to mud it without stopping to acknowledge him.

"Do you not want me here?" Nathan asked. If the man wasn't in a good mood, he didn't want to end up in a scuffle like the day before with Tanner. Any sort of fight terrified him.

"I was hoping you'd make it a few days before you found out." Ian gripped the metal blade's handle tighter as he ran it down some tape that was on the crack in the wall. "At least long enough to get your room mostly done. I should have known better. Rick is a fucking loud mouth."

"It's not like I didn't know that you'd done terrible things." Nathan worded his response carefully, and Ian set the bucket down to finally turn to him. "If you want to tell me instead of me just hearing it from Rick, I'll listen."

Half of him wanted to know what they'd done so he knew how dangerous they were, and the other half was unhealthy, morbid curiosity. Conny had been so kind and sad, and yet he'd knocked out Rick with no hesitation. Ian himself had been mischievous for sure, but he'd also been abnormally gentle for a man when Nathan had needed it most. Whenever he'd so much as looked at Ian the night prior, he'd scooted away so that he'd feel safe. It just didn't seem like the behavior of a man waiting to rape him.

"Here." Ian pulled up a stepstool, and set it next to him. "Sit."

"You don't want me to help?" Nathan asked with a frown.

"Do you know how to tape and mud drywall?" Ian asked, raising an eyebrow, and Nathan shook his head. "Then you can help me paint in a day or two. Let me do this part or you're going to have a lumpy wall."

The quality of his walls' texture was the least of his worries, but Nathan sat on the stepstool to wait while Ian went back to mudding. For some time, Nathan just sat and watched him work, until Ian was on the last wall and finally let out a long sigh.

"Do you want me to tell you I had some good reason to rape someone?" Ian ground his teeth as he glanced at him, and Nathan tensed up. "There isn't ever a good reason for that sort of violence. You can get away with killing people easier. You were frightened and defended yourself, or if you didn't, they would have hurt someone. All of that bull. You can't say you raped someone for any reason that's acceptable. It's not. I was angry, and I forced myself on the object of that rage."

"Why were you angry?" Nathan whispered after a moment of awkward silence.

"Why do you care?" Ian asked, turning completely around and sitting on a stepstool on the other side of the room. It creaked under his weight, reminding Nathan of how much muscle he had.

"Well... we're living together. I share a room with you for now, and..." Nathan took a deep breath, and when he let it out, it quivered. "I don't entirely hate you."

Ian lifted an eyebrow on his strange choice of words, but was silent and allowed him to speak.

"You demonstrated that you are kind, even if you are also frightening and dangerous at other times. I just wanted to know what someone could do to make a kind person do something that violent to another."

Ian captured his eyes, and Nathan did his best to not flinch back when he didn't let go. Ice bored into his own chocolate eyes, but it melted as Ian gave in with a sigh.

"People who are kind and give everything they have to the people they care about, only to be betrayed, snap the hardest, I think. When you spend every waking second you have practically serving people and they spit on you in return, it's hard to stay sane.

"Short story, my boyfriend was using me and cheating on me. I don't even want to know how many other guys he'd slept with. I just know it was a lot. I felt like raping the piece of trash was a bit of poetic justice.

"I was so remorseful at the hearing, swearing I thought it was consensual. It's terribly hard to get a conviction for partner rape or men being raped, so when you combine them, people just look the other way. After all, grown men can't be raped. The injustice and gender bias in the system is ridiculous but worked in my favor. My boyfriend wasn't a skinny shit. I was. So, his lawyer lost his request to remand me to jail. I have muscle mass now, but prison does that you.

"Anyway, they posted my bail at some exorbitant amount they thought I didn't have. I paid it and then killed him and his current lover when I found them fucking in our apartment. They dragged me right back to prison, and all the lies in the world couldn't cover it up then." Ian probably couldn't have been more sarcastic about the "remorseful" part, but his tone had been deadly ice when he'd spoken about killing them.

That made Nathan feel more uncomfortable, not less. It also had him thinking more than he wanted to about his own mental stability. Was there something that someone he cared for could do to him that was so bad that he would want to kill them? Nathan didn't think he would ever want to end anyone's life, but he also hadn't had anyone betray or use him. How could he know? Nathan was unable to respond to anything Ian had said. There wasn't much he could say about it. It had happened, and nothing he said or felt would change that.

"Did you eat after I left?" Ian asked, meeting his eyes with the same concern that had shined in them the night before.

"Yeah. I was surprised Rick didn't come back to lick the floor. Why did you make food for him when he calls you so many slurs?" Ian being kind to a frightened kid was understandable, but Rick, not so much.

"Rick is just a homophobic asshole. I suppose I get a certain amount of pleasure from seeing him cringe when I'm kind, and I like to make him grovel for food. It's nice payback for all the times he's called me fag, fairy, or bent." Ian let out a long sigh, dropping his amused smile for a deep-set frown. "That and I pity him. Rick hasn't had a good go of it here, so I try to make his stay a little less miserable. You've seen the way he and Maggie get along. That won't change while you're here, but Rick is also too frightened of Maggie to actually try and hurt her. He mostly just breaks shit to piss her off."

"Why is he afraid of her? You said you were worried about her being unkind to me too." Nathan had seen little of her, and while she was abrasive, she wasn't scary. She had certainly stood in Rick's face unfazed by his outburst, but he hadn't seen her hurl anything but words.

"Just pray you never have to find out. Let's just say things weren't really that great when we were all brought here. Some of us have mellowed out, others just deal with it."

Ian left a lot of his mind for the day, but they worked most of it. While they waited for the mud to dry, Nathan slid into the bathroom with some cleaning supplies. Almost two hours later, he crawled out with horror on his face that Ian had laughed at. It wasn't his fault he didn't like spiders. There have been so many of them in the standing shower that he'd probably never be able to clean himself in it without imaging them coming back up the drain.

Thankfully, everything was in good working order, just full of dust and spiders, and a leaking pipe in the sink had caused mold to grow in the bottom of the cabinet. Ian brought up a board from downstairs, they'd replaced it as well as the pipes, and then Ian had gone to start his second layer of mud after they'd air dried it with a few fans over the heating vents.

The tiles were still good, but the cabinet had needed a nice coat of paint, which Nathan did while Ian worked in the other room. For some reason, the paint Ian had given him was black, but it's not like he had expected a less sinister color. By the time they finished what could be done that day, the bathroom looked nice, and Nathan was ready for a break. It was almost one pm, and he needed some fresh air.

"It's all right if I go out, right?" Nathan asked, and Ian shrugged.

"As long as you're back by curfew, you can do whatever you want." Ian had a strange tone of voice when he said so, piquing his interest.

"Do you not go out?" Nathan asked as he threw on his jacket in the living room.

Ian had parked himself in the recliner and pulled out his cigarettes, but was waiting for Nathan to leave to light one. "Nah, I have no one to spend time with. Go have some fun."

Nathan felt bad as he headed down the street to downtown. Ian didn't strike him as the kind of person who enjoyed time alone. It was more like he was stuck in the house because he couldn't go out. A time or two, Nathan looked around to see if he could spot whoever watched them when he went out, but everyone looked normal. It was all smiling faces, chattering pairs heading down the street with drinks in their hands, but nothing suspicious.

Perhaps just like the men at the pen, their watchers had two faces.

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Word Count: 1691