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He was crouched on the floor, wiping down the outside of the last row of tanks, and he abruptly stopped, his elbows on his knees, his head bowed, the crumpled-up paper towel dangling from a trembling hand while the other pressed against his forehead.

"I ******** forgot. You were gone for two ******** weeks and I forgot that you were in this ******** division now too. ******** hell. Because it's so hard for me to think of you doing something so ******** stupid, even now."

"I'll ask Peyton," he answered, resuming his work with the same personally-irritated gusto. "And hooray for the ******** Death division rep from Antarctica. Maybe I should ******** relocate."

"I don't want to talk about America any more," he said suddenly. And then, with the same bitterness but somehow as sincere as he'd ever managed to be: "Your English has gotten a lot ******** better."

"Well good job, because it's working. I don't--have a head for languages." Which was true, because as much as he loved English, loved words, ensconced himself in them in a flimsy attempt to convince himself that he wasn't as stupid as the world assumed, clung to them because he'd never mastered an ability to use them properly, that was only English, and attempts at others had evaded him and he still, still, remembered the sting of April gently mocking his clumsy attempts to master ASL's alien sentence structure. He did not think it likely that Kostya felt the same wounded-puppy offense at commentary on his English, but felt compelled to say it anyway. "I told you you were selling yourself short," he said, not smug but tired.

"I have no need to learn Russian," he said brusquely, because a conciliatory gesture of friendship wasn't a need, because sharing some of Bashmet's daily frustration in an overture of sympathetic goodwill wasn't a need.

He gathered up his variously-scattered supplies and unfolded--Taym standing up always had the unsettling, arachnid suggestion of a creature with too many joints--to start the business of tidying up. This, too, he did like it pissed him off. "I am definitely transferring," he added, because to him the question was relevant to a need to learn Russian, and because he'd been carefully presenting it as a tentative option to everyone, bristling and irritated and too afraid to make it concrete. And because he wanted, now, to wield it like a weapon despite Bashmet's scoffing dismissal of Taym's concerns: you were the idiot that transferred in. I'm the smart one that's transferring out.

Later, maybe, it would occur to Taym to prod that statement, to peel back the words and look underneath them. Later, maybe, it would seem like a strange and somewhat dark thing to say; a suggestive thing to say, especially from Kostya, obedient in the extreme. That was if it occurred at all, which was unlikely, but if it did it would be later. For now it was only an obvious statement of fact, maybe lined with Kostya's cutting opinion of Taym's whining, at the very worst.

He dumped the armful of used-up paper towels and peeled-off labels from now-empty tanks and one empty bottle of cleaner into the waste bin, with a relished finality. It looked very much as though he were about to make some snarky, bristling accusation. It was incredibly obvious that his irritation as Konstantin Bashmet's existence--at his galling insistence on being important to someone over whom Taym felt irrationally possessive--had not left him, even if it was tempered now, displaced somewhat by exhaustion instead. "Have you had lunch yet?" he said.

He would go, and he would b***h at him for all the inadequacy of his groceries and to make some attempt to hide the fact that despite the fuller contour of his cheek, the shallower ridge of his clavicle, food was still a strange and taboo subject to him--that he was still carefully, painfully training himself to eat where others could see, around a shared table. A few sniped comments about Kostya's taste in bread would be sufficient to veil the unease.

And they'd talk, of course. He was right behind Kostya washing his bony, shaking hands (startled by the heat of the water, turning it down after a flinch and a sideways glance), and he was already sifting through topics. He'd read two volumes of Asimov just to have something to say, because Taym was one of those people whose gestures of friendship nearly always revolved, in some way or another, around a book. He would carefully avoid introducing the topic of America Jones, and he would make morose, openly-envious comments about Otto's apartment, and by the end of an hour (during which he'd manage to choke down a sandwich, and not just a slice of white bread and a whisper-thin spread of peanut butter that he tried to dignify with the name) the alliance would be as solid as it ever was--however solid that might be.

And later, when he got back to his room--just down the hall from Kostya's, now--he would realize that it had never occurred to him to ask Bashmet how he was sleeping, and whether the nightmares had been held at bay by work.