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Things had gotten desperate. Accordingly, he left his door open again, and waited for something to come of it. He had an "at my convenience" policy when it came to interaction, and the vague guilt he was feeling he pinned down to Fiona, accusingly, who carefully said nothing.

Taym sat on his bed, for once, stiff and uncomfortable, indulging in one of his rigorously-rationed cigarettes (the supply was growing perilously low and his days had become measured by the time between nicotine fixes) with a notebook open on his knee and his pen tapping back and forth with restless nervous energy. He hadn't actually written anything in several long minutes. His thoughts were wandering, which was, to Taym, the worst possible thing. Wandering thoughts led to introspection.

It was hot in the dorms, all stale air and semi-darkness with the power out, and he had reluctantly shed his coat but not the threadbare long sleeves he was never without, pushed up to his elbow. Probably the burgeoning beard wasn't helping. He was sweating the band-aids off his knuckles, but Taym had always tolerated heat better than cold. He'd spent too much time under the sun, and it showed in the brown line across the backs of his hands where his coat-cuff interrupted the tan, in the freckles blossoming on his neck and his nose.

Absently, he reached up to touch the nearly-healed slice across his jaw. He'd have even done that again, just to stay busy, but power was out to Argus too. He'd have killed for some sort of occupation, for a job or a mindless task or a--

Not any more. Fiona knew. Partly from his inability to filter what got through to her, and partly because they'd begun, tentatively, to have small conversations. Things that kept him distracted.

I know.

He glanced up but several empty seconds unspooled before he made any further acknowledgement, pen tap-tap-tapping against the page, which was full of tiny cramped handwriting broken up into bulleted lists. Some of it was almost actual work--DIANA plans, vague thoughts about organizing it, mostly--and some of it was absent working-out of palindromes, a recent obsession he was finding himself frustratingly bad at.

Abruptly, he closed it up and deposited it with undue care onto the stack of books beside his bed, their edges squared up with precision. All the effort he put into his living quarters--which were immaculate, as always, right down to the perfect turn-downs on the sheets he never slept in--was effort he apparently didn't see fit to invest in himself.

He folded his arms across his lap and bent forward, finally meeting her eye.

"I am going ******** crazy," he informed her. He felt the need to add, bitterly: "Not literally. Since that needs clarifying, right now."

"Sometimes," he said, by way of roundabout answer, "I play this game where I think of someone I know and I start with A. And I think of every word I can think of to apply to them that starts with an A. And then I move on to B." He paused. "Last night I got all the way to R with the girl who worked at the gas station where I used to buy my cigarettes. That is how ******** stir crazy." He finished off his cigarette, chucking the butt into the bottle next to the bed. Gross.

He absently picked at his bandaged knuckles, eyes dropping down to his hands. "I'm not good at having nothing to do," he informed her, feeling unusually inclined to confiding. And worse here, where he couldn't fall back on a few blessed vices to keep himself occupied.

He'd moved on to twisting the ring around his finger, taking it off and turning it over and over in his hands.

"No more food to raid, nothing to do, so is that an offer to beat me up again?" he said drily. Given his performance (or lack thereof) on the mission pre-Tear and his general sense of uselessness lately, the training grounds spent a lot of time at the forefront of his mind, but he found it hard to talk himself into using the dummies. There would never be a time, he thought, that stabbing something that couldn't move would ever feel anything but useless and ridiculous. So he introduced the topic before she could, another petty little power grab, tiny as it was.

He pulled his coat off the back of the chair but didn't put it on, bringing his cigarettes more out of a lingering paranoia that someone would steal them than out of any intention to have any.

He was quiet, and then, with obvious reluctance, he asked her what she'd been thinking about: "You going to be OK this time?"

It wasn't particularly what he wanted, but he'd gotten himself into this situation and he made the offer: "I'm happy to play defense, if you want."

Tell me again why I volunteered for this?

Because you have things you need to work on.

She sounded... eager. It made his skin crawl.

"I think they enjoy this more than we do. More than I do, anyway," he corrected. No need to define "they." He was twisting the ring nervously around his finger again.

He was oblivious, but she was right: instinctively, he moved to get the door for her, shading his eyes from the slanting sun. He held the door with his hip and absently, unthinkingly, rolled down his sleeves. The feeling Fiona had when they went up against anything that fed her, a feeling she'd never seen fit to censor from him, was one that felt uncomfortably familiar.

"Do you know Jordan Miller?" he asked distractedly as they stepped into the sun.

It wasn't. He didn't say anything else, just left the question and answer hanging in silence, one hand in his pocket and the other holding his coat over his shoulder. He looked distinctly worse out of it than in it, scrawnier and narrower.

"Take it easy on me," he said sardonically, as the fields loomed up into view. "You've seen how well I handle this." Twice, now: once during their spar and once off-island. To say he had handled himself poorly both times was to put it charitably. Whatever Amity had had, Taym didn't.