Welcome to Gaia! ::

He would have recognized him even without the name hovering over his head: the way he seemed like a child sitting at the adults' table, the laughable pink horns and the slump of his ridiculous wings.

He hadn't meant to come here. In point of fact, given his current mindset he wanted to be anywhere but here, because here was exactly where he wanted to be and he knew this for the warning sign that it was, even without the quiet ripple of Fiona's nervous disapproval.

(He kept instinctively reaching to twist the plain steel ring around his finger only to find that there was nothing there. This was, oddly, more comforting than alarming: she was gone, but she wasn't gone.)

The overbearing whimsy of the place had stopped being charming. He'd stopped going to seek out mock turtles and gryphons in deep conversation; he'd given up on sitting on trials for knaves of hearts. The game--he hated that word, in this context--had flickered in a strange fashion that boded all manner of unshaped ill, and then he'd found to his unutterable pleasure and with a buoying return of hope the caterpillar. Always his favorite.

He'd sat on the ground where he'd been spit out and he'd put his head in his arms on his knees and rested quietly, and for once he'd let himself think. He gave himself a few minutes to gingerly explore the turmoil of his head, and he'd remembered why he did not normally do that and wandered off in a random direction towards the vague promise of distracting violence, but he'd gotten, once again, hopelessly lost. And here he was.

He hesitated in front of the expectant walrus, the novelty of talking to it long since fled, and he felt around for an appropriate memory but he had nothing, everything dwarfed by the enormity of what he'd just endured. He was glad, fiercely and forlornly, that it was k1ng and not Phoenix that was slumped over a drink. Had it been her he would not have known what to do with himself.

He skipped it. Instead he made his way to the occupied table, and he slipped quietly into the seat opposite the tiny Dormouse, and he said, quietly: "If you haven't talked to any enormous caterpillars yet: don't."

Not for the first time Taym found himself looking at Leslie (not king, not right now) through the lens of first-person familiarity.

If he'd come in here alone, if the room had been empty--hell, if Phoenix had been here, or anyone else--he'd have dredged up another unforgettable memory, some frozen moment in time with Bird (because those seemed to be the ones on which he kept relying), and within a few seconds (because it was quick here, so quick; it was just like the needle except that it wasn't like it at all) he'd have been in the exact same state as king was now, or possibly worse.

For reasons he could not have even begun to articulate, he realized he absolutely would not do that, and it was king's fault--Leslie's fault--and he hated him for it.

He watched him quietly for a few seconds, and said nothing, neither disappointed nor approving nor even sympathetic, as king acquired another drink. When he did speak up, finally, it was to say this: "Sorry. Deus is kind of a crapsack piece of s**t when it comes to--to--things like that," he finished lamely. "I wish I could say you get used to s**t like that, but you don't."

"It's temporary," he said tiredly. "It always is."

He'd woken up after the Tear and Clerise had died, and Clarice, and there'd been a hunter screaming in the infirmary that had suddenly stopped screaming and he'd never had the balls to confirm suspicions. For them the Tear had been the last thing.

"It's temporary," he repeated. In a sudden movement of exhaustion he ran his hand over his face, raked his fingers through the hair (he'd miss that, at least), and instantly attempted to behave as though he hadn't, straight- and sober-faced as though he'd not betrayed himself in the split-second gesture.

"Pretty bad, then?" he asked, looking at the fresh glass, and it was obvious he wasn't talking about the drink.

(He'd never wanted other people's emotional baggage: he'd wanted to help people without shouldering their burdens. He had no curiosity, not normally, but he'd seen Tuesday in there and he wondered exactly what Leslie had seen.)

He thought about Tuesday's tiny hands (not Tuesday, not really Tuesday, just some little Tuesday-shaped fragment of dream) and the only way it could have been worse, he figured, was if Bird had been there too. He felt no shame but only fear that it might be heard or seen when his eyes burned.

Still it. Stifle it. His voice was calm. "It gets easier," he lied, because it was not in him to sit here and tell a drunk, broken boy that it only got harder. It would accomplish nothing. It would be, as Bashmet might have observed, inefficient. But that wasn't why he didn't.

He wondered, dully and without any affection at all for Leslie or for king--with anything but--whether he might have had a son one day, too.

"I don't know what the ******** you saw in there," he added, trying to sound conversational, mostly succeeding, "but it wasn't real. Just--hang the ******** on to that."

He stared at Leslie's forgotten glass. If it had been Phoenix's he'd have taken it. He had once, at a party, pointedly but nonchalantly turned the proffered red cup halfway around so that he could drink from the same side a pretty girl had left her lipstick on, and the hint had been taken. He reminded himself of this because it helped him tamp down the desire to down the rest of the dormouse's drink.

"You don't have to tell me," he said quietly, "because I was there, but if it helps, carry the ******** on. I wanna go home too. We'll go home. Just have to wait it out."

There'd been no future in his. Not really.

He hesitated.

"It?" he asked. "Alice?" A flash of irritation, of resentment, that asking Alice had not once occurred to him. She'd reminded him distinctly of the absent-gazed goddesses, and he'd instinctively classed her as one of them, hadn't even bothered to try. He was mixing up his mythos, here, but probably later when they all clicked their heels she'd tell them she hadn't bothered to convey this before because they wouldn't have believed it.

"The queens," he repeated, the all-caps absent from his voice. "I don't guess she ******** elaborated."