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The dust had barely had time to settle from what appeared to be an increasingly-routine suspension of reality: enough time to let her blow off her anxieties, he hoped (and he hoped in some way that did not involve crawling into an ill-advised bed); enough time to regroup with his own thoughts. Life went on as close to normal as was permissible at Deus, and after what had seemed like an eternity the calendar item that woke him up said infirmary and for once his pleasure at the prospect was greater than the nauseating dread. He suspected the "up on the scale" and all the accompanying proddings weren't strictly necessary, but he complied as placidly as he could, jaw set grimly, and closed his eyes when they congratulated him on the addition of five pounds since the last time he'd been there.

A series of texts arrived at America's phone early in the AM in a nearly-simultaneous wave that suggested they'd been painstakingly composed with one shaking hand and queued up beforehand.









He emerged from the infirmary (absently shaking out his arm and stretching his fingers with his sleeves rolled down, resisting the urge to scratch the eight-dozen itches that had evaded him for weeks now) and fully anticipated her presence even though he hadn't quite steeled himself for it. He'd put on a glib front on Twitter partially--almost entirely--for her benefit, stifling his own lingering thoughts of mirrors and hazy blue smoke (it wasn't real Fiona reminded him gently, constantly) in favor of flippant comments about princesses and kittens, in the hopes that it would in some insignificant way do what he knew Bashmet (automaton, blank-eyed, struggling Bashmet) could do more effectively than he ever could, and make her feel better.

He couldn't stop the resigned sigh that escaped, and so he tried to play it off as a joke by offering her, instead of a greeting, his chin. He did this glibly, amiably, docilely, with the air of a man paying up a lost bet.

What had been a not-unattractive layer of manful scruff after a week (possibly an improvement, really) was now a sort of unruly and unkempt thicket, with a firm toehold on the title of "beard, actual, with mustache, proper." The scruff had gone some way to hiding the hollows of his face, emphasizing instead the line of his jaw and his cheekbone, offsetting dark eyes and the sun-freckled weathering of his skin in a way that made him seem deceptively near-healthy and active. The beard, on the other hand, was edging up to the point of doing exactly the opposite, and had besides the effect of emphasizing how much deforested forehead he had in comparison to how little bare chin. It was by any measure not an improvement, and he was not a man with much room for anything that wasn't.

"Your obvious hurry to be here is very flattering. For the beard. Be kind," he said. "These are its last moments on Earth." You said something once about mixing pleasure and tragedy, he thought, but he didn't say it, because it was a reminder he had no desire to make.

He closed his eyes with exaggerated anticipation (this, too, for her benefit as much as it was to avoid looking her in the eye) and for all his posturing there was nothing he could do--there was never anything he could do--to veil the sudden tightening of his shoulders, the sense that he was contracting, withdrawing into an invisible shell.

For all his front of swagger and sarcastic indulgence he was never more poised on the edge of his perpetual flinch: he was taut and wary around the superimposed looseness of his limbs, the flippancy of his offered chin, and this was immediately evident to the eye, let alone to the touch.

He reacted with a sudden stillness: there was the sense of stroking a shivering, terrified colt that might at any moment buck or speed away, a sort of dilation of seconds around an implied and thrumming question mark. And yet despite this his voice was level: he exerted total control over every sound that escaped him and this might have been enough to create an illusion of ease despite the tension, were it not for the fact that he'd opened his eyes and apparently couldn't quite figure out where to rest them. They skimmed from her face (never quite meeting her eyes) to her shoulder and off somewhere in the middle distance, restless.

"Contrary to your expectations about how the world works, I did not in fact cultivate this specifically to please you but let it get this way out of a lack of patience for trying to shave with my off hand." No hesitation, no breath: "Do you actually like it?"

"I hate it," he told her. "It's been nice to avoid that little item of--of monotonous personal upkeep, but it's--" And finally he faltered, at some innocuous brush of her fingertips against his ear that wasn't any different than any of the others but was different enough. His eyes searched over her face but still nervously avoided her own.

The moment broke: he reached up and he took her wrist in his ungentle fingers and he pushed her hand away, cringing away from it like he was escaping a source of pain, and in the exact same second, heedless of the fact that they were still more or less in public, he bent his head to her and when he kissed her it was with a violent, questioning urgency, practically daring her to fulfill his every expectation and reel back full of disgust and not for an instant relaxing out of that barely-restrained flinch.

There had not been any relief in him at all, in contradiction of the expected narrative of sudden revelations brought about, Disney-style, by a kiss. Instead if anything the tension had ratcheted up unbearably, and the moment it broke was instead the moment he realized she was not only not tearing herself away but reciprocating.

To an onlooker it might have seemed like she had some sort of curse-breaking power: he uncoiled, visibly and tangibly, hands skimming over her shoulders to weave into her hair. For a breath of time it felt and seemed normal, and she was no different from any of the others and he was no different from the man he'd been then or the boy he'd been before, and everything was so easy and so familiar that there was no room for relief, because relief implied that there'd been anything to change in the first place.

I'm scared I won't remember.

It was the realization that Fiona was saying nothing--no distressed protests, no barking objections--that jolted him abruptly back, and the nerves rolled right back in. They had been displaced for a frustratingly brief few seconds, and he recoiled, and he tried to put space between them but found his hands tethered to her by a strange magnetism. He cringed and could not stop touching her: her elbows, her wrist, her hair, her jaw.

"Sorry. Sorry," he said, low and urgent. "Sorry. I don't--I'm sorry."

He closed his eyes in sudden, exhausted resignation at the noise, disappointment and relief written simultaneously in the expression, and he subsided but his fingertips kept brushing the back of her wrist, the last strand of lifeline while the hallway filled up.

"Here's the thing," he said quietly, still refusing to meet her eye. "We need to stop scheduling our social interactions around dessert, because it always goes off the ******** rails." A passing hunter succeeded where the other hadn't, cat-calling from a safe distance (maybe they'd heard about America or maybe they just had a healthy respect for redheads). Taym's hand drifted off hers and balled up into his pocket and he receded into his coat just like he always did, curling up on himself, making himself small.

"Sorry you're a fan," he said with a vague indication of his chin, already turning away, awkward, aching, uncertain. "It's off to the chopping block."

Possibly he'd foreseen her taking over his room: not only had he left the door unlocked, the cake and the bottle were arranged on the desk in front of his usual stacks of books and notes in a carefully attractive way that suggested he'd expected her to see them in his absence. The cake was pink-frosted and it had "happy birthday" iced onto it and a cluster of plastic balloons because putting your money into the hands of random people on leave was a surefire way to ensure an apathetic selection process, to put it charitably. He was lucky they'd brought back an intact cake at all, really.

He allowed himself a long shower after the lengthy and arduous process of disposing of his beard, because as much as it knotted at the pit of his stomach to think of someone unattended in his room (with his permission was worse: with Leslie he'd merely been enraged) the thought of joining her there was worse and procrastination, even in the form of the hated showers and the lack of distraction, was welcome. He vacillated between profoundly shaken and utterly numb. What had just occurred was a balm to him one minute and a torture the next. Fiona was an unhelpful but vaguely supportive silence and the walk back to his room was interminably long and entirely too brief.

He hesitated. Letting himself in, smelling like clean laundry and the cheapest soap and the cigarette he'd smoked outside to settle his nerves, he kept his hand on the door as though to give him an easier chance to bolt although in truth it was simply because he had not decided yet whether it would be safer, on the whole, to just leave it open to avoid being alone with her. Maybe she wouldn't be here: that would be an ideal world, and also terrible.

"You have my condolences," he said, and he was all dry sarcasm again, all carefully-constructed facade, all well-groomed apathy. The incident in the hallway might as well have not occurred at all. He dropped into his seat, stymied in the act of putting his feet up by the full desktop and settling for slouching back instead, one arm over the back of the chair. He looked, it must be said, a little odd--wan and pale--without at least the usual stubborn shadow of stubble. Doubtless it would be back in full force much sooner than he'd appreciate.

He'd left the door open a few inches, and spared a fleeting thought that he hoped, hoped, that Lawrence was neither in his room nor due to return to it any time soon. Maybe he was still in the infirmary. Maybe.

"Cute," he added flatly, eyeing the in-progress hat. "To be honest, it's probably better drawn than the original was." It wasn't. A beat, where he clearly hesitated over speaking, but he did: "What were you singing?"