Welcome to Gaia! ::

Taym being Taym he'd spent time rehearsing various entrances, mentally turning over greetings in his head, running through this or that approach. He'd kept it up even as he carefully wrapped and packed still-warm dishes, and as he walked down to the portal.

When her now manifested he was wearing the new jacket, the blood scrubbed clean save for a trace across the leather shoulder that had stubbornly refused to budge, and he hadn't shaved since he'd sent her the pictures and a tan and a smattering of sun-born freckles were almost, almost enough to efface the truth that he was once again struggling over his food, choking it down rather than eating on joyless autopilot.

This was visible in a certain hollow quality of eyesocket and cheek (even concealed, as it was, by the burgeoning crop of facial hair) but was not so advanced as to be tangible through his clothes--a fact made obvious by the fact that as soon as he saw her he shed all the half-planned greetings, the sly exchanges, the coolly-given regards, and instead he dropped the bag he was carrying and more or less threw himself into her arms, his own around her with an abrupt, crushing neediness, violent, possessive, unfettered; he pressed his face against her neck and said: "Poot."

How to say it? How to say that he hadn't really learned anything, hadn't really overcome anything she'd accused him of overcoming? How to tell her that she'd been gone for three weeks and he hadn't touched anyone or been touched aside from unfeeling lab tech hands prodding his ribs with a cold stethoscope or examining his teeth as though he were a horse weighed up to see if he was worth the effort of the auction?

He hadn't even said so much as hello, and certainly couldn't say any of that, so what he did instead was slide one hand down to tangle with hers, and then attempt to dip her as though they were mid-ballroom. It was not well done, at odds with his usual easy grace, and as was his habit he exaggerated his shortcomings as if through self-deprecation he might erase his failures, attempting, badly, to give her a little spin before simply pulling her close again, not even trying to hide the fact that he was inhaling the smell of her, nose grazing her jaw where his mouth was forbidden.

"We aren't underground," he pointed out. "And--oh my god," he interrupted, putting her at arm's length to look. "What happened to your hair? That is not a few inches of hair that is a lot of hair."

"Is this the part," he asked, "where I tell you it must have missed you by a hair, or that you're good at heading off danger, or whatever?"

Finally and reluctantly he let her go, stooping to retrieve the bag and to push it into her hands, a rude gesture explained as he went searching for his cigarettes which for all of Taym's meticulously organized habits never seemed to be in the same pocket twice.

"I brought food," he said, indicating the bag. "As requested. Where are we, exactly?"

"Minuets and a couple ******** on a prepubescent horizon," he repeated with impressed incredulity. "You turned Melville into beat poetry."

The bag, neatly packed so as to keep the dishes upright, contained--well, not much, Taym being Taym; he hadn't exactly brought a meal and if she'd been expecting it she'd find her stomach growling later. Instead there was a pair of ramekins wrapped in foil, smelling distinctly like late-summer raspberries and possibly strawberries too. Later, when the foil came off (or if examined by nosy redheads), there'd be a perfectly-charred crust of caramelized brown sugar that, once broken, gave way to creme fraiche and sour cream folded into the fruit. Like the peaches, it was something simple, something difficult to ******** up, that managed to seem impressive anyway.

"And what are we doing at Svetloyar Lake?" His pronunciation was not nearly so graceful as hers. It was, in fact, fairly butchered.

Her interest in him--the fact that she wanted to know, even if she'd also wanted to know from a four-eyed loser at some point in her life and probably from worse--it was this, forever, that buckled a selfish man's knees, and Taym was nothing if not selfish.

His cigarette was lit, and if any shred of what he was feeling escaped to his face it was soon chased away with a steadying drag. He reached to lift the ends of her hair mournfully, twining a piece around his finger and examining the damage as they walked before letting it go and then succumbing to the temptation raised by those constant brushes of her shoulder, and reaching to tangle her free hand up in his. Fionnghal, exhausted, no longer even protested.

"You are dead wrong," he informed her, "if you think I'm the one that's going to be doing all the talking."

He swung her hand right back, considering how best to take her up on it, grinning around his cigarette.

"I am thinking," he announced finally, "about investing in getting a pair of actual clippers and an electric razor runic'd up. I only put off shaving because it's such a pain in the a** without them, but just think--I could be smooth as a dolphin from collarbone to cranium twice a week, if I wanted to."

Maybe she'd feel, and maybe she wouldn't, the split-second of hesitation, the fraction of a moment of misgiving, before he ran his thumb over the backs of her fingers.

"I have never been happier," he said quietly, "at the prospect of a day doing nothing."