Welcome to Gaia! ::

He had gone first and foremost to Edith and he'd told her in a single sentence, meriting a look of consternation and, to his gratification, an instant turn to action.

It was all he could do. He'd realized halfway there that any other course of action would merely complicate the situation. The fewer people knew where his daughter was the safer for her. The less he became directly involved the better it was.

He was, in a word, helpless.

(Again.)

Numb and shaking he made his way back to his room, and when he got there realized he didn't remember climbing the stairs, didn't remember crossing the grounds in one direction as Edith set off in the other. He'd had panic attacks before that he'd never have characterized with that [removed](too weak, too feminine, too vulnerable, too cowardly), but if he had he'd perhaps recognize the aftermath, if not the symptoms he'd been fighting before: the trembling, the weakness, and above all the strange sense of depersonalization that plagued him at his most shaken. All the terror was present, but he observed it through a screen and it was the worse for it--a menace to be dreaded rather than an emotion to be dealt with.

It was almost like being the worst sort of drunk; like a hit that had been cut with something awful, just enough to take you out of yourself but not enough to sever the connection to your fear, a thin feed of panic between yourself and the surrogate present moment.

His hands were shaking almost too hard to text, but he managed, finally, and her immediate answer did not bring relief or peace. It merely ratcheted up the tension.

He took off his coat mechanically, and then the layers of his shirts, because he was shivering but the cold sweat between him and his clothes was doing nothing but making it worse, and after some difficulty he managed to light a cigarette.

This helped. By the time America arrived he'd moved himself to the bathroom, to fold up Indian-style on the floor in front of the toilet. He did not feel as though he would throw up--that nausea had vanished some time between Edith and now--but the threat was there and the cool porcelain was perversely pleasant despite his chills. He rested his arms and forehead on the pristine seat and smoked, trembling, using the bowl for an ashtray. It was incredibly unglamorous. It was pathetic, and sad, and alarming. The thought did not occur to him.

Without getting up he reached his free hand out towards her, silent and needy.

"Thought I might throw up," he explained stupidly, as if the reason he was sitting where he was wasn't obvious. "Didn't, but thought I might."

He was dry-eyed; his voice was level, but his throat worked and his ribs moved too steady and too deep.

"I'm sorry," he said quietly, closing his eyes again. "Should have just--waited til I felt better. I know you've got--"

At the dangerous falter abruptly lingering on the end of that word, he fell silent again, mastering himself long enough to add: "Sorry."

The long, still silence that followed the question only served to make the sudden crumpling of his face more alarming. It was gone in a flash as he clutched her hand, mastered, stowed away: not really gone.

"Leslie said one of the--the things that look like me was there. One of the ones that killed that girl." It was a whisper, taut, barely-controlled. "It told him it was--he didn't know what it meant--but it told him it was there for Tuesday." The shaking returned, deep and violent, with a desperate, hysterical: "I ******** up. I ******** up. I'm sorry," he added desperately.

"No. God, I don't know. I don't--no," he repeated, fiercely. Because he'd already know otherwise. He would. He needed that to be true; if it wasn't-- "Best I can guess it thought Leslie might know something. Best I can--best I can guess. So it doesn't know, or maybe--I don't know. I don't know what it meant but it knows she's real somehow and it's--doing things for her. Whatever that means. Waiting for Edith to tell me she's safe. She wasn't there," he repeated, in the voice of someone trying to convince himself.

A deep breath. "They moved her," he said, the hysteria creeping back in. "Jane moved her. Jane knew where she was. Jane was the one that sent me that ********' video. I don't know what--what happened to Jane. Jane that sent me into the Sahara. Jane knew about the copy Lawrence had, I think she--I think she knew that whole time, she had to have ******** known. Caelius didn't know. I don't ******** know where she is now. I think she's dead."

And was it worth bringing up the nightmare, slowly strangling while Jane said that Tuesday was right where she left her, and informed him that she was dead? That was guilty conscience, right? Just a dream, nothing else.

"They told me Tuesday'd been sleepwalking," he said shakily. "And waking up asking for me, and I thought it was just--maybe it was nothing, maybe it wasn't. I think Jane--she might have been--I don't know what to think. I really, really ******** up," he repeated, and it was tearfully now. "This was supposed to make things better for her. Everything I do I make it worse."

All he managed was a nod, childish and tiny and frantic, and more of those hard, steady breaths, a murmured "she'll take care of her."

He'd cracked a few times in front of her but never completely, and he apparently wasn't going to allow himself to do it now.

He did, however, succumb to a moment of quiet hysteria.

"I was so close," he whispered, with an incredulous, teary little laugh. "Twice. But the first time it was too late--how do you, how do you salvage a life when you've got an arrest record but no address? And every day just full of nothing. I tried. I tried," he said, sounding like he was begging her to understand but he wasn't really looking at her. "And then the second time. Lesser evil, I thought. It would have been so easy." He made a little sound--a child's imitation of a gunshot--and laughed again with a fresh surge of tears, ruining the toilet seat by putting his cigarette out on it before dropping the butt into the bowl. "I ******** up."

At this he fell quiet again, but the tone of the silence was different: stunned and startled, and accompanied by the slow subsiding of his shaking against her.

It didn't feel like it, and maybe if she'd said it a week before he would have laughed the same bitter, angry laugh, but it was possibly the best thing she could have said in a world of conversational landmines.

When the trembling had drained away from all but those unsteady hands he took in a deep and shaky breath, exhaling it slowly. He turned as if to meet her eye but fell short, glance skipping off her face and her shoulder. He'd always had startlingly incongruous eyelashes, long and dark in a face that was otherwise unrelieved hard edges and grit and roughness, and they were tear-matted now as he cast his eyes towards their tangled hands.

It was rare to see Taym thinking, to see him making efforts to sort through his own thoughts. He was more apt to choke everything back or to spill it out in a single incoherent mess, unsorted and chaotic. It looked as painful as it was, his body tense and coiled, his fingers tight around hers, glance wandering back and forth sightlessly across the floor. There was something in it of that night in the infirmary, standing in front of the mirror and exploring the alien shape of his body: perplexed and distant and difficult.

He broke it, finally, with a hard and shuddering swallow, and he reached to gather her to him, ignoring where they were, ignoring the fresh burn mark on his pristine bathroom, and pushing the rough texture of his jaw against the smooth one of her cheek.

No thank you, no everything will be ok, not even an I love you. What he said, in a whisper, was: "How are you feeling?"

He had a way of handling her after she'd seen him at his worst: a protective touch, a habit of smoothing her hair back and straightening her shirt on her shoulders, as though she was the one that had broken down and required fixing.

"I'm probably not going to be very good company for a while," he said quietly, and he hesitated before he continued. "If you--need anything, I don't want you to... hesitate. I don't need kid gloves," he lied. "And I know, with Leslie--coming back--"

Apparently he had meant her own issues.

"I want you to keep having good days," he said, in the broken tones of a confessor to a sin (the words shaped around the fear that the only good days would be hers, and the guilt that he wanted them to be his too, wanted to stop being afraid for his daughter, wanted to push the responsibility away and couldn't).

"Maybe not in the ******** bathroom floor, though," he whispered, and it was a shaky attempt at levity that immediately fell flat. He wasn't ready for that yet. There was still too much undecided and the only thing granting him any peace (besides his inability to do anything but wait, a paralysis of dread) was you've saved lives, and it was a lot and it wasn't nearly enough.

He was the one that got up first, tugging her along as though afraid to let go of her hand until he had to, to scrub handfuls of cold water over his face.

Until you kick me out never came, not that night at least. More apologies did, and then apologies for the apologies, and then silence.

He fell asleep, eventually--he hadn't been reading or making a move for his laptop; a fleeting attempt to distract himself through physical means was swiftly aborted and simply ended with his arms around her--and, perhaps worn out by a sudden demonstration he inadvertently gave her of his talent for crying noiselessly, he slept more deeply than usual. If there were nightmares there, they were locked away from her: he slept like a child, heavy and motionless, with one hand tangled with hers.