Welcome to Gaia! ::

Wake up early. Wake her up early, share a cigarette and a conversation like nothing's wrong and an interlude too tender-handed to maintain the fiction. Chase her out with murmured reassurances, stoic and calm until her fingers slip away and the door closes behind her.

Edit the two-page document that's never too far out of date. Hand-write a note to self, seal it with packing tape on three folded sides, and reproduce it in the hidden depths of DIANA's private files, long neglected and forgotten. Lists: these are people to obey and trust, these are people to simply obey, these are people to be afraid of. Just in case he forgets. And a few lines: this is who you are. This is what you have done. And this is why you did it.

He empties his bag and fills it with things he might want afterward or might not, he has no way of knowing, and he leaves it on his desk next to his laptop and she'll know why it's there. He tucks an i love you between the screen and the keyboard and he spends a few minutes with the cats, the closest he comes to succumbing to his fear and the urge to cry from it. He considers and dismisses texting his friends.

He dispatches a text to Jordan instead and drops off the missive and doesn't linger, and he's businesslike and collected when he does it, and he's freshly-shaven, bare-chinned for the first time in months and it's cold, makes him want to nestle down into his scarf.

Everything feels banal and distant, a glassy wall between him and the present but disconnected fear, and he presents himself at the labs as directed in full uniform, his hair still damp from the shower it had hurt him to take, the lingering smell of her diluted and gone from all but a trace hanging on to his collar. He's twisting Fionnghal's ring around and around his skinny trembling finger.

"Do I get a last meal or just a cigarette and a blindfold?" he asked flatly. "No need to point out I volunteered for this," he added. "Figure of speech."

He followed them, of course, and he was silent, failing to interrupt either of them, standing by in silence and twisting the ring around and around his finger. She was quiet, a tense presence in the back of his head, and he felt as if the two of them had been forgotten, put down and ignored, even as he watched the technical conversation about his immediate future unfold.

He waited until there was silence again. He hadn't written down an admonition to himself on this point, and it was partly because he'd told himself he wouldn't need to and partly because he didn't want to.

"If you're going to avoid even a pretense of hospitality, then I'll be brazen and directly lodge a request for later. Hopefully if we do this right Canary won't need it any more, if you're still catering to it." A pause, and then, sardonically: "Just in case."

He refrained from giving vent to the rising irrational rage at the use of his first name, and he pushed the ring around and around his finger.

He had a lot of questions. Dozens. Hundreds.

"No," he said.

Taym dies first but Fiona's mind and awareness shatters nearly the same moment. She builds herself thirteen times and accompanies 13 lives for 9 days, voiceless and more alone than she has been for nearly two years.

"What's wrong?"

"Don't be mad at me," she whispers, and the skin on the back of his neck prickles.

"Why would I be mad at you?"

"---" she says, and her voice breaks, and her face is contorted by sudden tears. "I have something I need to tell you."

Surrounded by file folders, pictures, and a child's drawings, the man who calls himself Taym wakes with a shocked jolt. The vivid scene fades under the present and he desperately tries to focus on them, to hold on to every scrap and sense left of it. There is the sense of so much more waiting, just within reach if he only knew what to look for.

It's hours before he realizes that it'd been a dream and that a dream meant that he'd slept.

He's never needed sleep before.

This one hadn't even gotten a name. He'd never wanted one, not even a number. He didn't, he said, deserve one.

Even though it never works he always tries, over and over, weeping in frustrated despair as his stubborn body knits itself back together again and again and again.

They're all a part of their source material. This one is the part that welcomes the sudden realization with a flood of grateful tears.

Tabulating the series of events that occur immediately after the pod opens will take a substantial amount of words, far disproportionate to the number of actual elapsed seconds: a scant handful at most, a couple of rapidfire instants one after another.

The first is the inhale, and he desperately needs it so that he can tell her it’s not like she thinks it is. The second is his hand closing around something that is not there, a secret swimming where the blackness of his vision had been moments before and where there is now a strange sort of light.

When the first hits his lungs the second is forgotten, and he simply breathes, a long hard intake-exhale, and in confusion he thinks he must have been dreaming, and that now he is awake. His first hysterical thought on waking--it has been this way for years now when the sleep comes hard and full of terrible things, a habit so deeply ingrained that even a year on the island had not dislodged it--is that he needs a score, badly; he’s shaken and he’s in the clutches of a nightmare and he woke up falling and that means he needs a score, and he needs to call--

--he needs to call--???---

-???-

--and he can’t remember his dealer and he isn’t sure where he is, and somewhere on the edges of his returning consciousness he’s aware of the presence of white coats and he thinks no no not again but before he can latch onto what it is that he’s dreading (those patronizing sweet voices, the pens hovering over clipboards, the understanding noises and the dope-sick agony and the boredom, the interminable unbearable lethal boredom) he can’t remember anything but the broadest stroke of it, an abstract with no detail.

And then this, too, is shunted aside by a new and dawning realization, on the heels of that first deep breath, of pain. It’s sharp and sudden and unbearable, and he claws at his hand and burns his fingers instinctively and frantically prying off a red-hot ring, and it’s clinking and clattering away on a strange floor and as he kneels cradling his blistering hand and fighting back bewildered tears he watches it roll to a stop at a pair of feet. A surge of something like panicked guilt; a swell of nameless remorse that feels oddly as though it belongs to someone else; and then the feeling is gone and there’s nothing left but his confusion and his pain and an inexplicable sense of loneliness and loss that he does not understand.