In a dream there's the silver cobweb scars striating the soft curve between her hipbones. In a dream they're almost but not quite smooth against his lips, and it never occurs to either of them that they might be anything but beautiful.

His dreams are fractured, messy, and undershot with the persistent, gentle sound of a woman's frantic murmuring, by turns distraught and guilty and resentful. In a dream he kisses the marks of what they've made together. In a dream she is not there, nothing is there, no one's there but the hollow-eyed deer, and there's just a dark space between a pair of bone-dull antlers where a paper-thin sun ought to be. He's exhausted. He sleeps so much now.

He lies in America's bed listening to her gentle humming floating in from the kitchen. He's awake but barely, and maybe she thinks he's in here with that dead-eyed thoughtless stare, the nothing expression he's been carrying around on and off since he remembered who he was, but when she is not there he is intense, his jaw set until his teeth hurt, and he's silently and relentlessly interrogating an informant who's willing but unable and sobbing her mingled apologies and reproaches.

She's remembering things in fragments and it's not enough because one of the first things she'd remembered was the whispered hint of a where. She knows where they are, or ought to know, but she can't get hold of everything and he's ruthless in his demands that she try harder, his silent screaming and threats and coercion. In a lapse of all compassion he threatens her with the golem. They can be hurt, he tells her, and her crying abruptly ceases, and it takes his own starting up, guiltstricken and desperate and silent in the dark next to America's sleeping form, to get her talking again. The tattoo still stings; America's sleeping on a towel stained with orange-and-gold ink, and when he swallows back the lump in his throat and silently begs for forgiveness the resultant pricking pain crawling over his neck is penance.

Edith's not happy with his decision to cooperate with H. He knows it without asking her--is afraid to ask her--so he circumvents her direct involvement in requesting permission to chase down the scraps Fiona gives him (the insides of rooms, the shape of streets, a sign, a license plate, anything, everything). He's denied. Too risky right now, he's told, and when America lets herself into his room he's staring at the ceiling with tears damping the hair at his temples and he can't make himself tell her why.

Instead he writes things down, in the beautiful books America gave him. Everything Fiona can give him. He stays up late collating things into spreadsheets and lists, breaking things down: names, conversations. The thought that someone else will be using these documents to track the things down and--do what exactly?--makes him sick. He does it anyway, and ruthlessly demands more. He sends them, the least incriminating parts, in hefty attachments to Edith, with terse notes. He deposits hardcopies in her mail slot, in nondescript manilla envelopes that blend in with the requests for replaced windows, with the invoices, with the paperwork of constant repair.

In a dream there's a French woman screeching, his feeble grasp of the language giving him a phrase here and there. She wants Taym back. She wants him back, he was hers. In a dream he's two people at once, moving in tandem, and when he wakes up from this one he blames Fiona for it, bitter. In a dream she's a fawn split neatly into a dozen pieces, each still mobile: a breathing ribcage, a flexing hoof, a sadly blinking eye, an ear that swivels apart from any skull, a bloodless beating heart. In a dream there's a room full of shouting that sounds too familiar, makes him think of Bix for reasons he can't place til he wakes up, and there's fists and cheering and the smell of blood. Someone else's. Hurting people has always felt good. Too bad Seven's not here for this.

The first aid tin has been hidden very carefully in the bathroom, far more carefully than any of America's expertly-concealed gifts. He doesn't dislodge any trinkets or bags of confetti as he makes the little space for it, and almost every day when he is alone here (and twice when he is not, when she is on the other side of a locked door) he takes it out, opens it and rolls the syringe between his fingers, holds the little packet in the palm of his hand.

In a dream he uses it. It's a good dream.

Fiona does not reproach him. Dull-thought, exhausted, she sits in the back of his head and through his eyes she stares at the needle, and she sends him Canary down below Deus in a pathetic surge.

He can fake it, in bursts. Between them he's an automaton, wound up and set loose on a dull and exhausting duty roster, and he feels nothing as acutely as he should between brief and intense waves: guilt, grief, frustration, rage, and resentment: for Deus, for Fiona, for America, for the house that he's sleeping in that she built to share with someone else, for the someone else, and, most terrifyingly and most frequently and hardest of all, for Tuesday. He will never be able to save her. She was his mistake, but he can't keep saying he's sorry. He's tried every way he can, and every apology has only made things worse. What do you ******** want me to do?

In a dream she's nestled in the crook of his arm and America's in the other and there's a curly-haired boy with his chin on her belly and Fiona's sobbing and muttering gently in the back of his head. Vivenne wants Taym back. Taym wants Tuesday, wants Tuesday like Taym, the real Taym, has never wanted anything in his entire ******** life, like he has never even wanted this little scene of lulling domestic bliss, more than he wants the box he hid so well. The want shakes him, terrifies him, and when he wakes up the questioning begins anew and harder.

He could get out, maybe. One night in a moment of utter desperation as he traces his fingertips over America's newly-inked shoulderblade he wonders if perhaps O gives their agents freedom of movement, and Fiona is a doe, knees buckling, folding herself up into the bracken as the coyotes close in.

Three times he's lying on America's bed watching her move through the room, watching her go about her life while he lies incapable of even rolling over or crying or falling asleep, and he thinks of asking her to sit down, of forcing himself upright so that he can begin the painful and exhausting process of cutting the tie between them as much as he can manage, aware that there'll still be too many ragged threads no matter what he does.

He runs the potential conversations over in his head, America saying it's not up to you to decide what I can or can't deal with and it's worth it if I say it is and how to explain to her that it wasn't selfless sacrifice but selfish preservation: but I can't. I can't. It's not about you. I can't.

He has nothing, has nowhere. Some days he's relieved that he can't avenge himself and save his daughter, and these are the days when he tells himself, over and over, just end it. Let her go. Tell her you don't want it. He's moved to a sudden, startling burst of despairing laughter by the realization that he's never more needed to know who he was and never felt less like himself. Wind the key, let him go, watch him walk: out of agency, out of options. In a dream.

Three times he opens his mouth to say the words and the energy to form a syllable isn't there, so they perch in the back of his throat until she nestles under his heavy unmoving arms, and he can feel her heart beating against his ribs and he knows that he'll never be able to say them, that they'll just pile up there, heavy, until he chokes them down in the form of tears or lets her, in his weakest moment, extinguish them with the pressure of her hands.

In a dream he says doesn't it bother you. In a dream he says I almost died that way why do I want it so ******** bad. In a dream he says it bothers me. He leans his throat into her hands, a silent plea, in a dream. Hold this for me. I can't carry that weight any more. Atlas, turning the world over to Hercules. In a dream she's fearless and Russia never happened. In a dream he holds her and she's sobbing and he takes it away, Atlas turning the world over to Hercules. It's all he wants. He can't do any ******** thing for her, and it's all he wants: just one act of salvation. One tiny act of salvation.

In a dream he pulled the trigger. In a dream he never left. In a dream she's holding his hand and he's doing it right this time, in a house that she built to share with him. In a dream he hunts, relentless, until they're all gone and Tuesday's sleeping safe. In a dream he still cares.

Please don't leave me, he whispers against her neck. He isn't even sure if she's awake. I want to help, he says, and he isn't sure who he means any more.