Welcome to Gaia! ::

"Well yeah," he said immediately, "but it's a little bit late to do anything about it now."

He hesitated, and he grinned, ducking his head to hide it as he did, because it was ******** funny even if it was an underscore to every reason for his resentment: "Did you tell America that Dostoevsky liked to beat a dead horse?"

"Seen what?" he asked in bewilderment, and then: "Oh. I saw she had one with her at the infirmary." A twinge, there, at the realization that this was some inside joke to which he was not privy. "She sent me a picture of her making kissy faces at one, once. Said his name was Felipe Pierre," he said, in a remarkably good impression of America's fillip on the end of the name, "but I didn't realize it was a thing."

A long pause while he shamelessly coddled the treat.

"She talks you into indulging a lot of s**t," he pointed out, without bitterness: just a sort of strange, hollow wonderment, devoid of actual curiosity. "I'm pretty sure there's a lot of people'd be taken aback to learn that Konstantin Bashmet has a manatee collection or," he edited, lest he be corrected, "contributed to one."

"She talks me into s**t because sometimes if I'm lucky she ******** me," he said bluntly.

"Harrison's a ******** idiot," he said, "given the ********' shackle he voluntarily took on."

Except that he was right: more about Taym than about Kostya, he thought. Save for one instance of Bashmet's anger at being routed out of bed their relationship seemed, from the glimpses Taym got of it, startlingly uncomplicated in a way that he would not have thought possible, knowing them individually.

Even now this formed a part of his frustration: the fact that he did not understand what it was that Bashmet had to offer, because the things he had for Taym--primarily, an emotional distance that made him nonthreatening but not entirely remote, and a frank and blessedly-superficial mode of conversation despite the language barrier--were not things that he had for America. They had a strange and secretive closeness, a fondness that jarred with the cold-eyed Kostya that he knew, and there was despair in admitting that it was possible for America to have keys to locked doors other than his own.

So of the two of them, who was the burden, and who was the gift? Taym, as always, could not help but see things in absolutes and extremes. Of the two of them, the one demanding distance and forcing closeness, the other with some secret but total compatibility--of the two of them, who was the noose? So are you, said Bashmet, but this was, Taym was certain, untrue. It was Bashmet's bed she slept in, and even if he'd stifled his own principles and jealousy and made himself come and live in this house he knew, completely, that it would still have been their house, and he just a guest.

When she'd suggested it he'd imagined her stepping out of a shower, brushing her hair and then leaving his room to go and join Bashmet in his, leaving him in an empty bed, his singular use exhausted and Taym not nearly delusional enough to think that he had anything special to offer in that particular area. Another flare of anger so intense it constricted his throat and his chest, not for Bashmet but for America, for the humiliating insult implicit in the offer she'd made him.

He wished that dwelling on it and nurturing the hurt would be enough to make him fall out of love as suddenly as he'd fallen into it. Instead it merely pained him, embarrassed him.

Transparently, he changed the subject. "How're things over in Death? Been thrown out any windows yet?"

The pause this time was meditative, not tense. He put Tubadiah down on the floor to let the treat stretch its legs, although by the time he'd finished talking it had simply come back to rest its head on Taym's knee and gaze up at him longingly.

"I am going to assume that there's not a whole lot of voluntary weaponization there," he said. "Seems like it might be pretty..." he hesitated, and then, with a snort "--harrowing."