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A ripple of disappointment that was not without relief, a tightening and then a trembling of his fingers, but he let himself be led to safer ground without protest, and he'd been planning to gloat that he'd cracked her vow of silence so easily but it felt wrong to do it now.

"I have made myself into a model boy scout," he promised her, "especially when it comes to cutlery. There are also," he said, voice lowering conspiratorially as if imparting a great secret, "spoons."

He was the one, eventually, that let go of her--under the pretense of putting out his cigarette. "And I think I saw Oliver and Company once, but I seem to recall that I slept through most of it."

Maybe his tentative toying with the caramel crust had more to do with his appraising his own efforts, but it was hard to say because Taym's avoidance of food nearly always took the shape of pushing it around the dish in one way or another, experimentally turning over parts of it, examining it as if it were some exotic scientific specimen rather than a bowl of oatmeal or a extremely thin chicken breast or a single slice of bread.

He pried up a section of it unthinkingly with the end of his fork, prodded the strata of cream and raspberries, and did not take a bite. "You could just ask," he informed her, not without fondness. And then he looked up at her and indicated her bowl, with the gruffness of Taym feeling suddenly shy. "How is it?"

He watched her as long as it was safe to, disconcerted to realize that she was, here and now, taking the advice he'd given her in Chicago, and besides caught up in the odd voyeurism that seemed to always accompany the sight of someone enjoying food now.

He only averted his eyes when she opened hers, and by the time she was dragging her finger through the crumbs in her bowl he'd managed a little over half of his, not eaten as slowly as he would have had he been trying to properly enjoy it, but also not simply bolted as all other food tended to be. That appeared to be as much as he'd give in to, because he set the bowl aside.

(Everything, even this, felt different now. Not because of the restraint, but because of the knowledge, which he could not shake, that she felt better at destroying things than building them.)

"I talked to Edith," he said suddenly. "About specializing. Hence the mission. I want to do--more civilian-side work. Helping the people who don't know about us." A pause. "Maybe I'll be gone a lot more, if she lets me do it. I'm sure you're going to be hot on my heels as far as a promotion goes, as much as you've done already and then getting picked for this; that's gotta be some kinda vote of confidence. So maybe we'll get a lot of opportunities to swap those pet-sitting debts."

He was rambling. This wasn't strictly unusual for him, but this kind of rambling--hesitant and pause-strewn--accompanied tension, nerves, not happiness or contentment. The expansive lectures he occasionally indulged when he was comfortable were much more confident things.

"I know it hasn't been but it feels like you've been gone a really long time. Like the texts are nice, or whatever, but I--please don't sit so far away," he finished, reaching for her hand again.

"Maybe," he said, a token answer, thoughtless. He was simply looking at her with a sort of thin, helpless despair overlaying his expression, and had been since she'd mentioned staying in shape. It was, strangely, without anger or frustration or irritation--just a sort of exhausted, faintly incredulous stare. "Probably some situations where having backup'd be useful, but then again keeping a low profile is valuable, too. And you know how Hunters in a group just attract trouble."

He had begun to consciously perceive himself as broken; being exposed to various mirror images of himself had finally forced introspection by, paradoxically, turning self-examination outward. He would never concede that the things fourteen floors below the Deus labs were human, let alone himself, but the effects of being exposed to them were unavoidable anyway.

All he could think about was Canary, with pin-p***k pupils and slack jaw and apathy where it wasn't bitter, as he looked at America and wondered about a person who felt better at breaking things than fixing them. A person who'd moved from a role of destruction in her former division to a role of repair in this one.

It would never have occurred to him to articulate the link between himself and her startling confession--this would have required too much conscious analysis--but the link was made anyway: she felt better at burning things to the ground than she did at building them back up. She wanted to build things. She wanted to break the things that would be taken from her anyway. She wanted to build things with him. She wanted to hasten some inevitable destruction. She'd found so many other parts of herself, on the island.

He'd rolled up his sleeve for the girl on the back deck but he hadn't gone any further. He'd thrown his pendant over to Hope and Joy but he'd fought instead of submitting. He'd told her he craved letting go of his hopes and dreams for new Hunters, but only after he'd made sure that the seeds he'd tried to help plant would yield fruit.

He had noticed. He'd noticed the wrecked bits of hallways, the splintered desks previously-whole, the swinging hinges. He'd noticed and chalked them up to the shadows, but now he didn't and America had been gone three weeks and in that time there had been no overnight acts of wanton destruction.

He had not consciously made the link between ascribing the word broken to himself and her unsettling disclosure, but he had made the link, and if he'd been more self-aware, more prone to thinking rather than feeling, maybe he'd have stopped to question whether what he was doing was because he had been trying, trying hard, to get better and to do things he could be proud of, or if what he was doing was because he'd always reacted to being broken by breaking himself still further (like spiting broken glass for the sin of cutting your fingers by crushing it in your bare fist, he thought).

His hand left her fingers to close ungently around her wrist, to pull her nearer, to try and get her into his arms, and maybe he was trying to fix something and maybe he was trying to break it, but he did it, in any case, murmuring something that even he didn't catch.

He lied, knowing he was lying, knowing from a decade of hard and repeated and explicit experience that he was lying: "I'm an idiot. Nothing that makes me this happy can be stupid," he said, in a voice slurred with the relief of touching someone who let him.

He waited for Fionnghal's protests, and instead got only the same silence he'd gotten repeatedly of late, when he did something self-destructive and she was too exhausted to reprimand him. There'd been a battle of wills and for now, at least, he'd won, and he gave way, as he always did, to the short-term satisfaction of temptation, guiding her mouth to his. He barely even drew back from her to ask, in a vaguely delighted murmur: "Have you been smoking?"

And he let her. As much as he was able he let her do whatever she felt moved to do, and if certain exploratory touches made him shrink back, muscle clenched and skin goosebumped under her fingers, he at least managed to keep himself from outright cringing.

Trust was still a thing that came slowly to him, but as she had in Chicago, as she had in the days after the Sahara when his body was still a fragile, paper-thin thing, she made headway: a few insignificant doors unlocked every time.

And later, after a half-hearted grumble about the uncomfortable ground, he reached to pluck a leaf out of her hair and regard her over it skeptically. "Shot your morning itinerary all to hell," he pointed out, not sounding especially apologetic.

"Depends," he said, reaching to drag his coat over, to shrug it over his bare arms and root out his cigarettes, talking around one while he repeated a search for his lighter. "Are we watching Oliver and Company or am I reading to you about rabbits or are you going to curl up around one of the books I brought you--" a pause while he lit, an inhale, and then he extended it towards her in offer, "--and completely disregard my existence?"

He did not actually sound displeased by any prospect, not even the last one, and possibly that was because he always took a strange pleasure in ignoring her in favor of a book or his phone while she was lying in the curl of his arm (unhurried, maybe; the suggestion that there was nothing novel about her being there).

Leaning forward he informed her: "I brought mine. But I was hoping to leave it in the bag, so let's do the rabbit thing. The other rabbit thing," he added drily.

He, too, made no move to get up despite his grumbling, instead gently combing his fingers through her hair, trying to undo some of the mess he'd made and occasionally mournfully examining the ends again. "Anyway the rate at which my debt to you grows is rapidly outstripping the rate at which I am humbly requesting things from you. What do you owe me now? Besides another photo," he said around an exhale, "which I will cash in before I leave."