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Where Do You Go

The only thing more satisfying than yelling at her was getting her to yell at him first. As he generally did when this happened, he only kept his voice level, flat, quiet, defiant. And he still, still, refused to let her go. He hauled himself upright, arms going gooseflesh as the blanket fell away, always cold.

“Tell me where you go. Tell me what you do.”



She just breathes for awhile until she hisses a curse and admits, "I escape. I leave on my own ******** terms and under my own ******** power!" She swallows and then bites out quietly, acid replacing volume, "And no one stops me. I don't have to be allowed."

In Russia she'd been lucky. She'd been rescued and even that had only just avoided greater disaster. Sometimes the weight of the 'what if's struck her, the pressure of it driving her to vicious distraction.



It almost makes him falter. The temptation to make her angry is very nearly replaced with a temptation to provide some kind of comfort, but he is good at one and bad at the other and he so often longs for a chance to feel competent--even this one.

"So you bailing on me--I don't give a s**t what you do when you're by yourself--you bailing on me in the middle of the night is--what? Rebellion? Against ********' what, exactly?" And his voice is rising, now, slow and steady like it does. "You say it's not about me. Fine. It doesn't ********' have to be. Just tell me what it is about. Trust me that ******** much. Because you say escape but I don't know what you're ********' escaping from if it isn't me."



"It's not from anything, christ." And suddenly she's just tired and where it wasn't about him before, now it is. She doesn't want to be in his room, she doesn't want him touching her, she doesn't want to answer question after question. "I just need to know that I can so I don't go ******** crazy, okay? Is that good enough for you? Let me go, Taym," she repeated, "now."



He is silent for a long few seconds, his eyes searching the shape of her shoulder in the dark, his jaw clenched. When he lets her go it's convulsive, as if he's just realized that he's been burning his hand, and he leans to turn on the light and reach for his cigarettes, for the book he'd been reading around her shoulder before he drifted off.

"God forbid you go ********' crazy," he says flatly, without looking at her. And then, plaintive, the abrupt shift in sympathies absent from his voice but visible in the agitated motion of his hand, "I never ********' know what to do."



"I don't know, you use the word so ******** much that maybe it'd occur to you to trust me?" And then she was up and off the bed, storming out of his room in her pajamas and slamming the door behind her.

It was such a small, simple act but it meant a world of relief to her to simply leave at her own will. It'd been allowed this time, though, and that choked away at the first breath and then the second. Anger welled again, bitter and suffocating. She'd been allowed to leave.

Bare Necessities

“Well what the ******** else would you call it?” he asked, leaning close so that he didn’t have to raise his voice. And then, in a flat, dangerously normal tone: “I’m not going to have a fight with you in this ******** stairwell.”



"I'd call it you being an a*****e to me in public, s'what I call it," she responds readily, hip cocked and voice all smiling belligerence. She wasn't moving another step.



"I feel like I'm well within my rights," he snaps, as quiet as she is careless, "to be a little pissed off that my girlfriend--who makes me earn a ********' out-of-focus nude photo like a dog earns a treat--my girlfriend's running around a crowded building naked. What the ******** are you thinking? You wanna talk about being an a*****e in public, you're the one that flashed your tits at the entire ******** hallway just to piss me off in front of a dozen ******** people. Which worked," he added acerbically. "Good ********' job."



"Honey, I've running around this place titties out since I stepped out the pod. Pictures are different, that's doing it for you and only you. The tits in those pics are yours, these," she cupped one through the damp, clinging sweater, "ain't nobody's but mine and I can do what I want with them how 'bout that?"

It would have been different, if he'd just asked. One shitty 'please' didn't count as asking a person like they're a person and not something you get to shove around and order about.



"Do me a favor," he says, and now it's quiet because it's through gritted teeth, "and tell me whether you genuinely can't see the issue here or if you're just being difficult for the sake of being difficult. Because it seems pretty ********' cut-and-dried to me. Don't make this into some sort of bullshit bodily autonomy issue. Do whatever you want with your tits in private. Hell, glue a couple of googly eyes on them and re-enact scenes from Hell's Kitchen in the bathtub by way of interpretive dance, for all I ********' care, but do it behind closed doors."



Caught between wanting to laugh and yell, she made a small, incredulous sound and huffed a bit in irritation. "Well first I was just confused, 'cause you said skinny dipping was okay and this is a lot more dressed and less personal than that. But then you start pushing and pulling me around and shoving s**t at me like that's an okay thing to do to me in front of every other person out there. You couldn't just wait? You couldn't just talk to me and ask?"

And where she wouldn't flush for her own nudity she did at this. "So damn right I'm gonna be ******** difficult as all hell, Obadiah Thompson."



“No, I couldn’t ******** talk to you and ask, and I--skinny dipping with Paige and Cee--” well, apparently he’d assumed Ezekiel and Evan hadn’t been a part of that “--is not even remotely on par with trotting around the Island naked. I already,” he hissed, “have to contend with the rumor mill running on grist that says I’m some sort of--eccentric choice of ill-qualified ********’ boy toy, or whatever, and I’ve been trying to diligently disregard what other people have to say even if I don’t feel much better about it sometimes. So I come around a corner and there you are strutting around with your tits out and I’m supposed to feel--how, exactly? Gratified? Why should I feel anything but disrespected? I was--and am--too ******** pissed to think, gee, maybe I ought to save that discussion for later. I ********’ did something about it, and your reaction was to flash the entire ********’ hallway in a demonstration of how little you respect my role in this relationship and what matters to me. Thanks for--”

He was, maybe, not monitoring his own volume too closely by the end of the rant, and they were passed by a hunter en route to the second floor who raised an eyebrow at them, which Taym reacted to by grabbing a hold of her and kissing her violently in a display about as romantically-driven as a dog marking its territory.



She returned the kiss like it was simply another part of the argument. A silent demand for respect in the form of teeth and tongue, an indignant statement of adoration in the soft yield of her jaw, the curl of her body leaning into his. When they broke apart the girl huffed a great show of exasperation and took his hand, apparently willing to move up the stairs now. "Exactly what do you think your ******** role in this relationship is that you get to yank me about in public like a ******** ragdoll and that respect's some one way street?"

Fancy Meeting You Here

Another long pause, during which he continued, mechanically, to work. “You volunteer,” he repeated, “every week, in the hope that you’re going to see Lurks, and--what, exactly?” There it was. That overly-polite, courteous, sarcastic fillip on the question mark. It was retail voice, phone voice. It was an instant red flag.



As well wave a red flag for a bull. Mouth pursing at the tone she replies, America shoves several boxes in place with unnecessary force. "Capture it. Got real close last time so don't you get all snooty at me."



"When exactly were you planning," he spits back, not handling his own task with undue gentleness, "on telling me this?"



With a negligent shrug she answers, unapologetic, "If it came up."



"If it came up," he echoes, venomous. "Came up how? Horrifically maimed because you think you need to act a ********' hero for reasons unfathomable to me came up? Returned in a body bag because you don't trust me enough not to make my problems into your personal vendettas came up? I can't ********' believe I'm hearing this s**t."



"I've fought it and won every time, I'm not being reckless, I'm not being a big damn hero, so settle the ******** down."

Hefting a water drum with pointed ease, America carried it into a tent and continued, "I hate that thing and it hates me right back. If you want me to back off 'cause you want to take care of it yourself, fine. Whatever. But if it shows up in my line of sight again I'm attacking it."



“This is not about my personal vendettas,” he shot back, and he wasn’t quite yelling yet but the distinction was somewhat academic. “This is not about that thing. This is about you putting yourself into danger on purpose on the unlikely off-chance that you--this is ******** stupid,” he finished impatiently, dropping a box like it was the argument, although unfortunately the argument continued. “I can’t believe you’ve been running around behind my back doing this s**t. You’re the one who spent months telling me about how it only took you ten minutes in the Sahara to get attacked but I’m the one who’s reckless with his own life? You ******** hypocrite.”



Anger fueling their motions and pace, they had finished the work even more efficiently than predicted and were heading back through the portal to get out the second drop off. "Excuse you, but dropping off supplies once a week for a single shift is not even ******** comparable to volunteering to stay out there for ******** months with a psychopath and agreeing to ******** starve myself for a shining ******** opportunity to die out in a desert, thank you."

Portal set for the next base, her grip on the sledge was white knuckled and shaking despite her calm tone. "I have no ******** intention of getting killed or maimed."