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Well, that didn't go as planned. That was sort of like telling someone in a bikini they were being distracting and having them strip it off instead of putting on a shirt. Luckily his face betrayed absolutely nothing, and he just left it. He was pretty sure moving them again would be the most surefire way to get her to keep them there.

"Oh, I don't know. I don't know the competition, but don't sell yourself short, sweetheart," he said. And then he grinned, and mock-flinched away from her as if expecting a punch. "That was not an intentional pun."

He went quiet for a minute, finishing his cigarette while he considered that, and he ignored her second comment in favor of addressing the way her voice had shifted.

"Evan's not going to be able to 'get carried away,' as you put it. There are going to be people everywhere."

Maybe before his run-in with Rep and the things he'd heard about Caelius he'd have felt differently about her description of Evan's attack. Maybe he'd have been baffled by it. Instead, he was rapidly coming to feel--and this was a dangerous thought in an organization that demanded cohesion--that they were as much at risk from one another as they were from any outside threat.

"So nobody's going to get carried away." He sounded like he was reassuring himself--and he was. Both for her sake and because he wasn't sure what Rep would do if he ran into him in public, although he found the idea a lot more appealing than running into him alone.

Without his cigarette he had nowhere to put her hands. Or rather, he had an option, but he wasn't crazy. He put them into his pockets instead, staring at her flatly.

"Deprived as I am of the neophyte's optimism about my ******** comrades, I don't know how much I trust anyone around here not to lose their ******** minds," he said bluntly, "but hopefully nobody's stupid enough to do it when half of Deus is watching."

"Neo like new. Someone who's new at something," he answered after the same uncomfortable pause he always deployed when she did that.

Did he trust her?

"Yeah," he said, but there'd been a long pause first. And honestly, he trusted her in the way that he'd have trusted a child. Taym, by and large, did not have high opinions of the brains and life experience of people he trusted. Not that she had to know that.

"You don't trust me," he said. It was a bland, unoffended statement of fact.

He was quiet for a minute, uncomfortably digesting that question, and opted to shrug it off callously, with snark: "I wonder why you didn't go down the hall," he said, and he tipped his head to watch her from under his eyebrows, and the grin seemed forced, this time, because he was still dwelling on what she'd just said. He didn't deserve to be trusted, and he knew it, and felt wretched while simultaneously trying to tell himself he did deserve it.

"Come here," he said, hoping to cut her off before she had a chance to answer and patting the bed next to him. "Let me see how it's getting on so I can chastise you again for being worried over a little scratch." Apparently he wasn't willing to take her word for it. Or maybe it was just the first thing he landed on to distract her.

"Scratch," he repeated adamantly, pushing her hair gently out of the way to survey the damage. Still pretty gross, in his opinion, but he kept it to himself. It had always been helpful to cultivate a careful state of denial, on the occasions--many--that he'd been suffering from some injury, some malady. The insistence that the abscesses were just nicks, or mosquito bites. Whatever stupid lie would help him believe he was fine. "Little scratch."

Success. Peyton's feet were now no longer practically in his lap. Unfortunately, now she was sitting next to him. He hadn't planned that far. He let her hair fall back.

He hesitated, then reached into his pocket, where the first runestone he'd managed to carve had been working away all morning on his phone. "I wanna show you something," he said, powering it up.

A computer was obviously preferable for this, but he made do. He wasn't even sure why he was sharing--fumbling need for validation maybe; something to fill the silence, in any case.

(Taym was not Solomon: no string of goofy witticisms to keep the talk moving, just awkward, self-conscious, surly jolts from one topic to another, the conversation full of seams and joints)

The longer he went without cigarettes and the more he focused on using his hands the worse and more constant the shaking was, but his fingers moved over the screen like he was used to them being there. It was one of those odd moments that reminded a person that Taym was actually still quite young. After a few false starts, he pulled up an intranet page--it was, he felt, something like opening a door in a ghost town--and managed with some difficulty to put in login information that he half-jokingly shielded from Peyton.

He didn't want to fight his hands any more. Making a frustrated noise, he handed her the phone.

"Surprised it worked. I guess they've still got power to all the servers, for whatever reason. I knew Twitter was up. Maybe I'm sharing space with something vital." That sounded surprisingly hopeful.