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He'd ganked a toothpick at the food court and, as had been his habit since the deprivation of the power outage had forced him down to three cigarettes a day or fewer, he was absently pushing it from one side of his mouth to the other between speaking.

"Ours?" he asked finally, after watching her with the exact same bored, slightly impatient and exasperated expression you'd expect of any guy stuck waiting while a girl tried on shoes. "Definitely those, then," he said, indicating the same pair--the sexy ones, according to him--he had just a moment before.

Her decision with the shoes made him grin, very suddenly, but it was gone quickly, and he pushed his hands into his pockets.

"I don't know that you're going to do much better," he told her as he eyed the candlesticks. "I'm going to grab some ******** gloves for H, I guess, since I don't know that I'll do much better either. We need to swing back by Valentino. I don't see a ******** tailor here, so he's getting a new suit and to hell with it." One that would need to be tailored. With suicidal pleasure, Taym considered this a petty victory.

"You should change your outfit too," the H golem informed Taym. Given that he'd already changed his clothes, Taym merely gave it a look before putting his new jacket on too. This seemed to satisfy it, and he went to go grab the gloves.



Can you even buy suits off the rack at Valentino? WHO KNOWS. Taym is gonna.

They'd gotten most of the way there when the gimlet stare that H's golem was giving Taym was finally noticed, and it actually brought Taym grinding to a halt, throwing up his hands.

"There is no tailor!" he hissed at it, apparently temporarily forgetting that it wasn't actually H. "There's a ******** place to buy a new suit, but there's no tailor. Take it or leave it."

The stare continued. Taym shot Peyton a weary look and relieved the H golem of its bags, thinking that perhaps being used as a pack mule was the source of its lack of satisfaction.

The stare continued.

"Maybe it learned from the floor associates last time we were in here," he suggested, with a dry, unamused little bark of a laugh. And to be fair, the look was certainly not dissimilar to the expression he'd been on the receiving end of when he'd come here not long before looking like he'd been sleeping on a park bench. Going back in with new clothes was somehow worse.

"I don't want to do this," he informed Peyton abruptly, voice thin with sudden panic. "This was a bad idea."

He gave her an odd look--a sudden realization that she was probably interpreting his hesitation as being over the suit, maybe, and not over his abrupt panic at having to look at those same shopkeepers and suffer those same judging eyes, now amplified by the fact that he'd changed his clothes. Nothing for it. They were already inside. He sucked in a breath and fielded the first withering "can I help you, sir?"

He didn't take long. Stores like Valentino's weren't there to provide a lot to choose from. The blood ran out of his face at the price tag, but hell, H had it, right? Right.

This, too, would need to be tailored. But maybe H needed a suit like this evening. Maybe any suit would be better than no suit.

"Let's take a break," announced the golem as Taym skittered out looking like he wanted to throw up and, in fact, actually stopped to press his forehead to the cool tile wall outside the shopfront as soon as he was around the corner. "My treat."

"I give up," he told Peyton. "So that works for me. I'm getting two bottles out of the vending machines and a condom and calling it a day. It's not my fault this out-of-touch asswipe gave me a list like this for a ******** mall." Shoving the bags back at the golem, he grabbed Peyton's wrist to pull her in the direction of the food court again.

Shopping with Taym was exhausting, but maybe that was just because of the extraordinarily odd circumstances. "Can you distract it?" he asked her, gesturing at the golem.

He disappeared.

He was gone for quite some time. This was because he was reduced to asking for a buck for the vending machine in the bathrooms until someone, apparently deciding that Taym needed to get laid more than the kindly soul needed change, took pity on him and obliged. This was a far less harrowing experience than getting withering looks from Valentino associates. Taym was used to begging change off people. Hell, he was used to begging change off people specifically for this purpose. It didn't mean he enjoyed it, but it was easier than it might otherwise have been.

The soda machines, mercifully, took cards. Thanking the universe for modern conveniences, Taym used his own to acquire a couple of bottles of soda more or less at random, and when he found Peyton and the golems he had the funereal look of someone anticipating his own doom. He held up a bottle of Dr. Pepper for H's golem, who took it and held it aloft.

"Does this make my butt look big?" it asked earnestly.

Taym stared at it for a long time with an unbroken poker face and then, suddenly, he laughed. It was the faintly-hysterical laugh of someone who was anticipating imminent doom, but it was a laugh. He shoved everything into the H&M bags.

"Let's get the ******** out of here," he managed. When Taym wasn't barking a sarcastic noise he was one of those people that laughed silently, shoulders shaking. "Ladies first."

"See you on the other side," he said, after a quick look around and a gesture verifying the coast was clear in both directions. He grabbed H by the collar, checked to make sure all bags were present, and, in the sudden and unsettling way that hunters did disappear at the end of a trip, he vanished.

When she got to the lighthouse she'd find him unceremoniously dumping what was H's while one of the techs did whatever it was that was done to a princess golem not presently required. The other tech was giving Taym a skeptical look at what he'd managed to bring back, but Taym was receiving it stonily, refusing to rise to the bait. H had put Dom Perignon on a mall shopping list. As far as Taym was concerned he'd done the best he possibly could under the circumstances.

He received the slip designating him on three days' toilet-scrubbing duty with a stoic face. Given that he'd told Peyton not too long ago that he was constantly looking for an excuse to work, maybe being given an extra domestic roster was a perk.

And then, perhaps surprisingly, he waited for her. Waited for her to drop off the golem and the list and the bags; waited with one hand in his pocket and the other threaded through the H&M bag handles, absently rocking back and forth on his heels. They'd left the mall in mid-day sunlight; it was growing dark here, half a world away, with the distant emergency lights throwing a faint path back to the dorms and with the ominous blue flashes of the Insanity Titans still occasionally visible through the water offshore.

For all that his face was thoughtful too, eyes blindly searching the middle distance, although he'd lapsed back into his characteristic silence and looked drained and exhausted, his senses overloaded, the weight of having spent several hundred dollars in a single day on something entirely legal resting solidly on his shoulders. He kept a careful two feet of space between them, but he slowed his usual hurried lope so that she wouldn't have to jog to keep pace, and, just as she doubtlessly expected, he held the door to the dorm building for her.

In the dim red emergency lights his expression took on the distant, irritated edge it usually did when he was conversing with Fiona, his eyes cast slightly upwards as though he were looking into his own head, but this snapped away suddenly as they approached their rooms.

In a strange and sudden turn, he dropped his bags in front of his door and then he was, smoothly and without apparent effort, stopping her from going to hers with an arm stretched out, hand planted against the wall to block her way. It was the universal attitude of the cool kid at school cornering a girl against the lockers to chat, nonchalant-seeming and effortless. What ruined it was that it was Taym: the hand against the wall was trembling again, as it tended to in the wake of stress; the face turned suddenly towards her was shrewd and considering and gaunt and hungry. He smelled of the strange chemical smell of new, unwashed clothes.

"Thanks for inviting me along," he said after a beat. And although he was the one that had stopped her, he was maintaining that careful space between them, a rigorous invisible barrier. "Sorry I wasn't better company."

His jaw was working silently and slowly, in the way of someone deep in thought, and he was looking past her now somewhere beyond the wall in the vicinity of her elbow. "Thanks for putting up with ********' neuroses, or whatever, then," he amended quietly. The space between them was closing slowly but inexorably, the gap eaten up.

He was trying to ignore Fiona's rising, panicked indignation; he was trying to disregard her too-accurate accusations that he was doing this because he wanted his ego stroked, that he was doing it because Peyton paid attention to him and because he hated Solomon with an irrational passion and because, most of all, Rep had said exactly what Taym had come to suspect was true over the past year and a half: that he, Taym, who had once gone out into the world and seen a thing he'd wanted and put out a hand to take it, was now as undesirable as something scraped off the bottom of a shoe. It was a perfect storm of circumstances to lead to a bad decision, especially in a person like Taym, who'd sculpted an entire lifetime out of bad decisions.

"You're good company too," he lied. She wasn't the kind of company he liked at all, really; she was amenable to his whims but otherwise she had no charms for him. He was aware of this and so was Fiona, and he shut out her protests in favor of his denials, and he trailed his cold fingertips against Peyton's knuckles, and his face was inches from hers when a door opened at the far end of the hallway and his head snapped up. It was too dark now to see who emerged; but the distraction was enough. He stared into the dark like a dog on the point, and abruptly yanked himself away, shoving his hands back into his pockets for his key and turning for his door.

"If we follow the usual run of things," he said, his voice suddenly normal, as if that entire interlude hadn't occurred at all, "I'll see you in a week. I've got cage duty tonight. Should probably go do that before they come and hunt me down."