Welcome to Gaia! ::

The eventual uncovering of the runes did nothing to settle Taym's nerves, and he exhaled with a skeptical sideways look before swinging his feet off the desk and crouching down to look, fully expecting some horrific creature to gaze at him from within, possible with a waving of tentacles and a baring of too many needle-like teeth.



Oh god, they're cute. This thought was both his and Fiona's, and he felt betrayed by it on both sides. Steady, Thompson. They're not cute. They're vicious beasts that literally feed on fear. One of them chewed distractedly on the other's ear before falling gracelessly off to one side and wriggling frantically in the way of fat, fallen-over kittens everywhere.

"They only have one tail," he pointed out after a long, drawn-out silence. His lack of expression might have done Kostya proud. He took another drag and eyed Kostya over the cigarette.

Experiments survived: II

He felt a twinge of guilt and shoved the thought away. They weren't real. They were a very good facsimile.

Very good. One of them was purring--half of it? one of them?--and it sounded a hell of a lot like an actual cat. He thought of the cat in the bookstore with something approaching a lump in his throat and steadied himself with another drag, carefully avoiding Kostya's eye.

"Cats don't melt," he informed Kostya witheringly and somewhat childishly. He was embarrassed: embarrassed as he always was to be thought of, embarrassed that Kostya had not only heard but remembered his tiny lamentations, embarrassed that he wanted desperately to hold them (it?) and was fighting it because they weren't real.

But loneliness--the peculiar kind of loneliness that some people have that cannot be quenched with the company of fellow humans but only with the mute unjudging affection of a dog or a cat--won out. He stuck the cigarette into his mouth and managed the latch after a couple of (embarrassing, again) seconds with his uncooperative hands, and then they tumbled out, surprisingly unencumbered by their joined tails, and one of them commenced gnawing on Taym's thumb while the other drowsed, head lolling against his wrist.

He said nothing, but after a moment he shifted them into one hand so that he could reach up and deposit his still-burning cigarette in the ashtray, so that he could fold up properly onto the floor, and he tucked the both of them under his chin, clutched to his toast-rack chest, and tried to pretend like Kostya wasn't there.

"Cats don't melt," he repeated after a second, his voice thin and tight.