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"I don't know," he whispers, tugging on her, pulling on her arms, alternating his rough demands with fingertips brushing her temple, her wrist, her shoulder, her belly. Forcing himself off of the bed brings the tears on fresh. "I don't ******** know. Please, Meri. Please forgive me. Please come with me. We have to help them. Don't wake him up. It's better to let him sleep." For her. For him. For all of them. "I love you so ******** much. Please, please, please."

He follows her, and as much as he's capable of such banal emotion he's dimly surprised that she's here and not shivering in the basement.

For a moment it looks as though he's going to adopt her numb, apathetic bent towards duty. He's expressionless, exhausted, and he blinks slow and heavy like he's trying not to succumb to sleep right there, standing in the hallway.

Fiona is in his hand very suddenly, and in a graceful movement she's biting deep into the crumbling old drywall, gouging a hard angry line through the peeling wallpaper. And another. And another.

There's every suggestion that stealth is still advisable, but it's quiet enough among the endless pacing footsteps. Among the old rotted termite-riddled wood everything is quiet enough: he grabs at a dangling corner of wallpaper and tears, hard, stripping it off the wall, and even the sudden brutal flurry of slashes into the door of the room they've just left is just a little noise, just a little, no more than the desperate, angry sounds escaping out from under his breath and through his clenched teeth with every jerk of his shoulder.

And then, just as suddenly as the violence started, it ended. He stood trembling, his face tense with rage and then suddenly crumpling with a childish little sound, and it's the fact that he can hear himself crying, more than anything, that compels him to speak.

"They're in the basement," he hiccups quietly. "I didn't know what to do. I still don't know what to do."

"You were down there. In--everyone's in a, ********', I don't know, tub full of ice. I heard some women talking--Cinna, one of them. Dew?" He for once didn't resist her attempts to coddle him. He just trembled against her and the pulse she found was racing.

"I didn't want to take anyone out because I didn't know what would happen. I still don't. But I don't have any better ideas. Maybe we just have to talk them out like I--like--maybe we just have to talk them out. Maybe we have to do something about the ice." He touched her hair, the edges of her tattoo. "You were--all pale. White-looking. You should be cold," he said. "Cold and wet." And he watched, over her shoulder, the wallpaper filming back over, the wall's wounds healing, and he closed his eyes. "******** hell, I think we're still down there. It didn't work."

"We'll fight about who we're testing it on when we get down there," he said grimly, with a dimly uneasy feeling that they'd find himself down there, too.

(And of course it would be him or her. Never one of the others. Never a stranger.)

Still moving cautiously, still occasionally stifling a noise of grief despite his attempts to wear a stoic all-business face, he held her hand while they made their way back to the basement stairs, past the flickering glimpses of other people's perfect lives, and he didn't let go, not even on the narrow staircase, and definitely not when they stepped into the room where the rusted tubs waited. Here he closed his fingers around hers, hard, just in case they would, in fact, have to fight about it.

It was important and he knew it, and he knew that they had work to do, and he knew that the right thing, the good thing, was to set his jaw and move forward, to treat her as an equal and a colleague, to listen to what she had to say and see that it was rational, to set emotion aside to detangle it later. The right thing, the good thing, was work.

She wasn't going to die. Nothing catastrophic was going to happen. This was no last-stand, final-words type of scenario at all. But the question was there and it was so loud it drowned out everything else he was thinking so he let it go, his voice flat and quiet.

"If we weren't--if--if things were different. Was that back there just because I showed up and I had to fit in somehow? Or would you--would you raise a family with me?" A beat. "With me."

He was calm and stoic again, his trembling subsided, and there was nothing but tired acceptance left in his voice. "I had to know," he said quietly. "I'm sorry."

He lifted her fingers to his lips, and then he let her go. It went against every ******** part of him to let her do this instead of him putting himself in the way of danger, but her reasoning was good and there was, besides, this: he didn't want to be the one left behind if things went sour. He didn't want to be the one left alone and more than that if the bad ending here was that she somehow wound up back in that room with that little boy he didn't want to be the one to have to pry her out again, again, again. It was more grief than he was prepared to shoulder. So he shouldered it, so she wouldn't have to.

"Let's see if this works," he said. He did not say I love you. It was too much like a commitment to the idea of an uncertain immediate future.

He watched her go, swallowing hard to quell the rising urge to panic. It meant nothing to see her vanish. In a place as strange as this a sudden disappearance was value-neutral. But it shook him, and it took him several long and excruciating seconds to extract himself from the room, to trudge back upstairs, still quiet, among all the pacing steps and flickering doorways, to seek out the one where she'd been.

He stood motionless for a while, watching a jug-eared little boy sleeping peacefully, the blankets still disarrayed where she'd left them. There were, at least, no tears this time: just resigned weariness and ever-present fear while he waited to see if she returned.

But the room remained empty save for that single little boy, and if she were there she would not have left him.

He turned away eventually, and wasn't sure how he managed it. Later he wouldn't remember the series of steps that led him back to the basement, nor would he remember exactly how it was that he ended up staring down at himself dispassionately. The world hummed and buzzed and flickered, and he cast a glance over the other pale sleepers with their joyous faces, and then back down at his own, pensive and griefstricken, and he crawled in next to himself shivering.

It felt, for a moment, like wrestling 7 down to the floor, his hands soaked in blood. That had been easier than this was. As he went under, miserably hoping that maybe this was the right thing to do, he thought distantly that his arms felt incredibly fragile, and he wondered if they felt that way to America when he held her on the bad nights as if he could possibly protect her.

He imagined her hands around his neck, and a noose, and her hands, until the edges of everything went dark and blurry, and it was beautiful, like it always was, to feel everything slipping into absence.

Not nearly as beautiful, though, as the sudden violent pain of air in his lungs when he surfaced almost against his will, shaking and breathing and for one hysterical moment sure that America was under him, pressed to his ribs, her hands sliding away from his throat to his shoulders to bring him close and murmur against his hair.