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"Aaaand... now."

Taym's hopeful look at the hall door as he says it is met with a disapproving snort from Maple, whose ribs are warm against his back. She is far too big to be inside, and he knows it, but he has never much cared.

He's sitting on the floor. Maybe to someone who does not know Taym this is a mere eccentricity, but those intimately acquainted with him will recognize this as a sign of his being thick in the midst of either a bender or a self-hating funk (or possibly both), when chairs resume their status as strange and undeserved things of luxury. He reverts, like an animal who's spent his life caged and cowers in the open when afraid, to the habits of a man sleeping in the streets. This is the sort of mood wherein he eats ravenously and hides food under the rugs, or goes on lengthy tangents about the exact flavor of a fine imported cheese while shivering in the heat of a raging fire, or writes long acrostics with stubby pencils on the backs of found leaflets, lovingly dissecting a word into its component concepts and arranging it back into its own initials for hours.

"Aaaand... now?" he tries again. Maple bumps her nose against his cheek and the shock of her warm breath is nearly painful. Any rational man would have stoked the fire in the parlor, but it's down to unbanked embers, and he hasn't even thought to put on a shirt, let alone a coat. His bracers hang loose at his sides, his toast-rack torso bare and all the scars of dogbites and mysteriously-appearing, mysteriously-healed rashes tracking through meager and grizzled body hair. It's the body of a man much older than he is. Where he bends at the waist his belly folds into slack and fatless creases, the skin like leather.

When he says the words he lifts his hands towards the door as if casting a spell. Between his violently shaking fingers is a tangle of wool, cream flecked with rainbow-colored tweedy threads, the bright and cheery offering of a street vendor and one of his many uncontrolled impulse purchases. When he was young his mother taught him to knit with his fingers and a useless chain five feet long trails onto the carpet beside him, the product of hours of intense struggle, and a kitten gnaws at the end of it while Whisky, all majestic and gleaming orange in the dying firelight, glares at said kitten disapprovingly.

He coughs. Maple jumps when he does, and anyone would: in the quiet house, the two servants angrily dismissed for the evening, the sound is abrupt and hard, metallic almost, and it wracks him like his coughs always do. He deposits it into his elbow, meticulously avoiding his knitting. Slowly, painstakingly, he adds another finger-stitch to the chain, and looks up at the door again. Maple huffs into his shoulder. "Don't," she seems to say. "It doesn't work."

The house is too quiet; he wills a visitor, even an unwelcome one; he hates himself for dismissing the servants. The occasional chirp of one of Taym's birds breaks the quiet, and the sounds of kittens and dogs vying for space on beds and sofas; but this is not enough, and when dogs howl in the nighttime now Taym no longer thinks fondly of adopted strays and long hikes in the fringes of the forest. When dogs howl in the nighttime now, Taym tries to hear if they are really dogs, without wanting to know the answer.

"Long enough," he decides, after the silence stretches along some considerable time more. The painfully slow process of knotting the ends comes next, and breaking the yarn with his yellow teeth. A six foot chain of single stitches, a useless string of unevenly-knitted yarn. He drapes it around his neck, then thinks better of it and drapes it around Maple's. She noses at it with uncertainty, and so having thus declared it unfit for her attentions, Taym, his feelings hurt, retrieves it again.

"Aaand... now," he tries again, pointing at the door and realizing as he does that the fire is now so far gone that he cannot see its shape in the hallway. The house seems suddenly very dark, and full of unseen dangers, and he grows still. Maple, ever alert, seems as jittery as he, but she places her nose into his hair like the comforting hand of a mother.

He hears steps, either in the hallway or on the stoop, and he swallows, hard. Maple rises to her feet, and although she trembles like a terrified dog she has the look of one that's prepared to bite.

"Isambard could have warned you not to scare the s**t out of me," he answers grumpily, and Maple shakes her head like a fly-irritated horse and settles back down on the floor.

He lifts the chain and loops it around her head obediently, adjusting the ends and observing: "My knitting is woefully inadequate. Congratulations on the finger's worth of warm neck of which you are now the illustrious owner." He pauses and adds: "You've got me at a disadvantage. Shield your eyes, this is no view for an innocent."

"I had the end of a roast," he says. And then, glazed, he calculates a bit and corrects himself: "two days ago."

Maple's huge, nervous eyes meet Bird's and her ears swing back. Perhaps she is anticipating another impromptu riding session around the building with Taym leading her like a docile pony, and it is very cold. Not that it's much warmer in here.

"Anyway, you're in no position. Your knees are like gnawed-on drumsticks. When's the last time you ate? Also, why are you forever exhibiting your unclad knees to reprobate old leches in dark houses, you will get a reputation." He adds, with great relish: "Hussy."

He looks at her blankly, uncomprehending, and then an unbecoming curse sort of falls out of him like he's dropped it. He examines her feet at the reference to them with a disapproving expression.

"I let the fire go out," he observes petulantly, and he heaves himself creaking to his knees to go and poke it into life again. "If you're hungry I can go rustle something up. Sustenance can be procured. Maple says warming your feet is beneath her dignity."

He does that a lot: frames things as though Maple is saying them. It is, perhaps, a gentle tease at her own way of presenting her toad's thoughts. Scooping Whisky off what's left of the hearth's warmth, he deposits the massive feline near Bird's feet, the implication clear, and disregards his narrow-eyed disapproval and the sudden cessation of his purring. Whisky is lazy and will sit where he's left. "Where's Isambard? We need a rear guard for Fort Nipples."

"Sustenance is cicada grubs," he apologizes, "so I will bring you jam instead. Less protein, but also less guilt."

He stands--a laborious process--and by the dim light of the baby fire feels his way to the door. "I will return," he promises, "but if you hear any loud crashes please come and rescue me. It's dark as the inside of a black cat in here."

He leaves the frigid room, quiet save for the crackling of the fire and Maple's soft breathing and, eventually, even Whisky's purring--because Whisky, a true feline, refuses to acknowledge that sitting on Bird's cold feet was not his own idea of a good time. The only noises come from Taym's clumsy, stiff-legged, blind stumbling down the hallway, interrupted by a "******** cat!" after what sounds like a particularly perilous fumble.

When he returns the fire is sluggishly gaining strength, and he's not only bearing a plate of bread and jam, held aloft like a butler's tray on his shaking fingertips, but also has a blanket thrown over his arm like a hot towel, and another over his shoulder. "I thought we had some bacon," he apologizes, offering her the food. He bends stiffly, painfully, at the waist. "What are your fortress constructing credentials?"