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If he'd known who was on the other side of the door, Taym probably wouldn't have yanked it open so quickly. As it was, he was considering installing a makeshift peephole.

Fiona, in the back of his head, went from her usual comfortable absence to a taut, shivering state of high alert as soon as Taym realized exactly what he'd just opened his door to.

Not helping, he informed her tensely, and the feeling slackened, but didn't vanish. Possibly she felt like Taym needed the leash of someone else's fear, because his was the wrong kind. It was the kind that made him fix Rep with a flat, unimpressed stare instead of shutting the door in his face. The kind that made him open the door wider instead, arms crossed over his scrawny chest. The room behind him smelled and looked shockingly sterile--a waft of day-old bleach fumes, a bed made up with hotelier precision and looking as unused as it was, nary a single scrap of personal effect in evidence. It looked like the world's cleanest jail cell. Taym, by contrast, looked like s**t and badly needed a shave, and the window was open but the trainee rooms were so tiny, so cramped, and so unventilated that in the heat they were sometimes like saunas, and there was a sheen of sweat on his forehead but he was wearing, as he always did, long sleeves pushed up just under his elbow.

His eyes drifted down to Rep's hands, then back up to his face. "Business call?" he suggested drily. Whatever the sight of the cigarettes had done, he hid it. No hard swallows, no tell-tale movements. Which was, in itself, a dead giveaway.

Taym resisted the incredibly strong urge to stare sadly at his freshly-scrubbed floor as Rep made himself at home. Like before, he offered up rebellion in the form of pliancy, stepping aside to let him in to deprive him of the pleasure of seeing Taym resisting and failing.

He eyed the door. Wise man would leave it open.

Leave it open! was Fiona's urgent suggestion.

He closed it, and then, after a split-second hesitation, he went and sat down in his chair across from Rep, and furthermore, propped his feet up on the desk.

And then, deliberately, he reached into the pocket of his coat hanging off the back of his chair--the coat he was now bodily guarding--and extracted a cigarette, and a book of matches.

His hands were shaking when he lit it, but it was the violent, intention-driven tremor of nerve damage, not the discreet tremble of fear. Granted, it was being amplified by the latter--or possibly even induced by it; Taym suspected at times his hands were all in his head, as it were.

"You can bullshit me with some creative ******** statement about what you're looking for in return or you can get to the point," he suggested. Saying more felt dangerous, so he didn't. He exhaled at the ceiling but didn't take his eyes off him. He hadn't taken his eyes off of him once, save for an instant of fumbling with the match and his damned uncooperative fingers.

Well, thank god for the cigarette, at least. It gave him something to do with hands--a desperate desire to occupy his forever-restless hands was half of why he'd taken it up in the first place and the entirety of why he hadn't even tried to quit--and a reason to temporarily turn his head as he reached for an ashtray. Which was, also, immaculate. He was saving the butts in an old bottle in case of an emergency, but the ashtray was immaculate.

To further emphasize that he was in no hurry to take what Rep had brought, he let the cigarette burn down in the tray while he pulled out his cellphone. Which was already on. Small luxuries. The blue glow of it drew shadows above the harsh hollows of his cheeks.

"Go ahead. Closest thing I have to entertainment at the moment." His fingers made unhurried movements across the screen, nonchalant despite their shaking.

He ran his tongue over his teeth, finishing up whatever he was doing on his phone before he answered.



"I seem to be doing pretty well for myself," he said with faux-calm, putting the phone back away into the coat pocket. He exchanged it for a box of cigarettes, hoping desperately, judging from the variety Rep had brought, that he wouldn't immediately realize it was from his own stash. He extended it toward the bed invitingly. It was over half full. But it was just one box. "Before what, exactly?" Draw it out. Maintain the polite fiction of small talk. Remain unhurried. Do not let the name-calling faze you.

(Provided the name is only coward.)

"That thought has occurred to me," he returned flatly, with an even stare. He tossed him a half-used book of matches without reaching out again. "Anyone who signed that ******** form thinking he was in for a long stay was lying to himself. I'm not under any delusions. I'm here to make myself useful until they throw me to the wolves, not save my own ******** skin."

This--the deadpan, unaffected acceptance of an early death--was half true. He'd signed up wanting to die, wanting a quick exit that made him somewhat useful, the thing he was too cowardly to do himself. He'd changed his mind.

It was Rep that had changed his mind. Rep, threatening him in the cafeteria: the moment he realized he didn't want to die. Because there had been monsters, and strange realities, and tense power-out nights with rumblings in the distance that shook bits of plaster off the wall, but these things were huge and incomprehensible and dream like, and Rep was a person. Just a person. A person who'd made him think he was going to die.

Seeing Rep smoke was enough to motivate him to go back to his own half-wasted cigarette, and he took his eyes off Rep when he took the drag. There were too many things going on in that last sentence, and if he looked at him--especially if he looked at him while he was smoking--he was going to lose the tenuous grip he had on the facade of calm. As it was, he took a few seconds to collect himself, and he hated that Rep could see him doing it, but it was better than the alternative.

His eyes roamed the wall, and then he stubbed his cigarette out, and calmly, carefully, he rolled up his sleeves. It was the sort of thing that seemed brought on by the heat, but it wasn't. He had a tattoo, and it was exactly the sort of tattoo that eighteen year old boys got thinking, wrongly, that it would make them look like Rep. But the tattoo wasn't the point. The light coming in from the window behind Rep was.

He swung his feet off the table, and he put his elbows on his knees, hands dangling, and turned to face him. All of this was very casual--all of it was perfectly natural, turning to face the person you were talking to, now that you were done smoking--and it had the effect of turning his inner arms towards him. Everything had faded but nothing had vanished. Maybe it never would.

If Rep wanted to own the things Taym had called him, Taym could own the names Rep had given. Or at least the one. The other, never. He didn't have to own that. Rep did.

"Speaking of bartering fags," he said. "You came on business?"

It had only taken the words "my mother" to make Taym close his eyes; to swallow hard, visibly. It was a reaction that barely filled a second, but it was the most emotion he'd betrayed since Rep had entered the room and it was impossible to tell whether it was anger or sorrow or something else entirely. Just something intense but fleeting, quickly mastered.

He wanted to say: I'm not your mother.
He wanted to say: My daughter will not be like you.
And more than anything, in spite of himself, in spite of the seething hatred that wasn't a bit diminished in this moment, he wanted to say: I'm sorry. I'm so ******** sorry. I'd undo it if I could.

He was spared from having to fight back the urge to say anything by Rep's sudden bristling. He'd never welcomed a threat with so much relief. The mention of Jordan finished the job of snapping him back to the moment. Their lives had intersected strangely and importantly on a grey battlefield in another world, and his name still felt strange in his ears, familiar and unfamiliar.

He pushed the words through his throat before he answered, a silent check that his voice would be steady, wouldn't crack. The stare returned, and he unconsciously, slowly, pushed his ring around his finger with his thumb.

"I'm sure it would be mutually beneficial if we dropped the smartass comments and small talk on both sides," he said levelly. "Reciprocity."