Welcome to Gaia! ::

The lull could be partly attributed to the passage of time and partly attributed to the fact that he looked distinctly different than he had last time their paths had crossed: less hair, for one, sacrificed both to the razor and, despite his fervent denials, to the persistent backwards march of his hairline. Less weight, too, although he'd never been more than slender. But the biggest difference was the wound-spring tension obvious in every line of Taym's body--he looked like a rabbit tensed to bolt even sitting on the floor with open books and notebooks spread around him--and the person Wilson had known had been about as tense as a bowl of jelly.

Luckily (for Wilson, anyway) Taym was pretty distinctive looking even when his face was drawn into an expression of vague, untargeted irritation instead of a hazy, amiable sleepiness.

He looked up from what he was doing and stared at Wilson uncomprehendingly at first, and he opened his mouth to say something but the words didn't make it out as he realized that the expression he was witnessing was one of someone clawing towards familiarity.

Panic mode entered. He visibly tensed even more than he already had been, and started searching through substance-clouded years of recollection for a face like Wilson's.

"Uh," he said stupidly. "Hi."

Well, that narrowed things down a bit. Taym had frequently been in the company of various women but very few had warranted the term girlfriend, even to a generous stranger.

With a jolt, he suddenly and completely remembered Wilson. The initial relief that their acquaintance had been glancing--a few conversations Taym vaguely recalled; a couple of shared social functions that Taym had mostly spent throwing up into people's sinks or sleeping on the floor or in stairwells and at which Wilson's presence, along with everyone else's, was a sort of peripheral blur--was almost immediately swallowed up by the realization that Wilson knew him. Knew even more than Rep had.

"I--uh," he said, stupidly again. He tried to master his obvious panic and present some sort of faux nonchalance. It almost worked. He dodged the questions. Answering them honestly would have been stupid, and it would have hurt. "I didn't even realize your name--on Twitter I mean--but I guess I never knew your last name." A nervous bark of a laugh. "I, uh. Wow. Seems like a long time ago, doesn't it. Small... small world. I guess I should have gone and looked for you given uh--given the conversations we had."

Of course maybe Wilson had pinned down Taym's tentative confidences to the fact that he'd obviously been in the throes of some sort of intensely chemically-altered state. Taym had no way of knowing. Taym himself, after all, had done the same. It had been easier to tell himself that the things he knew and the things he saw weren't real.

A sudden thought occurred to him, and the uneasy, tight grin abruptly faded. Taym was looking at Wilson with a carefully blank expression. This was the only way he could keep him from seeing the incoming wave of (misplaced) suspicion.

"It..." The question made him nervous yet again. The circumstances surrounding his recruitment were not ones of which he was proud--but then, there were few things in his life he could apply that word to.

"--I went pretty easy," he settled on, because it was mostly true. He sounded like he was referring to being taken prisoner. He might as well have said "I was compliant."

There was a button there to push, if he wanted it--but he didn't want it. He let it go, tactfully giving Wilson the conversational space the same way Wilson had avoided asking after his girlfriend again; had avoided pointing out that possibly Taym didn't remember him because he'd been busy destroying brain cells when their paths had crossed.

Genuine curiosity surfaced, and he asked of Wilson the same thing he asked of nearly everyone: "Have you been here a long time, then?"