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Items one and two: Taym had never really learned the knack of making a day conform to a rigorous schedule. He had never learned to handle downtime that wasn't filled up by propelling himself from one vice to the next.

Four months had gone by since he'd stumbled coughing out of the pod, and in those four months he had not overcome either of these deficiencies. He had, instead, created new and innovative vices to fill up his downtime--namely ascetic self-deprivation and an addiction to staying busy--and had decided that if a meticulous itinerary was out of the question, the solution was to simply follow the whims of his body.

Item three: Taym had never been much good at getting sleep, not without chemical help.

The result of all of the above was that on this particular evening Taym had found some strange hour to gain access to the labs to tinker with DIANA and delude himself into believing he was performing real work. It was a rest for his aching hands that had struggled with a touchscreen and intermittent tremors for so long, but the problem was that here he could not work standing up.

It was inevitable. His head had been buzzing for hours before he'd showed up, and the cup of shitty instant coffee had gone stale and cold even before he'd sat down.

Being off the alert on Deus was never a particularly wise idea, but Taym had, against his will, succumbed to the demands of his ill-used body, and had fallen asleep, an elbow propped against the neck and his forehead supported in one gaunt hand. It was a precarious position in which to attempt sleep, and so it was perhaps no surprise that he was awakened very abruptly by his arm slipping off the table as his head attempted to do what a sleeping head did naturally and approach the horizontal.

Several undignified things happened at once: Taym recoiled up from the shock of being woken up suddenly with a noise from the back of his throat; the noise turned into a yelp at the nightmarish thing that greeted him; he damn near ended up on his a** as the chair went backwards but managed to keep his feet instead, scrambling backwards a few inches.

There was very suddenly a knife in his hand, a dark blade that gleamed the off-white of late-afternoon sunlight, but fortunately for both of them Fionnghal was alert and aware and barking warnings at him before he had time to do what he was clearly thinking about doing, if the words "thinking about" could be applied to an impulse so hindbrain, so instant.

His eyes darted to the cuff, but he did not relax.

Truth: he'd been here four months and Taym had yet to meet anyone non-human outside of the Tear, if Fionnghal was an exception. Besides a few lumbering, formless enemies in a fogbank, a Titan, and a few nests of shadowlings, as well as the mermaids, Taym hadn't really had any contact with the other side at all. Which meant that Taym hadn't had any contact with the other side in any form he might be tempted to recognize as a person.

He was vaguely aware of the weapons conversion process. Bix had spoken of it, as had Peyton; he'd read a few files and books in his endless combing through the library. He'd asked questions and nosed around. And so he was able to piece together the most plausible scenario that had landed this thing in front of him, but he didn't put the knife away.

"Where's your--your handler, or whatever?" he asked, in an impressive display of articulating ability. He had a voice that was thinner and quieter than it should have been with that face, but rough, like it was teetering on a perpetually undelivered cough.

This was a time when Taym was more irritated than grateful for Fiona's habitual absences--the silence of both thought and feeling when she wasn't directly needed or chiding him, the lack of input. He felt directionless, and even more so when the thing didn't seem alarmed. And still more when it asked about the weapon.

He debated asking Fiona what to do, but he felt her stirring irritation at the thought and let it go. Literally, as well as metaphorically: the knife vanished, and Taym ran his thumb nervously around the ring on his finger. It was a small, possessive gesture, and made although he felt incredibly small and incredibly useless and incredibly alone.

"It's..." he hesitated, and succumbed to a nudge from Fiona, acting more out of tact than personal offense. "She's mine," he asserted. He sounded defiant, like he was thinking about following it up with "what of it?"

Oh god, oh god.

Taym had a vivid, very realistic vision of Caelius informing him that he'd managed to ******** up a very promising weapons conversion simply by running his mouth. He could hear the verbal italics in the Death Lead's voice when he said it.

"She's smarter than I am," he settled on eventually, adding: "and she lets me know it at every available opportunity." He was still settled into that leery stance, the curving line of his bony shoulders suggesting he might resummon at any moment.

A hesitation. Should he say more? Should he volunteer information?

Mental Caelius was hefting a knife. Taym swallowed.

"I'm--new," he half-lied, hoping no one had taken the thing aside to talk to it about uniform codes yet. "She's... also new." Maybe that would absolve him of answering any complicated questions. "But yeah. She--we... she mends. Not just destroys." He had no idea why he volunteered that information.

Every question was complicated.

He felt out a question, and got a blank, uncomprehending silence in return, edged with something like discomfort.

He had very rarely approached the topic of Fionnghal's unlife from before, and when he had there'd been a strange, bewildered silence in return. He was expecting it now and its appearance, though frustrating, was not a surprise. He'd gathered that if she remembered anything, it was very little, and very vague.

He'd wondered, more than once, whether she'd known that she'd forget. The stranger clearly didn't. He opted for a lie.

"Yeah," he said finally. "She... yeah. She says it's... the same, but better here. Sharper." Fiona's quiet protest lacked enthusiasm. He wished desperately that he could hand the mic over to her somehow. "I know some of the other..." he hesitated over the words, gave up: "... people have--self-destructive, like you said. I don't know if it changes. But it won't be you that gets the brunt of it." He thought of Peyton breaking her own shield.

Pointedly pulling the fallen chair over to himself rather than moving back towards it--preserving the gap he'd put between them--he righted it and sat down on the edge of the seat like he was ready to spring back off it again, thrusting his hands into his pockets and hunching forward.

"How old do I ******** look?" he demanded, backtracking.

Pointedly, Taym yanked his chair back a half a foot, and he gestured at the space he'd made with a poisonous expression made more poisonous by the thing's answer.

"Don't you motherf--don't you people have like ancient thousand-year-old intelligences wandering around in red satin capes and s**t? I'm not even a quarter cen--" No wait, he'd just had a birthday.

Oh god, he was a quarter of a century old. That sounded like a really long time, and felt even longer.

He decided changing the subject would be better for both of them, so he backtracked and decided to obliquely answer the question he'd skirted, now that he knew how to answer it at all: "Fiona--" he absently held up his empty hand, the ring, hoped she realized who was being referred to "--thought it was funny, anyway." And she had, a little ripple of subdued amusement greeting Aleria's comparison.

He was also trying to ignore the word "host." It made him uneasy. Fiona wasn't a tapeworm.

Another long, flat stare.

"I am very fond of my personal space," he said finally, and it was touchy but he wasn't exactly flying off the handle. "It's got nothing to do with you," he lied, "or with me being delicate." Which wasn't actually strictly true either, although a pack of wild dogs could not have dragged that admission out of him.

He decided to turn the conversation away from the endless questions with one of his own. It wasn't so much that he wanted to sit here and carry on a civil discussion with Aleria--his skin was crawling more with every passing second--as it was that he felt it would be ill-advised to find some sudden excuse to leave. And there was, if he was being entirely honest with himself, a slim thread of genuine curiosity. "What made you want to..." a pause, and he settled on: "join us?"

This time the silence was distinctly uncomfortable.

Taym had constructed a careful mental image of the Enemy, and whatever it was that he'd painted into that picture, an echo of himself, however vague, wasn't it. But so much of what Aleria had just said sounded familiar.

Part of his job, theoretically, was to help talk it into this, right? Or so he'd been told, although he'd always trusted that it would end up being someone more diplomatic than he was. And certainly he had no desire to confide in a ******** monster. But if he could help the process along, he would. He felt out the shape of the words gingerly.

"I... think you and I have more in common than you'd think." Those words disgusted him, although he carefully screened the thought from his voice. He didn't want anything in common with it, with any of them. Taym had been treated like he wasn't a person, but he was, and as far as he was concerned that was the crucial difference between him and the thing on the chair across from him. "The... pocket of 'piecemeal society' I belonged to before wasn't particularly--well-respected. No one expected me to make much of myself besides a corpse," he said frankly. "They offered me the same things they're offering you, and they were true to every ******** word. I am better. We are better. And yeah, just like you--I find people to listen to me here. There weren't many, where I was before."