Welcome to Gaia! ::

It opened almost instantly, Taym manifesting in the half-gloom on the other side and waving him in, lighting a cigarette, and dropping hard into a chair while pointing at the bed with his free hand. Taym apparently did not go in for scrounging up comfortable office furniture: it was a dining room chair, narrow and hard and old-looking, and it looked horrifically uncomfortable, which was probably why he was directing his guest to the barely-better dorm mattress for seating. The room afforded little in the way of creature comforts even for a trainee dorm--spartan and brutally clean, so clean that it didn't even smell like a smoker lived in it, right up until the moment that he exhaled. The books and notebooks stacked on the desk that Taym swung his feet up on were squared with careful precision across the corners.

"I don't know what I did to deserve a favor," he said, grinning a yellow-toothed grin that did nothing to conceal how gaunt and exhausted he looked, "but I appreciate the hell out of it. ******** the ******** portals being down. Everyone needs a break." In a moment of generosity--Kostya could not possibly be aware how much generosity, how thorough--he offered the pack and the lighter.

Which was about where he stopped him, out of a sense of propriety that prevented him from asking for any more right out of the gate.

"Well, if you want something in return take a ******** number," he said, not sounding particularly disgruntled at the idea. "I've got a list of people I owe s**t to. Is that Smirnoff? I hope you didn't pay Island prices for that," he said, tone promoted from neutral to vaguely cheerful. He'd paid an exorbitant amount for a couple of packs of cigarettes and felt gratified that he was possibly not the only person being ripped off.

He didn't drink; he waited for Kostya, surprisingly polite in the confines of his own room with company he didn't knee-jerk loathe. "How's that division transfer going?" Small talk, even. Miraculous.

With a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other Taym looked somehow much more like himself, more comfortable in his skin despite the constant tension in the line of his jaw and the movement of his shoulders. It was the difference between a mangy lion skulking around the edges of a kill and a mangy lion sulking in a pen with a half-frozen steak: not a drastic improvement in appearance, but at least more honest.

He watched Kostya over the lip of his glass, and didn't echo the wince at all. Taym could probably have drunk Listerene without flinching. "You have met Caelius, right?" he asked drily. "And Mark. You must have a masochistic streak a mile ******** wide. What's so bad about Moon?" A shade of jealousy crept into those words. Taym had unrealistic ideas about what exactly it was that Moon got up to, even after the Maebe incident.

Taym picked up on the thread of tiredness, mistook it for burn out for explaining his decision.

"Welcome to the fold, I guess," he said, trying not to sound skeptical. It was almost word-for-word the same thing he'd said on Twitter, but he'd forgotten that now. "Plenty of scope for action, if that's what you're looking for."

A pause. Taym, too, was awkward and out of his depth here. He tried to excavate the long-buried memories of how to socially function: how to talk, how to behave, what constituted appropriate levels of eye contact. At the moment he had the habit of stealthily avoiding someone's eyes, a weasely little habit he knew was both unmanly and insulting, or else fixing them with a steady doglike stare of defiance. He was tending to the former with Kostya, but the room was mostly dark, the conversation mostly desultory. He could get away with it.

He was apparently feeling expansive. "Advancing first probably isn't a bad idea. Caelius has pretty slash-and-burn ideas about proving your worth and muscling through the ranks. For the leader of a division nominally devoted to acquiring and handling intelligence," he said, not filtering his language at all for the benefit of Kostya's stunted vocabulary, "he takes a lot of pleasure in keeping people in the ******** dark. But I'll tell you this: all that s**t he throws about people not taking their job seriously? Dead ******** on. No wonder he's pissed all the time." Well, it explained the pissed. It didn't explain the psychotic. "Lot of people here treat this like it's a game. You know?"

"This" was an awfully big word to contain everything that Deus was, but Taym trusted that Kostya got the drift.

Taym struggled to keep his eyebrows from raising at equating Caelius with order. Wasn't his job to talk to him out of it.

He was, not for the first time, uncomfortably aware of the laddered trim on the end of his sleeves, of a promotion he didn't really feel he deserved, of the fact that he still felt as new and stupid as a child. No amount of overwork could compensate for it, and Kostya's nonchalant mention of having been on the Island a year made him uneasy. He wondered, not for the first time, if Caelius had handed him a promotion to shut him up or make him amenable to being used as human bait. He swallowed a gulp unthinking to dispel the idea.

"Your girlfriend was in Life, right?" Girlfriend. "No order there? Sun's a cult, definitely," he added, talking around his cigarette so he could enumerate on his fingers. "Life's full of manic let's-make-a-world-ending-laser types. And potatoes, apparently. Moon is apparently directionless. Mist has got to be even more directionless just by the nature of the ******** job, and I'm pretty sure they only take girls in miniskirts anyway, when they're not taking traitors. Process of elimination?" He grinned, turning his head away politely to exhale, not that it did much good in a space so tiny.

Taym eyed him over the lip of his glass, eyebrows lifted in an expression of sardonic disbelief.

"Sorry for the misunderstanding," he said drily, very nearly drawling it. OK, so there were some issues there. Fair enough.

He allowed himself a grin at the impression of America, a grin turned inwards, secretive. "Maybe it's good advice, even if she is insane. I don't know. She seems," he said, diverted onto a tangent, "like a high-functioning kind of insane. Like, batshit of course, but capable. So there's that. How tired are you of the constant communist comments?" Probably less tired than he was of the Mimsy-is-your-girlfriend comments, if Taym had to guess, but Taym hadn't actually made any communist comments in any case, and felt safe approaching the topic. "They're just going to turn into KGB jokes, now. I'm sure you've mentally prepared."

"I guess there's something for that," he conceded, leaning forward to put out his cigarette. He glanced at him sideways.

"I think Caelius had something similar in mind for me," he decided to tell him, not sure why, "but I'm... I don't know. Not particularly gung-ho about it. Ill-suited. I guess with all the... all the turncoat s**t going on right now..." he trailed off. It wasn't the most comfortable of topics; it was an uncomfortable topic at the best of times but he was talking to Kostya, who was throwing around the word "spy" and for whom the memory of the trials must have been painfully fresh. "Worry it's going to turn into McCa--into a witch hunt around here, but I guess the alternative's pretty ******** up too, if it means pretending it isn't happening." He ran his thumb around the lip of the glass before shamelessly holding it out for a top-up. "You know anything about that? About what's... going on."