Taym was prepared to debase himself.

He would bribe. He would beg. He would barter. He would do damn near anything if it meant that he could get priority for a day off the Island. He'd set off for the portals with teeth gritted and jaw set and shoulder bag at the ready (newly secured from H+M, and thank God for that and for clothes that did not make him look like a vagrant, or at least made him look less like a vagrant), defiant and bristling and ready to raise hell and talk sweet in turns.

They asked him how long he'd been on the Island, and he told them, and they waved him through without much further ado. Taym found himself standing in a bland suburban-metropolitan area, an ugly flatland of concrete and non-pedestrian-friendly roads and culverts and cold rainwater. It was drizzling. The false bravado of his resolve left him and he deflated instantly in its absence.

He could have gone anywhere. He could have gone to Paris and eaten himself sick; he could have gone to New York where he knew the streets but was faceless and anonymous; he could have gone to Cairo or Sidney or anywhere else. He'd chosen a no-name town in Mississippi (one that he'd heard once had a good used bookstore), three cities over from anywhere he'd ever lived, because he remembered huddling against a wall in the mall he'd visited in December and laughing because laughing was the only way to not succumb to his rising panic. He remembered a busy intersection with an unruffled Caelius and all Taym's hair standing on end, his bile rising.

He was afraid.

It had been more than half a year since he had been alone in public. It had been almost a year since he'd gone anywhere looking like a functional member of society. He'd forgotten the ins and outs. He was a dog kept too long in a kennel cowering and pissing itself when it was turned out into the yard, afraid of the vastness of the sky and the noise.

And there was noise, even here, in a Nothing-town in a Nothing-state: the occasional rush of a car or a plane and the patter of the rain against his shoulders. He stood for maybe ten minutes on the side of a mildly-trafficked highway where he'd emerged from between two empty buildings, getting steadily more damp and not realizing that this was an unusual thing to do. Before Deus he'd been lulled by a filler-laced chemical cocktail humming drowsily through his veins and numbing him to sensory input, rendering him incapable of caring. Now he was cowed by overstimulation, thoughts short-circuited by the idea of 24 unleashed hours.

To his shame, he realized he wanted to go back. He was shakily touching the pendant tucked under his shirt, desperate to crawl into his bed, or possibly--the thought was shameful but unavoidable--under his desk.

So instead he sucked in a hard breath, and he flinched when a pickup rushed by and sprayed him across the knees with dirty water. He huddled into his wet jacket, one hand desperately clinging to the strap of his shoulder bag and the other shoved hard into his pocket, and he walked in the rain.

Twenty-four hours: to visit a drugstore for cigarettes and deodorant and decent razors and to stupidly gaze at the dystopian utility of the vast aisles of cold medicine and cheap toys and incontinence aids and to consider asking at the pharmacy for ten-count 28 gauge, 1cc, even though he had nothing to put into them, just so that someone would look at him with all the disgust he was feeling; to acquire sixteen books for the basement library and to shamefully cry over the bookstore's resident cat when it crawled into his arms purring; to try and fail to find a decent restaurant and end up eating five bites of subpar Indian.

Twenty-four hours to find a shitty dive of a bar and to sidle up to a skinny girl with black nail polish and strike out; to find a slightly better bar and sidle up to a plump blonde with a lipring and strike out there too; to resign himself to a hotel room alone rather than a stranger's apartment smelling like patchouli and pot smoke and coffee.

(He was disappointed. He was desperately relieved. He was embarrassed. He was frantically glad to have the room to himself.)

Twenty-four hours for a bath in the hottest water he could tolerate, to drink a beer in the tub and eat a pint of blackberries and cream with a plastic spoon and read the first chapter of Lolita. To take a walk afterwards in the cool damp air and find an all-night tattoo parlor; to erase the mistake of an idiot eighteen-year-old, courtesy of a fifty-year-old woman with a smoker's cough whom he liked immediately and intensely and whose flirtatious "darlin'" he repaid with an equally-flirtatious "sweetheart" and whom he tipped exorbitantly for her trouble.

Twenty-four hours to wander down the empty streets, the tension draining out of him. Twenty-four hours to slide naked into the hotel sheets, careful of his stinging forearm, and read The Subtle Knife.

(Fiona's presence was the ambient pleasure-hum of a cat purring. She had, he realized, needed this as much as he did. She had spent six months cooped up with the wreck of his thoughts, and at least he had had a lifetime to grow accustomed to the chaos.)

Twenty-four hours to locate a surprisingly-decent breakfast eaten in its entirety at an expensive diner a block from the hotel, and then he would stand at the front desk and he would shed tears openly in front of these people who would never see him again, because he had been so afraid that he had forgotten what it was to be normal and because normality had come back to him so readily and now had to be folded back up and put away, just as soon as it had felt comfortable again.

Twenty-four unleashed hours, he'd thought, standing in the rain shaking and terrified and desperate to go--well, back, at least. Every minute was shorter than the one before it. The last ten sped by in the blink of an eye it took him to steady his face and his voice and to shed the skin of overwrought and irrational grief.

The lighthouse techs gave his last-minute buys a once-over; they boredly registered the books and skimmed for contraband. They did not speak to him and he was glad.