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Being someone's friend was like riding a bicycle: he never had to remember details, because he'd never forgotten them.

Kostya knew her labs like the back of his hand, and with it came the complicit knowledge of his failures, of his wrongdoings, of his sins. There were many, as of late, and every day, it seemed as though he slipped further and further into the red.

But he remembered the first sin; the ancestral one that all others sprung from. It was that he had left, even though she had left him first. Kostya had made the mistake of holding Mimsy's behaviour to the same standard as his own. He had not predicted that, and his inability to do so had cost him more than he was able to pay.

He did not knock at her door, but did lock it behind him, standing close to it, away from her. He had heard her, in the distance, murmuring in Russian refrains-- no more than a syllable or two, in her voice-- and so chose to use it now.

"I once asked you if I needed to hide a body," he said. "I would have done it then, and I would do it now. I have done it, in the most metaphorical sense, to the evidence you left behind in his room."

He looked at her and only saw in her the quiet sort of resentment that had been building for a while now. Kostya had heard her murdering to herself, and not for the first time, he knew that she had gone among the mad.

'You must be,' said the Cat, 'or you wouldn't have come here.'

It did not matter what she did. Even now, he would lay siege to the world, if she would only ask.

(It was with a weary heart he could admit to himself: she would never ask.)

After a long stretch of silence, he nodded. "Yes," Kostya said, "I am." The walls had eyes, here, all over the island. It was why he had dragged Lucky to the jungle, and it was why he looked to the notebook before her, so that he could write a name that would sound too familiar to ears that were listening for it, even amidst his native tongue.

Kostya always had a pen of his own (in two colours: blue and black, and a sharpie in addition. America appreciated a boyscout, and that meant he was prepared.) and stepped closer, standing opposite of Mimsy. He thought it strange that the page before her was blank, but it was convenient for his purposes. Slowly, he wrote so that the letters would be right-side up to her, using the Russian alphabet rather than the English one.

Р A M O Н А

In muted horror, he watched them fade away, and grey eyes met Mimsy's, if she would look at him. "His room has been cleansed. Of evidence of the fire, but also of the writing."

Moving away, he gave Mimsy and her book distance enough that he no longer felt claustrophobic. She used to be the only presence he felt comfortable in, but she had set a room aflame, and he was no longer under the umbrella safety of being a portion of Mimsy. Kostya had been reliable: he had done as she had asked, but more than that. He had been quiet and unassuming, demanding little in return except the order that fuelled him and his existence.

Mimsy had not been able to provide that level of order, because she had been absent.

"It is not an unknown fact that you are Robert have been together. To me, and perhaps to other, it is evident that the loyalty you demand is absolute. There were rumours immediately of 'vengeful ex-girlfriend' -- but suspicious minds have been convinced that it was not you who lit the match."

He had lied to America and to Obadiah, and to a few others that had mused their theories. Kostya's casual insistence that he recognised the handwriting had been a lie, but it had not been Mimsy's, and so by process of elimination, there was only the one that could have wrote it.

It had all made perfect sense, to blame Robert. Even still, a roiling sense of unease rippled through him, as this was the longest Mimsy had deigned to interact with him in a long, long time, which had been less than nothing.

'...You can't take LESS,' said the Hatter: 'it's very easy to take MORE than nothing.'

To see Mimsy's eyes widen in such a manner was almost comical: they'd gone large and doll-like behind the thick frames of her glasses. He was taken off guard, because it was an expression he had never seen, something foreign on a familiar face. It was unnerving. She was possessed with an emotion he would have to analyse at a later time, in a different place, because she was asking questions.

In a vague, far off sense, some part of him realised how much her Russian had improved.

He did not blanch as she looked curious.

"You burned it, Mimsy. You turned his room into a funeral pyre, a cleansing inferno to rid his walls of--" a brief hesitation as he nearly said it, said the name that would give them away. After a brief pause, he recovered: "To rid the walls of her."

Kostya was unsure why she was asking. She had to have known that he would put the pieces together, but then, he supposed, that would require thinking of him at all. It awakened in him a misery, but he could not find it in himself to wish for the days before.

'It's no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.'

"I indicated Robert was to blame. To pick a random person would have been too flimsy."