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For a moment it seemed like she'd get her wish, as there was absolutely no reaction from the bed. But then again, Taym had always been a ridiculously light sleeper, so this was in its own way a dead giveaway.

Two dehumanizing days of being prodded and measured and examined and cautiously combed over, and he'd fought like a wild animal when they'd had to re-run the IV because in a hazy state of pain-fueled delirium he'd thought of eating out of Lurks' skeletal fingers, but it was there now, and the damage was slowly and steadily being repaired, the raw edges on his neck stitching themselves together under Fionnghal's tender attentions and the techs' brisk and unfeeling ones. Even without the raw slice across his throat he would badly have needed a shave, but the contrast was doing him no favors.

After a moment he turned his eyes away from the wall and in America's general direction, but he didn't look at her. There was a resigned expression on his face, not of exhaustion or of shame, but of guilt. A mother retrieving her overdosed son from the hospital might have been witness to that blank, culpable face (and had been).

He toyed with the IV line in his steady fingers, and he said nothing but judging from what he'd gone through maybe he couldn't even if he'd had something.

"It was," he said after a long pause, and his voice was raspy and it caught and choked, "a shitty thing for me to do, and a shitty time to do it, and for the love of god don't say sorry to me again." He didn't sound apologetic either, but nor did he sound angry. He hadn't taken his eyes off her hand since she'd reached and checked it, but they wandered now to her face and they met hers and stayed there, possibly for the first time but certainly for longer than he ever had, and then wandered away again, tired, guiltstricken, and he traced the IV tube back and forth with his fingers.

"I had the option," he rasped. "To die." He was interrupted by the painful process of stifling a cough because a cough was more pain than he could handle right now and he would have done anything, anything, for a file that didn't tell them not to fix it. When he spoke it was only a few words at a time, and those rough and strained.

"Not to die for anyone, because I did that too, and I won't--apologize for it. Just to die, easy. Quick. I could have done it." And perhaps have made Jane's day, if he had, but spiting her was, he was realizing, only a small part of why he hadn't. "I don't--" he started, but he couldn't finish the thought and didn't need to anyway. He coughed instead, and the coughing, however brief, bent him double.

For a second it sounded like he was still coughing. There was a joke in there somewhere but it wouldn't have been as impressively clever as prevaricough. He repeated himself, more clearly but still doubled over in case it hit him again; in case it brought up blood or something equally horrific (because the idle, intrigued conversation of every Life tech that had prodded him in the past few days had planted ideas not worth thinking about).

"Habakkuk," he said. "Not something."

It didn't sit right with him to be taken care of, but it clearly sat right with her to take care, and he would have dealt with much worse if it had kept that suspicious shine in her eyes moments before from spilling over into actual tears.

He did as he was instructed, flinching and choking but obedient, and he reached for the other cup and blinked and eyed it while swirling its contents back and forth but otherwise made no acknowledgement of any special ingredients.

He ignored the pen for the time being, and he hesitated but his hands moved in a series of complicated, practiced gestures that were clearly sign, knowing that she wouldn't be able to translate them which was, given what he was saying, possibly for the best. It was a flippant, show-off gesture--look at all my hidden depths and see how useful you could be right now and this is the definition of a wasted talent--and he would have kept it to himself but he wanted desperately to cry and apologize and beg her to forgive him; he wanted to give in to how much it hurt and the dull post-traumatic terror he'd been staving off for two days now, and so he did anything, anything to avoid doing any of that, and this was as good as anything else.

"Prevaricough," he repeated hoarsely over the lip of his cup, pen still ignored.

"You sound," he said after a long pause during which he tossed back the rest of the tea like a shot and stifled the choking, "like my mother." It was not disappointed, or accusing. Just a bland, tired observation, vaguely apologetic.

And my sisters. And my brother. And my father. And every decent friend I ever had.

He leaned over to her, much as he could restrained by the IV, and he touched her hair but a stray strand on his forearm made him tense and nervey; felt like a thing crawling and he thought of Waits with a needle against his neck.

"I don't want to die," he whispered, more to himself than to her: a confession, a secret, a terror. He hadn't made room for a future and that had been a year ago (god, a year--he'd anticipated weeks), and now he wanted one and had nothing to fill it with. He still wanted to hurt himself, to chip away, to reshape, to punishpunishpunish, but he did not want to die and maybe, maybe he never had, and maybe he had simply not understood that to do the one thing was to do the other.

It had taken threats and physical restraint to pump some kind of excuse for sustenance into his wrecked and ruined veins, and every time he thought about solid food the specter of it was borne on Lurks' horrible fingers and turned his stomach. He wanted a cigarette; he wanted another shot, or four, or eight; he wanted to go back to filling out meticulously-detailed mission reports and collating other people's notes until he fell asleep out of raw exhaustion, and most of all he wanted the things that he could not have and that he had not had, he realized, in well over a year, which seemed impossible.

He put his hand into hers, lacing their fingers together, and he made as if to pull her closer before he thought better of it and simply did as she wanted, and held her hand.