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Loose End

"He knew," he said finally, into a long lull. "He knew it wasn't me."

Catch up

He was suppressing a grin with that air of wounded dignity he liked to put on sometimes, and that at least had not changed.

"But I shouldn't expect any better," he conceded, already flinching away in case she decided to punch him right there in the infirmary room, "from a woman who'd cheat on her wife with a goddamned manatee. And then," he added indignantly, as though piecing together a mystery at last, "trying to get me fat. Everything falls into place."

Loose End

Her expression turned grim and there was a secret lurking at the edges that spoke of late nights and the methodical turning and overturning of the best ways to kill a man and not get caught. "I know."

Catch Up

With a disgusted sound, she flopped onto the infirmary bed, every inch the image of aggressive sulking. "Does this mean no threesome? I can switch to the walrus, but i thought you'd get self-conscious in the face of such manly whiskers."

Back

He was still a little hoarse, a natural progression of what the cigarettes had started, and it suited him and smoothed and mellowed the thin nasal edge that was always there in his perpetually-quiet, forever-softspoken voice. It would leave, eventually, but it was on the whole much more pleasant, not that he knew it.

"Only if you're volunteering for construction," he said, frowning and gently smoothing down the bent corner of a book so battered it couldn't have made much difference. "I used to have a friend," he added, in a rare moment of personal sharing, "who would break into my apartment no matter how I locked it and make extremely elaborate blanket mazes." The pang that resulted from discussing this didn't show in his face. "She had nothing kind to say about my blanket fort skills. So: only if you're volunteering for construction."

It was indulgent, and not unkind, and prickly in a way that seemed old and unchanged and familiar. Fiona reminded him, rote and uncertain, that he'd made himself a promise, but he ignored her, and he caught America's hand again, greedy for the contact, without really pausing in his work.

Catch Up

"There exists neither man nor beast," he coughed fondly, "can intimidate me on the topic of facial hair, but I have my reservations about the tusks. And about sharing," he added, and he inwardly flinched but played it off, making room for her with a show of aggravated longsuffering. "Getting shouldered out of bed already and I bet you haven't even called him up yet, jesus."

Mirror

The Fetch, the Stupid One, the Copy: it gazes at him with stupid, hurt eyes from under its lopsided crown and Taym would love nothing more than to flay it alive for the sin of wearing his skin no matter how much he'd hated wearing it himself.

The knife, in fact, is already in his hands.

He woke abruptly, but not theatrically gasping for air or screaming or even whimpering. He simply opened his eyes, suddenly and utterly awake, and he was dimly, instinctively aware of someone else's breathing in the chair by the infirmary bed. Someone asleep. It could have been early evening or midnight or the small hours of the morning. Time had taken on a strangely non-linear quality and remembering something that had happened since returning felt like anticipating with dread some upcoming horror.

He opened his mouth to say something, to address some comment or request to himself, to the air, to the sleeper, but the words caught in his throat and choked him and he coughed and the cough was unbearable and he shouldn't have talked so much earlier, to America and to the techs and to his scant visitors, sniping and snarking and imperiously refusing certain indignities and pretending that he was fine, just fine. The gunshot all over again. He paid the price for his stubbornness now when the taste of blood hit his lip and it was familiar and he realized he'd never asked Jane whose it was. They had him off the IV to sleep; he was grateful for it now, dimly, as he jerked to the side to violently vomit nothing but stomach acid onto the tile beside the bed, and he stayed there, too exhausted and startled to move, and his back was to her but he heard her wake. She was always a light sleeper. Almost as light as he was.

Magnified by pain and effort and exposed by the gauntness of his frame, the movements of his ragged breaths were the workings of a secret machine laid bare for curious spectators. He was bare to the waist and his nudity delineated all too starkly the rhythmic, halting engines that powered his impossibly abused body, the continuing efforts of a strained system to move blood from point A to point B, to pass oxygen through the wreck of his throat. Each swell and subside of his ribcage was a visible piston rise-and-fall, the shape of his sides expanding and contracting around the audible choke of air, and there was a sense of taboo intimacy, of mechanisms meant to be hidden away but instead rudely unveiled, in the swell and subside of his back. At any moment, it seemed, his veins might begin to hum.

He hung limply suspended between the hospital bed and his shaking hand on the nightstand, gazing uncomprehending at the pinkish stain on the floor, and out of habit and muscle memory more than a sense of hygiene or shame he lifted the back of his hand to push away the drop of bile and saliva and blood that was beading on his lower lip.