The first nightmare in his own room is the same as the others: the stupid, infuriating sobbing of the
copy as he strips it of the skin it shouldn't be wearing. There is no blood. It is not a nightmare of gore and carnage. The fear of it is the sound the thing makes as he peels its bony ribs clean, and the fact that it makes it in his own voice, a whimper rising to a wail rising to a scream laced with wordless pleading.

He wakes suddenly, as he has several times a night since returning. His back is to the room and it makes his stomach lurch but it was an intentional decision: he curls around her sleeping body and she murmurs something in her sleep and he knows that soon she will abandon him and his nightmares for Bashmet's apparently more-pressing ones, but for now his back is to the room and he allows himself the sick and hollow fantasy that he is protecting her, a little side-road among the thicket of a larger, longer lie that he tells himself here, that he told himself yesterday, that he will tell himself when he wakes up next to her again.

-*-

After he talks to Edith he gargles vodka to get the flavor out of his mouth and to steady his nerves, and then he sits down in his dark and silent room and he eats, mechanically and with painful slowness, through a slice of white bread and peanut butter that tastes like nothing, and he thinks of Lurk's juice-stained fingers affectionately and roughly petting his face.

Like a good pet, he thinks without emotion.

-*-

Probably most people wouldn't believe him if he told them he runs every day, but he does. It is a habit cultivated long before Deus when empty, jobless days stretched out in front of him, in the gap between waking up and scrounging up his fix for the day. It is a thing to do, and he is horribly out of shape--he has offset what the bond could do for him with willful self-destruction--and so it hurts. Before the island it hurt because his smoker's lungs burned and his legs ached from sleeping on bare ground or benches or sitting upright against a wall. It hurt because he ran in his boots, because they were all he had. Now it hurts because he runs his body on empty or as close to it as he can get away with, and the hurt prevents him from thinking too hard.

It would be wiser, if the goal were honing his body into a more efficient weapon, to run longer and slower, and to pace himself. But this is not his goal. Taym runs at a sprint, short-lived but with a surprising, lupine grace, until he cannot think through the fog of exertion and the effort of willing his shaky, starved legs from giving out. This way the entire act of hobbling back is marked with a buzzing, hazy apathy that on a good day is almost as good as the real thing.

Today he runs differently, and she makes it seem effortless and enjoyable and perfect, and Fiona fairly sings with images of does suspended over crumbling stone walls in graceful flight, of a stag clearing a river in an effortless bound. He hates the both of them, and pushes himself harder, and the fourth time she loops back around to him--look at this and come see--he catches her by the sleeve, winded and exhausted, and he would be ashamed but he buries it, catching his breath against her hair.

He builds another side-road into the web of self-deception, this one paved with the good intentions of taking a much-needed breather (just a minute; only a moment; he wishes it was raining like the end of the world) that somehow ends breathless.

-*-

The first time he takes a shower he can't breathe and he is glad that there is no one to see him jerking back from the water, gasping and cringing. He scrubs himself clean off to the side. It takes three more before he can bring himself to stand under the spray, and another before he can do so without shaking.

At night he stares at the wall that connects his room to Lawrence's, and he turns Fionnghal over and over in his hands.

-*-

"The robbers!" she says, and it would be cuter to say that she slurred the R into a W, but she doesn't. She has always spoken remarkably clearly for a child of her age, and there was hardly a lisp to begin with, let alone to linger now that she is--the thought hurts--five years old. The other parents watching from their seats in the audience have flubbed lines to giggle and coo over, but Tuesday delivers hers with a precocious aplomb. He thinks Harley, probably, made her costume--his mother never could sew but Harley was always fond of it and the thing has a handmade look to it--and he hopes she reads to her, the same way he used to read to Harley, before Harley started kindergarten. She scratched her nose early in the performance, leaving a trail of pink grease paint.

"Now this house is ours," says someone else's daughter, in a suit with floppy dog ears, with a patch painted over one eye. She gazes expectantly at the audience, verifying that she has said the line correctly, and looks as though she might cry. Tuesday distractedly examines a piece of prop scenery. She has spent the entire performance delivering her lines more or less on cue, singing adorably as expected, and being obviously distracted by everything around her, restless and fidgety.

The children sing an off-key chorus to a polite round of adoring, aww-studded applause, and this, Taym thinks, is what parenthood is: carefully-measured boredom, frequent frustration, punctuated with fear so intense that it hurts. This would bore him to tears if it were any other kid on stage, and to be honest in a way it still does. If he were in the audience he would be fighting off a yawn fifteen minutes in and fidgeting by twenty.

He wonders, not for the first time, who sat through the entire thing with a video camera, and whether it was a parent or an older sibling and whether they, too, were bored.

The video ends, and he lights another cigarette and leans back in his chair and taps the play button again.

-*-

She says she wants to make a place that people come home to, and he knows, even not having seen her vision of a perfect future, that she does not mean a place for the two of them together. There is no reason she should. She is seven years younger than he is, and for all their closeness they barely know one another. He does not know what compelled her father to write poetry; she does not know that he spent eighteen months sleeping in the street and on other people's filthy couches. She is vivacious and ridiculous and self-assured, and he is miserable and introverted and fearful. His fixation is irrational.

They have nothing save for a newborn friendship, nothing save for a few snatched nights together when he opens himself up and pours out a flood of terrified, desperate, needy affection strung up with laughter and the aching relief of knowing he is wanted.

(His fixation is irrational.)

She is not the sort of person who wants to come home to him, and even if she was they barely know each other. They barely know each other, he reminds himself; they are not a singular unit but two disparate people who happen to occasionally tumble into the same bed. He leans into her shoulder, and when she sneaks a brush of her fingertips across the scars dotting his arms this time he pretends not to notice, and he lies to himself a little more, but no more, he thinks, than she lies to herself, imagining a happy future where there's none to be had.