He'd been so close: the white, impassive, blue-eyed face succumbing to pain slowly beneath his skeletal hands. He'd been so close to finishing what he'd started, his hennaed arms winding around to snap Lawrence's useless neck. If only he'd spent less time on the lead-up, invested less care in the meticulous dismantling of human flesh. He'd had a plan to save the man's scalp, and give it to her as a gift. It was more in the style of the War clan to hang such a thing from a belt, but she'd do it, he thought, proudly, and resent him for beating her to it the way she resented Lurks for what they had. He wanted her to resent him. He wanted all the envy she could give him.
He hangs limply against the empty window, the shards of glass that still cling to the frame slicing his clutching, weak hands and his chest where it leans against them, and his eyes water with exertion and with a painful sense of lost opportunity.
He hears later that his division's off probation. Today would be, he thinks tiredly, a good day for a break.
--
She'd asked him if he wanted to take a shower with her and she'd concealed the disappointment when he politely, self-deprecating, declined.
She thinks his name is Charles Kinbote. He didn't think she'd get the reference, and she didn't. While the water runs he holds her purring cat against his naked chest and idly roots through her phone. There's nothing risque, but a picture nominally of her new haircut and dispatched to her recently-ex boyfriend was clearly taken for the purpose of showcasing her cleavage. She'd done a good job, he thinks, of making herself look better than she did in person. He forwards it to himself and deletes the evidence, and distractedly scratches the cat's chin.
--
The city that isn't his stirs slowly to life, mundane and safe and boring, and when he goes downstairs to check out the clerk will make an obvious attempt not to look at the twisted scar around his neck, and wonder what sort of life he's led to put it there. He feels hollow, listless, consummately boring in every respect, positive that to regale any willing listener with his story (with shadows, with drugs, with monsters, with torture, with secrets) would be to plunge them irretrievably into ennui.
--
(He learns quickly what America meant by how delicate civilians are, and he adjusts accordingly. The necessity of restraint leaves a metallic, unpleasant taste in his mouth.)
--
He picks up a stack of books for Konstantin and his library; on a whim he picks up A Canticle for Leibowitz for Hanna Nowicki who said on Twitter that she liked Dystopian literature.
He finds a glossy, small-run edition of a short story he'd once read by Neil Gaiman. The cover is a dancing phoenix superimposed over a place setting. He hesitates, but he picks it up, too.
--
It takes four tries to find a likely candidate, but the coat fits as well as any coat off the rack is going to.
"You ought to have it taken in, sir," says the clerk. Taym touches the buttons, slides his fingers under the gap between them, and tries not to look in the mirror more than he has to.
"I'll look into it."
He walks the four blocks over to the restaurant, and makes the reservations in person. They ask for a deposit on his credit card so he pays the bill in full, cash upfront. The hostess eyes him sideways, curiously, but she complies.
"Table for two," she confirms.
For a while he's perversely delighted by trying to guess for himself what unseemly and interesting profession the man who paid cash, the man with the shaved head and the scars, the man with the expensive sports coat and nice boots but worn-knee jeans, must have in the world of the hostess's imagination.
Eventually he starts weighing that man against the real one, and the entertainment drains out of it.
--
He asks her endless questions and she delights in talking, talking, talking. He thinks she probably lies a little, and embellishes a lot. He avoids the hints about the scar, and maybe she'll make up a story later for the benefit of her girlfriends that she thinks is almost certainly more interesting than the real explanation.
--
The cats purr in the crook of his elbow.
He considers, distantly and without feeling, whether they would cry if he hurt them, or if they would simply melt away. A hand twitching on the floor of Caelius's office, a fetch with his face crooning and leaning into an approving touch. A week, two weeks of nightmares of flaying his own skin off a thing that doesn't deserve to wear it, nightmares mostly because he never gets to finish.
He takes Quint's paw into his hand, thinking of America's treat and his bandaged stump. The cats have gotten so big now--they are not kittens any more--and he is not sure whether he is relieved or disappointed that they grew like a pair of normal cats might.
He strokes the smooth, glossy fur of Quint's foreleg, and then closes his fingers around it, feeling out the shape of the bone beneath the flesh. Quint does not react but Jessel stirs uneasily, lifting itself onto its elbows, as Taym, deliberately and slowly, wills himself to push, and push, and push.
He has never been anything but kind to them. They seek out his hands like real cats might, desperate for his affection. It delays their reaction to the pain, until Quint bristles, its eyes flashing, and then cries out in betrayed alarm.
He cannot. He has tried and he can't. The cats crouch terrified of him in the corner of the bed, their backs arched, their shared tail a bottle-brush but with all eight limbs intact, and Taym curls up to cry his guilt out weakly into his arms.
When he goes to usher them back into the carrier later Quint hisses at him through the bars and he is relieved, so relieved that it shakes him, that the cat has not simply forgotten, already leaning, stupid and affectionate, into his hands.
--
He propels himself down the Sun Run without thinking, dimly surprised to find himself only slightly out of breath at the end of it. When he strips off his shirt in the shower after he catches the hated glimpse of his own reflection, and he is taken aback by what looks like a stranger there.
He examines, in the shower, the shape of his ribcage. He has been unmoored, he thinks. Depersonalized. Touching the hollow of his clavicle is unaccompanied by a sense of either agency or recognition: someone else's hands, touching someone else's collarbone.
--
He fills a little box, and he leaves it beside her door with a note: this doesn't mean you get to shave your head.
--
The tech on lighthouse duty feels the need to snark at the fact at the list he's brought back: cigarettes, books, one pricey sports coat, a brand new laptop, and enough liquor to sustain him through several mental emergencies treatable only by being blackout drunk.
"Interesting party you're planning there," she says.
"Sorry I forgot your invite," he answers, with some of the old autopilot, with a blessed apathy over whether it's an interesting or rude or evasive thing to say. She snorts.
I'm so ******** tired, he thinks. She must be new. It's the first time anyone's felt the need to talk to him, coming out of the portal.
--
It would be nice to say that he thinks of America before, or during, or after, but he doesn't, not really--she flits across his consciousness in a way that cannot be dignified with a word that implies consideration. He doesn't really think of her until he leaves, walking the six blocks back to the hotel. His hands are cold; he thinks he'd like to share someone's pocket the way he used to.
Guilt follows him all the way back to his room.
--
lizbot
Text to America Jones: Put your hair up or I'll wear the cow tie.
ATTACHMENT: [schedule item]
ATTACHMENT: [schedule item]
--
"Seventeen pounds," they told him. Better than expected, they'd told him; the weapon bond speeds it up, they'd told him. They sounded congratulatory; he'd felt his mouth go dry without really experiencing it at all.
He lies on top of his blankets, distractedly running a hand over the alien shape of his side through his shirt. It should bother him, he thinks, but nothing does, right now. He's drunk more than he ought to, considering he's got less than eight hours to sleep it off and get to work. He'll be nursing a hangover for the duration of his first roster, a nauseated headache rattling Fiona's composure in the space she's forced to share with it, so loud that it robs him of his ability to think.
Good, he thinks.
