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It wasn't so much that Taym thought fast as that he simply was fast. There was a reason so many people were quick to assume that he had a history of methamphetamine usage: for all he'd thrown the term at Ever, if either of them was truly squirrely...

So he caught them, of course, dropping the book he was holding in the process, and then damn near dropped the cigarettes too because today was a day when the tremors were out in full force, the kind of cripplingly-bad that they rarely were since arriving on the Island, the kind that made small acts of manual dexterity frustrating to watch, let alone to attempt.

He turned the back over in his shaking hands, examining it like it was some strange, esoteric artifact.

"You can afford better than Pall Malls now," he pointed out flatly. "No rent. Not to sound ungrateful or anything ."

"Bet," he said flatly, managing, with difficulty, to tamp the pack down on his palm and peel it open, apparently having decided like there was no time like the present to make use of them. Maybe he thought they'd be revoked if he sat on them for too long.

He certainly didn't pay any attention to Ever's clothes, or his shoes. Taym's own were something of an anomaly compared to the rest of him: the rest of his clothes were obviously relatively new, cheaply-made; his boots were ancient with the kind of ancient that suggested they'd been very expensive once. It wasn't the sort of thing he expected people to notice, specifically because the only time he had to notice other people's shoes it was to disapprove of Crocs on women or to silently rate a pair of heels on a meticulous personal scale: plus points for peep toes, negatives for wedges.

"Wasn't a debt," he added, after a pause.

"Believe it or not," he said around the cigarette, and watching Taym try to use a lighter when his hands were like this was agonizing but he got it after several tries, "I wasn't. I do judge you for feeling obligated to pay it back--I give you a ******** positive mark in my mental reckoning, if that's what you're after."

He leaned back, arm draped over the back of his chair, and the look he gave Ever was deeply unimpressed. "We all roll out of the pod on equally shitty footing. We all exit our first spars in the same state. Later, I give you cigarettes and you don't find a good turn to do for me, maybe I'll judge you then. But you can be sure as s**t all you want on this one and still be wrong."

"I do, in fact, have an upstairs room," he answered, idly pushing the dropped book along with his toe. "I just had--"

He hesitated, and it was a long, pregnant pause, the sort that, when it's ended, makes it obvious that whatever is being said is a lie.

"--work to do, and what are you gonna do with that hellish commute?" Taym's grins were an act of aggression, and this one, full of smoke and yellow teeth, was no different. Ever had labels that made Taym deeply uneasy--he fit into boxes of people that Taym didn't like for capricious, uninformed, arbitrary reasons--but he was also snot-nosed and cocky in a way that Taym appreciated as much as it made him want to break his face, and he had not forgotten--might never forget--that Ever had asked for work, and asked for help. It was making him more talkative than he might otherwise be, and less dismissive.

"So I lent it to the new girl. Cee," he clarified. "So probably my other sheets are one big ******** patch of spray tan and bad perfume and hairspray." A pause. "So much ******** hairspray."

"You aren't sleeping in my room because that invitation did not ******** extend to you," he answered, snippy. This wasn't actually strictly true--he'd explicitly told Cee to have people over if she wanted, but he'd made that rule on the twofold assumption that A) at least some of those people would be girls in lacy underwear having pillowfights (photographic documentation of the same being a condition of the lease agreement, as it were) and also B) weren't Ever, and everything that Ever was that Taym did not articulate, aware of the social fallout. "As to calling you over to stomp out spiders..."

He trailed off, waving the cigarette vaguely. "Maybe she likes to keep a secondary base of operations for the purposes of soap opera research, since a hell of a lot of the drama takes place down here, apparently. Or maybe, and I suspect this is true," he added, sardonic but condescendingly affectionate, "she just likes seeing men ask her how high when she says 'jump.' Principessa, or whatever."

"High enough," he said comfortably, apparently not offended by the question, even delivered by Ever. If the topic had been someone else, possibly there would have been a flare of infuriated indignation, but Cee was a non-threat, and better than that, she was a notch on his woefully-undernotched bedpost. "But not so high that I anticipate her being surprised when she gets an eviction notice. How are you settling in, Ambrodiel?" he asked suddenly.

"No. Sometimes they're a lot worse." It was the predictable answer, the one you'd see in a the script for a cliched, hokey TV show, and he knew it: another sarcastic baring of his teeth. "But sometimes they're better. They're pretty much all ********' weird, though. You'll adjust to the weird. This past Valentine's Day the entire Island turned into cats," he added pleasantly. He did not everyone but me. "A week after I got here I went to get breakfast and nearly fell into a pool. Because the cafeteria had turned into one. The entire cafeteria. So even the weird's not all bad. But then sometimes--"

He looked at the drifting smoke, thought of Wonderland, thought of the caterpillar and of himself rocking back and forth in a hotel armchair and waiting for the inevitable.

He made a dismissive gesture. "The unexpected, though? The 'do what's in front of you because that's the only choice you have'? Yeah. All the missions are like that. Just be glad we didn't come back to a power outage this time."