Welcome to Gaia! ::

The little square house, she'd said, and he knew after a moment of bewilderment which she meant, grief and rage warring that she'd noticed him pause for three seconds over a ramshackle wreck but hadn't managed to piece together weeks of his unspoken begging.

The door swung open more easily than he'd anticipated, its path clear of debris that was for the most part shoved off to the side rather than actually cleared. He picked his way through it, through the golden late-afternoon light slanting through ruined windows--too close to evening and to dark, if he lingered, but he hadn't meant to find himself here anyway. He'd been up before dawn, lost track of time in work, and his arms and his back ached, tempted him to go crawl into the new bath until the water went cold, to drink until, with the exhaustion, sleep came easy, but instead he'd turned towards the little cul-de-sac that would be, one day in America's hazy dream-future, full of too many parks and not enough houses.

He meandered through the dark rooms, toeing at the collapsed, rusting bedsprings in the bedroom, brushing fingertips over fresh boards for bookcases as-yet uninstalled, over cracked thresholds and the curvy backs of fiberglass chairs long-since wrecked by exposure and neglect, although he did find that some of them in decent shape had been salvaged, the rust scrubbed off their slender legs. Two were arranged around a table, in the little space that opened out into a kitchen that, aside from the duct-taped window over the sink, looked as though it had been neatly excised out of an intact civilian home and lifted wholecloth to the island. Ever-tactile, he touched the clean countertops and shining cabinet pulls, turning the handles of the faucet although nothing happened, before sinking gingerly into one of the chairs and pulling towards himself the box that rested on the floor in front of it.

On the top of the mess within was an ugly ashtray in the shape of a cat, of the kind of boggle-eyed, vintage kitsch that suggested that it might have been native to the house if America had not scavenged it in a thrift store, and this reminded him to light a cigarette, and so he did. Fiona was silent as he lifted from the box a shoddily-carved, stylized deer with an uplifted hoof, as he rested it on the table with great care, as though it were some precious artifact.

The mentioned bit of china, marked with a black cat. A singularly ugly tie. A poster of Raquel Welch--not that he recognized her--that undoubtedly once graced the back of some teenage boy's door and had since fallen into disrepair, the corners disintegrated by a few decades of tape and tacks. A blue china cat curled up sleeping. An old, old mug with a guard for the drinker's mustache, adorned with a verse extolling the virtues of facial hair (he laughed quietly, and then was angry once more because he had not shaved for well over a week and he knew why even if he tried to tell himself it was out of apathy). A pop-eyed pink plastic kitten that probably hailed from the same era as the ashtray.

He lined them up with care on the table, his hands shaking but his expression blank, until his reverie was disrupted by something stirring through the door he'd left open. He lifted his head, still and alert, a buck aware of some encroaching creature but too assured of his own fleet-footedness to run before his curiosity was satisfied.

Flame-red at the corner of his eye, and he returned to his examination of a knick-knack, cigarette dangling. The relief that it had not been a strange shadow had been short-lived. It would have been easier, if it had been.

"It's just me," he said without looking up.

"This type of house, normally it's all plate glass along one wall. Mid-century ideal of a seamless transition between the indoors and the outdoors, something like that. Probably made things easier on you that this one wasn't." He put down the thing he was examining on the table with the rest of them, and he pointed distractedly at the other chair while he fished something else out of the box.

"I think you misunderstood my request, and before you get all indignant," he continued, tired, his own voice with a distinct, throat-aching strain around the edges, "I'm taking credit for that, not blaming you."

He was silent for a minute, rolling the words around in his head, finding them no easier to say, until, finally, he opted instead to say what was most important.

"I already told you once that I'm not ashamed of you, just ashamed of what I expect out of you. I wish you'd stop interpreting that as a personal insult. I do want stability. I do want someone to come home to--that's... that's what that means, for me. Not a house, not a job, just people. I don't want to be your neighbor. I don't want to see you when I leave my room in the morning. I want to see you when I wake up there." And then, with a bluntness that he hated, and that did not come naturally to him: "When I said I wanted stability, I meant with you. This isn't me asking you. I know you don't want to. This is me clarifying because I can't stand the thought of you thinking that I'm anything but proud that you want my company at all."

Moving slowly like moving hurt he put the cigarette out in the kitschy ugly ashtray, gently shoved the things spread across the table aside, and buried his face in his arms.

"With you and Kon," he repeated, so low it was almost inaudible.

He pulled himself back up onto his elbows, but he didn't look at her, instead staring distractedly into the middle distance.

"You're misunderstanding me again. This is karma," he added listlessly, to himself or to her was impossible to say, "for every time a girlfriend gave me the Bird ultimatum and I always picked her. Just start ******** her and you're as good as married." It was delivered with the bitter, nasal tone one reserved for mocking imitations of others. "For ******** sake. With you and Kon."

She would find, disappointingly, that he was neither. He smelled like he always did, except that he'd also been engaged in manual labor in the heat all day, so maybe not quite as inoffensive as he always did, actually. Probably he should have heeded the inner voice telling him to go home and take a ******** bath.

He attempted to shoo her away out of instinct before remembering what was happening and trying, lamely, to catch her wrist instead. Put the issue of Konstantin Bashmet aside, and curry a false hope: false hopes were an area in which Taym could, if he wanted to, excel. "And anyway, what happened to sowin' your wild ********' oats, as you put it?" he asked bitterly.

Don't let her hear it. Don't let her hear what you're really looking for: putting it down for you. Setting it aside for you. For you, personally, specifically; you are an exception, you are worth it, you deserve it. Deserve her.

And if (she won't) she says it (she won't say it; she still doesn't get it), don't let her (don't let yourself) hear the rest of it (the worst part, the small part, the petty angry hypocrite's part): the promises you'll ask her to make later, that she never, ever will.

He could not help it: he lifted the backs of her fingers to his lips the way he had when he'd let her back behind all those walls he was forever putting up, a single desperate, needy grab for closeness before he let her go again, shrinking away: cringing. Don't touch me written in every line of him, even though he'd done it first.

"I don't want to share you," he said quietly, gathering up all her little thrift-store offerings and beginning to pack them neatly back away. "This is why I said I wasn't asking. You've made it clear again and again that even if you're waiting for the barest scraps or you think that being with me feels so important it's apparently not enough."

He was on his feet almost in the same instant that he was flinching to the side to avoid the incoming projectile, and this time when he went for her wrists it wasn't with pleading affection but with angry violence, accompanied by an attempt to push her bodily back into the counter, to hold her still.

Even now the contrast between her body (a tool, a weapon kept work-fit and treated with care by an owner exhilarated by its abilities) and his (a burden, a hated costume, beaten into submission and heaped with abuse of every kind) was marked out, but the weeks since the Sahara had shaped him into something closer to a functional Hunter than he'd ever managed yet to be. There was a strength in his hands that had not been there before he'd left her, and she'd seen the suggestions of it twice now: once angry in a basement room and once possessive and affectionate in a Chicago hotel. He was not a physical animal like she was, and never had been and possibly never would be, but at some point he'd stopped holding his own body hostage.

"Stop," he hissed in her ear, struggling. "You talk or let me talk, but we're not going to do this."