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The first breath was sudden and shocking and too much. She was going to drown and burn as air turned to fire and finally, ice. In an infirmary bed, finally awake after several days, America Jones couldn't think beyond the uncontrollable shaking of her body. In the back of head, Stryker tried to soothe and explain, but there was an overwhelming hopelessness that whispered this was forever.

Not for the first time in the past couple of days, Taym found himself having to sort out whether he was still asleep or truly awake, and he decided as he hauled himself upright that the resultant protests of his body suggested the latter.

He was, suddenly, alert: "Is she up?"

"She is," Kostya replied, his heart swelling. He took a step to the side, enough so that Taym could see her in all her exhausted glory, alive and sleepy-eyed. Slowly, he carded his hand through her hair, taking in a singular, deep breath.

"You had big adventure." He did not know what she had done, and it didn't matter. It had come at a great cost to her, that much had been clear even when they'd seen her down below. Strung out and hurt and frantic.

"But you are home. And you are safe. And so are ve."

Relief suffused every tense line of the girl. "Oh," Anerica sighed. "Oh." A smile followed with a soft laugh, and she said again and again because of course. She'd just had a little adventure and now it was over. This was Deus and horrible things happened sometimes and maybe even you died or somebody else did, but almost always it was just some sort of dream or delusion. Once you woke up though, it was over and everything was fine again.

Hands shaking from the chill scrambled at the bedding, pushed her hospital gown to seek out a wound that shouldn't be there. America glanced up at Taym, not really seeing him, and began to joke, "Least this time I didn't steal your little deer. Remember..." She glanced down at her hand, resting on the ragged red starburst of a wound left by Squirrel where he'd impaled her. There'd been so many dirty jokes about that spear, most made by him and even in the end he'd been quippy about it in the end before...

America fell silent.

Kostya met Taym's eyes, and had nothing to offer but a grim sorrow that did not last.

He had, in all his time, never been good at comforting anyone. He had his presence and his analysis and his facts and little more, although now he could at least offer physical contact and words of affection, unconditionally provided.

Even if she had been in his own mind, Kostya would not have forgiven her-- because there was nothing to forgive.

"Vhat you remember is probably overvhelm. But it vas very clear that you vere not always you. Obadiah notice it first."

"Okay," Kostya said, with no argument, calm as still water. He wanted to clutch her, not because of his own desire to touch, but of how important he knew the contact was-- and so he grabbed for a wrist, holding on to it if she allowed. "Then you did vhat vas necessary. And I am glad. Because you are alive."

He did not care the extent she had gone. None of it mattered: he would trade another life for hers in an instant. Five. A dozen. A hundred. The world. "Remember. Ve are hunter first, and human second, and can be both, but not vhen ve need to survive."

The swiftly withdrawn hand and question were enough, despite Taym's careful tone, to have America's head lift to gaze at him in resignation and then look away, not wanting to see the confirmation of what she'd been expecting for days. Her time in the labyrinth and city had been filled with tension and battle and desperation, but there had also been a lot of time to think. Of home, of her friends, and what going home might be like. There were moments that the thought of going back was more terrifying than what was waiting for her at the base.

Focusing on Konstantin she tried to keep her voice firm, "Don't excuse it. I had my reasons and I stand by them but that doesn't make anybody any less dead. I killed two men." The firm, calm tones began to crack. Then steady. Then break, the words turning into an emotional tide that kept going back and forth between steady and breaking. "I kept wondering if it'd have been better to have just stayed under through and through cause then it's the red's fault. Even if things got worse and worse and more people died, more people went like slow like they did with Marge, at least it wouldn't have been me. It's so much easier to be innocent, Kon, and ******** the cost. But I'm not, so don't make it less than it is."

He wondered if the thing--it was hard to call it a body, in the state that it was--with the blonde hair had been Marge, wondered if that was what she meant, and thought about the single clear line across Boris's throat and abruptly felt sick.

(If it had been him? He wasn't sure he could have done it. He prayed, selfishly, that he'd never have to find out.)

He watched her, just a flat and unfathomable stare that betrayed nothing, and if there wasn't judgment in it there wasn't sympathy either: there was nothing, just an absence, a void, hoisted up as a shield while he clumsily sorted out the chaos of his reaction.

When he finally said something it was quiet and rapid and he didn't move his eyes from her to Bashmet at all. "You're human first," he said, direct disagreement. "Nothing ******** better or more worthy or harder to be than that. So you did the human thing," he said, and for an instant his voice shook, betrayed him, but he mastered it again. "You can't always use words like innocent and guilty but I can't imagine you ever doing anything that wasn't right, at least, just because it was easier."

The air felt strangely thick between them, whether from the way she'd shied away from both their hands or because of the way he'd withdrawn his or simply because there was, forever, the tension of Bashmet there keeping him from saying and doing what he wanted to say and do, which was tell her to cry and sort it out later and hold her, if she'd let him. It pinned him to where he sat on the edge of the infirmary bed, his hands restless with the desire to reach for hers but afraid to do it and in any case the words he most wanted to say stuck in his throat, so instead without lifting his hands from his lap he pressed his middle two fingers to his palm, the others outstretched and shaking, and said it that way instead.