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He turned on every light first, and then opened every window, drawing all the blinds to let in as much light and air as possible, carefully doing what he could to make the white-walled rooms a far cry from dark underground passages. Aside from pushing his furniture around to avoid ever having to sit with his back to the room, it was precisely what he'd done to the little room downstairs after he'd gotten back from the Sahara, but here, with more space and more windows and a certain lived-in quality from the bookcases and the larger bed, the effect was more pronounced.

He thought briefly, with a pang, of all the windows in the little square house, of how it might have looked with the beadboard painted white, how bright, how open.

He arranged on the corner of his nightstand a motley assortment of unorthodox (or not) means of relief: two tiny baby blue pills, a joint, a bar of expensive dark chocolate (secured on his last leave and still only a quarter eaten, one savored square at a time), a clean towel in case she still wanted a bath, and a can of liquid meal replacement. He was afraid to touch that question, afraid to touch the thought of the foil-wrapped, fly-buzzed packets in the Russian refrigerator, but she'd said that eating was hard and that, at least, Taym could understand even if the reasons for it terrified him.



And then he waited, and realized that he was half-expecting her not to show up at all, to once again leave him hanging, and he tried to tell himself that the stir of anger was of despair and fear, and it was, but it was also of resentment. Was always of resentment. Would always be.

He picked up a book, and he left two chairs and half of the bed unoccupied.

He put his book down but didn't move from where he was lying, picking distractedly at a chapped lip before indicating the nightstand. "If any of it'll help." A pause. "You look nice," he said quietly, and that time his voice matched hers, because he remembered, suddenly, scraping together ten bucks for a haircut and a shave before hitchhiking home for Tuesday's birthday party; remembered spending seven dollars on a real shower in a truck stop, remembered portioning out the panhandled budget that two months before would have gone to heroin and combing through thrift store racks for hours to find the most presentable clothes he could, and spending an afternoon making his boots look more weathered than battered.

"You look nice," his mother had said when he opened the door, and there'd been that note of apologetic hope in it, of despair and optimism all at once. You look nice. It was a week after he'd put a gun under his chin in a drug store parking lot, and it was less than 24 hours before he took the recruiters up on their offer.

He ignored this, pointedly, and he didn't move to put his arms around her, uncertain if she'd find that hurtful too, and instead reached and gingerly, just barely, brushed his fingertips against her shoulder.

"Why don't you deserve it?" he asked. No assurances that she did. No argument. Just why.

Seeing her do that, seeing her do what he expected of himself and tense underneath his fingers, hurt more than he would have imagined it could.

"You're dealing with more s**t than is even remotely fair," he said finally. "It wasn't a ******** sin and even if it had been how could it possibly be enough to undo all the things you've done for me?" A pause. "I want to help if I can. I don't know how you feel, but I know how you feel."

For the second time he loved her and this time the moment was not brief. It held while he gave the question the careful consideration it deserved and while his eyes searched her face and while he told her the truth because this was a lie she would know for one, if he didn't.

"I wish I had a happier answer, sweetheart," he whispered, "but I think the answer is time. Other things help temporarily and you--you shouldn't be too proud to take a break if it gets too hard but they don't... Tame it. Time does that. It won't even make it go away but you'll... Assimilate it. And it'll get quieter and smaller and further away but you're going to have bad nights, sweetheart. And bad days. But there's nothing wrong with you and there's nothing broken. All this is normal. So maybe that helps too: you arent alone or weird. I ran into Bix in the hall once in a cold ******** sweat from a nightmare and that's Bix."

It felt strange and unliberating to say those things: to assert as truth what he wanted to believe. He'd spent months struggling with what he felt was unwonted and disproportionate guilt and grief too large for his actual experience, and America's experience, he thought, dwarfed his own.

"When I came back from my civilian mission with Bix, and then again after the Sahara I thought I'd never function again. I felt like it wasn't fair that I lived and other people died because I felt guilty for living and I almost... Almost didn't want to. Wasn't making use of it. Living was scary. I was just--afraid. All the time. When they tried to feed me in the infirmary they wanted to run a tube and I was--I have never been so ******** afraid. Of nothing. And I'm still scared sometimes. If I get caught unexpectedly out In the rain it feels like my heart's gonna stop. Or someone will get hurt on a mission and I won't wanna help, just run, because what if I cant help enough and I have to see--to look at that? But I get better. Always. Even if it feels like the opposite a lot. They don't go away they just get smaller and quieter like I said. And I can go swimming with you. And I can eat. Sometimes. And I can help people even if it's scary because nothing is more important than that. And maybe that helps me, besides time. Helping people. Making use of it.

"And you'll have good days. And I know, I know, you don't feel strong. You feel so ******** helpless and ashamed. I know. But I promise you you're strong even if you can't feel it. I can see it. There's nothing strong in having nothing to fight, and you have more to fight than anyone ought to and I can see that you're going to anyway. You are so much stronger than me and that is good because you've gone through so much more than me and I'd take it if I could even though it'd break me like it hasnt broken you. And those good days, America, they are so, so good." He offered, tentatively, a strained and tearful smile. He felt. He felt everything too much, too violently, and like an answering ache from an old wound her pain welled up in him and tangled with his own until he could no longer tell them apart. "I know it's not fair," he whispered. "I'm sorry. Things will get better for you like they did for me and maybe we'll have a few bad nights and you'll have to do hard and unfair things because being a hunter and being a human is so ******** hard and unfair but we are also gonna have so many good days. And good weeks. And good years."

(one small lie, to cap a large truth.)

"It'd be nice," he agreed. He did not hesitate to take her hand, winding their fingers together. If anything he radiated the tension of longing to hold her and letting her take the initiative. "And for the rest of it--I lie about it. A lot. But I don't guess you have the practice I do. When's the last time you slept?" he asked gently, leaning up to reach over her for the pair of pills but not offering them to her yet, having long since lost all sense of where social taboos and insulting implications existed when it came to chemical relief.

He returned the gesture of trust, narrowing the gap between them and almost idly kissing the backs of her fingers. "Jesus Christ," he whispered. "No wonder you feel like s**t." He held the pills out toward her free hand. "Sometimes one good night is enough to grant you a few more where you don't need help," he said in the voice of someone who knew. "Don't lie about it though. I wish I didn't. I don't always know why I do. Feels like showing my belly to something with claws when I don't I guess, even though I'm not. Makes it... Take longer. Once you put words on it it flies away a little bit. Flew away just now, most it ever has at once. I could put music on. Some of that sleepy s**t Kostya gave me, just loud enough so you aren't hearing anything. And I can leave the light on. And I can stay here. And--"

He realized abruptly what he was taking for granted. "I can walk you back to the house, so you don't have to go alone."

"That could probably be arranged," he said, squeezing her hand gently.

It occurred to him to wonder but only briefly if he ought to be ashamed that his solution to America's problems was to intentionally advocate for recreational drug use and to unintentionally advocate for dishonesty, but after an examination he decided that the answer was no. He saw no harm in the former--he was coming to accept it, with resignation, as his best crutch--and didn't believe that the latter could possibly stick, not with someone like her.

He rolled away from her, one hand still touching hers, to examine the stack of books on the other nightstand (edges squared up with precision). In the end he settled on Mattimeo, recently acquired at a used bookstore to be donated to Kostya's library and still on his nightstand so that he could scan through it for marginalia, for doodles, for bits of lost paper and old receipts and all the other things that made used books so appealing.

It wasn't that he didn't trust her with more mature books. If she'd asked he'd have gladly picked up Kafka or Hardy or Melville, anything dense or obscure that she'd asked for. But he picked up Mattimeo because Redwall offered what those books didn't: simple escapes and small problems, happily solved in time for dinner; an easy backdrop for the steady cadence of a beloved voice. The same reason that he, indiscriminate despite his superficial literary snobbery, still quietly read Narnia books and pored over The Hobbit. They were relief between two covers, and he didn't have Watership Down handy.

(He would, he thought, skip over the more gratuitous scenes of food, although they were almost entirely vegetarian, and the lingering revulsion of why that would maybe be OK still terrified him.)

"You shouldn't take those on an empty stomach," he said gently and quietly as he resettled, drawing her up against his side again with careful hands. But he didn't move to force her, or even to tell her what she already knew from knowing him--that sometimes keeping a can of vaguely-chocolate flavored nothing down was easier than actual food but sometimes even that wasn't an option. That sometimes the best you could hope for was a slowly-melted square of dark chocolate, and sometimes that was too much.

Before she could answer he pushed her hair from her forehead and gently pressed his lips to her temple and he tried to keep the ferocity of his emotion out of his voice as he whispered: "I love you so ******** much. Whole thing. Not just parts. Exactly as it is,"

And then he opened the book to read to her, to hold her, to chase the noises away if he could, as long as she needed him to.