Don't think about it: that's been his mantra for eight, nine years now. Before the island he helped himself along with the means available to him there. Now he distracts himself with work, and in a turn of events that would have seemed impossible only months ago, with one singularly attractive and infuriating redhead.

He's got a duty roster with Bashmet. He trades off for it before Kostya will have a chance to see it, not because of simmering resentments (although those persist, and are intensified daily), but because after Russia he calmly told America that it didn't matter what she'd done. He's finding it hard not to think about that, and Taym, dog-loyal and forever finding comfort in Konstantin Bashmet's non-reaction (certain that it is accompanied by a moral compass, as he always has been, until now, in the same way that he assumed Kostya ate and breathed) does not want to think about it.

His new partner is chatty and sarcastic. He finds himself thinking about it anyway, and wishes he could stop.

Later, with America, he's confronted with the rest of what he can't stop thinking about.

--

There hadn't been a dilemma, down there with the needle. Not really.

He won't take leave alone for a while. The only thing that changes is the increasing frequency of those dreams where he's thwarted again and again, that always end right before he finds the vein.

It had been an easy decision. Not a tragedy at all.

--

Rosalyn Thompson, sitting up in bed with a book, glances up when the dog curled up at her knees suddenly perks.

Tuesday's up again, padding down the hallway in an oversized T-shirt and bare feet, her eyes glassy and unseeing.

Ros wakes her granddaughter up gently, slowly, still finding it hard to shake the old wives' tale that to wake a sleepwalker might kill them ("nonsense," the doctor had said), and carries her back to her bedroom.

"Where's daddy?" asks Tuesday, sleepy and toneless. Ros has heard this question a dozen times, two dozen, in the past few weeks. It no longer carries an immediate sting. She smooths Tuesday's hair (newly-shorn after the bubblegum incident, and what a heartbreak that had been) away from her forehead, and they talk again about why he isn't there, why he won't come back. She'd dug up the Sesame Street episode about Mr. Hooper and that had helped, for awhile, but then the sleepwalking started.

She speaks confidently and calmly, and silently wishes she was still a religious woman. When she returns to her room her composure cracks, and for the fourth time that month her husband holds her, his lips pressed to her hair, while she sobs silently until she hears Harley come home, and reaches to turn out the light.

"I'm sorry," he whispers to her, and it's not the first time he'd said it. She'd said, in the week after the news came, that she didn't blame him. She's starting to suspect she no longer believes it.

It's easier to resent her husband for his insistence on discipline and his forever-exhausted well of second chances than it is to resent her son. And she resents her son, so much and so often.

--

I wanted a kitten for so long. Really would not let up. We had cats but I wanted a kitten, my own kitten, one that I could raise and take care of. Mom lobbied hard but dad resisted.

And then one day out of nowhere she shows up with this little tabby and good god, I was smitten. I was beside myself. She slept on my pillow that night. I named her Aravis, because I was reading the Narnia books.

I got scared, though. I don't know when it happened but at some point all I could think about was one day Aravis is going to die. It got to be a real--it was a problem. I'd be playing with her or she'd be sitting in my lap while I was reading and I'd just feel this--this despair, like, of this unavoidable horrible thing. What if she got out and got hit by a car. What if she got sick. What if she ate a mouse that someone had poisoned. I started avoiding her.

And I talked to mom about it, eventually, and some of what she said helped, but what stuck with me, I guess, was she said: it's not fair to Aravis that you're wasting all that time she wants to spend with you.

I don't know. She lived to be eleven, that cat. She died the year before I graduated. Cancer, or something.

I don't know.

--

When America tells him about Jonas Delmarr he holds her tight to his side and thinks about April, guilt closing his throat.

When she talks about how they might have met, why they might have spoken, he longs to tell her again: she would have loved you.

--

He hadn't gone on leave alone, of course. He'd gone with America and spent a deliriously normal day doing wonderfully banal things and engaging in a few petty, snipey, bickering arguments. He'd been supervised the entire time, and he is utterly unsurprised when he's summoned to the Life labs for a last-minute "test" that they try to imply, half-heartedly, is about the copies, and which he knows is not. He suspects he's meant to know that it isn't, that he's supposed to feel ashamed, made-fun-of. He obediently pisses in a cup. It will come back clean.

He's halfway back to the dorm before he realizes that he's trying to think of a way to cheat it, if he ever has to do it again.

That night just before he drifts off in an empty bed that still smells like pot smoke and America Jones he wonders if Leslie can get morphine out of the infirmary, and whether it's patch or pill or IV.

Just idle curiosity.

--

"What're you drawing?" Harley asks, kneeling down to see.

"Me and daddy," she says.

"Lots of hearts," Harley observes. Tuesday adds another and another and another.

Taym's face in Tuesday's drawings is always drawn with a straight line for a mouth, or a downward curve. She draws what she knows, Harley guesses, what she's been told: your daddy was sick and it made him very sad. Surely it's not the way she remembers him. He always smiled for her.

--

She probably knows he's just pretending to sleep. She is all sly kisses against the corner of his mouth (all beard, now, and starting to get hard to upkeep) and sly hands and sly whispering, which is preferable to the days she launches in and starts jumping on the bed.

It's better than the way he'd actually woken up, which had been with his dream-world fingers closed around the barrel of the needle, thumb at the ready, any second now, any second now--

--failure seems so imminent. There's a dozen things wrong with America Jones creeping into his bed, a dozen things wrong with the idea of her slowly but certainly dismantling so many of his shields. Don't think about it: don't think about the impossible futures, not just the easy and huge ones of little square houses full of children's laughter (and she is not America, in those futures, but some faceless amalgam of a woman, whoever will have him, whoever needs him), but the smaller, harder ones that will never come: a door between two second-floor rooms and coming home from a mission to wind his arms around her waist in the calm stillness of a makeshift house that is theirs, of his giving to her all of himself until she needs no other.

Don't think about it. Instead he woke up from the dream with his shaking fingers still curled around the intangible needle, and what he allowed himself to think was: she was not here yesterday, and so today, America will be here. They will go running, and he will touch his fingertips to the back of her wrist on the exhausted trudge back home, and later there will be smiles and wry stories and reproachful Obadiah Ezekiel Chokingsound Thompsons, and work and purpose and Camille Ryland with a bundle of suggestion for next month's seminar and a body that is not his but is almost nothing to be ashamed of, almost. Don't think about the little girl sleepwalking, or the things wearing his skin thirteen floors below the compound, or what waits in the Sahara, or the things that make America wake crying.

She wakes him up slyly, and he lets himself think about running, and about today, and maybe even, when he is feeling brave, about tomorrow.