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He wasn't expecting any--he'd taken, full seriously, her suggestion of (ME) on the joking list--but he did yell don't ********' sing through the door before it opened. He'd come close to asking let me wake up with you on my birthday but had rebelled, galled that he had to ask at all. Not that anyone would have suspected. He was all pleased, prickly, self-conscious grins as he opened the door, hair still shower-damp, communism-crushing coat in evidence, caught mid-smoke.

"Meri," he said quietly, the shape of the name still strange in his mouth, even now that he'd had a week to adjust to it. "Fiona sends her warm compliments on your sartorial choices," he added, with a jerk of his chin at the sweater. He reached to take her hand, leery of a hello kiss or even a hug in the hallway, still shying away from public affection. "Come in for a minute."

He had an answer for everything, itemized for her when she was done (I'll concede looking but I don't smell bad please don't ever tell me I smell bad; it is a happy birthday, yes; I love you too) hiding his face against her neck, against her hair, the grin felt even if it wasn't seen. Maybe part of it was the fact that his room still smelled faintly of pot smoke--he'd been up early and his tendency to self-medicate had intensified of late--but most of it was undoubtedly her.

He'd woken up a year older and wracked with anxiety but he'd had a few hours and it was hard to remember it now. She made it easy to forget a lot of things and not all of them, luckily, were self-control or long-term self-preservation. Now he felt young, coltish, almost silly. He swayed a little, but it wasn't quite dancing, and then he told her he liked her hair like that and he asked her, quite out of nowhere, if she'd ever read The Lord of the Rings.

He put her at arm's length, suddenly distressed. The question had been a sort of token segue, the answer as pre-ordained as that to so are you in the habit of breathing often.

"I'm going to read you The Hobbit," he announced grimly. "Inexcusable. Anyway," he resumed, scandalized, "I asked you that because there's a--a thing, in Lord of the Rings, about giving other people gifts on your birthday. And it's something my mom used to do but I haven't had a chance in a long time. So I--I got you something. But do not get excited, it's not exciting, it's nothing to be excited over." He was apparently waiting for some sort of vow of stoicism, as he made no move to let her go, let alone procure any gift. And he was abruptly all prickly self-consciousness, as if waiting for her to make fun of him.

He threw up his hands, his irritation a little bit sincere and a little bit exaggerated, and made an attempt to hold her still with one hand while with the other he pulled a little cardbox gift box out of a pocket and pressed it into her hands.

"I saw it and I thought of you," he said, defensive, like he was arguing against a horrible accusation. I saw it and I thought of you was a common refrain, not just for little gifts but for anecdotes about a fox running across a city street on leave, shaky pictures taken in the field, snippets from old books in the library. I saw it and I thought of you.

Maybe it was for a reason that he'd never given her a gift in person--bad at it, bad at reacting, bad at gauging reactions, bad at owning up to his own ridiculous sentimentality. In pre-emptive defense he said: "And I wasn't sure if you'd like it but they did this--like--engraving thing, so--so what the hell."

It was a ring (not a book, not a trinket, but something as mundane and predictable as a ring, which was possibly amplifying Taym's obvious and rising discomfort). It had the look of something handmade: a delicate-looking feather curled into a circle that nonetheless had a weighty, rough-hewn feel in the hand reminiscent of the ring he'd pulled out of a teapot in Wonderland. He wasn't looking at her any more, picking distractedly at his lower lip and watching the shifting light from the window playing across the wall. Around the inside, in a miniaturized but clearly-recognizable version of Taym's shaky, careful handwriting, was engraved: run with me.

"Don't make fun of me," he said, half-pleading, half-imperious. He sounded like he regretted doing it at all. "Don't even talk about it, actually. Let's go."

He was less scrupulous and more demanding than she was, and for a couple of seconds it seemed like maybe she'd have to contend with his distraction as his tension shifted from one kind to another, away from embarrassment (miserable and peaked at that laugh) and into the struggle between craving touch and shying away from it that had never entirely left.

Instead he withdrew, goosed her a little just to tip the scales away from embarrassing sentiment, and reached to drag his bag over his shoulder and move for the door. "I need to develop a coffee habit just to keep up with you in the morning," he groused, winding an arm around her waist so that she'd find it difficult to grab him by the hand and pull him along. A hesitation, and he asked, as neutrally as he possibly could: "Have you eaten?"

Her joy was--and he knew it, a strange jolt--not just to be headed out to skate, but to be heading out with him. It weighed as heavy as a responsibility and as he so often did with responsibilities he felt unequal to it. The looming ghost of his own inadequacy suggested sabotage, the easy out, a little infidelity, a little argument, disappoint her now instead of later, rip off the bandage.

And more than that he was plagued with a sense of guilt--guilt at the frisson of it that ran along his arms, at the buoying quiet pride, at hoping for a good day and knowing that he'd get it while somewhere out there, unshackled and nameless and dangerous, there was a threat that he could do nothing but ignore.

"Then let's get breakfast," he said, trying to subdue her enthusiastic attentions with quieter ones of his own, as if he actually thought it would work and that she'd notice that his gestures weren't all fondness but instead a silent, timid demonstration: like this, like this.

He was notably more at ease on the other side of the portal, while they wandered down a street (his step loosening, the arm around her waist no longer an effort to pin her down but instead proudly proprietary, and no more attempts to stifle her humming) until they found a diner and he relaxed, distractedly playing footsie with her under the table, fielding her chatter with the same quiet voice he always did, with little teasing jokes and restless fidgeting, trying to balance the salt shaker on its edge, a task ill-served by his trembling hands. He ordered a cup of tea, no sugar, and he ordered toast and then, with a tired glance across the table not quite at America but at her hands on the menu, he assayed the request for a single egg, sunny side up.

He knew the answer instantly, of course: cold day, back in Atlanta finally, apartment that still smelled of new carpet and the raucous background noise of his entire family trying to find enough places to sit and April, reconciled, showing even though she'd taken to wearing oversized sweaters to try and pretend she wasn't, laughing at his contagious delight when a clumsy-footed Great Dane puppy was introduced to the room, a bright blue bow around its neck.

"Ask me again," he said, fingers brushing her ankle before he returned to pushing the last crumbs of his toast around a plate full of uneaten egg yolk, "at the end of the day. You go instead."