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There were plenty of practical questions to be asked, plenty of pragmatic debriefing that could have taken place, but what Taym found himself dwelling on instead as they tiredly left, hand-in-hand, was what exactly America meant when she said (it would have left a lump in his throat, some other time) let's go home.

It was a false hope but he wasn't sure for which of them: when they left the labs he turned, not towards the dorms, but towards the town. It was gathering dark, probably later than a trek through the jungle was strictly advisable, but he just tightened his fingers around hers. Home was off down those shadowed paths, for her; for him, as he'd claimed so many times, it was right there, hand-in-hand. In the end it didn't much matter where they went. In the end it mattered entirely too much.

Taym could not help thinking, immediately, of the day he'd gotten shot and insisted on trying to make it to the infirmary under his own steam. But that had been different, right? Not his hatred of Konstantin pushing him but his hatred of his own weakness. It was, either way, an uncomfortable thought.

He had escaped the worst of the mess--America'd gotten the brunt of it--but he was streaked here and there with Horace's blood and with, besides, a clinging sense of filth just from such prolonged proximity to Lawrence. He stripped off his bag, dumping it in the floor; started following her lead, shivering in the sudden air, after a quick glance around the semi-dark of the house to make sure they were alone, a mingled pang of triumph and guilt when they were.

"Can't believe ******** any of that. Like a ******** horror movie. If they don't kill him this time--" he left it hanging. He'd already made a promise and he hadn't kept it, and his face twisted up in sudden grief as he reached, absently, to touch the feathers sweeping across her shoulderblade. "I should have."

He leaned back against the counter, swirling a bottle absently in one hand and picking at his lip with the other.

"I don't want anyone to die," he said quietly. "And I'm just afraid that he's..."

He paused.

"Before I went to the Sahara," he said abruptly, with difficulty (it was not a thing he talked of often, if at all), "I went to talk to some other Hunters who'd been. And one of them asked me, out of nowhere: how many lives are worth your own?" He hesitated.

"He wouldn't tell me why he asked, just told me one day I'd need to know, then asked me if I had any family off the island. And when I--when I went there and things... went... bad, when that happened, one of them asked me that. I think she--she asks us that." He took an agitated drink. "I asked Lawrence that, today. Because I ********' know she asked him. And he answered me, he said: as many as it takes."

He raked a hand through his hair, uneasy. It was getting too long, necessitating constant restless flicks of his head, coltish, to get it off his forehead. "I know he lies through his ********' teeth but he told me when he snuck off to see his daughter before she died Famine was there. And maybe there was--maybe there was some... seed of truth in that." Another pause. "I don't want people to die," he reiterated, swallowing back the lump in his throat. "And I... ********' worry, that people are going to, maybe Hunters, maybe worse. Because I didn't kill someone today."

He closed his eyes, exhaling a slow tired of course breath.

He was silent for a long time before he met her eye, and his were glazed in the half-light of the kitchen with a film of unshed tears, and he (still so much boy) who hated himself on the training fields for going through the motions of violence (who had sometimes hurt his fiancee for the sheer relief of hurting her), whose heart broke for skinny strays that he could no longer save (who had threatened Rep in his infirmary bed, pushed his knife to his chest), he (who still woke up in tears of guilt for the look on April's face when it surfaced in his nightmares; who had thrown up outside the labs and hadn't been able to do it, not even convinced, even now, that it would have been right) did not look away from her when he repeated, level despite his sudden trembling: "I should have killed him."

"This is not a ********' nursing home. And no offense," he said quietly, two feeble attempts at a joke, "but I think you need it more than I do."

He watched her move, watched her stretch her fingers under the running water; he ran his eyes over her tidy, well-kept bathroom, the shape of the windows welcoming from the outside and cozy from the inside, over the curve of her sides, over the loved floors, over the spill of her hair mingling with her new tattoo, over everything that looked nice to come back to. The day had not been physically strenuous but he ached, from the clench of his jaw to his tired feet.

He was still quiet like he was afraid to break the peaceful noise of the water running, but he spoke, suddenly. "Everything you say and do makes me proud to be with you," he said.

He was there, kneeling beside the bathtub almost before she got done talking, reaching out to catch a hand against the back of her neck, small comfort though it could have been, and he was bewildered. He'd said what he'd said partly because he needed to but mostly to avert some sort of crisis, but whatever he'd been expecting it hadn't been this one.

"What could you have stopped? What difference would it have made? I didn't know what it meant, America." And the idea that she could feel even remotely responsible--now, here, months and months after she'd herded a near-stranger down to the infirmary because he was obstinately starving himself, months and months after he'd shot her a thanks a lot, months and months after he'd resigned himself to the fact that he had no one to blame but himself--planted a tiny panic. "How would it have changed anything at all, to hear you repeat a conversation that wouldn't have made any sense?"

"If you ever so much as ******** suggest to me again that I would have been better off with you giving in to that threat of his," he whispered ferociously, genuine anger behind it, "I'll know that I'm gone, because I don't think a world exists in which you'd ever let yourself believe that I'd be happier or better off because America Jones let someone coerce her, and if that world existed I wouldn't let myself live in it. Don't even ******** hint at it."

And then he softened, but only a little, and he reached to scoop up a handful of water, tip her head back and smooth it over her forehead, to begin gently detangling her hair with his fingers. "None of this is your fault. Please, god, can you imagine how ******** pleased he'd be to hear you suggest it was? And even more pleased because it's not true. Whatever happened before the Sahara, I fumbled into that nest without his help, and I'm pretty sure the--the thing that held me there wasn't taking orders or suggestions from some insignificant little maggot like Lawrence Weiman. It happened. It's--" he was obviously about to say over, but it wasn't, was it? It was still casting a shadow over every ******** day of his life, and they both knew it. "--It happened, and it would have. And what's happening now would still be happening. You really think if you hadn't showed up he'd just be sitting around innocently composing pretentious piano fortes and hurting no one? He's vicious and he's bloodthirsty and he has no respect for human life and he likes to delude himself into playing God and you have nothing to do with any of that." His voice broke. "I ******** hate him for this. I hate him for making you think any of this is anyone's fault but his. I hate him for dragging you through his ******** filth."

"If you are a coward and selfish your standards for brave and selfless must be ********' impossible," he said.