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Not that she'd ever know it but the sound of her breathing almost turned her welcome wagon away, but at least the sympathetic full-body cringe it incurred happened out of sight and was only long enough for him to collect himself.

It was generally easier to deal with the snarky ones, veiling their fear behind drawled witticisms. The terrified ones: that was hard. It spoke to everything he wished he could be for them that he could never (as became more obvious every day) be.

So he'd be what he could: information freely given, but that later, and for now a tentative voice a few feet off: "Easy. Easy." Like someone calming a startled horse.

Divorced of the context those who knew him had, maybe Taym looked a little better, or maybe he looked a little worse: he was no longer skeletal and those looking to assess him visually wouldn't be comparing the shape of his wrists to that of several months before, but he was also carrying a weight of exhaustion that seemed more significant when it hadn't been built up to gradually, the slow accumulation of tiny draws on his finite well of energy all made clear at once and abruptly; there was the sun-drenched freckled brown of him that nowadays leaned more healthy than weathered but also the mutilated ear, the ruined neck that the ink and the stubble can't quite hide, that he doesn't really try to hide, not any more, even with the uniform on.

He didn't look entirely qualified to be saying "easy, easy;" he looked like he needed a nap. But there he was: soothing her at a safe distance and watching her like he was looking for an opportunity to put a hand on her shoulder that wouldn't entail it getting bitten off in a panic. It was probably an accident that he was holding the clipboard like a shield.

Her deliverer apparently did not think that this term applied to him, giving their surroundings a somewhat flummoxed assessment as if through a stranger's eyes and then physically shaking it off: a little full-body shiver as if to return to the present.

"Probably not," he said flatly, "but good show." A pause, and more gently than he'd intended: "It's OK if you aren't, you know. I mean, it won't be OK later, but if you need about ten minutes to--to ********'... panic, or whatever, it might be good to go ahead and get it out of your system now because you won't have time later and I can look the other way or something." Another pause, as he glanced down at the clipboard. He'd meandered a few steps closer. His hands trembled, but he seemed calm enough. "How much do you remember?"

"If you let yourself have a freak out about every ********' insane thing that happens to you from now on you will never get anything else done" he said tiredly, and apparently something about the change in tone of her panic apparently put him at ease, or at least enough to get to the task at hand. "Name?" Just in case she'd forgotten that too. "Age? How much do you remember?" he repeated.

There was this to be said about introductions with Taym: he was aware of the glass house of his own weird names, and wisely and kindly said nothing about hers, although an exhausted comment on her age was more difficult to restrain.

Like children. Never mind that she was only a year younger than America'd been when he met her; at times it was all too easy for America to seem unsettlingly young herself. And what was he, if not a juvenile moron, totally unequipped to handle his own problems and rash and impulsive, essentially a teenager in all but years?

The look he gave her was half-sympathetic, half-exhausted.

"You aren't dead," he informed her. "Dead people tend to be readily identifiable by, say, a lack of a pulse, or the inability to talk." Generally. "Or, failing that, not having a need to gasp for air. Steady," he added. "Just let it go, it'll be better for you in the long run. Trust me." A pause. "Also: hanged, not hung."

It was difficult to maintain an air of aloof professionalism when one was hugging a clipboard in the manner of a teenage girl protecting her diary, but Taym gave it a spirited try.

"Yes it's about you. Also ha ha ha, never heard that one before. You'd have to ask my girlfriend." No, wait. "Don't ask my girlfriend," he hastily added. The era of notes might have been at an end but the notes still existed and Taym was not entirely confident that such a question wouldn't result in actual comparative diagrams vs. the rest of the Island, and he was entirely confident, too confident, that in the event of those diagrams he would not come away looking particularly impressive. Love might be generally blind but specifically, in this case, it was probably anything but.

This was easier. An obnoxious teenage girl making d**k jokes was easier. He relaxed, and still guarding the clipboard (he wasn't even sure why), he loosed a slim packet and handed it to her. Its contents were 50% stark and informative and 50% incongruously cheery and brightly-printed, because Taym had long since learned that in some matters it was wisest to give Cami her preference.

"It says here," he observed in an attempt to move the topic elsewhere, "that you've been put into--" he hesitated "--the intelligence and reconnaisance division," he decided. Let her read the name herself later. He sounded disappointed, and couldn't refrain from adding: "Good. Teach them something. If you're feeling OK for the time being we can..." again the hesitation "--move on to the next step here." And then, belatedly: "Welcome to Deus Ex Machina." It did not sound congratulatory.

"Not really," he said, and if he'd sounded exhausted before he sounded like he ought to be settling into a grave on those two words.

"This next part's not bad--" he thought of Fiona, of the steely resolute brisk professional strength in her, an unbreakable little monolith of thought and feeling around which all his chaos had collected "--it's not bad at all, but it's a little--insane. And then on the other side I'll help you figure out the room situation and show you around some, and let you know what you can expect, workwise. Training montage-wise." He hesitated.

"You OK?" It wasn't, he had realized, the sort of thing that depodded Hunters necessarily heard a lot. Maybe the entire trajectory of his time at Deus would have been altered if he'd heard those two words instead of gotten a lecture from a sociopath on how important it was to be callous (and how little he'd known, then, exactly what that Hunter had meant). Then again, maybe it wouldn't have. It's not like he would have answered honestly, anyway. He had no reason to believe that Creedence would, either.

He didn't call her on it, giving her the dignity of her strained peace with herself as he set off towards the Cove.

"Obadiah Thompson," he said, and he hesitated before deciding now was neither the time nor the place for the nickname. There was always a temptation, here, to try and walk the alarmed newcomer through what was about to happen, but it felt so pointless: if they believed him, would they comprehend the totality of it? He didn't think they would. So all he said was: "Trust your gut here. You're not going crazy yet."