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"And in larger quantities." Jordan grinned back, unashamed of his ploy. "You use it up fast." He kept his pace slow, partly to make it easy on Rep's bruises and tired muscles, partly because he hadn't had a good, valid excuse to touch for quite some time.

The question made him miss half a step, evoking a sudden rush of vivid dream-memories. Most of his dreams were hazy and fairly mundane, quickly forgotten after getting up, but there had been a rather clear exception recently. "Might have," he said cautiously. "What kind of weird?"

It had been a vivid dream. A slight blush dusted itself over Jordan's cheekbones. "Mass knocked over the trashbasket," he said. It was a relatively minor detail, but it would still serve as sufficient confirmation that the dream had been shared, if indeed it had been.

"It was. Is?" He slid a thoughtful look sideways at Rep. "Any idea what might have caused it?" The dream hadn't felt like a warning or an event, had felt instead more like a simple continuation of something, something that he hadn't been there for. But that, too, matched up with the knowledge the dream had presented.

"Not that weird, considering ******** else that happens around here," Jordan said dryly. He slowed and looked sideways at the necklace, feeling a complicated mix of emotions, both his own and echoes of another self's.

"Did you have it back before I'd gone?" he asked. "I don't remember." He sighed. "That week's not real clear in my head." One corner of his mouth pulled back, and he shook his head slightly, a tiny motion more aimed at himself than anything else. "He wasn't happy about that. Isn't. I don't ******** know what tense to use here." He recalled his other's thoughts about him just as clearly as the rest of the dream, irritation, a certainty that he was weak, wrong, perhaps incompetent, an edge of pity that wasn't quite sympathetic or understanding, because the world his other lived in had little room for sympathy or understanding without ulterior motive.

"Didn't mind it," Jordan offered, a little warily. He had said it to Mimsy, not that long ago; what he found most disturbing about his other was how disturbing it was not, how enjoyable the other state of consciousness could be. He had gotten the tattoo after he'd left, no longer the gesture he had half-planned but a smaller, simpler symbol, not a reminder to himself or anyone else, not where he could see it without an effort to look. He still wasn't entirely sure why he'd gone through with it, marking himself with a link to a world that he'd helped destroy, that few people would see and few would understand.

He nodded in agreement. "Didn't think so." Would the dreams have changed anything? He didn't know. Maybe not. He'd been in bad shape then, breaking apart and only dimly aware of how badly he had broken, and he thought that maybe he had needed the time apart more than he had known, needed to learn the shape of himself alone to pull out of the self-destructive freefall he had been in. Harrison had a sense of his own worth, and Rep would never allow himself that much self-knowledge; Jordan had lost his own somewhere along the way, had been forced to rebuild it from its fragmentary pieces.

"I wonder what caused it to reach out further. How long is its range? Do you know?" He'd moved far enough down the hall to feel like he was away from them, as much as it was possible to be out of reach when they remained in the same building, on the same island. He wondered now whether he would have been in reach of the dreams if he hadn't gone as far; wondered briefly and quietly why he was considering ways to return his other to the dreamworld, but that answer he knew well enough.

Jordan shrugged the shoulder not currently supporting Rep. "Maybe we'll get some kind of clue at some point." He didn't know why now, or what had changed, but the part of him that was the fragment was contented for once, not on edge, though there was a watchful stillness to its sense. He thought, a little wistfully, of sleeping beside other warm bodies, comforted by the slow rhythm of breathing, but kept the thought to himself. He had gotten used to sleeping alone again, enough that it didn't keep him lying awake too often.

He snorted softly, barely more than a huff of air. "I didn't mind," he repeated, stressing the last two words just a little.

"I don't know how I'll ever handle it." Jordan affected a put-upon tone. "I guess I'll just have to endure the dreams."