He perches absently on the arm of the couch, absorbed in the meticulous task of fine-tuning his spontaneous new gift.

Tim snorts.

"Nothing good," he says dryly. "It's really been a while. Never actually took lessons or anything. Pretty much just learned by ear, picked up stuff as I went along, that sorta thing." Tim's sort of thing, this weird, off-beat interest that happens to be the one thing about himself undefined by cryptic bullshit. It was never wrapped up in him so deeply it could never be extracted. Just some dumb college kid's hobby.

He smiles, wry and one-cornered. "Probably Brian's fault I got interested in it in the first place. So encouraging it was obnoxious sometimes."