Many thanks to Crazy and Miyabi, for betas, and everything else they do!
Credibility Ch. II
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Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force! It is a dangerous servant, and a terrible master.
George Washington (1732 – 1799)
Criminals do not die by the hands of the law. They die by the hands of other men.
George Bernard Shaw (1856 – 1950)
Thankfully, the professor was back from whatever it was she'd had to do. I hadn't asked details before, and I wasn't going to now; it wasn't necessary. Just so long as the ordeal was over, that I'd done what was requested of me with the appropriate amount of attention…and the length of time before Une asked me for another favor was a long one. Until that time, I wasn't going to dwell on what it might be, since I knew it wasn't going to be the most inspiring thing on earth.
So, instead of those thoughts, I occupied myself with getting ready to field the press that was going to be on our doorsteps as soon as they gathered their collectively small wits, and realized the bust that had been engineered was not from the local police department.
On that note, I turned my attention to the door, waiting for my returning agents to walk through. It was a while before I got the call from the watch desk, letting me know that they'd passed through the entry check points, and I knew to expect them in less than a minute, if the officer at the front desk had been accurate with his call.
Duo was the first one to walk in the open door, Marcia being absent due to the hour. He had a wave and a grin for me before he sat down, and he was closely followed by a tired-looking Davies. The former Gundam pilot was the first to speak.
"Well, that was fun." His sarcastic tone wasn't needed, I could tell he was meaning anything but from his expression alone, as it was pinched up into a look of distaste. "You know, man, I'll help you take down a drug ring anytime, but that doesn't have to mean I like actually having to associate with them." Now he looked slightly nauseous. "Hell, I don't even like having to watch them."
I was glancing between him and the preliminary arrest records as he spoke, and by the time he'd finished speaking, I was concentrating more on the reports. "But perhaps it's that aversion that lets you be so successful. At least, according to these." I indicated the papers by lifting a few pages.
After I'd gone through most of it, I closed it, and focused on the agents. "What's not in here that I need to know?"
Davies rubbed his eyes with one hand as he barely relaxed in his chair. It was for returning field agents that I had the overstuffed chairs in my office to begin with. And why they were covered in a liquid-proof material that was ridiculously easy to clean. "They were using kids to move it. That's why it was so hard to get a fix on them in the first place. But they were also using kids to move the account information, making it even harder."
I felt some surprise filter through me, and I looked at Duo. "How?"
He shrugged back at me, and made a helpless gesture. "Video games." After he'd said it, he had the grace to look a little sheepish, as we'd often used the same trend of methods to move quite a few things during the war. It seemed that there would always be things to haunt us. At least we knew that we weren't the ones that had given this idea to a side we would never condone.
"Ah, I see." I nodded to Davies to continue.
"We moved into position with no trouble, and began to integrate ourselves into the organization, but we hit a snag when someone recognized Maxwell as someone they'd known on L2."
I glanced at Duo with a small amount of alarm, but knew it probably looked just a little bit like surprise. He shook his head at me, telling me without words that it wasn't a war connection, or anything else that would break the greater cover we were all maintaining.
Duo shrugged, perhaps doing it only to make a more definitive, and "right" action out of his response to my silent question. Always hiding. "It wasn't anything important, really, nothing that could make a difference." He grinned. "Hell, the guy didn't even know my name, just recognized this," and he held up the end of his braid, "from grade school, if you can believe it."
With his stressing of those two words, I wondered what significance they held for him. "Okay, go on."
Another shuffle, an imitation of a shrug this time. "Well, despite that minor inconvenience, everything was perfectly fine. We got in, we got busy, we got arrests. Everything should be happy hunky dory."
I looked at him. "Why does the arrest report indicate that Meyers," the leader of the ring, "was babbling about night creatures stalking him?"
They both looked baffled, though I noticed that slippery Maxwell wasn't saying anything. He did, however, begin to tap a complex pattern on the arm of his chair, the taut fabric enough for it to make a fair thrumming sound. I listened to it with half an ear, waiting for the message, and went on to tell them to get out of HQ, get some sleep, and type up some full reports, because we were going to need them.
Davies left quite a bit earlier than Duo did, looking as worn out as I had ever seen him coming off the field. Hopefully, that meant that Duo had run him into the ground, and I wouldn't have to listen to any of the gossip I knew, otherwise, would be running around the halls. I could just feel it now, the whole publicity of this thing. Whenever we took over anything from a local police department, it seemed to garner the most attention, and that attention was usually rife with accusations of jurisdictional issues, whispers full of the words "just like the Alliance," and similar idiocy.
Luckily, I was only one of many to give interviews and speeches, and so had only to give a few on any occasion.. Most of that was left to other people, the powers that be having very quickly realized that I would probably only inflame the conversations more, and manage to get several people to say rather disadvantageous things for themselves as they attempted to defend whatever stand their news group wanted them to take.
After Davies left, there were only trivial matters to discuss. In this office, we didn't mention anything that could get out, because I didn't have the time or patience to be continually sweeping the walls, the carpet…anything that could get bugged. Instead, we went into the new bike, and I told him everything that he'd missed in that arena. I had it stripped, and the parts had begun to trickle in, so we were ready to get down to the actual adaptations now. We made plans to that effect, and when he left, I did so as well, to inform Une of Duo's missing knife.
She, however, wasn't in. She'd left barely before I got there according to the janitor cleaning out the trash cans, which left me to resolve the issue in the morning.
As it happened, I wasn't able to get up to Une's office until just before I was supposed to meet Sally for lunch, and when I got there, Une had already had heard about the knife through Duo, the man himself deciding that it would just be better to make sure that everyone who needed to know would be informed. So other than a trip designed to elevate my annoyance level, there was absolutely no reason for me to go see her. A waste of time.
Then, as I was leaving, none other than Ms. Dowldon ran straight into me. She had been asking Une's secretary a question, had begun turning away from his desk…and that was right where I was in that moment. She fell back, the various folders in her hands going everywhere, and it took me a moment to actually respond in any way that might help, because my first reaction hadn't been anything that might constitute "assisting".
So by the time that I had knelt down to help gather the scattered papers, both she and Hamilton, Une's secretary, were already doing it. I contented myself with picking up the ones that had really scattered, glancing at them while I was doing it and seeing the "Confidential" and "Classified" stamps emblazoned across the top of them all. Gundam schematics. I frowned down onto them.
"Ms. Dowldon…what are these?"
When I looked up at her, she seemed flustered, or maybe embarrassed, but I couldn't tell what it was for, yet.
She took them back from me, firmly, and replied. "Those are the original notes that my mother had." She gave me a small, sad smile. "She's the reason the seminar was being held, it was her idea." She was shuffling them back together then. "But those are classifie…oh. I forgot." Now she was embarrassed, but seemed amused, too, and shrugged. "I'm dropping them off for Commander Une, because they have to be locked up, now."
I must have been staring at her like an idiot, because she began to look nervous. It took me a moment to recollect myself, but when I did, I pointed to the papers, "Do you mean they haven't been locked up?"
Still nervous, eyes wide, she shook her head. "No…" Again, she shrugged, and stood up. "When my mother died, I asked Lady if she wanted them locked up, but she said that it was okay, there wasn't any real need, that these weren't anything but the non-essential areas anyway."
I relaxed back onto my heels and stood up, no longer ready to rake both this girl and Une over any convenient coals. "Ah."
We were standing there, awkwardly for a moment, when she tilted her head and broke the silence with a question. "Speaking of which, Captain...I have a question for you."
I raised my eyebrows. "Another one?"
She smiled, quite bright, with her eyes meeting mine unhesitant. "That's my job, you know, to ask questions, and attend classes to get them answered. But yes, another one." She held up the stack of papers. "These, and even the lectures, which are now over…they don't give anything but the non-essential pieces." Now she was frowning. "There's none of the systems that made the different suits unique, or any of the upgrades that they received—or were rumored to have received several times throughout the conflicts."
I glanced over at Hamilton, busy over his desk, but I knew that there was no real safe place to discuss anything related to this outside of several places too far removed from where we were then. Une could deal with Hamilton.
So I focused back onto the girl. "Ms. Dowldon—"
She cut me off with a head shake. "Oh, please don't call me that. Sam's just fine, really." My expression didn't change.
"Sam. Those systems were never fully released by the pilots, though they assured us that they would, should any need for them to be released arise." I shrugged. "Really, there's nothing we can do about it, except to wait until they feel secure enough to divulge them. The original designers are all dead, they died in 195, so we have no alternate sources." Which we were all quite happy with, except for a few of the more zealous of our prodders, which mainly consisted of Une, Relena, and then by any of the thousands of other politicians that had tried to coerce us into supplying them with the prints, and all of them for different reasons.
She was focusing on me intently, and it was somewhat unnerving, meeting her gaze as she thought that through. "So, in other words…say some group discovers the methods used, and then they figure out that they could sell these ideas, and the pilots get wind of it. Then the schematics are going to be available, to dissuade the public?" Now she was obviously both resigned, and irritated. "We're depending on the pilots' good will for that technology?"
I nodded, not at all disturbed by that prospect. I'd already shown too many people into the heart of the world's terrors, I wasn't going to support any more of it.
She appeared disappointed, but without the bitterness I would have associated with a defeat. Then she looked at me with interest. "I don't suppose you'd have anyway of guessing when that might be?"
I know I was very serious when I replied. "They have made us aware that their hopes are not for a very, very long time." Knowing that she was going into some field that applied to the technology, I wanted to cement in her the fact that these were not good or nice things that would be in those undisclosed plans. "None of the systems that were withheld were good for much more, right now, than destruction."
Her expression was equally serious as she listened to me, but it lost its solemnity somewhat after a moment. "I guess I'll have to take your word on that, Captain."
After having made a point out of my address to her, her use of my rank made me curious, so, having known from an early age that the best way to learn about something was to ask about it, I did. "Why, if I am to address you by your given name, and then, even with a diminutive form of it, do you address me by my rank?"
She was unhesitating with an answer, and smiled at me as well. "I assume that you've worked hard to get that mark of distinction, so it would be a sign of disrespect for me to address you as something else, even by 'Mr. Chang'—which also has the added problem of sounding rather weird, considering the fact that, at most, you're a year older than I am." She tilted her head to side, and her smile grew wider. "If that."
I was late to meet Sally for lunch, but greater than the compulsion for me to be on time, I felt a need to examine this interesting morality she was avowing. Which didn't make sense to me later on, but then, I'd always been one to follow what I felt like doing, more than anything else.
"So you're saying that I couldn't have you address me by anything other than 'captain'?"
She shook her head, smile still firmly there. "No. I might use your name…but not here. Here, you're very much Captain Chang, Preventers."
"I see." I was considering a reply, some further question that might explain what she meant, but my phone rang, urging me to answer it with a high pitched chime. I pulled it out of the holster I kept it in, and answered it with "Chang", as normally as I ever did.
Sally, on the other end of the line, laughed. "Whoa, stand down there, Wu Fei." I could hear her amusement threaded throughout her voice. Apparently, she had decided that I'd been not quite as normal as I was on the end of her line. "You do know that you're late for lunch, right?"
I glared at nothing in particular, and saw "Sam's" curious face out of the corner of my eye. "Yes, Sally, I was quite aware that I was late, thank you." The girl's face sharpened with curiosity. "I'm still coming."
"Ah, that's good. I was beginning to wonder what could have captured your attention, and made you late. I was worried for the state of the union." The woman almost sounded serious.
I was gritting my teeth by then. "No need to worry. I'm sure Relena could solve anything by this point." I willed myself to relax, because I knew otherwise, the first thing I'd do when I got to the restaurant would be to glare a hole into her head. "Just give me a moment."
"Okay. Do you want me to order for you? Anything you want in particular?"
"No, go right ahead. You would anyway."
"Then I'll see you in a little bit." The line went dead, and I had visions of the woman happily ordering up whatever she thought I might like…interspersed with things she knew I wouldn't. Damn her, and her suggestion that we eat some type of food I hadn't experienced yet.
Sam was still standing where she had been, and hadn't even made any move to get away, though many people, when faced with a person on a phone, would make a gesture or something to indicate leaving them to it, or even sitting down, and waiting. She'd stood there, with that same expression of curiosity.
When I was off the phone, and rubbing my forehead in resignation, she was the first to speak again. "Well, it appears that I've made you late, Captain."
I stopped the ministrations that wouldn't be of any help until I had the headache I knew Sally was going to give me, and glanced at her. "I don't think you were the one who made me late. That would be putting too much into your hands."
She smiled again. "Mnm. Would it…Well, perhaps we'll run into each other again, Captain." She frowned, and rubbed the small of her back. "Though I hope it's not literally."
I nodded at her. "Then have a good day, Sam."
Her smile widened. "And you as well!"
I turned to walk out the door, and she, I assume, continued on to Une's office.
Most of the walk to the parking lot, even the trip to the restaurant was a blur, later. It'd become so many months ago, when I'd truly fallen into the use of it. Once you've done it a thousand times, or memorized it to the point of pure submersion, it becomes possible to go from point A to point Epsilon, without remembering the many steps in between. It was a session in the cockpit of a mobile suit, the first, and last step that you thought about, was merely putting your fingers down on the right keys. After that, there was no real connection between thought and action.
I guess that told me how many times I'd been to Une's office, or the small Italian restaurant that Sally and I ate lunch at all the time.
I'd just pleasantly forgotten that she had convinced me to eat somewhere else. Which meant that, sitting at the light to pull out of the Preventers' parking lot, I lost my reverie, and had to pull to mind the map I'd glanced at, showing me how to get to the restaurant.
I made it, and Sally was already halfway through a bowl of soup when I sat down across from her.
She glanced up at me from where she'd been looking—the bowl of her spoon. Trying to decide what was so interesting about it, I leaned forward a little bit, to look into the bowl of her spoon, and she dropped it into her bowl, chuckling when several splashes hit me in the face.
I sat back with a glare and used my napkin to wipe my face off with. I knew better than to say anything, because she'd come up with something smart-ass in reply.
She was happily laughing away for a few seconds, and was still chuckling when she went back to her soup, occasional bursts of laughter making her pause with her spoon halfway to her mouth. I stayed silent, and attempted to not brood and glare. If I did, she'd find many excuses to make the rest of lunch absolutely miserable, and if I tried to get completely angry, she'd use logic to show me what an asshole I was being.
How I let myself be convinced by her, I have no idea, but I did it consistently, and somehow, at the time, her logic would be perfectly clear. When I looked back at it, it seemed to be completely different, and I couldn't follow it.
I think she took as much joy in that as she did over the fact that she could now get away with things such as splashing soup into my face, and I had given up on trying to make her stop.
Her first words, when she'd stopped enjoying the residual amusement, were much more serious than one might expect after her outburst.
"So, where were you?"
I sat there with my arms crossed over my chest, debating what she wanted to know this time. Deciding that she'd pull it out anyway, using whatever means necessary, I gave up trying to figure it out, and broke through the embargo I'd placed on speech after her prank.
"I ran into somebody coming out of Une's office, and we were discussing some aspects of the lectures I gave." I stared at her, waiting for whatever she was going to say.
She raised eyebrows at me. "Hm? You ran into somebody, huh? Someone from the class?"
I nodded. "Yes. She was dropping off her mother's papers, her mother being the one responsible for the class in the first place."
Sally looked interested, even going so far as putting her spoon down, the better to lean forward, and focus on me. "Really." She propped one elbow on the table, only to pull it off when, not two seconds later, the server appeared, placing the dishes down in front of us. I looked at mine, and had no idea what it was.
There was some sort of green lasagna thing in the middle of the plate, surrounded by little green chunks, what looked like maybe some sort of plant leaf. I looked up at Sally, questioningly.
"What is this?"
"Dolmades and spanakopita."
I leveled a firm stare at her. "That doesn't tell me what it is, only what it's called."
She smiled. "Fine, fine. It's stuffed grape leaves and spinach pie. That's all."
A fork seemed to be the best way to investigate it, before I actually went for a taste. She laughed at me, and dove into her own, which, looking at, I still didn't recognize, but it looked remarkably like a roasted meat with normal vegetables.
I ate the lunch, but I decided that the one was a little too salty for me, and the other too rich. Thankfully, I wasn't as unhappy about the entire experience as I could have been. She hadn't yet pulled up the fact that since she was a doctor along with her normal agential duties, she had access to my records, and so she knew that I hadn't taken a vacation since I'd started. She felt that should be remedied, told me about it at length, nearly every single time I saw her, it was one of her more sore points with me.
She also hadn't grilled me on anything else that had happened recently. No. So far, all she'd done was order different food, and splashed me on purpose with her soup. A rather mild lunch.
I must have been staring at my empty plate for some time, because my gaze was interrupted by her hand waving in it, and when I looked up at her, she smiled, a wry, half smile.
"Wow, Wu Fei, you were really off in La La Land." Her smile broadened. "What's pulled you into contemplation?"
I met her smiling eyes with my own serious ones, and blinked a few times, focusing my thoughts onto her in the present, rather than the past. "You."
She sat back with both an amused and a slightly worried expression. "Me?" She looked a little confused, but then she seemed as poised as she was most of the time. "Finally planning on how to get me back for all the things I've wounded your pride with, Wu Fei?"
With a head shake, I took a drink from my water glass. "No. More on why you do them in the first place, if you know that they annoy me." I met her now serious eyes across the table.
Her elbows found their way onto the table, her chin firmly resting on one hand as she contemplated me, and perhaps her answer, as well. Then, just as abruptly as she'd become serious, she sat back, and folded her arms across the front of her uniform.
"You take everything so seriously. I worry about it, sometimes, and when I do, I decide how to make you see that you don't have to take others as seriously as you do yourself." She shrugged. "Which isn't to say that it's not necessary to take others seriously, as well, a lot of the time. I'm just attempting to show you that it's all right to sometimes not." She smiled again, a very secure, placid composure sealing her features into poise. "Balance in all things, Wu Fei."
I stared at her face, sorting through that concept in my head, and when I had settled it into a place where I could pull it out later, and examine it better, I nodded once, and said, "I see."
Her arms dropped to her lap, and she leaned forward again. "Do you? I'm not sure, yet, but we'll see."
The rest of lunch—and the rest of the day—passed by in a blur that wasn't wasted time, just full of all the procedure and routine that made it, just as that trip from Une's office to the parking lot, so very trivial and unimportant to remember.
Duo was already at my house when I got home, sitting on the top stoop, duffle bag sitting behind him, allowing him to lean up against it, with his ultimate support being the wall behind it. He shot me a lazy wave when I pulled up, and the garage door opened. He didn't follow me in, waiting instead for me to go through the house and open the front door for him. He had an aversion for going through anything but the front door when he wasn't trying to do something clandestinely. A throwback to our lesser times.
"I'm set up in the shed, in the back." He laughed at me as I threw a grimace at the many bikes lined up in the garage attached to the house.
"You're the one with the bike fetish, 'Fei."
Now the grimace was at him, as he called me that. I'd given up trying to explain to him exactly why it didn't appeal to me. He usually came up with very inventive ways to say I was being ridiculous over a small thing. After that, we would usually change the subject, attempting to keep the peace as we both knew that, as far as individual outlooks went, we were far too similar, and dissimilar, and we realized that our friendship depended on us holding out, and not pushing some things. Such as small, insignificant things that didn't make sense to the other, like a name, and to Duo, that was the thing. He could understand it with himself, not wanting to be called by anything other than what he had named himself. For those of us named by other people, he took absolute liberty with. To him, his own name was sacred. All of the rest of us, we had, perhaps with the exception of Trowa, who, although he'd merely taken the name after someone else, had chosen to keep it as a good name at the end of the second war, merely been given names.
More often than not, I had the feeling that he'd have been happier calling us by our Preventers' codenames, because those had been chosen by us.
It certainly wasn't one-sided, this setup we had, where I could ignore something like that, because I could understand where he was coming from. He too stayed quiet, and let me go on with some of the things that I needed to vent on, even if he didn't agree with my view on it. Such as why I was with the Preventers, and would be, merely for ideals. He occasionally would rally to the cause, but he thought, and understood from his upbringing, that there were some things that couldn't be solved perfectly. Not without cauterization, which he couldn't agree with either.
Sally said it was the normal give and take in any friendship. I told her that I hadn't had any friendships since grade-school, and she'd smiled, saying that now was a perfect time to make up for it.
Duo pulled me out of my contemplations when we reached the shed, by taking a look into the sorting I'd done for the parts we'd ordered.
"Hm…what is this?" He held up one of the boxes with a large picture on all the sides, holding it out for me.
I took it from him, glancing at it, and looking at the invoice number it'd come on. "Add on for the alternator. Helps boost."
He raised eyebrows at me, more an impression anyway, considering the fact that his eyebrows weren't really visible through the rough hair over his face. "Uh huh. I'm hoping we didn't pay extra for this…" He let it trail off.
I shook my head. "No, it was part of the package that had the most usable parts for the fuel conversion."
He smiled. "Oh, good. I can give this to Howard, then, to minimize out-of-pocket for the rest of the parts, then." He began to sort through the rest of the different piles, reorganizing the order I'd had. I watched him for only about a minute, before speaking up.
"What was wrong with how they were ordered the first time?"
He was squatting down on his heels in the middle, and so I could see most of his face as he looked up. "Well, here, you have them all sorted by function…" He gestured. "But if we order them up by when we need them, we'll be done faster, and all that." He began to pivot back to his sorting, but looked up again at the last minute. "Oh, and, then we'll know what we're missing, in order."
That made sense, and I nodded to show that, and began to help him, now understanding his method. We soon finished, working in tandem, and, while we stared at the new configuration of parts, sat at the work bench, studying it, looking for the weak links in our part chain. We wanted to be able to see which parts would have to be sent back, before we attempted to use them on the bike. There always seemed to be a few of them. Some we already knew about, those were the ones that we would trade to Howard for the parts not available on the open market. Some we just wouldn't know we could circumnavigate before we tried to use them, or before we thought of ways to do it.
I guess that was one of the things we were carrying over. It was the teachings of need versus what was on hand. If we wanted or needed it bad enough, we were knowledgeable enough on systems to discover new ways to do things.
I shook myself out of my thoughts, and went back to concentrating on the parts, and Duo's muttering. He'd already gone onto whatever part he wanted to start with, and was busy pulling apart the packaging, making sure he had the directions in front of him. Thos he would study carefully, and then probably find a source of information elsewhere, before he'd recommend to me a variation.
I chose my own parts set to begin working on, and sat down with him at the bench, although a good distance away.
After he'd dug into it, he began to pull up conversation, beginning with, "So what have you been up to while I was on the job?"
I glanced at him, and went back to my instructions. "Not much."
He had a snort of laughter for that one. It was usually what I told him.
"How did you lose a knife, anyway?" I looked at him curiously, until after he'd looked back up at me, with a shrug.
"I decided that I'd scare him. Thought that might be the best way to get him to stay where he was while they were busy looking for the door into that room." Another shrug. "It worked."
I nodded down to my open box, studying the filter inside still. "It did work. They got a clean arrest, instead of the very messy chase it could have been." Now I was frowning into my box. "You know, I think we need to get a better filter."
He looked over at my box, before actually standing up to come look at it. "Yeah? Okay."
I sighed, and folded the box back up, creating with it a new pile for returns.
I couldn't seem to concentrate enough right then to pick up a new piece of the puzzle we were working on, so all I ended up doing was sitting backwards on the stool, arms crossed over my chest, as I brooded into the air, staring for one moment on the stripped down bike, the next on the plain board walls of the shed.
Duo eventually decided to comment, after many minutes of my inaction. "What's up?"
I sighed with a frown, still not looking at anything in particular. My thoughts were on that girl, and I told him so, saying, "I ran into that girl from the lecture today in Une's office."
It took him a minute to respond, and when he did, it was simply with a belatedly startled, "Huh?"
I turned to frown at him. "You know, the girl from the lecture who asked me about Deathscythe."
He stared back at me. "Yeah, I remembered her. What was she doing in Une's office?"
"Oh." I shrugged. "She was dropping off her mother's notes."
With a nod, he went back to the bench. "Ah. So you ran into her? And?"
"Well, actually, she ran into me, literally." He laughed. "And then she asked me about the suits again."
He cleared his throat. "Uh huh. I'll bet that was fun."
I looked at him dryly. "That wasn't exactly how I'd describe it, but it was interesting, and made me realize that we need to come up with something official, if they're going to be putting these things out there."
I could see him shrug from the corner of my eye. "I'll tell Quatre and Relena. They're the idea machines."
"Fine, that will be good." We lapsed back into silence for a while, and still I felt no desire to dig through things on the floor, to find something to begin working with. He was quite happily engrossed with the innards of the parts, and I couldn't settle down.
Now, I was thinking about that girl, Sam. "Duo?"
"Yeah?"
"Do you think that sometimes it's all right to be impulsive?"
I don't know if he looked up or not, but his reply was a little more clear in the air than it should have been if he had not. "Yeah, sure. Time and place for everything, and all that." I nodded, and left him there, going into the house to cook something for dinner.
