For notes and disclaimer, please see part one.

Here's a couple things you might need to know or maybe you just forgot: Downy leaves Ellie a present she isn't happy to receive in the form of a dead bird on her doorstep. Casey's on clean-up duty and promises to have a chat with their little killer.

Twenty Questions, Part 5

Downy glanced up at Casey when he stopped scratching the top of her head.

"Wildest thing you've ever done?" he asked.

She exhaled slowly, her cheeks almost instantly turning pink.

"You still have your veto," he reminded her.

He was such a gentleman, she decided. It didn't matter what the question was, if she hesitated for more than a breath, he was more than willing to try to save her honor. She had a feeling he'd give her more than one if she needed it. She ran her fingers through her long dark hair, inhaling. "I, um... It's probably double-duty," she acknowledged. "Wildest and dumbest thing. But, it's sort of a collective thing..."

Casey looked at her. There was a curiousness but he never pushed. He was happy to listen to whatever she wanted to tell him.

"When Chuck went to Stanford, it was like... It was like I was finally getting my opportunity to be wild and crazy and do all of the teenage rebellion thing that... that I missed out on. There was a lot of drinking," she said slowly. "Which was how I learned to tie cherry stems. There was a lot of... A lot of being reckless," she admitted.

Casey watched as Downy, tired of sitting with him, crossed towards Ellie.

"There were a lot of one-night stands, a lot of random hook-ups. In fact, Devon... Devon was one of those. The first one, even," she admitted.

That piece of information piqued Casey's interest most, as he looked up at her.

"First day of med school, we slipped off to a janitorial closet," she said, wincing a little. She could see the disbelief in his eyes and she immediately broke eye contact, looking down at Downy, who lazed between them.

"So, what changed?"

She held up a tiny space between her thumb and her index finger. "Getting this close to failing out of med school in my first semester. I couldn't... I couldn't have worked so hard for so long just to throw it all away, so I straightened up my act very quickly. I eked out barely passing grades in those classes, but I made it through to the next semester and I started behaving more like the responsible adult I'd been since I was ten," she said with a humorless laugh.

He nodded slowly. He wanted to ask her more but he knew he'd been lucky with the one follow-up already.

"So, what about you?" she asked, resting her head against her propped up hand. "Wildest, craziest thing you've ever done?"

He exhaled slowly, thinking. So much of his life was classified, but he'd already inadvertently revealed his military background. "When I was a Marine..." He could tell a story from recently, pass it off as something he'd done before. "I, uh... I got taken," he said slowly. "By this Russian... guy," he said as diplomatically as he could. "He had me tied to someone else, back to back, and, uh... well, I had to get out of it."

Her eyes got wide. "What'd you do?"

"We battled it out. We wound up on this balcony and we were pushed... We were several stories up... if it weren't for the swimming pool below, pretty sure we would've been a pancake."

"John," she breathed. She wasn't sure what she was feeling, but she was pretty sure there was fear, amazement, and relief, all rolled into one strange emotion.

"We lived."

"Well, yeah, but..."

He looked at her. "But what?"

"That's decidedly scarier than my wild times!"

"I'd have to disagree."

She looked at him disbelievingly.

"Anything could've happened to you." His brain went through the varied outcomes, each one worse than the other. It made him internally shudder. "I pretty much had just two options."

"Well, we can agree to call them both decidedly wild, crazy, scary and probably stupid."

He nodded.

She took a slow breath. "What went through your head? I mean, falling all those stories... into a swimming pool! How do you handle that?"

"Years of training."

"Seriously, John... what were you thinking as it happened?"

"Honestly?"

She nodded.

"If I die, let the guy tied to my back live."

She hadn't been expecting that. At all.

"Better one live than none."

"Well, at least you aren't in the Marines anymore. Don't have to worry about that kind of a thing anymore."

Someday, when and if the real truth ever came out about what he did... Someday, this might all come back to bite him on the ass, he knew. She hadn't asked him a question about his service. He just chose not to correct her. That wasn't so bad, was it? He kept telling himself it wasn't. He cleared his throat. "And at least your wild-child days are behind you as well."

Ellie smiled gently at him then sighed, looking at her two hampers filled with cleaned, folded clothes. Their final loads had finished almost a half hour ago. "Speaking of... I guess it's time to get back to reality."

"Probably," Casey acknowledged, standing.

"Same time, next week?"

He nodded, offering her his hand so he could help pull her to her feet.

She smiled a little, placing her hand into his.

"Have a good week," he told her.

"You, too."

Stay tuned...