AN: Beta-read by
Carbohydratos,
Did I?,
Gaia,
Linedoffice,
Zephyrosis, and
Mizu.
Chapter 124: Welcome Home
Zeke and Anna went their way, and the four of us went ours.
"Gonna go yell at Management again?" Garrus asked Max.
The latter shook his head. "Tomorrow, after I talk to those two a bit more. I'm heading home."
"Alone?"
"Not if I can help it."
The group split again, Homura and I granting the two their privacy.
"Poor Zeke," I muttered.
"Mm," Homura agreed.
We parted at the edge of the park. She turned left towards her apartment; I wandered towards the Traveler's Palace, the modern, stylishly facaded high-rise visible from nearly anywhere in the main Warehouse space. As always, it opened out into the square, where Jenn was sitting on the edge of the fountain.
"Cass!" She bounced to her feet and ran over to throw her physically-twelve-year-old arms around my waist.
"Jenn?"
"Proud of you," she said by way of explanation.
I chuckled and mussed her hair. "Come on, say it. Make
me proud of myself, too."
"Sure!" Jenn let go and hurried back to where she'd started, climbing onto the rim of the fountain to put us closer to eye-to-eye. "You went and took on the role of parenting a teenager even though I know you're not super confident about it, and you did it for someone who needed it way more than me, too! Good job!" She punctuated her final congratulations by throwing her arms up in celebration.
"Thanks." I sat down on the fountain beside her and added, "To be honest, I was a little worried you'd be jealous."
"Don't be silly. You offered, remember? It's not like you weren't willing; I was the one who was busy." She used her temporary height advantage to pat me on the shoulder the way I often did to her. "'Sides, we can still Jump together whenever we want. If you keep Jumping regularly, you'll pass me in age sooner or later, and then it won't even be weird if you parent me!"
"It's funny that age can work like that here," I said. "That you can 'catch up' to people, I mean."
"Time shenanigans!"
"Time shenanigans."
Jenn seemed content to enjoy my company in silence, but some lingering insecurity prompted me to ask, "If you don't mind me asking, how much did you hear about how my first try at parenting went?"
"I followed along with Megan whenever Luke called," she answered. "He told us all about what was going on back in Strawfield, and of course we visited, too. You did a great job."
"I know I made mistakes, though. I mean, I think I did all right, but parenting is too big a job
not to make mistakes."
"Everything worked out in the end, though, right?
"Hopefully." I stretched my hands high into the air before resting them behind my head, elbows out. "Maybe all we can hope for is to do a little less damage to our kids than our parents did us."
Jenn side-eyed me. "That's kinda dark, Cass."
"Not all progress is fast."
"With perks it is!"
"I dunno, I feel like being raised by someone with a 'perfect parenting' perk would fuck up a kid in a whole new way."
She laughed and sat down beside me, smoothing her sundress beneath her. I didn't tell her I hadn't been joking.
"Can I ask you something?" I asked instead.
"I might not answer, but ask away."
"Why'd you stay twelve? Or return to twelve, or however you want to describe it." I'd seen her in forms old enough to drink, so I knew she'd been an adult at some point.
Jenn spent nearly a minute worrying her lip with her teeth.
"That's a hard question to answer," she said, "because it's the result of so many different things it's really hard to synthesize an answer. It's like, you know, 'Concise, correct, complete; pick two', except it's pick one-half instead. And my reasons have changed over the years, too."
"You don't have to answer—"
"No, I
want to answer. Actually doing it is a little frustrating, though."
I chuckled and patted her on the shoulder. "Believe me, I know the feeling."
"Thanks." She switched from worrying her lower lip to worrying her upper lip. "The simplest answer is that I
can, but that doesn't really answer anything, does it?"
"It's good enough for me."
"But it doesn't answer the question!"
"You don't have to answer the question," I repeated.
"I already said I want to!"
I smiled and held out a hand to bid her continue.
Jenn kept thinking a moment longer, then swapped to a form roughly the same age as mine to continue thinking.
"I'm a kid because I can be," she repeated at long last. "I was twelve when I was rescued, so that's the age when I got to stop being a little miniature post-apocalypse-survivor adult and be a child again, and that wasn't easy—but at the same time it was, sort of, because the world became good and wonderful again at the same time—that is, once I stopped being incredibly traumatized. Anyway, when I say 'I can be', that's really important to me. Even if I'd survived in the old world—heck, even if Max had fixed everything—I probably wouldn't have ever gotten that opportunity if he hadn't taken us in.
"I did grow up—well, I grew old, at least. Max put down some ground rules when I begged him into letting me stay, like I couldn't mess with my age until I turned thirty 'properly', so I didn't just stay a kid and never grow up. Which was definitely the right call, 'cause the alternative would be, you know, pretty sketchy. Could I really make an informed decision on staying a kid as a kid?"
She didn't pause for an answer. "So I grew up enough to make a proper, informed decision about how I wanted to live. Uh, it's not like I give up any intelligence or anything when I'm little, to be clear. That was kind of the point of that whole process—proving it, that is. Showing congruence between my adult
decision making and my childlike
behavior. I'm not exactly the same when I'm being a kid—I'm more energetic, sillier, maybe a little more impulsive—but I'm still fully cognizant. But the 'chain doesn't need more adults, and I
like being a child. Being innocent, I guess."
"Innocent?"
"Yeah. There wasn't much innocence left after the world ended, so part of healing was getting that childlike innocence back, and I treasure it. So I stay a kid because I want to hang onto that. I can 'put it down', metaphorically speaking, be an adult when I need to be no matter my form, but it's what I keep coming back to."
It was my turn to sit and think.
"I think I—"
I hesitated.
"—well, not 'understand', exactly, because I haven't felt anything like that—"
"You heard and comprehended," Jenn summarized.
"Yeah."
"Then
that is good enough for me." She popped back into her usual tweenage form with a contented smile, kicking her legs out now that they no longer reached the street.
"Great."
I took a long look around the square, rustic-looking wood, brick, and plaster facades that wouldn't have been out of place in Wyndia incongruously interrupted by the modern construction of the Palace and backed by even more varied buildings in rows behind them—villas and skyscrapers and castle turrets and weirder things besides—then raised my eyes to the false sky, where images of fluffy clouds crawled across the flat ceiling.
"Crazy life, isn't it?" I asked.
"Crazy," Jenn agreed. "And we wouldn't trade it for anything else."
———X==X==X———
Someone knocked on my door that evening a few hours after the doors closed for good. I rose from the desk where I'd been rereading
Katalepsis and opened the door to reveal Zeke—back in casual clothing, but still… smaller in some way that he'd once been.
"Zeke!" I said. "Come in!"
He paused for a moment before stepping into the room with a noticeable level of concentration and care.
"It's fine if you want to float," I said.
He shook his head. "I don't have the core synced, and I wouldn't want to use thrusters in here even if I did."
"Not used to not having it?"
"Yeah," Zeke agreed. "It's what I'd imagine missing a limb feels like. Or an eye."
"Then why not stay synced?"
"Because now that I'm finally back in a safe place, I want to go a day without carrying a weapon around." He sighed and shook his head again. "It's not
just a weapon, of course, but after fighting for so long it's hard to see it as anything else."
"I'm not going to judge. Would you like to sit down?"
Zeke took the chair. I sat down on the bed, which disturbed the sheets enough for Benny to stick his head out from under the bedding, give me a baleful look with his single eye, and burrow once more.
"It's only now that I've lived through 'existential-threat superweapon' battles that I really understand what Endbringer fights meant to capes," Zeke observed. "You were
there for one of them, so I'm sure you know what I mean. How are you so comfortable with them?"
"I don't know. They're small and harmless?" I reached over and poked the lump in the sheets with one finger, prompting it to shift about and rumble in disapproval. "I guess humans really will pack-bond with anything."
"That we will."
I shot Zeke an appraising glance, which he answered with a raised eyebrow.
"So," I said, "where are the girls?"
"The 'girls'?"
"Anna and Abby."
"Oh." He chuckled. "Abby's asleep in my room, and I just showed Anna to hers."
"Cool."
Zeke nodded once.
"Were you able to visit your friends from Moperville?" I asked.
"Yeah. It was a bit short notice, but… yeah. We made it work."
"Have fun?
"Yeah."
"Good."
Zeke nodded again.
"How was the rest of your Jump?" he asked. "After I left?"
"Eventful."
"Oh?"
I started ticking points off on my fingers. "We turned the bakery into a tea cafe, I adopted a kid, that guy who thought I was a vampire came back to say hello, magic was revealed to the world, I started serving tea with fox ears on, the girl I dated for like two weeks before she freaked out and ghosted me tried to make up, Homura earned three Michelin Stars for her baking, I got to be a fairy godmother for a wedding…" Having run out of fingers on both hands, I concluded, "Eventful."
"Sounds like it," Zeke agreed.
"They were good events, though, mostly."
"That's good."
I paused to see if Zeke would offer any of his own anecdotes. He did not.
"Are you okay?" I asked.
He scoffed. "No, I'm not. Neither of us are, and we probably won't be for a long time."
"You can call it a stupid question if you want."
"Maybe it is. Why did you ask?"
I sucked on my teeth for a moment. "I hope you don't take this the wrong way, but you're… different."
"Hard not to be."
"Sorry, I wasn't—yes, of course. I meant you
sound different. You had a very, um, 'specific' way of talking, before, if that makes sense?"
Zeke sighed again. "Sometimes, being weird is a luxury. I adapted. Learned to talk like other people talked, and to imitate social tics like facial expressions, body language, pauses and stutters, those kinds of things."
"You changed your presentation."
"I would've used the word 'affect'."
"That's one part of it," I allowed, "but it's more than that. How do I put it? It's not just your emotional expression, it's your diction, your tells, and all that. You're conveying
normalcy."
"Normalcy isn't the goal for its own sake. It's about sending the expected signals on the expected channels."
"I wasn't trying to claim it was. It's still an attempt at 'being normal', though, isn't it?"
"Maybe. Why?"
I shrugged. "It's just that I had a similar experience, once. Well, maybe not
similar, but at least… analogous?"
"Oh?"
"Yeah. I'll tell you about it sometime."
"Why not now?"
"Because we've already spent way more time talking about me."
Zeke sighed and leaned back in his chair, closing his eyes. "I didn't come in here to talk about myself. I'm still coming to terms with the last few years. Fuck knows how long that's going to take. I'm not sure how I survived." He opened his eyes, then turned to look out the window at the snowy mountain landscape beyond.
"Sometimes I'm not sure I did."
If 'Zeke' was the quirky, sardonic kid I'd gotten used to over the last two Jumps… maybe he hadn't.
He straightened up and, with great effort, put on a smile. "I'll have plenty of time to talk about
me in therapy tomorrow—and probably the next day, and the day after that, because I know I'm going to need it. Right now I want to hear about you. It feels like it's been a lifetime since we talked."
"Really?"
"What do you mean, 'really'?"
"It's not about you," I said, holding up a hand. "It's just something I talked to Tess about, ages ago. It doesn't really bother me that I may not have spoken to someone in however-many years; I always feel like we should just be able to pick up right where we left off, time be damned. I thought it might have something to do with having a memory that doesn't fade with time, but Homura says it's a symptom of ADHD."
Zeke cocked his head curiously. "Wouldn't that have been cured after we left Bet?"
"I'd've thought so, but it seems to have stuck around. How
is your memory, anyway?"
"Flawless."
"Yeah, I figured. That rules out it just being about memory."
"A lot happened in the meantime."
"I can only imagine," I agreed. "You've changed a lot, haven't you?"
"Hard not to."
"I guess it would be."
I hesitated.
"Are you… okay with that?"
He frowned. "I don't really have a choice, do I?"
"You changed once. What makes you think you can't change back?"
"Why would I?" Zeke asked. "It's not like I got any particular benefit out of being weird."
"I'm not saying you
should, I'm just saying you can."
"Again, why
would I?"
"That depends entirely on which 'you' you like better," I said. "Or, you know, if you
weren't okay with having had to change in the first place."
"I think I like the me that acts like a person."
"Like what people consider 'normal', you mean."
"Like a 'normal' person, then," he said, annoyed at the pedantry.
"Sorry for being a stickler for this, but—right, how about I just tell you the story I put off earlier?"
Zeke nodded and leaned back in the chair, annoyance disappearing behind a smile. "Let's hear it."
"I mentioned that Homura said the whole 'not feeling time between conversations' thing was a symptom of ADHD, right?" I began. "Well, after that, I got curious and looked into things a bit more, and it turns out a lot of the things I thought were just, you know, 'silly idiosyncrasies' were actually just more symptoms of ADHD that weren't unique to me in the slightest. And then it turned out that there were more than a few other 'idiosyncrasies' that were symptoms of autism—high-functioning autism, but still. And
that made me start reflecting on my childhood, and how it was that all the doctors I'd been to had missed it."
"The ADHD or the autism? Or both?"
"The autism. The ADHD is actually pretty straightforward; the diagnostic criteria for girls and boys are different. I wasn't diagnosed with ADHD as a young boy because I was displaying a young
girl's symptoms."
"Interesting," Zeke said. "Um, sorry for the tangent, but do you think of your first childhood as 'when you were a young boy' rather than 'a young girl'?"
"I don't really think about it in
either way; it's more like 'when I was a kid' without focusing on what kind of kid, if that makes sense? I meant that as far as the
doctors were concerned, they were examining a young boy."
"Ah. Sorry, go on."
I waved it away. "No need to apologize. Anyway, I'm pretty sure the reason they missed the autism is that when I was a kid—probably while I was still in elementary school, I think, though I'm honestly not sure—my parents put me into a program for kids who had trouble socializing, and, uh, hmm."
"What?"
"Nothing, just… it's a little odd that I'm telling you this story now. The time I told it was back on Bet, talking to Taylor." I sighed. "Just an odd coincidence, I guess. Anyway, I don't think it was the intention, but the
effect was, basically, a harsh lesson in presenting as neurotypical—allistic, I guess, if you want to be specific."
"'Allistic' being the alternative neurotype to 'autistic'."
"Yes, exactly. And while that may not have been a good way to do it, or a good thing to do at all, it
did do it. I rarely had any issues presenting as an allistic kid." I let out a rueful chuckle. "I don't think it served me well in the long term, though, 'cause for one thing, any time I messed up, I just looked like an asshole rather than someone who was convincingly faking an understanding of social cues and just happened to get one wrong."
"That hardly seems like the only problem with all that."
"Yeah. Those idiosyncrasies I mentioned? I'd have understood them and myself a lot better if I'd known why I was like that. And of course there was the obvious 'never diagnosed with autism' thing that could've… I don't know. Maybe I could have gotten help in school or something?"
Zeke frowned into the middle distance as he absorbed all that.
"So your objection to the use of the phrase 'acting like a person' is that prior to your own moderately traumatic crash course in neurotypical presentation, you yourself acted in a way that might not qualify as 'acting like a person' in my words?"
I chuckled and shook my head. "It's not about the collateral damage, it's that you're putting yourself down for no reason. You've been acting like a person the whole time you've been a person because you
are a person."
"You're making a definitional argument," he accused. "If I'm a person, everything I do is something a person would do. Right?"
"Yes, exactly!"
"But that's a semantic quibble. You know I'm talking about 'how people act' in the general case, not the exhaustive one."
"Which is why I'm insisting on using the 'normal' qualifier," I explained. "Otherwise, you're denying the personhood of everyone else, yourself included, and I wouldn't consider myself a good friend if I let that pass without comment."
"But you knew what I meant; you could have just responded to that instead of quibbling. Is how I say something important enough to get this sidetracked?"
"I think that sometimes 'how you say something' can reveal more about how you think than 'what you say' does."
Zeke blinked twice while he considered that argument.
"So you're saying you think I meant to deny my personhood?"
"I don't think you meant to
say it, but I was concerned you
thought it. And even if you didn't, talking about it that way could get you to start."
"Understandable," he said. "Now, if you don't mind backing up a bit: if it's 'not about the collateral damage', why bring up your own experience?"
"To make the point that a lot of people don't act 'normally', so there's no reason to believe that how well one follows social expectations has any bearing on personhood. And that you're in good company, if I do say so myself."
"Because your maybe-not-similar-but-at-least-analogous experience was in learning how to
receive social signals like how I had to learn to
send those signals?" Zeke guessed.
I shrugged one shoulder. "That's not quite right: it was about presentation for me too, not just interpretation. Besides, I don't think you ever had a problem sending signals. You were perfectly clear. You just communicated in a way that was, well, distinctly
you."
"And the way I do it now isn't 'me'?"
"No, no, that's not what I meant!" I hurried to explain. "I'm just saying it was something unique to you. Distinctive, even. And there's value in that, right?"
"I did say being weird is a luxury—or
presenting weird, if you prefer."
"Yeah, you did say that—and to be honest, I hear more of the 'old you' now than I did earlier, when you'd just gotten back. Not that either way is 'wrong', of course."
Zeke gave me a wry grin. "Probably because I'm talking to you."
"Old habits, huh?"
"I would phrase it as code-switching—falling back into using specific words and patterns of speech. It's still not quite how I used to talk, though, is it?"
"Not exactly, no."
He nodded. "I remember how I used to talk and think, but putting that 'affect' back on feels even more fake now than doing
this did back when I started. It's strange, but at some point I stopped including things like hesitation, disfluencies, and qualifiers deliberately and started just…
doing it. It's like I stopped 'emulating' them and just adopted them as part of my 'normal' affect."
"You formed a new habit?"
"Not even that—calling it a 'habit' implies that it's still an affectation, just an ingrained one. I think this is more… natural, for lack of a better word." Zeke paused, then leaned in and raised a hand to shield his mouth from hypothetical eavesdroppers. "Although between you and me, I may have played up my nervousness when I got back. Not that I wasn't nervous, of course, I wasn't sure what I'd have done if Max had said 'no', but I chose to
express it more than I normally would even with the changes in presentation. I wanted him to know I was nervous, though in hindsight I can see why someone might argue it was manipulative."
I rubbed my chin in thought. "I think that's a fair thing to do," I said. "Though with perks and stuff, he probably would've known anyway."
"That's probably true. It's been a long time since I had to deal with anything like that." Zeke's eyes unfocused for a second as something occurred to him. "Now that I think about it, that might have contributed to the 'not fully acclimating to humanity' thing."
"Because with Deanna and Max, you didn't need to learn how to—how did you put it? 'Send the right signals'?"
"And the fact that they understood me anyway made me even more uncomfortable by comparison with people who couldn't—and reinforced my bias that it was everyone
else who was weird and unreasonable."
"Ah. Yeah, that makes sense," I said. "Say—and this segue is only going to make sense in hindsight, but do you remember the conversation we had about my issues with writing?"
"Of course."
"Well, I'd completely forgotten that I wrote an incredibly amateur novel-length story a couple months before I joined the 'chain. Management was kind enough to retrieve it."
"
Before you joined," Zeke repeated. "Before you got any help with your issues."
"Magical help, at least, but I'm pretty sure I know why. Or how, I guess, depending on how you look at it."
"How, then?"
"Because a few months before
that, I'd come out as transgender," I explained. "And when I did, I also changed the way I presented—not so much 'physically', since that takes time and, you know,
confidence, but I transitioned socially pretty quick. I came out to the people I spoke to online, had them gender me feminine, and… it felt right. I finally understood that trying to be a guy just
didn't work for me, and I think that was the thing that had been fucking me up, if you'll excuse my language: trying to be a guy had completely stifled my ability to express myself."
"Which brings us back to the issue of presentation, which is why the segue makes sense in hindsight."
"Yeah."
He frowned. "But what does your gender presentation have to do with writing?"
"That's a good question. Maybe it was just the whole 'presenting male without feeling it' thing confusing me, but there was definitely an anxiety component, so… yeah, I don't know. There's no clear link, but the correlation is hard to argue with."
"True."
We fell silent for a moment. Zeke relaxed in his chair; I glanced back at the lump in the covers.
"You know," I said, "when I said, 'Humans will pack-bond with anything'…"
"Yeah?"
"You said '
we will'. I'm pretty sure that's the first time I've heard you talk about humanity in the first person."
Zeke stiffened slightly. He held my gaze for a second before averting his eyes, a frown creasing his forehead.
"Of course I count myself as human, now," he said. "War is always 'us' versus 'them'. Tribe versus tribe. Country versus country. Humanity versus hegemonizing swarm. Sometimes, the desire to protect 'us' is the only thing that keeps you going. Sometimes, it's the desire to destroy 'them'—though I've only seen that second-hand, thankfully."
I wasn't sure what to say to that, so I said, "Oh."
"That's not the only reason," Zeke continued. "It might be the largest one, but not the most important, if that makes sense? Even when things got bad, there was more to life than the war. This was the first time I was fully… 'immersed' in humanity in the way people talk about language immersion. I didn't have anywhere to retreat to, like I did with Deanna and Max, and… it was really
fucking stressful, but it also gave me a much better understanding of why people are the way they are. All the things that used to annoy me or mystify me made a lot more sense once I couldn't step away and watch it from the outside."
"Huh," I said. "Most of the things that mystified me about people made more sense once I was able to step back."
"Because those were the parts you were missing."
"Probably."
"Deanna and Max did their best to look after me," he continued, "but that meant they always gave me an out. When I got confused or stressed or whatever, I could always leave, and that meant I never had to buckle down and properly
understand everything as a whole 'package'. I only got bits and pieces."
"And no context."
Zeke shook his head. "No, I got context. I just never had to stitch together the bits where one context ended and another began, or where they overlapped, or however they happened to interact. I never had to do the synthesis."
"Even when you were in high school before your sudden, uh… 'departure'?"
"No. I probably should have, but I resented the experience enough that I never fully took that step."
"You made friends anyway."
"But that was because I was weird, not in spite of it."
I knew too much about the friends in question to dispute his assessment.
"The point I was making," he concluded, "is that my 'cultural immersion', if that phrase is appropriate when the 'culture' in question is as broad as 'human', meant I had nowhere to go to stop 'being human' and start being… well, the weird human-shaped bundle of opinions and qualia I identified as previously."
Zeke saw my objection coming and headed it off with, "And by 'human-shaped', I mean both physically and mentally. I've had a human mind since my first import, as I'm sure you're about to remind me, but I insisted on categorizing myself separately—out of stubbornness and misplaced frustration, mostly, but the point remains."
I nodded and leaned back in my chair, mollified.
"At any rate, I'd held myself in a deliberate state of derealization—or maybe some sort of 'inverse derealization', as though
I wasn't 'real', whatever that means—and the whole 'immersion' experience broke that apart. Being on my own forced me to 'grow up' in a way I hadn't before. Not that I blame Deanna or Max for that: I wasn't exactly a normal child. I had more knowledge than most adults and less context than most toddlers, and I think they did pretty well given the unusual situation. I don't think I would have survived the last eight years half as well if they hadn't. They prepared me to deal with human life, but they never actually made me do it."
"And then you got whisked away to Perth."
"Where I didn't have a choice." He paused, then added, "And while it was traumatic enough that I wouldn't call it 'beneficial', it did let me grow in some ways even as it cut me down in others. My own 'harsh lesson', as you put it."
"You could have gotten that same growth in much healthier and less traumatic ways," I summarized.
"To put it lightly," Zeke grumbled. "Did I need someone or something to push me outside my comfort zone? Yes. Could it have been done safely and constructively instead of abusively? Also yes, not that Management cares about that—if they understand it at all."
I nodded.
"Anyway, 'growing up' and 'leaving my comfort zone' meant experiencing all sorts of things people like to wax poetic about 'being part of the human experience' or 'defining one's childhood'," he concluded, "and while I don't exactly agree with that sort of hyperbole, I will admit that, taken as a whole, they made it a lot harder to keep telling myself I was different. Especially when I was sharing those moments with friends who were a lot closer than I let anyone get back in Moperville."
That was as good an opportunity for a segue as any. "Speaking of friends: if you don't mind me asking, what exactly is there between you and Anna?"
Zeke fixed me with a look. "We're
friends. That's all."
"She joined the 'chain for you, didn't she?"
"Good friends," he amended. "Partners, maybe—in the strictly non-romantic sense."
"And nothing more?"
"No. Are there rumors starting already?"
"I haven't heard any," I told him. "But it hasn't even been a day since you got back."
"But you're assuming there will be?"
"You brought a girl home from a dating-sim universe, people believe whatever best fits their assumptions, and not even the 'chain can defeat heteronormativity."
Zeke winced. "Ah, fuck."
"Yeah, I feel your pain." He raised an eyebrow, so I explained, "A few months after you disappeared, Zero let slip that she shipped Homura and I, which is… awkward."
Zeke winced again, this time accompanied by a look of befuddled exasperation. "Why would she
tell you that?"
"It's Zero."
"That doesn't tell me much other than that she's the kind of person who would do that. The first and last time I met her was at your birthday party—though that's true of half the people there, now that I think about it."
"Really?" I asked. "Huh."
"What?"
"Nothing. I guess sometimes I forget I'm not the only person who finds a few friends and stops looking."
Zeke snorted. "This is
me we're talking about, Cass. I had to be badgered into looking in the first place."
———X==X==X———
