Chapter Text
When Steve had been lying still and quiet for a little while, he found his ears attuned to Bucky's breathing. He winced when he recognized the sound of it: carefully even and shallow, without the slightest accompanying sound of movement. That was Bucky in pain, or lying awake in the night trying not to give himself away.
Steve had always figured, when he lay in camp listening to Bucky breathing like that, that he was remembering the factory at Kreischberg--his imprisonment, and that table Steve had found him on. Now that Steve knew what Bucky had survived, he couldn't help wondering if it had been more than that keeping Bucky awake at night. Had he felt himself changing in slow motion the way Steve had changed inside Howard's Vita-Ray chamber? Had he known what Zola did to him, or had he been left to wonder?
Would he ever remember enough of those nights to tell Steve what his nightmares had been, or had other nightmares long since blotted them out?
After an agonizing three-quarters of an hour, the sound of Bucky's breathing changed to something even more familiar. The softness of sleep, real sleep, which Steve had heard in his ear and felt against the back of his neck more times than he could count. He fell into something like a doze himself, lulled by the sweetness of it and the sudden release of tension.
When a distant sound woke him, there was a second when he didn't know where he was, only that Bucky was near. Was it their day off, precious hours wasted drowsing in the park? Were they napping in camp ahead of a night raid?
He opened his eyes and saw the potted plant and the skylight, and recognized the soft pad of approaching footsteps. Stark--Stark the younger. Tony.
Steve got silently to his feet and strode out of the bedslaves' quarters and across the big bedroom. He reached the doorway into the hall when Stark was only a couple of steps away.
Stark stopped short. He was carrying a tray of food in assorted bite-sized pieces, including a little bowl of some kind of rainbow-colored bon bons, and for the barest instant he looked surprised to see Steve there. Steve held up a hand and stepped out into the hall, pulling the door shut after him.
"He just fell asleep, maybe ten minutes ago," Steve said softly. "The worst of the headache must've passed, but I don't think he'll be ready to eat until he wakes up on his own."
Stark looked past Steve, as if Threetoo might materialize behind him, and said, "The worst of what headache."
"Oh," Steve said. Right, he'd only recognized it himself from seeing how dark Bucky had made his sleeping area, and the plant, and what he'd heard. "Yeah, he... he made it pitch black where his bed is, and I could hear him being real careful drinking that juice, like he felt sick, so I figured... sick headache. I had a bunch of 'em when I was a kid, for weeks after I got my bell rung real hard in a fight. He hit his head yesterday, didn't he?"
Steve felt a little sick himself as his memory answered his own question with the sick sound of Bucky's head hitting the floor of Stark's lab.
"Sick headache," Stark repeated, shoving the tray into Steve's hands and turning half away to rub his eyes. Steve was a little glad to have something to hold on to and gripped it tightly. "Migraine. But it didn't start yesterday, did it? JARVIS, how did we miss this? The other day, he asked for dark--"
"He felt sick first, sir," JARVIS pointed out. "The headache appeared to follow after. He has made his sleeping area artificially dark twice before, but there was no reason to conclude that he was experiencing migraine symptoms."
"But now there is, so is he? Was he?" Stark demanded. "Did we--" Stark focused sharply on Steve again. "You're sure he's sleeping? He's not lying there in pain?"
"I mean, I can't guarantee he hasn't woken up in the last two minutes," Steve said, nodding toward the closed door. "But I know he fell asleep maybe ten minutes ago. His breathing changed. Relaxed."
Stark stared at him for a couple of seconds, utterly still, and then shook his head and turned away, muttering, "Right. You know the sound of his breathing. Of course. Okay. JARVIS, check with Cho about migraine options and what we can do without her physically examining him. And tell me the second he pushes the curtain back."
"Of course, sir," JARVIS assured him.
Stark didn't seem at all reassured. He took a couple of abortive steps, one direction and then the other, obviously worried about Threetoo and not knowing what to do with himself when he couldn't help.
Steve was familiar with the feeling. He raised the tray of food into Stark's eye line and said, "I'm guessing this was your lunch as well as his?"
Tony stopped, narrowing his eyes, and said, "I know for a fact that he did not have a chance to tell you it's your job to make sure I eat. And it's not your job. Or his."
"Okay," Steve said agreeably. "But there's this food that's gonna go to waste, since--"
Steve stopped short, experiencing a weird retrospective recognition as the words I know you're not going to feed this to him if it's not fresh occurred to him.
DUM-E had brought him blueberries, a carton discarded half-full. All the ones left had been crushed or oddly shaped or otherwise imperfect. And Steve knew that Bucky liked blueberries. He was willing to bet that Tony knew it, too, and only gave him the best.
Stark ran a hand through his hair and then nodded, gesturing toward the stairs to the lower level. "Yeah, okay. I want the actual story on you and him--and, hey, medical history. You know his?"
"Uh," Steve said. "Well, up to 1945, I guess. Roughly."
Stark raised his eyebrows, but didn't ask any more questions until they were down in the kitchen, the tray on the island between them. Tony waved Steve toward a stool, so he perched there while Tony paced around, fetching drinks and napkins and setting the dish of brightly-colored bon bons pointedly to one side before he picked up a cracker from the tray and popped it into his mouth, waving at Steve to follow suit.
"So," Tony said. "From the beginning."
"Well," Steve said, building a tiny cracker-and-chicken-and-cheese sandwich from the tray. "My folks were enslaved in exchange for passage from Ireland in 1916..."
He expected Tony to get impatient and tell him to talk about Bucky, or the war, but Tony just nodded, watching him intently and continuing to eat, so Steve kept talking between bites, explaining that his mother had been pregnant with him when his father was killed in the Great War and was emancipated, granted citizenship, as his death benefit. He told Tony how Bucky's family had been better off, how he and Bucky had lived only a few blocks apart but in subtly different worlds, since their flat had been quite a different place from the tenement apartment Steve shared with his ma.
"I always knew where I was headed," Steve said. "Ma didn't like it, didn't want that for me, but... times were hard--I was eleven when the Crash hit--and me being sick a lot didn't make it any easier. But when Bucky was sixteen, he suddenly just started talking about doing the same, and that--he didn't have to do that. His folks were getting along all right, even then. But I... I was already crazy about him, and he made it sound like an adventure, like we'd..."
Steve shook his head, dismissing all those pulp novel fantasies of emancipation and fame and fortune, slaves turning millionaires through luck and hard work. "So I didn't argue. And I didn't realize until after we'd done it that he... he was coming with me because he felt the same way I did. Then it was too late for us to--"
Stark was frowning into midair and rubbing a piece of cheese into fragments between his thumb and finger. Steve elected not to explain about the cock-lock.
"Well. We saw each other as much as we could, but service didn't leave us much free time. And then the war... Buck got put down for the slave draft right away, although they didn't take him for training until the middle of '42. Me, I kept trying to get myself on the list, but no dice. I was 4F, unfit."
That got Stark to look at him, his gaze raking meaningfully up and down as he chewed another cracker. Steve did not blush. He'd had far too much experience withstanding that particular kind of look.
"Before Dr. Erskine and Howard got involved, I was five foot four, maybe a hundred pounds dripping wet. Asthma, family history of diabetes, TB exposure, touch of heart arrhythmia ever since I had scarlet fever as a kid, half deaf in one ear. But they had this experimental program, and Dr. Erskine decided that I was the perfect test subject, so..." Steve made a little ta-da! gesture at himself.
"So that's how you got into the war," Stark said. "But Barnes was already in the 107th by then, straight infantry. Already deployed?"
Steve nodded. "I, uh... Erskine was killed by a Nazi agent--HYDRA, their deep science division--and no one could replicate what he'd done. They sent me to a lab for a while to study me, what the serum actually changed and all, see if they could find a way to reverse engineer it. No luck, and I was stuck there until Howard pulled me out and started bringing me around to look good in uniform for whoever he was doing deals with."
Steve hesitated there, but Tony didn't seem interested in his time as a toy soldier, and Steve was happy not to elaborate.
"He brought me with him to Europe, into Italy when he went to meet up with the SSR brass there, and that's how I found out most of the 107th had been captured by HYDRA's own shock troops. The ones taken were mostly slaves. No one was planning on rescuing them, and Bucky was... unaccounted for. So I, uh... I convinced Howard to drop me into Austria to go find them."
Stark stared at him. "Drop you..."
"From a plane," Steve supplied, although he had a feeling that that wasn't really what Stark was having difficulties with. "I mean, with a parachute, and some prototype gear. That was part of why he brought me along, to model and test some stuff he was developing for the Army."
Including the ridiculous combination thermal underwear and partial body armor which Howard had insisted on getting up in a gaudy American flag design, but Steve wasn't going to describe that to Stark if he could possibly avoid it.
Well. There was the silver lining to Bucky's amnesia, because God knew otherwise he would probably remember every inch of that outfit in loving detail and would feel no compunction about describing it. He'd probably lobby Tony to make Steve a new one. Bucky had had a funny fascination with that getup, even after Howard redesigned it into something Steve didn't have to cover with fatigue pants and a leather jacket to be halfway decent in public. He'd bitched from time to time about the hazards of Steve's anti-camouflage, but he never actually pressed for Steve to change to something more practical.
Stark had his head in his hands, and Steve dragged himself back to the point. "That's where--I think that has to be when he--he got... changed. So he survived what happened afterward."
Stark's head jerked up at that. "He wasn't..."
Steve shook his head. "As far as I know, the SSR never tried again after me. Erskine was dead, they didn't have the formula for the serum, and Howard sure hadn't dragged along his Vita-Ray machine to Europe. But Bucky had been taken away from the other prisoners--they said the ones who got taken away never came back, but I found him alive. Strapped down on a table. I think... Zola. Arnim Zola, one of the top HYDRA scientists, he'd--I think he'd done something to him."
Steve had known a part of it: that Bucky was cock-locked, after that. Steve hadn't pressed to know what Zola had done beyond that, and it was obvious now that that had been by far the least of it.
"Even at the time, I had an idea there was something, but I never... we didn't talk about it, and he said he wanted to stay in, wanted to come with me and keep fighting HYDRA. The SSR put us on that directly, a strike force that just went after HYDRA bases and destroyed them however we could. Behind enemy lines like that, it was better to send slaves--at least if we got captured by regular army, we had some protections under the Geneva Convention, more than free soldiers. Obviously HYDRA didn't care about that, but still better us than anybody else. We were trying to capture Zola himself when Buck--when he fell. But he survived, which means..."
Stark looked away. "You said... as a sniper, you said..."
"Yeah," Steve said, swallowing hard. "Yeah, I think... I never fought beside him before Zola got him, I'd never been in combat at all before that rescue. I didn't really know what a normal sharpshooter was like. But I think he... he was really something special. So maybe that was... a sign, and I just didn't get it."
There was a little silence. Steve forced himself to eat another few tidbits off the tray, thinking of rations and Bucky's lean and hungry look during the war, smoking all of Steve's cigarette rations as well as his own. Had he been starving then, the way Steve would on normal rations? Had Steve been letting Bucky go hungry while he wolfed down triple rations in front of him?
Steve thought of Bucky as he'd seen him an hour ago, every rib showing, collarbones like a towel rack. Tony hadn't known until yesterday how much Bucky needed to eat; Steve could see the same guilt on him as he stared down at the tray of food between them.
"Bone density," Stark said after another few seconds. "What about--bone density? Dr. Cho noticed something about his bone density that made her realize he needed the same stuff as you to be anesthetized. What was that about?"
Steve frowned, thinking about the way Bucky had held his rifle. Recoil couldn't have done what the shield did, could it? But then... she'd been working on what was left of his left arm. Whatever impacts that had been taking must have been after.
"My hands," Steve said, showing Stark his palms, as if it would be visible. "I, uh... I had this... shield. And I used to throw it, catch it on a ricochet--" Steve struck the palm of his left hand with the side of his right, demonstrating. "It hurt like hell at first. I got better at the angles, but... apparently my bone density is a lot higher right there, too. My body adapted."
Stark nodded, snagged a couple of cubes of cheese and slapped them into his mouth. "Okay. And the anesthetic thing? Tell me whatever you know about that, in case we need to tinker around getting him a headache remedy."
"Well, my metabolism is apparently four times faster than normal?" Steve offered. "I, uh... I had to have minor surgery once, at Alamogordo. Howard figured out how to keep me under--of course, that was ether gas, I don't think they use that anymore?"
Stark thankfully didn't ask him what the surgery had been, just started questioning him about the ether.
Threetoo woke up feeling groggy and halfway between sick and starving. Everything was dark and warm and wonderfully soft. For a moment he thought that he could just snuggle in and go back to sleep, and then the memory slammed into him like--
Like a fire extinguisher, knocking him flat.
Steve. His master had brought Steve to the penthouse, to be his second bedslave, for Threetoo to train. Instead of doing anything useful, Threetoo had been seized with the punishment-pain, worse than it had ever been, so bad he could hardly stay upright. He had begged off immediately, and left his master to show Steve around, to get him settled.
Threetoo's mind's eye supplied visions of Steve kneeling by his master's feet, his master gently explaining that he was safe here while feeding Steve his lunch, running his fingers through the dark gold of Steve's hair and running his hands over Steve's perfectly smooth skin. For a weak, cowardly moment Threetoo considered hiding until he provoked his master into coming to find him, but he rejected that thought as soon as it formed.
This was Threetoo's project, as much as his master's. And if his master was pleased to have Steve, pleased to touch and talk to him and teach him, then that was all to the good, because his master would be happy, and Steve would be safe and good.
Threetoo tugged his curtain back, letting in what turned out to be less light than he expected. That wasn't too bad. It would doubtless be brighter outside, but he was going to go and find his master and help teach Steve whatever he needed to learn, no matter how badly it hurt.
Before he could even climb out of the pillow box, JARVIS said, "Please stay where you are, 32557038. Mr. Stark is on his way to speak to you."
Threetoo winced, curling down, and the throb in his head that had only just died away started up again.
"Hey," his master said, only seconds later. "Hey, sweetheart. On a scale of zero to ten, with zero being "doesn't hurt at all" and ten being "I cannot move or sign because I am in so much pain and I need urgent medical care or I might die," how's your head right now?"
Threetoo raised his head to look at his master, mentally assigning ten to the otherwise indescribable experience of the day before. He raised two fingers.
"Mm, two means you only notice it when you focus on it. Is that right?"
Threetoo raised a third finger.
"Okay," his master said, smiling a little stiffly and settling a warm hand on the back of his neck. "Thank you for telling me that, Threetoo. Good data. I'll get you a copy of the scale so you can assign numbers consistently going forward. Before, when you came in here to lie down, what number was that?"
Threetoo winced. His master squeezed gently on his neck, rubbing firmly with his thumb and finger. "Let's say nine is 'can barely move or think because of pain' and eight is 'pain is so severe it's hard to think, talk, or listen, and very hard to move or do anything else.' Do I need to describe seven?"
Threetoo shook his head the tiny bit that his master's grip allowed and signed, eight.
"Eight is a lot," his master said quietly. "Eight is way more than I ever want you to feel without telling me about it, because eight means we should be doing everything we can to make it better as soon as possible. I mean, I'd like to be doing something about three right now, but Dr. Cho says all she can do reliably at this point is make you unconscious, so it's probably overkill for a three."
Threetoo stared at him. His master hadn't actually asked him a question, so he technically didn't have to reply. That was a good thing, because he had no idea what to say.
"Have you been having headaches that get really intense, that make it painful to see light? Make you feel sick? Maybe cause other weird effects? Make you feel too cold or hot, or see lights in your peripheral vision, or..."
Threetoo nodded slowly.
"Okay," his master said. "I wish you would have told me about that, but to be fair I didn't think to ask. Those headaches are called migraines, sweetheart. They happen sometimes if you've had a head injury, which I think you probably had even before yesterday. They also happen sometimes just for no reason. Lots of people get them, and I don't know if we'll ever be able to make sure that they don't happen at all, but we can at least get you some pain relief when they do happen, even if it's only making sure that we help you go to sleep right away when it gets bad. Being in pain isn't good for you, it's just like being punished--"
Threetoo's lips parted, his hand twitched, and then he looked sharply away.
His master's hand tightened, then went back to the slow, rhythmic rubbing.
"Threetoo," his master said quietly. "Look at me, please."
Threetoo dragged his gaze up to his master's, trying not to tremble, trying not to even breathe. His master looked tired again, the way he had yesterday, and nearly as unhappy.
"Threetoo, honey, project number one," he said softly. "Did you think you were being punished?"
Threetoo closed his eyes and nodded.
What else could it mean? It wasn't an injury--he hadn't known about migraines until his master told him--so it had to be a punishment, didn't it? Masters could do things from far away, through chips and... and other things.
"Threetoo," his master said, his voice very quiet and small now. "Did you think I was punishing you by making your head hurt like that? And not telling you why, or what you did wrong, and talking all the time about not wanting to ever punish you, and punishing you anyway?"
Threetoo squeezed his eyes shut tighter, feeling them sting with tears, and shook his head hard enough to make the pain flare and his stomach turn. He raised his hand to sign no, and then--because he knew his master needed good data--I thought maybe. At first. But you said. So I knew it wasn't you. Because you wouldn't.
"Okay," his master said quietly, and there was a press of lips against his forehead that didn't stop the throbbing in his head from rising into what was probably a four. "Okay, I... I'm glad. But... who did you think was punishing you? Or was it just... cosmic punishment, floating around randomly?"
Threetoo swallowed. He hadn't thought about it, really, but... he had thought--believed--known--that the pain was punishment, even while he knew his master wouldn't inflict pain on him. And no one else was authorized by his master to do so; no former master held that power over him any longer.
And that only left one person responsible. One person who had access to him and definitely had no right to interfere with his master's goals by inflicting pain on his master's number one project.
Me, Threetoo signed, before falling back to the safety of referring to himself by designation instead. 3-2. 3-2 punished. 3-2 knew 3-2 deserved.
"Oh--" his master moved, and then his arms were around Threetoo, drawing him up out of the pillows and into his master's lap, cuddling him close against his master's chest. "Okay, so. On the one hand--I really really don't want you to do that, Threetoo. Even if you know you've done something wrong, even if it seems really bad, I... I don't want you to hurt yourself, not in any way, ever. Okay? Because I want you to heal and get better and be safe. Right?"
Threetoo hid his face against his master's chest, nodding. He did know that. He did, and his stomach was a stone, his whole spine and skull ablaze with tension and pain because he knew he had done what his master didn't want.
"And on the other hand, and this is the really important hand right now--" His master's actual hand stroked down his spine and back up to the nape of his neck, then down again.
"I need you to remember that it was never punishment, Threetoo. It was never anyone's fault, including yours. Especially yours. Even if you thought you were punishing yourself--it wasn't punishment, and it wasn't your fault. It was just a fact about your body that we didn't understand yet. But it's not your fault."
Threetoo didn't want to contradict his master, but...
He raised his hand, enough so that JARVIS could see it if not his master, and signed, Occurrence not random. Correlated to infractions.
"Mm," his master said, still petting up and down his spine. "Well, hey, guess what, correlation does not equal causation. That's science, baby. I'm not gonna ask you to lay out for me what infractions you think you've been committing, but whatever they were, I bet your migraines also correlate with you being stressed because you thought you did something wrong. Stress, worry, that can do a lot of things to your body. Raises your blood pressure. Brings on migraines, sometimes, if that's what your body's predisposed to."
Threetoo leaned against his master, and breathed, and felt the pain and tension subsiding under his master's touch. That had happened before--his master had touched him gently, reassured him, and if the pain--the migraine--was only just beginning when he did it, then it might stop. Because he stopped being worried when his master touched him. Because it was early enough in whatever physiological process made up a migraine to short-circuit it. Sometimes his master's touch didn't help: when the pain was already very bad. When the process was too far along.
Not a punishment. Just a fact. Just his body.
Threetoo signed, Oh.
His master laughed a little. "Yeah. Oh. Hey, what's your plant doing over there? You want it back on the shelf before you have your lunch?"
Threetoo nodded against his master's shoulder, and his master stayed still for a moment before gently pushing Threetoo to sit up on his own. His master got the plant and brought it to Threetoo, and Threetoo waded through the pillows and set it back up on the shelf. When he came back to the edge, his master was holding a lunch tray with something new on it--little irregular balls, something dark studded with rainbow-colored bits like candy.
"Yeah, I see you eyeing the sweets," his master said, sounding amused. "One of the cooks made those up for you special to help you get blueberries and maximum calories at the same time. And in honor of you having such a rough day yesterday. You want to try one? It's got blueberries in it, but it's not an actual blueberry."
Threetoo nodded, curious and fascinated. A treat--from his master, but also from someone other than his master. Someone he'd never met, who was supporting his master's project, and cared that he'd had a rough day.
It was sweet, and the rainbow sprinkles were a little crunchy, but it was chewy and tart, too, a burst of intense flavor. Threetoo showed his master his upraised thumb.
"Good, well, the rest of them are for after you eat some protein," his master said firmly, and Threetoo nodded obediently and settled to the work of being fed.
Rogers wasn't waiting outside the bedslave's room, where Tony had barely managed to scrape him off after he followed Tony upstairs. He'd told himself, in the fraction of a second he had to think about it before he was wholly focused on Threetoo, that it was good to know he would have a chaperone for this.
Clearly that hadn't lasted long; he reran the conversation in his head, trying to work out what Rogers would have heard, as he walked out of his bedroom and looked around. He was nowhere obvious.
"J?"
"You may wish to check the guest room."
Tony rubbed his eyes, feeling stupidly exhausted for a moment. Whatever was going on with Rogers, he didn't want to deal with it--but Tony had taken responsibility for him, and Rogers was a mistreated slave too. He deserved to be looked after, and Tony had separated him from everyone else who could do the job. It was necessary, in order to maintain the illusion that Tony was inflicting some suitable correction upon his would-be murderer, but it meant that Tony was the only person left to do this.
So. He would do this, obviously.
He tapped at the door of the guest room, and opened it a few inches when there was no answer.
It was nearly as dark inside as Threetoo's bed, but he heard a soft rustling of clothing: Rogers getting to his feet. "Mr. Stark? Did you need me for something?"
"Uh, not really," Tony said, but he pushed the door the rest of the way open and stepped into the dim room. Rogers was standing in one of the near corners, where he might not be immediately seen from the doorway. "Were you... hiding?"
Rogers shrugged stiffly, looking away. "Seems like I shouldn't let him see me, don't you think?"
"No, it's good--" Rogers flinched, turning half away with his head down and shoulders up, and Tony stopped short.
Clearly Rogers had heard at least part of his conversation with Threetoo, and if he heard any of it at all, he'd have heard the part where Threetoo was at an eight on the pain scale earlier. When Tony thought he was having some kind of programming-tension-freakout which was, in reality, an excruciating migraine. Probably still caused by the stress of pushing at his programming, and therefore by the sight of Rogers.
"Okay, maybe we should be careful how much he sees you until he gets used to you, but that doesn't mean you have to hide in a dark room. He's napping again, for one thing, and JARVIS can help you avoid him if you really need to. God knows there's enough space in the penthouse for the two of you not to see each other."
Rogers shrugged stiffly. "Is there somewhere else I should be, Mr. Stark?"
Tony pressed the heel of his hand to his brow, trying to push back his own incipient headache. "Jesus, you live in my bedroom and I have to use your first name at least to Threetoo. Call me Tony, all right?"
"Tony," Rogers echoed, mechanically, dutifully. "Thank you."
Tony shook his head, turning away. "Okay, right, stand around in the dark if you--"
He'd made it just to the threshold when Rogers spoke behind him, his voice not flat at all now but expressive nearly to the point of desperation. "Tony, I'm sorry."
Tony froze.
"I--I don't think I said that, before," Rogers went on. "But I tried to kill you and I'm so sorry. I would have--it was wrong. I know I was wrong about you. I knew that already, but listening to you talking to him--you're so good with him. Not just kind; you know how to help him. I couldn't do this for him like you do, I..."
The rush of hideous sincerity trailed off, and a second later Tony managed to snap out of his horrified paralysis.
"Well, hey, not everyone can be a billionaire playboy genius with a heart of gold," Tony said in his most careless style. "Don't beat yourself up just because you're not as good as me, no one is. JARVIS, lights."
The lights came up, and Tony walked out without looking back to see the results of his words, or the refuge he'd deprived Rogers of. He was too desperate to get back to his lab and find something, anything, to scour away the sound of Rogers being every bit as wrongly grateful to him as Threetoo was--and without the excuse of whatever combination of brainwashing and brain damage had made Threetoo who he was.
It had been barely more than a day, and he'd already managed to break Rogers from a berserker bent on freedom or death to... this. Apologizing to the man who made the StarkChip.
This was why he didn't meet the slaves he was involved in rescuing. This was why he definitely didn't move them into the penthouse. And this was why he needed to get Threetoo more attached to Steve than to his master as fast as humanly possible--so he could get both of them the hell away from him. So he could stop corroding them just by being who and what he was anywhere near them.
"J, see if you can get a thousand liquid calories into Threetoo in the next four hours? Things to do. Places to be."
Anywhere but here.