Feeding tubes. The insertions, the removals. The tube being there, one eye watching the beige fluid moving through steadily. Really wanting something good. Going almost four months without, because they weren’t sure I could. Then having it be a chore. It had been better than the alternative, but a chore, to force myself to eat it right, to chew it thoroughly enough.

I swallowed hard again, not because I had another bite to swallow.

Gilpatrick was looking at my files and notes, his back to me, my english muffin sandwich in my hands.

He glanced at me, saw the blinking, and looked away. “If you want to talk, I’m all ears.”

“I don’t, thank you,” I said. “I had a bad day, the part you knew about, then it got worse. Now I’m trying to get centered.”

He nodded.

“This is really good,” I said.

“They are, I took a bite of mine in the car and then ate it before I got here,” he said. He bent over a box, looking at the notes. “Man, I wish I still had access to these files and books. I’d try bribing you if I could do it in good conscience.”

I swallowed again. “They’re mine and I’m too straightlaced to be bribed. You can call me if you want to ask about any of it.”

“Then I owe you more favors, am I right?”

“I thought we weren’t counting anymore,” I said.

He didn’t respond to that. He picked up a file, paging through it.

“Which one is that?”

“Ossuary. Why leave it out?”

“They’re back, or they will be soon,” I said. “Activist villains with a heavy focus on environment. They wouldn’t call themselves villains, I don’t think. Long list of really messy executions, longer list of leaders with very short tenures, who try to pull a very disparate group together, fail, and abdicate.”

“Were they the ones who used to call themselves Elephant Graveyard?”

“That’s the one. One of the early leaders pushed the name change along with a shift away from focusing on animals and animal welfare,” I said. “I liked Elephant Graveyard more, I think. Clunky, but clunky in a way that stands out, and it made for really good imagery, when they left a spray painted calling card.”

“I don’t want to pry,” Gilpatrick said.

“About Ossuary?”

“About you. I spent a while thinking about what to do. I’ve had some good bosses and bad bosses over the years. When you throw yourself into the fray like you do when you’re a PRT squaddie, you really need to know that the people above you are looking out for you. That your back is covered.”

“Yeah,” I said. Same applied to family, to parents.