Chapter Text
Ian was emptying a wastepaper can with the phone pinned in the crook of his shoulder when Hector told him that the pro naturalist bloc was trying to have him taken to actual fucking criminal court. This was not an ideal circumstance under which to receive this information.
Hector, Ian’s talent agent, was a friend of his mother’s. This was on purpose; she was a good judge of which people in the business wouldn't clash with Ian’s deep resistance to following orders he didn't already agree with, and he generally trusted her to have his best interests in mind.
Generally.
“Ian, you know, I hate to be the bad guy here-” Hector was saying.
Ian privately thought that this was untrue in at least two distinct ways; Hector did not at all seem to dislike delivering bad news, and there was no way that he had the spine to be the bad guy. He was a henchman at best. Ian didn't interrupt, because he was shaking Mira’s office bin upside down to dislodge a sticky bit of post-it clinging to the inside.
“But she's not happy with thing you’ve done at ComicCon, and she asked me to talk to you. You know, don't shoot the messenger or anything, but she's asked me to speak to you about how it's going to play for your future career.”
“Which thing that I did there is Mom anxious about?” Ian said, setting the bin roughly upright and moving on to maybe clear the can in the bathroom next. He hoped that the subject of this conversation wasn’t the fan-organized dramatic reading of the infamous gross-out fanfic Alcor Goes To BurritoTown. He wasn’t sure how he was going to explain Alcor Goes To BurritoTown to Judy Beale.
“Not anxious,” Hector corrected. “I didn't say anxious. She's concerned. Justifiably concerned.”
“No, I said it, because I know her patterns when she gets bad.” The bathroom’s can barely had anything in it, it’d all fit in the same bag. Ian shuffled the phone to his other shoulder so he could maneuver it. “How serious is this? On a scale of: ‘she left you two voice mails’ to ‘she left you twenty nine voice mails.’”
“Your mother is… is not wrong , in this case, Ian,” Hector fretted. “She’s a very intelligent woman.”
Ian stopped and held up a finger, even though Hector couldn’t see him. “Don’t put words in my mouth, please. I know she is. Nobody is suggesting she’s not. Can you please tell me what the subject of this conversation is, Hec?”
“You implying that you were going to murder Bruce Trueheart’s wife is not going to play well. You had to have known this!”
Ian stopped halfway to tipping the can. “What? I didn't say I was going to murder someone's wife. Who told you that?”
“I’m looking at the holovid on Twitting right now ,” Hector snapped. “You said you had so many fans that nobody would hear a scream.”
Ian covered his eyes with his wrist. The hand was still dangling a half-full trash bag. His metal eye helpfully informed him that the ambient light levels had decreased due to object blockage.
Hector continued. “This was at a panel. You're on a stage, you’re hosting a Q&A or something, there’s also a photo of you here dressed as some kind of cackling yellow PT Barnum devil, is this now ringing a bell?”
“That-” Ian’s voice cracked. “That picture’s taken out of context.”
“Okay, well-”
“Hector.” Ian was now gesturing with the bag. It swung and nearly knocked the soap off of the counter, and he started walking it towards the kitchen with a vague idea of putting it down. “This woman was heckling me. She broke into the panel and yelled insults. Security had to throw her out. Is this not something you're seeing?”
“Ian, no, you're not listening. She did not break in, she had a right to be there. She had a VIP pass.”
Ian’s eyes narrowed. “I was listening. She married Bruce Trueheart, so now she gets nepotism to shield her from the consequences of her actions?”
Hector paused delicately, and Ian could practically hear him thinking that Ian’s mother was a talent agent and that Ian had a successful entertainment career and that these two things were causally linked. This was way more complicated than people who didn’t know Ian’s life thought it was, actually, and Ian did not want to interrogate this subject today. Ian broke in again, to cut him off.
“That actually doesn't surprise me that it’s Bruce,” he said. “He had that whole scandal about taking money for a pro-nat streaming service, right? He's in a cult that hates magic?”
“Pro-naturalists are not a cult. They are a political movement. They are associated with religious interests and lobbies, but they are generally in strong opposition to the groups in which you find demonic cults.”
Ian pulled the bag’s drawstrings shut a little too hard and tossed it towards the front door; good enough. “Religions are just cults that are too badly organized to efficiently exploit people. ”
“Ian,” Hector sighed. “You know what? I’m glad you brought this up. This is exactly the kind of thing you can't say when you meet them to apologize. Bruce isn't the figure he used to be when Relatively OddAngles and Andy Banshee were airing, but he has made it clear he’d like Gisnep to refuse to renew you for another season as a show of good faith. He definitely never wants you back at ComicCon again.”
Ian’s eyebrows went up. “Excuse me. When I meet them to what? ”
“There's a social media campaign to have you boycotted,” Hector continued, exasperated. “Have you been on any trending page in the last six hours?"
Ian had already switched the call to speaker and was flicking through apps to open Twitting. Hector could not see him doing this, but he'd known Ian for more than five seconds, and could tell that the pause meant.
"Oh no, oh do not post about this. Ian! Ian. Do not reply to him! Stop typing!" Hector begged.
"I wasn't going to post about it," Ian lied, already mentally composing an absolute screen-melter of a twitt draft containing the words morons and occult.
"For the love of my sanity and your own continued employment, please. I will put something up for you to retwitt, do NOT use your own words. He’s making it a whole thing about prejudice against pro-naturalism, and he goes golfing with enough of those C-levels that at the very minimum, renewal cutbacks and much heavier oversight of your content by sensitivity readers are a very real wish they could grant for him. Already! Anything you say that is not a completely calm and level-headed apology will make you sound like even more of a - a - brand liability!"
He hadn't been about to say brand liability, there'd been something else on the tip of his tongue.
Ian sat down on the couch, then was immediately too restless to sit and started pacing. “You really buried the heck out of this lede, Hector. Are you kidding me? Is this a joke? I didn’t even hurt her, I just said some words! I just scared her, she’s alive and she’s fine! Nobody watching that, with context, could possibly in good faith think that I meant anything with that speech stronger than a prank.”
“No, no, listen. You're lucky he’s only gone to the internet with it so far - he has completely valid grounds here for an intentional infliction of emotional distress suit. People are pointing this out to him! In New California, verbal threats can be considered criminal assault! Do you want to be the man whose byline is kids entertainer with criminal charges brought against him? Because I don’t want that for you, at all! You screwed up, Ian, I don't know what to tell you. You don't have a lot of options!”
“What! But - she started it? What I said was self defense! If what I said was intentional infliction of distress, what she said definitely was! Let’s sue them first, screw em. Hector, how do you sue someone?”
“Ian,” Hector said, desperately, “You don’t have the money to sue anybody. Their entire political movement is going to back them, they will throw money at this until they win. Don't die on this hill."
Ian jabbed a pointer finger at thin air. “Don’t tell me what hill to die on.” Ian said. “This is my Everest, prop up my body next to that rotted-out guy with the neon boots. Freeze me like the proverbial peach. I don’t believe this.”
“On a purely practical level, in cases like this, freedom is about who you already know, and money is speech. You don’t have enough. Maybe ten, twenty years if your career keeps going the way it is, you could win this, but not today. You don’t have the professional connections! Everybody you work with is your age. They’re ground-level inkers and animators, they’re not making the calls about who does or doesn’t make it on the air.”
“He can’t do this,” Ian fumed. “He can’t just push us around.”
“Yes, he can, in this case, he absolutely can. Ian, listen to me. You don’t get to decide whether you say you’re sorry. You just get to decide how much your ego is going to make you drag this out. How ugly do you want to make this before you lose anyway? Because that’s your choice. In terms of public opinion, whoever wins is right, and you cannot win. I didn't want to play this card, Ian, but blood and fire forbid someone is motivated to dig up your medical history. If they draw a line from point A, which is a history of severe mental health issues, to point B, which is public threats, you're not only going to lose in court, you're going to lose whatever trust people had in you to put content on the air. Do you understand why your mother and I are a little concerned?"
Ian had his temper under pretty good control , he thought. He wasn't the biggest fan of the person he became when he was mad. He wasn't nearly the ticking time bomb he’d been as a teenager, partially because adulthood had come with far fewer people trying to curtail his independence.
But he had his limits.
“So, so what?” He snapped. “So we have to kowtow like complete cowards to the most prejudicial, out of touch, Puritanical assholes as our gatekeepers for the entire genre? The antithesis-”
“Ian-”
“of creativity, which is fear of the other? Explain to me what the limit is, here, on my actual ability to defend myself from harm, because stars forbid that my employer and my-”
“Ian, you-”
“- actual agent stand behind me instead of whichever voice nearby screams the loudest about which groups do and don't belong in polite society, play the moral offense card when they can't poison everything in the rhetoric around them without someone finally hitting them back.”
“Can you please-?”
“I can't believe I have to listen to the person that’s supposed to be on my side for this stuff tell me to do something that’s objectively wrong, and in complete opposition to my actual principles-”
He was still at it when Mira got home almost twenty minutes later.
“...censor ourselves both inside our products and outside of them, in our personal lives? Like I don't exist except where I can turn out profitable and bland bread and circuses, I'm not allowed to be a human being with my own boundaries on how people are allowed to speak to me and what they can come up to me and accuse me of? Commodify time I donate to their marketing by appearing at events - hi Stardust -”
Ian was pacing, gesturing - his hair was sticking up like he’d been running his hands through it over and over. He stopped to wave.
“Hi babe.”
“ - as yet another totem to the baseless, sneering ‘values’ of people that I never agreed to make a show to appeal to?”
S&P? Mira mouthed?
Hector!! Ian mouthed back.
Mira winced. Hector, on the other end of the phone, finally managed to get a word in edgewise while Ian was distracted, and wearily said something about Bael and summoning circles.
“Okay, well, I see no reason to change those, Bael isn't real.”
Mira made eye contact with Ian and made an ehhhhh wiggly-hand gesture as she hung her purse and jacket, dropped her keys into their usual candy-shaped dish. Bael isn't not real?
Ian covered the phone’s receiver pickup with his hand and mouthed again: He doesn't need to know that!
Mira turned to open her tea cabinet, shaking her head in fond exasperation. Not her circus, not her monkeys.
“If you could please just-”
“No.”
“Just talk to the Truehearts-”
“No, Hector.”
“They’re nice people, they have offered to let me arrange to have you be the bigger man.” Hector begged. “I told them you would, I was doing basic damage control , that’s what you pay me for. I am doing my job, which is keeping you employed, please do not yell at me! You don't have to be their best friend, you just have to show that you can reach across the proverbial aisle. Have one meeting, shake hands, bury the hatchet. It's the adult thing to do!”
“No, screw that. They started this, she showed up at my thing and threw a tantrum.” said Ian. “Call their bluff, tell Gisnep to fire me. If they’re not going to back me, I don't want to make a show for them.”
“You don't mean that,” Hector said. “You’re agitated. Walk away for awhile and think it o-”
Ian hung up. Ian threw his phone at the couch.
Ian grabbed a cookie off of the counter top, shoved it in his mouth, jammed his hands in his pockets and stormed out.
Mira, who knew perfectly well that Ian would rather pull his own fingernails out than leave a creative project halfway through completion, just set the electric kettle for two cups of water. Ian’s phone rang. A song from The Littlest Selkie was muffled into the carpet several feet short of the couch Ian’s throw had been aiming for. Even with cutting-edge optical technology, his depth perception was hit or miss. Mostly miss.
Ian's phone stopped ringing. Mira set the kettle to boil. Ian's phone rang again.
“I admit that, in the past, I've been a nasty
They weren't kidding when they called me kind of strange
But you'll find that nowadays
I've mended all my ways
Repented, seen the light, and made a change!
True? Yes.”
The kettle whistled. Ian’s phone rang again. Mira dunked two tea balls full of something calming and let them steep. Ian's phone rang again.
She picked up the phone and its tinny showtune on her way into the bedroom. Ian was lying in the dark, on top of the covers, with his arm thrown over his eyes.
Mira tossed the phone at him, underhand. It bounced onto the bed near his knee. The screen's MLED backlight beamed letters directly upwards, vivid in the room’s dim.
INCOMING CALL: JUDY BEALE
12 UNREAD VOICE MESSAGES
“Now, it's happened once or twice
Someone couldn't pay the price
And I'm afraid I had to rake 'em 'cross the coals!”
“She's going to keep calling me,” Ian groaned. “She’s having a meltdown over there, I can tell. And Hector is useless, like always.”
Mira thought about consequence, and responsibility. Mira thought about an awe-inspiring, awesome demon big brother that had become a kind but exasperating twin brother and then had become a seriously concerning little brother and now, as Mira was in her twenties, was something close to being her son. Alcor hadn’t changed, but … that was the problem. Mira had.
“Well,” Mira said, carefully. “Sometimes it's difficult to know what to do when someone you love is hurting and they're putting all of the responsibility to feel better about it on you.”
Ian lifted his arm, eyes guilty.
“Not you,” Mira murmured. She wasn't making eye contact, she was just stirring her tea to dissolve the sugar cubes.
“We have to go DB Cooper,” Ian said, without sitting up. “Disappear and never be found. Take only a huge bag of money, and some cool sunglasses, and a parachute. Retire to a deserted island.”
“This is clearly a great idea,” Mira said, “And I don't see any practical challenges wrong with it, except that we’re going to need to build an antenna out of coconuts so that I can keep streaming episodes of Pretty Angel Henshin Cure. This season has a girl whose costume theme color is orange.”
“Is that important, that she's orange?”
“You have no idea how crazy it is that there's one that's orange.”
Ian’s phone rang again. Ian groaned.
“And I fortunately know a little magic!
It's a talent that I always have possessed.”
“Do you remember the lady who called me a puppet at my panel?”
“What - yes, of course I remember. I imagine her when I’m doing the parts of working out where I have to hit a bag a bajillion times!”
“You can imagine anything other than the thirty minute minute loop of Hear From Ur Heart from the Dancy Dancy Rebellion soundtrack you play during your workouts?” Ian asked.
“It’s because it’s cardio!” Mira huffed. “I’m strengthening my heart!”
“Your brother should just zap you into always being in perfect shape if he wants the help, I think,” Ian said.
“Alcor doesn’t know how the human body works, he’d end up filling me with spiders or something.” Mira put her hands on her hips. “Don’t try to distract me! Where is she? Let me at her. What did she do now?”
Ian told her what she’d done now. Mira’s shoulders went rigid.
“I could take care of this,” she said. Her voice was quiet, dangerous. Not a threat, a promise. “I still could. I don’t get caught.”
“Look, no, we can’t,” Ian said “I’m in trouble for even implying I would. Even if they disappeared with no trace, it’s not like the entire pro-naturalist movement would magically forget that I apparently ‘threatened’ her, they’d connect the dots! They’re dumb, but they do have basic object permanence. I don’t want you to become a murderer for me, Starshine.”
Mira looked at him, her dark eyes dull and the line of her jaw tight and hard. Ian shivered, despite himself; remembered in the summoning circle when Mira had come from nowhere like the hammer of fate, cutting clear through the forces of the biggest military on the planet, her Mizar gear covered in red.
Ah. Right. Not ‘become,’ then.
“Come down here,” he said. He opened his arms up.
“Ian,” she said. She sounded about ten inches away from breathing fire. Ian pictured a dragon in pink-armored scales, teeth like barbed wire. An ancient legend staring out of a young face, an unbroken chain of victory down the line all the way back to the sundering of the world.
“Please.” Ian said. “I’m … I think being here for me as you and helping me come up with other ideas is more important than violence you can do on my behalf as Mizar, right now.”
Ian could see Mira fighting years (lifetimes) of instinct to believe him about this. Her body was all coiled-spring lines, and the mug in her hand was being gripped hard enough that Ian was worried about its structural integrity. She sat down with him.
Ian’s phone rang again. They both ignored it.
“You’re the one with the problem,” Mira said. “I should be talking you down. Aren’t you mad?”
“Well, you know. The couple that doesn’t slay together, stays together, because neither of them go to prison forever.”
Mira laughed - Ian could always make her laugh, but this one was short, and a little bitter - and leaned on his shoulder. The softness hadn’t quite come back into her face, glittery eyeshadow shuttered over whatever it was he’d seen in her eyes.
“I am mad,” Ian said. “But I don’t … hit people when I get mad. I-“ He stretched out his fingers, long and articulate and marker-stained, curved the knuckles until he heard little pops. “Humiliate them in front of crowds.”
“Well, we could just do both. We’ve got their mental health covered and their physical health covered. You make them cry and then I’ll kick them when they’re down.”
Ian was not going to disclose how deeply, deeply tempting that was.
His phone rang again. It actually was kind of distracting, this time.
“I'm a very busy woman
And I haven't got all day
It won't cost much
Just your voice!“
“Is that really your ringtone for your mom?” Mira asked. She sounded as if she was skeptical about there being a non-mean explanation for the choice. “She’s a musical talent agent, right?”
“Look, it’s a complicated relationship. She’d probably think it was funny anyway.”
Ian’s phone rang again.
“I just.” Ian put his face in his hand. “Screwed up. I think. Stars that’s rotten to admit out loud. Sometimes, at the time you’re screwing up, it feels completely correct, but it’s actually not the best ….career -“ Ian’s face twisted. “I can’t even finish the sentence, ugh. Ugh.”
“ So don’t,” Mira said “You were right. She deserved it.”
“She did. But the problem, at this point, won’t go away if the actual people were to like, end up in the hospital.”
Mira handed him his tea. “In the ground,” she corrected, mildly.
He took the tea without meeting her eyes, to keep himself from thinking about how close he was to actually asking her to do it. To seriously planning out what that would take. Nope. Ride the emotion out. It’ll pass, and then you will be glad you didn’t do anything dumb. “Thanks.”
“I’m just so mad? ” Mira said. She said it like a question, like she wasn’t sure how it could be fair that she was so mad and yet also could not solve the problem. “I’m sorry that I’m not… you know. I don’t know how to solve law problems, or animation industry reputation problems. Mostly I only know how to solve customer service desk problems, and JSK tailoring problems, and demonic cultist problems.”
Ian shook his head. “No, it’s … no. I love you. I trust you. It’s … not like you’re the only one that wasn’t exactly the normal college classmate we were expecting on the first and second dates.”
Mira flicked a drop of tea at him. “I would never have stayed this long if you were a normal boring classmate, Ian Beale.” A beat - Ian heard her hesitate, as if debating saying the next part out loud. “But if you’d gone with somebody regular you… might have two eyes right now. I guess.”
They had never talked about it, what had happened after Ian’s preincarnation results had been intercepted.
Their strategy so far had been a mutual and silent agreement to skip the part where they were clearly not fine and pretend they were already at the part where they were fine . This did not always work with perfect success, such as when Rosa and Sun Mi had to intervene, but the majority of the time it got them through their daily lives.
They’d talked around it, sure, they’d talked near it, but never about it. Not with each other. Who felt guilty about what. Who was terrified of what. Whether they saw each other differently. Whether they saw themselves differently. Whether either of them ever lied awake at night considering that Bill Cipher might have had backseat driven them both into a relationship to get closer to Alcor.
They both knew that that conversation, if it ever happened, might end in an answer that neither of them wanted to look at. They’d met, before, when Ian had never been haunted by self-loathing or passively suicidal ideation, when Mira hadn’t been saddled with the duty of being Mizar and hadn’t needed to know how to murder someone and not get caught. Those versions of themselves had hated each other. The truest parts of each of them were souls that repelled like matching ends on magnets, and after this lifetime it was very likely that they would go back to war.
Ian didn’t want to break the truce today. He waved this off.
“Bill would still have figured out how to come out of me, and you wouldn’t have been there to save me, so I would have two eyes and be… not Ian. On the other hand, I wouldn’t have anyone stealing the pink marshmallows out of every bowl I try to eat of Unlucky Leprechaun cereal, so maybe I would finally find out what one tastes like.”
Mira whacked him with a throw pillow shaped like an ice cream sandwich. Ian took this as as sign of success and paused in his snickering to duck a little so he wouldn’t spill his tea.
Then Ian’s phone rang again. He groaned.
“It’s such an uphill fight to have a …personality, in entertainment, I feel like? It’s almost the same skill set as- as some other stuff. Just, in the opposite direction. You’re always pushing against the tide to stay a human being instead of just being a smooth, featureless brand that never causes controversy. As normal and agreeable as possible, except where being a little kooky tests better as marketable.”
Mira grimaced, over her teacup. “This is why I self-publish. No offense. I’d rather have a smaller audience that likes me for me than to not be able to make the final call on my own stories.”
“I need a stage,” Ian said. He spread his arms, helpless. “You, like - you write, and I write, because when we’re not writing the ideas in there build up and accumulate and I feel like my head’s going to explode if I don’t get them out and written down. Whenever I’ve tried to do something other than stories, all I can think about is how much I’d rather be making up stories.”
“Plot bunnies multiplying,” Mira said, nodding.
“Plot kudzu mutating,” Ian said. “But the only time I don't feel like there’s something wrong with me is when I’m with you or when someone's applauding. I don’t know if I can even do art for art’s sake any more, I’ve tasted the forbidden fruit of being somewhat internet famous. I need a t-shirt that says Mizar the Magnificent ruined me, thanks for asking .”
“Oh, I’ll ruin you alright,” Mira said.
Ian’s tea almost came out of his nose.
Mira smirked, but kept her voice deceptively mild. “D’you want me to be scary murder Mizar? I can be scary murder Mizar.”
“Don’t cross all the wires in my brain like this,” Ian protested. “I have to talk to my mom in a second! Probably!”
Mira poked him hard, in the arm. “Ian. Is being famous worth your integrity?”
“Somewhat! I said somewhat famous. Rosa is famous, I’m just popular with the Twiceler demographics. And… I’m not sure, but not going to court might be worth my integrity? I haven’t decided yet, I guess.”
Mira sighed out through her nose. “I don’t like this. I don’t like that they’re twisting your arm to say stuff you don’t believe-“
Ian’s phone rang again.
“- and I don’t like that your mom is in on it.”
“I didn’t say I liked it,” Ian said, quietly. There was a hard, furious stone of injustice in his stomach, in fact. He hated, hated, hated, hated this. “Plan A is not to do the apology. Plan A is still to disappear and never be found. I haven’t heard one I like better than that yet, but Plan B is to ask Alcor to go back in time and un-invent pro naturalism.”
“We tried that,” Mira said. “Most election years I ask about that. Price would be really crazy to avoid getting into a causal paradox, Alcor says. And he’d like, have to fight a giant baby or something? I wasn’t sure if that part was literal or not.”
Ian’s phone rang again.
“Is she… seriously freaking out?” Mira asked. “She’s not just mad at you? Are you sure?”
Ian nodded. “It’s, she’s done it before, when she thinks I’m about to make a big mistake and she wants to protect me from it. She’s got … what I’ve got, kind of. The anxiety stuff. Every couple of years she gets into a phase where she thinks she’s just, like, too smart to listen to her doctor and stops keeping up with her DBT. Like, you feel better because you’re doing the DBT and the medication, Judy. You aren’t cured, the treatment is just working. And also, I’m an adult. I have to be able to make my own choices.”
Ian’s phone rang again. Mira winced.
“I guess it isn’t really about my job, to her.” Ian said.
“It’s not,” Mira said. “Even if she's wrong, and you’re right, this is about keeping you … safe. Even if her definition of what safe is actually kind of hurts you and makes your life harder.”
Mira averted her gaze again, stirred her tea. Hoped Alcor was somewhere else, doing some Alcor-y thing, and not here listening to her and wondering where she’d get an insight like that one.
“I can yell at Hector, but I’m not sure I can yell at my mom having an anxiety attack,” Ian confessed. “I just don’t know what to say?”
Mira laced her fingers with his.
“You could just lie to them. Say you’re sorry, but we’ll both know you really aren’t.”
“But everybody will see me saying that,” Ian protested.
Mira rolled her eyes and booped his nose. “You are worried about being famous. No, everybody won’t see that. Not if you take the meeting up that Hector already set up for you.” Mira said, in a singsong. “You can lie to him in private, and it doesn’t need to be anybody’s business.”
Ian’s phone rang again.
“Mira,” Ian said, seriously. “I have something important that I just realized. I love you. Let’s date.”
Mira laughed - and, finally, it was genuine, and there was her smile again. It was like a spring thaw. Ian grinned back. He couldn’t help himself.
“I’ll be the innocent victim languishing in a dungeon,” he said. “You can be Scary Murder Mizar.”
Mira hit him with the ice cream pillow again. This time his mug did spill.
“Oh, shoot!”
“Crap!”
They scrambled to clean it up before it could stain the bedspread, and, when that was mostly more or less taken care of, Ian finally answered his phone.
“If you want to cross a bridge, my sweet
You've got to pay the toll
Take a gulp and take a breath
And go ahead and sign the-”
“ Mom? Hi. No, yeah, the thirty-seventh call was the charm. I always ignore the first thirty six times someone calls me.”
Mira rolled her eyes but smiled, and handed him more paper towels.
They’d figure it out if they had each other. Wasn’t necessarily going to be fun , the whole time but -
They’d figure it out.