Eventually he says, "I want to say I'm sorry I didn't tell you, but I don't know if I'd do it any different another time. I think if I'd told you, it'd come out pretty much the same, but with more of you trying to get me not to do things first."
"If you wanna put it that way, then yep," he says. "Absolutely. I didn't tell her about you. I told her about me. It'd be bad if she spilled somehow, but I don't think she will. I think she can handle it."
"Falling in love doesn't come with a schedule," says Trouble. "And if the next person I get all gooey over is another Ethan, I'm not gonna tell them anything unless we - and by we I mean you, me, Robin, Ethan, and Andi - want to bring them in and can see a way to do it without fucking everything up."
"As far as Rhea's personal characteristics go she doesn't seem like a disaster, but if we told everybody whose claim to non-disasterhood was 'not an Ethan', half of Phoenix would know by now, and we'd have screwed up at least once. I don't think who you fall in love with is a useful filter. If you keep doing this, you will screw up eventually. At least once. At most once, you only get to tell the Yeerks that there are morph-capable humans in Phoenix one time, after that you don't have to tell them anything because they win."
"...yeah, but not being Ethan isn't her only claim," he says. "What I'm trying to tell you when I say I wouldn't tell another Ethan is that I'm not telling anybody if I think they're gonna be a problem, and the reason I don't think Rhea's gonna be a problem isn't that I fell in love with her, it's that she doesn't act like she's going to be a problem. I can't give you a list of every single thing she did or didn't do that made me think that, I don't work my shit out on paper like you do, but that doesn't mean my observations are monkey farts."
Trouble waits a little while, to be reasonably sure he won't run into her on the way, and then he owls out of the house to find somewhere safe to sleep for the night.
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Eventually he says, "I want to say I'm sorry I didn't tell you, but I don't know if I'd do it any different another time. I think if I'd told you, it'd come out pretty much the same, but with more of you trying to get me not to do things first."
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She gets up.
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