Work Text:
Bruce woke up on the hospital bed in the Cave.
His vision was blurry, so it took him a moment to even gather that much information. Dim as they were, even the faintly glowing lights high up among the stalactites were almost too bright for Bruce’s eyes to handle.
“Master Bruce.”
Bruce tried to turn his head toward Alfred’s voice, but was prevented by something around his neck. He grasped at it with his hands, and was concerned to realize that it was a neck brace.
“Alfred?” he said.
Alfred stepped over to the bedside. He smiled down at Bruce, but his face looked more haggard than usual and there were deep shadows around his eyes.
“You’re awake! This is wonderful. How are you feeling?” Alfred asked.
Bruce took stock of his current condition. There was a low, deep ache in his chest and his vision was still blurry, but otherwise he didn’t feel any more banged up than usual. He said, “Fine. What’s wrong with my neck?”
“Nothing. Leslie put the brace on as a precautionary measure.”
“What happened?” Bruce asked.
“You were shot with some kind of an alien energy weapon,” Alfred told him.
Bruce considered this information, but could not make sense of it. The last thing he could remember was having a discussion with Damian about cleaning up after Titus. This was not the first time he’d woken up in the medbay with no memory of how he got there, however, so he did not panic.
“I think my memory has been impacted,” he said.
Alfred frowned. “Yes, well, you were thrown quite far. Dr. Thompkins did warn us that some memory loss could occur.”
There was the sound of soft footsteps, and then Tim stepped into view. He was wearing his Red Robin suit, but pulled off his cowl as he approached the hospital bed.
“B!” Tim said. “How are you feeling?”
“I will go contact Leslie and let her know you’re awake,” Alfred said, and patted Bruce’s arm before he stepped away to go make the call.
When he was gone, Bruce looked to Tim and said, “Can you get me up to speed on what happened?”
Tim nodded and dragged the stool over next to the hospital bed before he dove into his report. He gave a detailed, thorough account of what had taken place, one that was characteristically direct and absent of speculation.
The gist of it was that an alien army had been manipulated by Brainiac and attacked Metropolis, and the entire League was called in to handle the problem. During the ensuing battle Bruce was shot by an alien’s energy weapon and his body was thrown into a nearby building. Diana caught Brainiac, and Clark persuaded the alien army off the planet and back to their own sector. When Clark eventually found Bruce, he was unconscious.
“Were there any casualties?” Bruce asked.
“Six civilians died in the attack and there were 312 reported injuries,” Tim said. “Flash broke his wrist and Vixen got a bad burn on her arm from one of the energy weapons. Green Lantern was found unconscious under the rubble nearby where you were found, but he woke up a couple of hours later. Otherwise the rest of the League was battered but mostly fine. Your injuries were the worst.”
“How long have I been unconscious?”
Tim winced. “Two days.”
“Have you pulled the video footage of the incident?” he asked.
“Babs did, but we haven’t had a chance to review it because The Ventriloquist broke out of Arkham that same night. Steph is running comms and I’m about to go meet Duke and Jason. We think we have a lead on where he’s been hiding out with his crew,” Tim said.
Bruce nodded, but didn’t say anything because he suddenly didn’t have the energy for it. He blinked a few times, but each time it was more difficult to open his eyes again.
There was the tap tap tap of Alfred’s shoes and then the man walked back into Bruce’s line of sight. He looked down at Bruce and said, “Leslie is on her way to check on you.”
Tim got up from the stool and said, “Glad you’re ok, B,” before he headed to his motorcycle.
Darkness was encroaching. Bruce meant to say something about how he wouldn’t be awake when the doctor arrived, but was already asleep before he could.
* * *
It was another couple of days before Bruce was well enough to return to duty. Though he had no visible injuries, his body ached and his energy was sapped. Alfred demanded that Bruce take it easy, so he took over comms for a while and sent the kids patrol Gotham in his stead.
Running comms was a good excuse to go through the hours of surveillance footage of the Metropolis attack. This was standard procedure after a League event. Any incriminating footage that might reveal a League member’s identity had to be located and destroyed. Bruce was also curious to see if he could find out what had happened to him. Sometimes he thought he was remembering bits of the battle in patches, but he’d fought with the League so many times that it was difficult to know if what he was remembering was real or a figment of his imagination.
He was going through footage one evening and keeping an eye on Cassandra and Dick when his League communicator was pinged.
Bruce accepted the ping and said, “Batman.”
“Hey Spooky.”
There was only one person in the League who called him that. Bruce frowned, but said nothing.
“Sorry it’s taken me a few days to call. I was off planet dealing with a Corps crisis. I just got back and Flash told me you were awake,” Hal went on.
Bruce still didn’t say anything, instead busying himself with rewinding a surveillance video that had captured Diana’s fight with Brainiac.
“Uh, are you there?”
“I’m fine,” Bruce said. “I was unconscious for two days, but otherwise I’m unscathed.”
“Unscathed? Jesus Christ, Spooky. I know you’re a tough one to crack, but I figured even you’d be a little shaken this time.”
Bruce paused the surveillance video, his curiosity suddenly piqued. He remembered Tim mentioning that Green Lantern was also found unconscious in the same area where Bruce was found after the attack. Was there something that had happened during the battle that Hal remembered that Bruce couldn’t?
“I am afraid I don’t know what you mean. I have still yet to regain any memories of the attack,” Bruce said.
There was a beat of silence.
“Oh,” Hal said. “Oh.”
There was another pause, a much longer one this time.
“Lantern,” Bruce said.
“I mean, altogether it was pretty routine,” Hal said. This sounded far too casual to be genuine.
“Is there something that happened during the attack that I need to know about?” Bruce asked.
“Oh wait, I’ve got to go,” Hal said. “Corps business.”
“Lantern,” Bruce said again, but Hal had already ended the transmission.
Bruce sat back in the chair. The paused video showed Diana about to swing her sword. He’d yet to find any evidence of where he and Hal had ended up during the battle.
Bruce pressed play and resumed his search, much more intrigued by the mystery of the missing memories than he had been when he started.
* * *
Over the next few days Bruce spent hours pouring over the footage from the attack. He became so preoccupied, in fact, that he had to hand control of the comms back over to the kids.
The focus paid off. On the third day he found what he was looking for.
A security camera above a bodega captured the video of Bruce and Hal fighting off a squadron of the alien army. There was no sound and footage was grainy, but it showed him most of what had happened.
In the video, he and Hal worked together to hold the squadron off, and Bruce was unsurprised to see that they worked well together during a fight. The aliens hadn’t arrived in great numbers, but they were all larger than the average human. The largest of this company went after Hal while Bruce was preoccupied with the remaining five smaller aliens.
Everything was going well until one of the smaller aliens broke away from the fight with Bruce and snuck over to attack Hal. Hal didn’t see the attack coming, and Bruce was too distracted by his own fight to notice what was about to happen. The construct Hal had been using to block the bigger alien’s attacks broke when he was attacked by the smaller alien. The big alien used the opportunity to shoot Hal with its energy weapon.
When the blast hit Hal, he fell to the ground on his knees. It was difficult to tell some of what happened at that point. Hal’s suit protected him from a multitude of dangers, but this weapon did appear to have some effect. There were flashes of light as the energy weapon did something to Hal’s suit.
While this was happening, the big alien turned its weapon against Bruce and shot Bruce as well.
Bruce had no energy ring to absorb the blast, so the force of it hit him in the chest and sent him flying through the front window of a credit union. A few seconds later Hal was in the air again. He saw what had happened and went flying through the broken window after Bruce. That was the last of Batman and Green Lantern that that particular video caught.
It took Bruce over ten hours to track down security footage from inside the credit union. The business was a small one, locally owned. The owners hadn’t updated their security in a long time, so the video from inside the credit union was even grainier than the bodega’s footage.
It still showed him enough.
Bruce’s body came in through the window and he landed on the floor. He was unmoving, likely unconscious. A few seconds later, Hal flew in after him and went to Bruce’s side. There was some blurry movement that nonetheless conveyed Hal’s anxiety. At one point, Bruce thought Hal might’ve tried to remove his cowl.
Then Hal did something. Bruce watched, perplexed, as Hal raised his fist and brought it down hard on Bruce’s chest. There was a flash of light so bright that the screen almost whited out. When the flash faded, Bruce was still unconscious and Hal’s suit was gone. Wearing his coveralls from Ferris Air, Hal moved jerkily around Bruce again, but everything got shaky, almost like an earthquake was happening. The video cut off, and after that there was only static.
Bruce rewound the videos and watched them several times, grateful that Alfred and the kids were all too busy to ask him what he was doing. By the time he was done watching both of them ten or twelve more times, Bruce was pretty sure he understood what had happened.
Bruce’s theory was that for a few moments after he was hit by the energy weapon, his heart had stopped. He was also pretty sure Hal had used the rest of his ring’s power to restart it.
* * *
Bruce called Clark the next morning.
“Hello Mr. Wayne,” Clark said. “Is this a personal call or a business call? I’m afraid I don’t have a lot of time to chat right now.”
Bruce could hear the familiar sound of Clark typing. He’d known he’d catch Clark working, either on some story for the paper or helping with the recovery efforts in Metropolis.
“I have some questions about the attack on Metropolis,” Bruce said.
“Memory still spotty?”
“Did I die for a few seconds?”
Clark stopped typing.
“Come again?” Clark said.
“On the day of the attack. Did you hear my heart stop beating for a few seconds?” Bruce asked.
There was a pause.
“Hold on,” Clark said.
There was some shuffling. Bruce heard Clark tell someone that he was going to take a quick break, and the murmur of a reply. Probably Lois.
About a minute later, Bruce heard a door creak and shut. In a low voice, Clark asked, “Ok, say that again?”
“You’ve told me before that you track the League members heartbeats during fights just in case one of us is taken out.”
“I never put it that way, but you’re essentially correct,” Clark said. “That being said, I wasn’t in any state to hear anything during Brainiac’s attack.”
“Why not?”
“Because of the Kryptonite.”
“You were exposed to Kryptonite during the attack?” Bruce asked.
“Wow, you really don’t remember anything. Yes, Brainiac had one of the energy weapons like the ones the aliens brought with them, except his was powered by Kryptonite.”
Bruce was annoyed by this information, but couldn’t particularly pin down why.
“Why are you asking me if your heart stopped? Do you think you died during the attack?” Clark asked.
Bruce ignored these questions and instead asked, “When you found me and Hal later, were we in the same place?”
“Yes,” Clark said.
“Was he wearing his suit when you found him?”
“No, actually. He said his suit lost power during the fight. He got hit by one of the energy weapons and it drained most of his ring’s power.”
“And when you found me I was alive.”
“Yes, you were alive, Bruce,” Clark said, sounding exasperated. “I would’ve told you if you were dead when I found you.”
Bruce grunted, but otherwise gave no response.
“Did you talk to Hal? Sounds like if anybody has the information you want, it’d be him.”
“I have to go. The kids need me,” Bruce said.
Clark sighed and said, “Ok.”
He did not sound as if he believed Bruce, but Bruce did not care. He hung up the phone without saying goodbye.
* * *
Bruce did not call Hal.
Reluctance wasn’t the only reason why he didn’t. A couple of hours after his phone call with Clark, Bruce was contacted by Amanda Waller and warned that Killer Croc had escaped from the Suicide Squad. Hal almost slipped Bruce’s mind altogether during the four days while he was busy tracking Waylon down.
But Bruce and Waller did eventually find Waylon, and once that situation was resolved Hal was right back at the forefront of his mind.
Bruce was, at heart, a detective. Having an incomplete picture of what had happened in Metropolis left him with a constant compulsion to investigate. Surrendering to his own worst impulses was inevitable, and once Bruce realized this there didn’t seem to be any point in wasting time.
He was in Coast City by the very next evening.
The first floor of Hal’s apartment building was leased by a cafe. Bruce bought the latest issue of The Coast City Ledger and ordered a cup of earl grey tea at the counter, then chose a table out on the cafe’s patio. He read the paper as he drank his tea.
He spotted Hal on his way home from work about forty-five minutes later. Bruce didn’t look up from his paper, but he examined Hal as much as he could in his peripheral vision. He saw as Hal slowed and stopped on his way to the building entrance, his head turned in Bruce’s direction.
For a moment Hal did not move. Bruce flipped to the next page in the newspaper and started skimming over a story about industrial waste. He wondered if Hal was considering pretending he wasn’t there. That wouldn’t prevent Bruce from speaking to him, of course; it would just mean Bruce would have to break into his apartment instead. The way he’d chosen to go about this meeting was much more courteous than his usual method.
Hal must’ve come to this same conclusion, because he finally walked over to Bruce’s table.
“Bruce?”
He looked up from his paper wearing an expression of unconcerned curiosity. His eyes widened when he they met Hal’s face. There were some other customers sitting at tables outside on the patio, so Bruce made it believable. He always erred on the side of caution when it came to his public persona.
“Flyboy,” Bruce said, his tone delighted. “Well, this is an odd coincidence. What are you doing here?”
There was a long pause.
Hal finally said, “I live here.”
“Really? Well, what a strange surprise. How have you been?” Bruce asked.
“I’ve been good,” Hal said, but instead of making polite inquiries about Bruce’s wellbeing, he asked, “What are you doing here?”
“I was supposed to meet a lovely lady named Amelia here, but she’s late by about a half hour. I think I’ve been stood up,” Bruce said.
“Huh,” Hal said. “That’s, uh. Too bad.”
There was another pause, during which Hal appeared to be considering something. Bruce let him make up his mind.
“Do you want come up for a drink and catch up? My apartment is upstairs.” Hal made a pointless motion upwards.
“That sounds great,” Bruce said, cheerful. He folded his newspaper and got up.
As they made their way into the building, Bruce launched into a meandering and completely fictional story about his nonexistent date. He kept it up as Hal led him through a mail room and onto the elevator. The woman who got on with them on the ground floor got off on the third floor, shooting a bemused look at Bruce as she went. As soon as the elevator doors shut and he and Hal were at last alone, Bruce stopped talking.
Hal let out a breath in the sudden silence. He didn’t look at Bruce, but Bruce examined him. Hal was wearing his coveralls from Ferris Air and he smelled of motor oil, but otherwise he was the sunny picture of wellness. His hair was even glinting with natural gold streaks.
“I forgot what it’s like when you do that,” Hal said.
“Disconcerting?” Bruce suggested.
“That’s one way of putting it.”
Bruce couldn’t help but smirk. The Brucie act was a necessary evil, but he had to admit it was entertaining at times to use it on the kids or members of the League.
“How are you going to explain how we know each other if we end up on some disreputable gossip website?” Hal asked.
“We already know each other.”
“We do?”
“Las Vegas.”
“Ah,” Hal said, nodding. “I forgot about Vegas.”
The elevator dinged as it arrived at Hal’s floor. They exited.
Hal led Bruce to his apartment and unlocked the door. He stepped aside as he opened it to let Bruce through first, but as Bruce went in he said, “You’re not allowed to judge me for living in squalor.”
“I wouldn’t dream of it.”
Hal snorted. He shut the door behind them and dropped his keys on the kitchen counter.
Bruce walked through the kitchen into Hal’s living room. The apartment was small and untidy, but otherwise more or less what Bruce had expected. People tended to assume that apartments were foreign to Bruce, but high-density housing was the standard in Gotham. Bruce had seen way worse.
“I wasn’t prepared for a guest. It’s been a busy week at work. Honestly, you’re lucky I’m home early tonight,” Hal said.
“I have three children living at my house right now and four or five others who come and go as they please,” Bruce said. “There are messes where I live too.”
Hal shrugged and went to the refrigerator, peeling off the top half of his flight suit as he did so. He was wearing a black t-shirt underneath it.
“Beer?” Hal said.
“I’ll have one if you are.”
“I think a beer or two is required to get through this conversation,” Hal said.
Bruce did not comment on that, and Hal returned to the living room with a bottle in each hand. He handed one of them to Bruce.
“You can sit wherever,” he said with a wave of his hand. Since he'd gestured at the couch, that was where Bruce sat down.
Hal sat down on the recliner across from Bruce and put a boot up on the coffee table. He leaned back into the chair while he twisted the cap off of his beer. He drank a long sip.
Bruce removed the cap from his beer as well, but did not drink.
Hal swallowed and said, “I guess it was naive of me to assume you’d just call.”
Bruce gave him a quizzical look.
“Clark warned me you’d been asking questions about Metropolis,” Hal said.
“Clark is a busybody,” Bruce said.
“Don’t get pissed at me, he’s your best friend. So? You want to ask, ask.”
“Did my heart stop after I was hit by the energy weapon?” Bruce asked.
Hal raised his eyebrows and drank another long sip of alcohol. Bruce waited.
“Wow, right to it, huh?” Hal asked.
Bruce continued staring at him, even though Hal suddenly would not meet his gaze. Bruce had no intention of leaving Coast City until he had the answers he wanted.
Hal sat up straight. He still didn’t look Bruce in the eye.
“Ok,” he said. “Yes, your heart did stop for a few seconds. Would’ve stopped mine too if my suit hadn’t absorbed most of the shock.”
“When you realized that my heart had stopped, did you do something to get it beating again?” Bruce asked.
“One of these days you’re going to admit how you get your intel," Hal said.
“I have a colleague who is very skilled at gathering information. Answer the question.”
Hal rolled his eyes. It wasn’t a full, dramatic eye roll like Bruce would’ve received from one of his kids, but it conveyed Hal’s exasperation nonetheless.
“Yes, I did do something to get your heart beating again,” Hal said. “I tried to do it the old fashioned way at first, but your armor wouldn’t budge enough for that to work and I couldn’t figure out how to get it off. I had to use the ring.”
“In what way?”
“It’s, uh. Something it can do, like a defibrillator.” He made a fist with his ring hand, perhaps without noticing he was doing so. “I’ve only had to use it a couple of times.”
“Did that drain the rest of your ring’s power?”
“I lost a lot of power when the big guy shot me. Using the ring on you drained the rest of it.”
Although it was a mere confirmation of what Bruce had already suspected to be the truth, somehow he hardly felt settled at all.
“I thought you remembered,” Hal went on. “Not the defibrillator part, but at least the getting shot part. So when I called you and you told me you didn’t remember anything, I figured maybe it was better if you didn’t remember.”
“Why would it be better if I didn’t remember?” Bruce asked.
Hal looked at him at last, frowning as he said, “You’re just a guy in a fancy suit of armor who likes to go out and punch gods. Do I really have to be the one to remind you of that?”
“Mortality is not something that I struggle with, at least not on a personal level,” Bruce said. He knew he sounded dismissive, but it was the truth. He’d almost died far too many times to be spooked by the persistent threat of losing his life.
“Yeah, of course. Big bad Batman isn’t afraid of anything.”
“I never said I wasn’t afraid. I meant that the threat of danger hasn’t stopped me from putting the suit back on before,” Bruce said.
Hal breathed out, long and hard. He drank another sip of his beer.
“Yeah, well, it sure scared the fuck out of me,” he said.
He met Bruce’s eyes again, and this time he did not look away. The moment of silence that passed was long—perhaps too long, and loaded with something left unexamined and unspoken.
“This is a matter we should discuss with the rest of the League at the next meeting,” Bruce said.
“You want to talk about how you almost died with the rest of the League? That sounds uncharacteristically vulnerable for you.”
“The conversation would revolve more around what the appropriate course of action is in scenarios where a League member is critically injured during a battle.”
Hal, who’d been about to drink from his bottle again, froze and said, “Come again?”
“I suspect you understood me the first time, so I won’t repeat myself.”
Hal shot to his feet.
“Before anymore bullshit comes out of your mouth, I just want to point out that you will never, ever convince me that I made the wrong call,” Hal told Bruce.
“Using up the rest of your ring’s power left you vulnerable. There was no way to know whether or not using your ring on me would work.” Bruce glanced at the ring on his middle finger.
“You realize you get to sit there and chew me out right now because I made that gamble and it worked,” Hal said, pointing at him.
“The strategic maneuver in that situation would have been to retreat and return with reinforcements.”
“And—and what, explain to Superman while I show him your corpse that I had a chance to save you and I fucking left? Or what about later, when I have to explain it to Nightwing? That would be a fun conversation.”
“The building collapsed on us because of damage that the alien squadron caused. We were both unconscious at that point and quite frankly, I believe it is nothing short of a miracle that we both made it through the attack alive,” Bruce said. “I am sitting here across from you now because you made the choice you did, and I am grateful. However, I cannot help but consider what else could have happened because you made that choice.”
“Fuck you, Bruce. Fuck you,” Hal said.
Without another word, Hal left the living room. He went inside a dark room that Bruce assumed was the bedroom, and slammed the door shut behind him.
Bruce did not let himself out. He would have left if Hal had told him to, but since Hal hadn’t Bruce did not budge from his place on the couch.
Instead he drank his beer and examined Hal’s apartment, in particular the photographs on the wall. The images were mostly of family members, but their were images of the other Lanterns as well. None of them were wearing their suits in the images, but anyone could break in and wonder why a test pilot from Coast City might have pictures of himself with two known Green Lanterns. It was sentimental risk, and indicative of Hal’s weaknesses, Bruce thought.
Meanwhile there were sounds of movement in the bedroom. Drawers opened and closed. The sink was running for a few seconds. Hal stomped back and forth from the bedroom and the bathroom, his steps heavier than usual. Bruce was patient.
When Hal at last opened the door and walked back into the living room, Bruce saw that he’d changed clothes. He was no longer wearing the coveralls, but a clean grey hoodie and jeans. Without saying a word, he sat down on the couch next to Bruce and put his beer on the coffee table. He was close enough that Bruce could smell the lingering scent of motor oil on his skin and in his hair.
“I had a thought just now,” Hal said.
Their eyes met, and Bruce raised an eyebrow, the question left silent.
Bruce made no attempt to prevent Hal when he leaned over and kissed him.
Bruce shut his eyes, and felt the satisfied huff of air on his cheek when he opened his mouth. Hal’s tongue tasted of the bitter tang of beer.
He’d had his share of awkward first kisses, but this was not one of them. Hal showed no fear, no hesitation. He’d wanted to kiss Bruce, so he’d done it. He’d wanted to run a hand through Bruce’s hair, so he did it. The kiss overwhelmed his senses, and Bruce found himself thinking that Hal was making it count.
Hal pulled back as soon as their lips parted. Bruce missed the warmth of Hal against him at once. He did not go far, however, just far enough so that they could make eye contact.
“What was your thought?” Bruce asked.
“Once I remembered that I have to translate everything you say from dickhead to English,” Hal said, “it occurred to me that maybe the reason you wound up with such a stick up your ass is because you were worried about me. The kiss was a gamble, but you didn’t storm out so I must be on the right track.”
“Situations like this one,” Bruce said, and hesitated before he went on, “are the reason why I cautioned Clark and Diana against romantic entanglements within the League.”
From the moment Bruce had met Hal on that clear summer night in Gotham, he’d distanced himself from the man on purpose. He’d noted the glances that went on a little too long and ignored Hal’s throwaway complaints that Bruce was avoiding him. He’d been dismissive, and he’d argued with Hal because making him pissed off seemed safer than the alternative. He’d tried to guard his heart. It had not worked.
“I hate to break it to you, Spooky, but even if I didn’t think you were hot I still would’ve made the same call. I think I’d just leave the planet altogether and maybe never come back if Batman died because of me.”
“That’s absurd,” Bruce said.
“It isn’t. Losing Batman would hit the world way harder than it would if Earth lost Green Lantern. My ring goes to the next worthy candidate if I die. Not to mention Earth already has John and Guy and the others,” Hal said, waving a hand. “There’s only one Batman.”
Bruce started to disagree, but Hal spoke over him.
“Look, I would like to kiss you again,” Hal said. “Especially if you’re planning on getting up and pretending this never happened.”
Bruce leaned over and kissed Hal.
It was a softer kiss the second time, less consuming and desperate. Bruce kissed him like they had all the time in the world—like his plane wasn’t scheduled to take him home in a few hours, like Vic or J’onn couldn’t contact them at any moment to alert them of some world-ending disaster.
And when the kiss was over, Bruce did not get up to leave. Hal stared at him and seemed a little puzzled by this.
“Well?” Hal said.
“My plane doesn’t leave for another four hours.”
Hal raised an eyebrow. “Oh? You’re welcome to stick around. I’m going to make you pay for dinner, though, since you interrupted my evening.”
“I’d love to get dinner,” Bruce said, and stood up.
Hal stared up at him, still puzzled.
“So you want to go out for dinner?” he said.
Somehow Bruce could tell Hal was worrying about his reputation.
“I do if you do. I reminded you already that we met in Vegas,” Bruce told him.
Hal's frown deepened. He asked, “Wait, was that a contingency plan just in case you ever wanted to fuck me?”
“That’s a vulgar way of putting it.”
“Goddamn it, Bruce.”
“Are we going to dinner or not?” Bruce asked.
Hal got up and followed Bruce out of the apartment, complaining the whole time about him and his plans. All things considered, however, Hal didn’t seem that put out.