Work Text:
The case had been open on his screen for the last three hours.
Tim leaned forward in his chair, elbows on the desk, and thumb pressed against his lower lip as he read intently. The data he was muddling through was dense but just barely navigable. The shipping logs were cross-referencing against the police reports, and the financial trail that kept disappearing into shell companies was nonetheless reappearing two steps further down the chain, transformed and cleaner each time. Convoluted, but not impossible to track.
He picked away at the skin of his lip as he continued to scroll.
The smuggling rings weren’t new. He’d been aware of them peripherally for weeks, bobbing at the edge of his conscience over several cases until it had kept resurfacing too many times to be a coincidence. The latest intercepts he had filed through suggested that the operations had worryingly developed from the usual contraband that filtered through Gotham on the regular into a different category of concern entirely. The kind that, once distributed, became everyone’s problem simultaneously.
Time pulled up the map and studied it.
His jaw tightened in displeasure.
He’d known the entire time, but couldn’t help confirm it once again, just whose territory the primary distribution point sat in. He’d known, and yet, had spent the last hour reviewing his options with the thoroughness of someone who was hoping the data would eventually produce a different answer.
It did not.
With a sigh, he unclenched his jaw and reached for his phone.
The response came back in under four minutes, which was neither a good sign or a bad one.
Absolutely not. Tim almost rolled his eyes, as the response he predicted came through.
A pause, and then: You go in there now and you blow three weeks of groundwork. I have people inside.
Tim typed back evenly. I'm not planning to engage. Reconnaissance only. I'll stay clean.
You'll stay out. Another pause, shorter this time. We’ll talk in person. I'm coming to you.
Tim looked at the message for a while longer, anxiety suddenly pooling. With a resounding snap, he closed the phone and pushed back slightly from the desk, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands.
Fine.
Enough time had passed that the initial discontent had subsided and Tim had fallen back into his research, so engrossed that he was oblivious to all else. The loud growl of the engine startled him and caused him to flinch backwards.
He heard the bike before he saw it. The familiar rumble of the engine coming closer, and echoing in the hollow of the access road made him stand to attention.
By the time Jason entered, Tim was by the entrance of the cave, watching him dismount and pull of his helmet with detached but keen observation.
The first thing that Tim noticed, was that Jason looked older.
It wasn't a surprise, exactly. Time moved for everyone, including the ones who had technically died and come back, and Tim had not been under any illusion that Jason Todd was frozen somewhere in the angry, volatile state of his return. But knowing something abstractly and seeing it were different things. The lines in his face were new. Settled into his skin in the way that they did inevitably did for all. Even the width of him, the way he carried his weight, had shifted from the aggressive forward-lean of his earlier years into something more restrained.
He looked nothing like the boy Tim had watched from rooftops, cataloguing Batman and Robin through a telephoto lens with the focused devotion of a child who had found the thing that made the world make sense.
And he certainly looked nothing like the revived boy either. No longer raw and open with fury and fresh grief, a still-open wound that had learned to walk.
Jason looked like someone else now. Technically the same person, but so incrementally different that he was unfamiliar. Tim looked at him and suddenly found very little that was the same, and wasn't sure what to do with that.
"Drake," Jason said simply, by way of greeting.
"Todd," Tim said, by way of reply.
And they both went inside.
The conversation was functional, which was more than Tim had expected and possibly more than he'd hoped for. They spread the case files across the main console and worked through the logistics with the clipped efficiency of two people who had been trained by the same person and were currently choosing to find that useful rather than irritating.
Jason's intelligence on the internal structure of Crime Alley was better than Tim's. Tim's analysis of the distribution chain was better than Jason's. Neither of them said so directly, but the plan that emerged from the next two hours was materially better than what either of them had arrived with, and they both knew it.
The nickname surfaced unceremoniously.
“Replacement. The read on the entry point is wrong.” Jason tapped the map with two gloved fingers. "You're putting us in from the south, but the sight lines don't work. We'd be exposed before we cleared the first container."
Tim didn't look up from the file he was reviewing. "The south approach keeps us off the main camera grid."
"The south approach gets us shot at."
"The south approach," Tim said evenly, finally locking eyes, "gets us there without being seen. Which matters more at entry than at extraction."
Jason made a sound that was not agreement and not concession and moved on.
Later, when cross-referencing the distribution contacts, Jason piped up again. "Replacement, what do you have on the secondary distributor? Because my guy places him at two different locations in the same week and that doesn't track."
Tim pulled up the relevant file, rotating it to face him. "It does track - if, the secondary isn't one person and two instead. Or even multiple. I think it's a shared alias. Multiple people, same name, different routes. Keeps the paper trail clean."
A pause.
"Hm." Jason looked at the file, sniffing. "Yeah. Yeah, that works."
Tim had already moved on to the next document.
The hour had grown late, and an unbidden yawn prompted Tim to attempt to wrap things up. They agreed on a timeline. One week. Coordinated entry, shared communication channel, and defined exit routes. It was the most thoroughly laid plan Tim had made in a long while.
Jason left the way he arrived, helmet back on before he'd fully reached the bike. Tim stood at the cave entrance and watched the tail light disappear up the access road and then stood there a moment longer in the quiet dark before going back inside.
The week passed between them slowly, in increments.
Logistics, mostly. Exchanged files, updated intelligence, a few short exchanges that were terse by habit but not by hostility. Tim found himself, toward the end of the fourth day, reading back through the thread of messages with a faint and unexamined sense of surprise.
It was the most they had ever spoken together. Ever. He was almost certain of it. The accumulated words of a week of case coordination added up to more genuine communication than the sum total of years of the same family, the same orbit, the same city.
He closed the screen and didn't examine it further.
Jason arrived on the day exactly when he said he would, which Tim noted and filed away without comment. He came down the stairs to find Jason already in the cave, jacket off, reviewing the updated files on the secondary console with the focused quiet of someone who had done their homework and was checking it one more time.
Tim came down with his coffee, still warm, and stood at the foot of the stairs.
"Ready?" Jason said, without looking up.
"Almost. I need to go over a few things first."
Jason made a sound that wasn't complaint, and Tim crossed to the main console and sat down.
He pulled up the files and began to work through them with the methodical patience that the situation required - updating his threat assessment against the latest movements, and cross-referencing the two possible new variables that had surfaced overnight, rebuilding the entry timeline around a change in the guard rotation that had come through that morning. His coffee cooled by his elbow. The cave was quiet except for the sound of the keyboard and the distant water.
He was aware, in his peripheral vision, that Jason had stopped looking at his own screen.
He didn't say anything. He kept working.
Jason was looking at him the way you looked at something when your eyes had arrived there without your permission, when your attention had moved ahead of your awareness and you were only now catching up to where you'd ended up. Tim didn't turn to look back. He knew what it looked like. He had done it himself often enough.
He wondered what Jason was seeing.
Jason was thinking about the nickname. Replacement. He had used it without thinking about it much this past week, but he had started ruminating on it last night out of the blue, and now it wouldn’t leave him.
He wasn't sure when it had started, exactly, the specific occasion on which replacement had first left his mouth in Tim's direction. It had felt right though.
It had left his mouth fully formed, like part of the furniture of how he thought about this particular person. The proof, carried forward and maintained, that the thing which had been done to him had been done. That ason Todd had been discarded and substituted, and that the substitution was standing right there in his cave, alive and present and occupying a space that Jason had once occupied, wearing a suit that he had once worn beside the person who had left him.
That was what the word was for. That was what it had always been for.
He looked at Tim working, the focused stillness of him, the slight furrow between his brows, the way he turned his coffee cup a quarter rotation without drinking from it when he was thinking - and tried to locate the familiar shape of that feeling from all those years ago.
It was there. But it was different. Worn, maybe. Like a word repeated until it loses its sound.
He thought about what he actually knew of how Robin had passed from one person to the next. He had been adjacent to the details without ever having sought them out, in the way you could be aware of the shape of something without turning to look at it directly, because looking at it directly had never seemed necessary or particularly useful to his own survival.
He knew how it had passed from him. Nothing so dignified as a handover. An absence, and then a decision made around it, made when no one was there to object.He had not been consulted. He had not been considered. The symbol had simply moved on without him, the way Bruce moved on from things, efficiently and without ceremony, and Jason had spent a long time understanding that as the fullest possible expression of his own disposability.
In recent times, he knew things had fractured between Dick and Tim. He knew that Robin had passed from Tim in circumstances that were not, by any account, clean or willing or kind. And honestly, he had not particularly cared at the time.
But now he was beginning to suspect, sitting here in this cave, in front of him, that Tim Drake had not simply stepped out of it either, and yet the symbol had once again, passed on without ceremony.
His replacement had been replaced. The thought arrived with the flat clarity of something obvious that had unfortunately somehow taken years to surface. The word he had aimed at Tim carried the weight of a betrayal. Jason's betrayal, Jason's loss, the thing done to Jason Todd. And somewhere in the wielding of it he had not once considered that Tim Drake might have his own relationship with the word ‘replacement’. His own version of the loss. His own awareness of his disposability.
He had not considered it because it had not been his problem.
It was still not his problem. But he wasn't sure, sitting here now, in this cave, at the end of a week that had been (unexpectedly) not bad, that this accounting still felt entirely true.
"You gonna stop staring at me?"
Jason blinked. He hadn't been aware that he'd been staring, which was an uncomfortable thing to discover about yourself. He looked back at his own screen.
"Hmph," he said, with a grunt. "Who's staring."
Tim didn't respond. But Jason caught, in his peripheral vision, the faint involuntary curl at the corner of Tim's mouth before he turned back to the files.
The cave held its careful silence around them, and Jason sat in it, and did not say the nickname, and didn't yet know what that meant.
The operation ran clean. A bit too clean.
That was the first thing Tim noted, filing it away with the same reflexive tidiness he brought to everything.
The entry had gone exactly as planned, the timing had held, and the two of them had moved through the warehouse district with the kind of wordless coordination that shouldn't have worked as well as it did given the very limited precedent for it.
Jason took the south approach. Tim took the east. They communicated in clipped shorthand over the shared channel, just enough to stay oriented to each other's position, and the silences between transmissions were comfortable in a way Tim hadn't anticipated and didn't spend too long looking at.
There were no surprises. The guard rotation matched the updated intelligence. The cargo was where the manifests had placed it. Tim documented everything with the systematic patience that was his particular contribution to this kind of work — photographs, notations, chain of custody details that would matter later when this reached the point of being actionable in a courtroom rather than just a cave. Jason handled the physical security with an brutal efficiency that Tim observed and did not comment on.
They were out in under forty minutes.
The ride back was quiet, the city thinning around them as they moved toward the cave, and Tim kept his eyes on the road and his thoughts on the next stage of the case and did not think about how smoothly the night had gone.
The cave was exactly as they'd left it.
Tim was at the console before his jacket was fully off, pulling the photographs from the camera and beginning the upload while Jason came in behind him and dropped into the adjacent chair with the heavy, settled weight.
They worked through the findings methodically. Tim talked, Jason listened and occasionally corrected or added, and the picture that assembled itself from the combined intelligence was cleaner and more complete than either of them anticipated it would be. A distribution hub, three confirmed contacts, two still unidentified, a timeline that suggested the next significant movement was ten days out at the earliest.
"We have plenty of time to do this properly," Tim said.
"Agreed." Jason leaned back, arms crossed, studying the board on the screen. "I want the two unidentified contacts down before we move on the hub. Pull one thread without knowing what's attached to it and the whole thing collapses before it's useful."
"I can have names within forty eight hours, probably. The financial trail is a lot more obvious than they think it is."
Jason nodded, not looking away from the screen.
Tim casually reached into the inside pocket of his jacket, which was draped over the back of his chair, and produced a small prescription bottle. He shook two tablets into his palm without ceremony, reached for the water glass on the desk, and swallowed them.
A beat of silence.
"What's that for."
Tim glanced at him sideways. Jason's eyes were still nominally on the screen, but his attention had moved, the particular quality of deliberate indirection that meant he was more interested in the answer than he wanted to appear.
"Antibiotics," Tim said.
"Yeah, I can see that." A pause, calibrated to land somewhere between disinterest and impatience. "What for."
Tim looked at him for a moment with the expression of someone deciding how much patience they currently have available. "Why do you want to know."
"I don't," Jason said. "I'm asking."
Tim turned back to the screen, tempted to just blurt out that he had no spleen - that’s why he taking drugs. "Permanent medication.” He said instead. “Infections that other people fight off naturally become a problem for me, so I take prophylactics indefinitely. It's a management issue, not an active problem. Now, can we move on?"
Jason said nothing for a moment.
Tim pulled up the financial records and began working through them, the soft rhythm of the keyboard filling the silence. He turned the water glass a quarter rotation on the desk without picking it up.
"Which antibiotics," Jason said.
Tim's hands paused for just a fraction of a second, incredulous. "What?"
"You said it's permanent." His voice was level, deliberately incurious, the tone of a man asking about weather or traffic. "So which one is it."
Tim looked at him properly this time, reassessing. The question was specific enough that it couldn't be casual, and Jason met his eyes with the slightly defensive set of someone who had asked something they hadn't entirely intended to and were not going to apologise for it.
"Azithromycin," Tim said. "Currently."
"Currently."
"I’ve taken different ones before. The first two caused some reactions. This one just-" He stopped, and something crossed his face that was not quite a wince, a private inventory of a familiar discomfort. "It still sits badly. My stomach." He said it without complaint, in the flat factual register he used for things he had made peace with. "It'll settle. It usually settles after a few weeks."
Jason looked at him for a moment longer than was strictly conversational, and then looked back at the screen.
What the fuck was wrong with him? Why did he randomly start asking about the specifics? The question had arrived before he'd consciously formed it, pulled out by the sight of Tim shaking tablets into his palm with the automatic familiarity of a gesture done daily, and without thinking he had asked.
He did not ask about when this had started, because he probably should’ve known this already, if honest enough with himself.
"You eaten anything?" he said instead.
Tim blinked. "Sorry?"
"Antibiotics on an empty stomach." Jason's tone was gruff, slightly impatient, the manner of someone delivering obvious information to a person who should already have it. "You shouldn’t take it like that. S’probably why it hurts."
Silence followed.
Tim looked at him with an expression that was difficult to read. Not surprised and not quite guarded, but somewhere in the register of a person shutting down, rebooting and then recalibrating in real time. He glanced at the water glass, and then at the files open on the screen, and then back at Jason with the careful quality of someone who had learned to be precise about what they accepted and from whom.
Tim held back the sarcastic response on the edge of his lips and instead genuinely replied.
"I'll get something after we finish the debrief.”
Jason made a low sound in response and made a exaggerated motion of gathering the messy papers together, signalling that the moment was over and releasing the tension immediately.
Neither of them said anything else about it.
But when Tim reached for the water glass twenty minutes later, Jason got up and came back with a protein bar, which he slid across the desk while resolutely not looking at him, nonchalant.
Tim looked at it. Looked at Jason. Jason's eyes stayed on the papers, expression unchanged, giving him absolutely nothing to respond to.
Tim picked it up.
He didn't say thank you and Jason didn't expect him to, and the debrief continued, and that was the whole of it.
They had been working in silence for the better part of an hour when Jason spoke again.
"Replacement, pull up the analysis on the secondary contact."
It was always so offhand. The same casual reach for the same familiar word, worn smooth with use. Tim pulled up the file without responding, the way he always did, fingers moving to the keyboard with the practised automaticity of someone who had learned a long time ago that reacting cost more than it was worth.
He stared at the screen.
Something was different tonight though. He couldn't have said precisely what - the hour, maybe, or mission gone well, or the weird energy from before.
He said, without deciding to:
"I wasn’t actually your replacement by the way. In case you’re still thinking that. I didn't want it."
Jason looked up from his own screen. Tim's eyes stayed forward.
The silence stretched long enough that Tim almost let it become nothing; a passing remark, an anomaly, something that could be left behind as the night moved on. He could feel the familiar architecture of his own composure waiting for him, ready to reassemble itself if he let it.
He didn't quite let it.
"Robin, I mean" he continued. His voice was even. Careful. "I didn't want it. I wasn't-" He choked. "I wasn't trying to take anything."
Jason said nothing. Tim could feel him listening, which was not the same as Jason's usual quality of attention. This was different. More still.
"I know you probably already know this but, I went to Dick first," Tim said, wanting to explain everything. "That was the first thing I did, when I could see what was happening to Bruce. I went to Dick and I told him he needed to come back. That Bruce needed him." A pause. "Dick said no."
He didn't elaborate on that. He didn't need to.
"And Bruce was- " He turned the glass on the desk. Once. Twice. Trying to find his words. "He was falling apart. And I could see it, and I couldn't- " A breath. "I couldn't just watch it happen. So I went to him instead. And I told him he needed a Robin."
The quiet in the cave felt very large.
"He didn't agree," Tim said. "Not at first. Not really, even after." He paused, and something shifted in the careful register of his voice, so briefly that it might have been missed by someone less attentive. "I intruded into his life at a very low point and he hadn't asked for me and he didn't particularly want me there. The training," He stopped again. “Started differently. He was so scared that he didn’t training me at all. For a long time I thought it was because he saw nothing in me worth pushing. Then later it became the opposite. He pushed me really hard. Because he thought that if made it hard enough, I'd finally give up and leave on my own."
Jason's hands had gone still on the desk.
"I didn't leave though," Tim said. There was something in it that wasn't quite wry and wasn't quite sad. "I was-" He exhaled through his nose. "I was a bit too stubborn. I wanted to help and I had decided I was going to help, and that was that." He turned the glass again. "And somewhere in the middle of all of that I got attached. Which hadn't been part of the plan."
He said this last part quietly, and then seemed to hear how it sounded, and added: "It was my own fault, really. I should have been more careful about it."
"That's not-" Jason started, and stopped.
Tim glanced at him.
Jason's expression was doing something complicated. He looked, briefly, like a man who had started a sentence and found something unexpected waiting for him at the end of it, and was deciding still how to proceed.
"You were a kid," Jason decided on finally. His voice was flat and controlled in the way it went when he was keeping something contained. "Attachment isn't-" He stopped again. "That's not how it works."
Tim looked at him for a moment with the careful, assessing quality. "Maybe not," he said.
He looked back at the screen, unsure of what more to say. A long silence opened up, and Tim sat inside it and felt the strange exposed feeling of having said more than he'd intended to say to a person he hadn't intended to say it to, in a cave at an unreasonable hour, without quite knowing how he'd gotten there.
"And the thing with Dick and Damian?" Jason said.
Tim's jaw tightened. Just slightly. Just enough.
"It wasn't their fault" Tim managed to get out, painfully even.
"I know. That's not what I meant."
The words arrived without heat, but they were direct, and Tim felt them land with the particular precision of a question that wasn't going to be deflected.
He looked jnto space for a long moment, eyes blurred. He thought about saying something functional, maye redirecting to the case, to the next stage, to Thursday, to anything else. He had a whole architecture of deflection available to him, refined over years, and he knew exactly how to use it.
He didn't.
"It hurt," he said, simply.
It was the plainest possible version of the thing, delivered in a voice that was very quiet and very level, the way Tim delivered things when he had stripped away every layer of management and reached the fact underneath.
Jason waited.
"I knew, going in, that Robin was just temporary. A stopgap. That was the whole point. And I knew that when Bruce came back, or Dick came back, or someone came back, that it would end. I'd known that from the beginning. But I'd had it for a while by then. And it turned out that knowing something is temporary and then actually losing it are…" He turned the glass. "Different experiences."
"And the way it happened," Tim said, more quietly still. "It wasn't." He chose the word with care. "It wasn't how I wanted it to happen."
"No," Jason said. His voice had gone quieter too. "I know it wasn't."
"I've thought about leaving. Properly," he said, eventually. "Gotham. The family. All of it."
Jason looked at him but didn't speak.
"And I did leave. For a while." Tim's thumb moved against the back of his hand, slow and steady. "And I found that I hated it." A long pause. "More than I hated staying. Which I hadn't expected." Something moved across his face, briefly, that wasn't quite anything Tim would have named if asked. "So I came back. And I decided that if I was going to stay then I had to… I had to let go of it. The resentment. The hurt. All of it." He exhaled. "Because I can't carry it and stay at the same time. It's too heavy. So I put it down. And I try to be grateful for what's here. Because the alternative is leaving, and I already know how that ends."
He said this last sentence with a finality that was not peaceful. The sad finality of a decision made not because it felt right but because the other options had been exhausted.
Jason mulled over it.
He considered all that had been said, had been confessed. The boy who had arrived uninvited into a grieving man's life asking only to help, the training that had been designed to punish rather than develop, the attachment that had been described as a fault, the loss that Tim had apologised for feeling too much. He thought about the boy who had been handed a very difficult set of circumstances and had responded by making himself smaller, more manageable, easier to keep, and who had mistaken that diminishment for maturity.
Something in Jason's chest was doing something he hadn't budgeted for.
"That's," he started, but struggled to keep going.
Tim looked at him, waiting, with the patient neutrality of someone who had learned not to expect much, but was still a bit hopeful anyways.
"What happened to you," Jason said carefully, "when you came in. The way Bruce —" He stopped again. His jaw moved. "That wasn't. That shouldn't have been…" He looked, for a moment, genuinely frustrated with his own language, with the gap between what he was trying to say and what he was finding. He exhaled through his nose. "You just came to help."
Tim was very still, not quite understanding what he was trying to say. "It was a long time ago," he tried quietly.
Jason seemed to read it on his face because he tried again.
"Yeah." His voice was rough. "But it's still —" He gestured vaguely in the air, unusually inarticulate for someone who was normally so precise. "Unresolved. You're still hurting and trying to justify the pain away. Like it needs justification." He looked at Tim directly, and his expression was unguarded in a way it hadn't been at any point in the evening. "It doesn't, Drake. You're allowed to be angry, or upset, and you don't have to just take it when someone's an asshole. Especially when that asshole is one of us."
Stillness settled between them.
Tim looked at him for a long moment, his expression doing something careful and complicated, like he was deciding whether to trust what he was seeing. He opened his mouth, closed it again.
"Thanks," he said finally, and cleared his throat, and left it at that.
The silence that followed sat differently from the ones before it. Jason shifted in his chair, restless, feet tapping an uneven rhythm against the floor, clearly unhappy to leave something where it had landed but not yet sure how to move it.
"And I'm sorry. For calling you Replacement all this time."
Tim turned his head away, blinking furiously to clear the stinging in his eyes.
"I'm not gonna pretend I didn't mean it," Jason continued, his voice gruff and slightly too controlled, picking each word with more care than he wanted to admit. "Especially at the start. I wanted it to hurt, because" He stopped, voice going slightly strained. "Because Bruce left me, and then he replaced me, and I was so fucking angry about it that I needed somewhere to put it. And you were there." His feet kept tapping against the floor. "And I'm not gonna lie and say I've completely let it go, either. I still think the whole thing was fucking stupid and handled badly and I'm still, you know" He exhaled. "But."
He seemed to run out of road there. His arms circled around him, a brief and uncharacteristic gesture of discomfort.
"Fuck, I'm no good at this." He said it almost to himself. Then he pushed through it. "But you weren't the issue. Even if you had tried to take Robin, I know you weren't. It still wouldn't have been your fault. You were just a kid, and you were trying to help. And I took everything I had with Bruce out on you instead.”
“And then later, when I should have said something - I didn't. And that was its own thing."
He took a bracing breath.
"I'm sorry, Tim."
The name landed heavily between them, meaning and intention clear.
Tim looked at him for a long moment. Something was happening in his expression that he wasn't managing to keep off his face. He had ended up receiving something he had, privately, given up on ever getting. He hadn't realised until this moment that he'd been waiting for it.
"I-" He stopped and tried again. "Thank you. For saying that." His voice was wobbly, slightly rough at the edges. "And for," He gestured vaguely at the space between them, at the whole of the night, at all of it. "This."
He didn't bother saying it was alright or that it didn't matter. He just sat, completely grateful, and enjoying the tectonic rearrangement of their relationship that had just taken place.
It was enough. It turned out that was exactly enough.
Jason nodded once, shortly, and turned back to continue cleaning up the files.
Tim followed his lead, turning to the console to save their progress before shutting it down. The screens went dark one by one, and the cave settled into the dim peripheral lighting that remained when the main systems were off, and both of them moved through the quiet business of packing up without speaking.
And when everything had been stowed and Jason was putting on his helmet, “Tim." Just the name, first. "I’ll see you Thursday for the next stage. And make sure to go eat something."
Tim looked at him, expression still careful, still processing, but beneath it loosened in a way it had not been for a long time.
"Thursday," he confirmed with a small smile.
Jason nodded once, and pulled his helmet on properly, starting his bike without another word.
Tim stood and watched him go, listening to the engine turn over and catch, then fade as it climbed the access road and disappeared into the city above.
He walked past the darkened console and the empty cave, and brought his hand to his chest, rubbing at the invisible weight that seemed to have lifted.
And went upstairs to find something to eat.