One Republic - All the Right Moves
Title: Puppet Show
Pairing: Yamapi/Koyama
Rating: PG
Summary: AU (anti-cyberpunk?). Koyama isn’t nearly pragmatic enough for what he’s doing.
Notes: Many thanks to my beta!
The mask is hot and hard to breathe through, just like it had been at his first masquerade, but this time Koyama is grateful for it as he arrives at Yamapi’s place. It hides the pang of guilt he feels when Yamapi opens the door with a smile, mask in hand. He looks good in a tuxedo, as always.
“What, don’t I get a kiss before we go, Keisuke?” Yamapi asks.
Grimacing at the fake name and trying to keep his voice light and teasing, Koyama replies, “Patience is a virtue.”
In reality, they’ll probably never kiss again. After tonight, Koyama will have what he needs from Yamapi, and he thinks he might actually die of guilt if he stays.
Causing an accident could damage Yamapi’s nice-guy image, thereby hurting his acting career, so his mask stays off as they get in his car-Thought-Enhancement Chips don’t give their users x-ray vision, and the masks are limiting. At least, that’s the reason Koyama would have assumed before they started dating. Now he’s pretty sure Yamapi just genuinely doesn’t want to hurt anyone.
Either way, it lets Koyama spend the entire ride guiltily studying Yamapi’s face. Even after six months of dating, he has a hard time distinguishing when Yamapi is focused on his TEC and when he’s just spaced out.
It’s strange now to think that he’d chosen Yamapi in part because he didn’t think he could get attached to someone so coolly expressionless, and stranger still to think that a man known for hosting frequent masquerades really has no need for a physical mask.
Except around Koyama, who has unfortunately found Yamapi quite likeable.
He’s almost as relieved when Yamapi ties his mask on in the parking lot as he had been when he put on his own earlier, the creepy lack of facial features making it easier to pretend it’s someone else, not someone he’s using for his love of parties and connections to TEC service providers and politicians.
Koyama spends as much of the party avoiding Yamapi as he thinks he can afford. He wishes he could be anywhere but here, as his part in this whole thing was to get the band hired for this party. All he has left to do is to get Shige and Ryo back in tonight to remove the rest of their equipment.
Right now, it’s their turn to work. Koyama simply has to play dumb, which isn’t hard when his whole face is covered by a mask.
Once upon a time, Koyama had been enamored of these masquerade balls, where the wealthy gather with their TEC’s turned off to show off their ability to learn intricate sequence dances without the aid of computers. He’s since learned that, at least now, the majority of the participants are too afraid of embarrassing themselves to turn off the computers in their heads. The masks are just a way to hide the glazed expressions of people letting computers do their thinking for them.
And so they all go twirling around the room with perfect, precise steps guided by computers, decked out in finery from a variety of bygone European eras, with masks on their faces hiding their emotions, and all Koyama sees are robots. The idle chatter among them is the only evidence that they retain any humanity.
From time to time he passes Yamapi as they dance, but the unspoken rules keep the dance pairs male-female (ostensibly to keep up the medieval feel, more likely because the TEC dance programs get confused, otherwise). Tonight, it’s both a relief and a frustration-he feels like there’s something different about the way Yamapi carries himself in the dance, and it makes him curious. He’ll probably never know what it is.
Koyama is watching the band on a break from dancing when Yamapi finally tracks him down.
“They’re really good,” he says, nodding at the band.
Of course they are, Koyama thinks. Aside from Shige (who isn’t an actual member of the band but needed to be present), none rely on TEC to aid their music.
“It’s because they’re not perfect,” Koyama agrees, then winces. Way to make himself suspicious. He trails off. Yamapi looks at him, but the mask hides any emotion he might be feeling.
Yamapi fills the silence with, “The cellist is really passionate. That really does make a difference, doesn’t it?”
Surprised, Koyama turns to ask for clarification-Massu’s level of passion is something of a faux pas, these days-but a woman interrupts to ask Yamapi to dance.
He goes back to watching the band and thinks that “passionate” doesn’t even begin to describe Massu. Maybe Ryo, but when he watches Massu play, Koyama is always a little afraid his soul is going to fly out.
Tegoshi pauses to rest his violin on his knee and catches Koyama watching them. He grins and winks, and Koyama nods in response, laughing a little at how easily Tegoshi recognized him.
As the piece they’re playing draws to a close, Koyama realizes exactly which one it is.
A short woman in a yellow dress asks him to dance. She’s only wearing a columbina, leaving her mouth visible. Just from that he can tell who she is, an actress who’s been in dramas with Yamapi. He accepts with some trepidation, knowing exactly what’s going to happen thirty seconds after the dance starts.
He’s left his own TEC on so that he’ll notice when it happens, though he doesn’t really need it for this dance (he never had time to learn them all properly), because they deliberately chose a simpler one in the hopes of minimizing the utter chaos they know will ensue.
It starts off normally enough, dancers moving precisely in pairs and Koyama making small talk with his partner. But then, suddenly, there’s the faintest hint of a strange whining noise as the computers Shige and Ryo had set up the night before kick in, and everyone’s TEC’s shut off.
There’s a second where Koyama feels sheer relief at the buzzing in his head quieting, and then people start falling all over each other.
It isn’t quite as bad as they’d expected, which Koyama chalks up to muscle memory. Intriguingly, his own partner doesn’t react at all until another couple runs into them, and her voice sounds completely sincere when she asks the couple if something’s wrong.
A potential ally or a skilled actress? Koyama wishes he could ask.
Five seconds is all it takes for the computers to get all the information they need before they stop running interference. It takes a few more for the dancers to collect themselves, filling the room with awkward laughter while they snap back into position like marionettes.
Yamapi is staring at Koyama from across the room. Koyama notices and misses a step, and his partner laughs.
“What’s gotten into everyone today, I wonder?” She asks.
Koyama apologizes. “I got distracted.”
Yamapi says nothing of the incident on the way home, but his face is oddly blank. He kisses Koyama and invites him in for a drink, though Koyama has already told him he’s meeting up with “college friends” later.
“Sorry,” Koyama says, apologizing for a whole lot more than not sticking around. He moves in for one last kiss, almost starts crying when he has to pull away.
He goes home, changes, and takes a nap to pass the time.
At five in the morning, he picks up Ryo and Shige and drives back to the dance hall. They tell the guard at the parking lot gate that they forgot something, and he lets them in, saying, “The door’s unlocked. You’re not the only ones who forgot things.”
Koyama’s heart jumps to his throat. They need to do this without being seen.
He opens the door with more than a little trepidation to find Yamapi sitting propped against the stage with his eyes closed. Cleaning bots whir around the floor around him.
“Oh, Koyama,” He looks up as Koyama and the others walk in. “So it was you.”
Koyama blinks and tries to look confused. “Huh? No, these two just forgot some thi-“
He pauses. Yamapi just called him Koyama. “Wait, Koyama?!”
“It’s Koyama Keiichirou, right?” Fuck. “You realize you went to high school with my best friend, don’t you?”
Ryo curses behind him. Koyama rather agrees with the sentiment.
“But Akanishi-kun’s out of the country,” he protests, weakly.
“And? He asked for a picture.”
Koyama doesn’t know what to do. Yamapi is alone, but the unknowing bots have cleaned the floor of all the patches that had run interference, meaning they can’t stop him from sending a TEC SOS. And now he knows Koyama’s name to report to the police.
He gets up from the floor and walks toward Koyama. “What did you do?”
Ryo tenses like he’s about to attack, but Shige stops him. “Wait.”
“Just tell me what you did.” He’s right in front of Koyama now, making it hard for Koyama to avoid meeting his eyes. “I won’t call the cops if you’re not going to hurt anyone.”
“We’re not,” Koyama says. He sighs, “You’re better off not knowing.”
Yamapi glares. “That’s for me to decide.”
Shige opens his mouth, but Koyama cuts him off. Shige could explain it better, maybe, but Koyama’s the one who’s been lying to Yamapi.
“We hacked their TEC’s.” Koyama says. “Well, they did.”
All he did was seduce Yamapi.
“Why?”
“To get TEC service providers’ account logins. It’s a lot easier to hack a TEC than their servers.”
And hacking a TEC isn’t easy.
Yamapi’s face darkens. “And what are you going to do with that?”
“We’re just going to take the TEC’s down for two days.”
“Whose TEC’s?”
“Everyone’s,” Ryo answers.
Comprehension dawns on Yamapi’s face. “You’re anti-TEC.”
“We prefer to be called ‘humanists,’” Ryo is taking over the talking, but Yamapi doesn’t look away from Koyama. “But yeah.”
Yamapi says nothing for a while, and Koyama waits on tenterhooks. Someone as phobic of being bored as Yamapi isn’t a likely ally.
So he’s surprised when he just asks if Koyama needs to help Ryo and Shige, and when the answer is no, lets them get to work and drags him to the other side of the room to talk.
“How long have you known?” Koyama asks, leaning against the wall.
“Two months.”
Gaping, Koyama meets his eyes for the first time that morning. “Why didn’t you break up with me?”
“I like you,” he says, and Koyama winces. “And you seemed harmless enough.”
There’s a brief pause in which Koyama feels a fresh wave of guilt pour in.
It’s Yamapi who breaks the silence again. “So why just one day? If you’re anti-TEC, shouldn’t you want to do it for as long as you can?”
“We’re not really anti-TEC,” Koyama explains. “Not exactly. What people want to do in their own time is up to them, and it has its benefits.”
“What bothers us is that it’s required for most jobs. You’re not allowed to think on your own, even if you want to, because a TEC thinks faster. It has better analytical skills. So you’re wasting the company’s time if you try to think yourself. In the end, they hire you to sit around while your TEC works.”
That shouldn’t be news to anyone, but it’s hard to tell with Yamapi. Actors don’t suffer from this problem, as TEC-aided acting is the stuff of comedies.
“It’s really boring,” he continues. “Your brain gets all mushy and you stop feeling human after a while. And you can only chat with your friends and read blogs for so long before you run out of things to say and read.”
“Even you?” Yamapi smiles for a moment. Then he frowns and turns to rest his arms on the wall on either side of Koyama, leaving him no room to look away, and asks, “How much of it was a lie?”
“The name,” Koyama says. “That’s about it. And I wasn’t always a waiter. I had a desk job for a while.”
He stops. He’s about to confess to something that wasn’t a lie, or wouldn’t have been if he’d ever said it, but before he can get up the nerve, Yamapi kisses him.
Not sure what it means, he wraps his arms around Yamapi’s waist and kisses back hopefully.
“Does this mean you’re not breaking up with me?” he asks when Yamapi pulls away.
Yamapi hesitates. “I’m not sure yet.”
It’s more than Koyama thought he’d get. He tries to smile.
There’s a cough in the background, and they look up to find Ryo and Shige staring at them, looking unimpressed and uncomfortable, respectively.
“Are you done?” Ryo asks. “We need to get out of here.”
Oh, right. Koyama lets go of Yamapi and pulls himself away from the wall. A hand grabs his arm.
“Take me with you,” Yamapi says.
Koyama shares an uneasy look with Ryo and Shige.
Ryo speaks first. “He already knows enough to get us arrested, how much worse can it get?”
“A lot,” Shige says. “He could get Massu and Tegoshi arrested, too. And then we’d be stuck in prison with them.”
A look of horror crosses Ryo’s face, followed by an irritated one. “Screw that. If I’m going to jail, they better be going, too.”
Koyama smiles.
“But you do realize,” Shige looks at Yamapi, “that if you get involved, you could end up in prison, too?”
“Or it could cause a scandal,” Koyama adds.
None of this dissuades Yamapi, so they let him tag along to Tegoshi’s place. They don’t ask why he’s so interested, but Koyama figures it doesn’t really matter. Stranger things have happened. Like Tegoshi, he thinks, as Tegoshi lets them in, so caught up in doing something on the Internet with his TEC that he doesn’t even notice the extra person until ten minutes later.
He spends the time while Massu cooks breakfast and everyone else works telling Yamapi how they formed as a group and as much as he knows about why three people good enough at hacking to do this would even want to do it. He also talks about how relieved he felt, the first time he shut off his TEC after months of using it endlessly for work, how he realized it had even been affecting his opinions.
In order to get the kind of complete shutdown they want, Ryo has told Koyama, every TEC in the country has to be infected with a time-bomb virus so that it can’t continue to do offline processes when its network connection goes down. The work involved in getting this virus distributed takes quite a while, so the actual shutdown doesn’t happen until weeks later.
They start in the morning, at the beginning of the usual workday. Koyama throws alibis to the wind and takes a few days off to take a road trip with Yamapi, hoping the trip will distract him enough to give the silence a chance.
Pairing: Yamapi/Koyama
Rating: PG
Summary: AU (anti-cyberpunk?). Koyama isn’t nearly pragmatic enough for what he’s doing.
Notes: Many thanks to my beta!
Click to viewThe mask is hot and hard to breathe through, just like it had been at his first masquerade, but this time Koyama is grateful for it as he arrives at Yamapi’s place. It hides the pang of guilt he feels when Yamapi opens the door with a smile, mask in hand. He looks good in a tuxedo, as always.
“What, don’t I get a kiss before we go, Keisuke?” Yamapi asks.
Grimacing at the fake name and trying to keep his voice light and teasing, Koyama replies, “Patience is a virtue.”
In reality, they’ll probably never kiss again. After tonight, Koyama will have what he needs from Yamapi, and he thinks he might actually die of guilt if he stays.
Causing an accident could damage Yamapi’s nice-guy image, thereby hurting his acting career, so his mask stays off as they get in his car-Thought-Enhancement Chips don’t give their users x-ray vision, and the masks are limiting. At least, that’s the reason Koyama would have assumed before they started dating. Now he’s pretty sure Yamapi just genuinely doesn’t want to hurt anyone.
Either way, it lets Koyama spend the entire ride guiltily studying Yamapi’s face. Even after six months of dating, he has a hard time distinguishing when Yamapi is focused on his TEC and when he’s just spaced out.
It’s strange now to think that he’d chosen Yamapi in part because he didn’t think he could get attached to someone so coolly expressionless, and stranger still to think that a man known for hosting frequent masquerades really has no need for a physical mask.
Except around Koyama, who has unfortunately found Yamapi quite likeable.
He’s almost as relieved when Yamapi ties his mask on in the parking lot as he had been when he put on his own earlier, the creepy lack of facial features making it easier to pretend it’s someone else, not someone he’s using for his love of parties and connections to TEC service providers and politicians.
Koyama spends as much of the party avoiding Yamapi as he thinks he can afford. He wishes he could be anywhere but here, as his part in this whole thing was to get the band hired for this party. All he has left to do is to get Shige and Ryo back in tonight to remove the rest of their equipment.
Right now, it’s their turn to work. Koyama simply has to play dumb, which isn’t hard when his whole face is covered by a mask.
Once upon a time, Koyama had been enamored of these masquerade balls, where the wealthy gather with their TEC’s turned off to show off their ability to learn intricate sequence dances without the aid of computers. He’s since learned that, at least now, the majority of the participants are too afraid of embarrassing themselves to turn off the computers in their heads. The masks are just a way to hide the glazed expressions of people letting computers do their thinking for them.
And so they all go twirling around the room with perfect, precise steps guided by computers, decked out in finery from a variety of bygone European eras, with masks on their faces hiding their emotions, and all Koyama sees are robots. The idle chatter among them is the only evidence that they retain any humanity.
From time to time he passes Yamapi as they dance, but the unspoken rules keep the dance pairs male-female (ostensibly to keep up the medieval feel, more likely because the TEC dance programs get confused, otherwise). Tonight, it’s both a relief and a frustration-he feels like there’s something different about the way Yamapi carries himself in the dance, and it makes him curious. He’ll probably never know what it is.
Koyama is watching the band on a break from dancing when Yamapi finally tracks him down.
“They’re really good,” he says, nodding at the band.
Of course they are, Koyama thinks. Aside from Shige (who isn’t an actual member of the band but needed to be present), none rely on TEC to aid their music.
“It’s because they’re not perfect,” Koyama agrees, then winces. Way to make himself suspicious. He trails off. Yamapi looks at him, but the mask hides any emotion he might be feeling.
Yamapi fills the silence with, “The cellist is really passionate. That really does make a difference, doesn’t it?”
Surprised, Koyama turns to ask for clarification-Massu’s level of passion is something of a faux pas, these days-but a woman interrupts to ask Yamapi to dance.
He goes back to watching the band and thinks that “passionate” doesn’t even begin to describe Massu. Maybe Ryo, but when he watches Massu play, Koyama is always a little afraid his soul is going to fly out.
Tegoshi pauses to rest his violin on his knee and catches Koyama watching them. He grins and winks, and Koyama nods in response, laughing a little at how easily Tegoshi recognized him.
As the piece they’re playing draws to a close, Koyama realizes exactly which one it is.
A short woman in a yellow dress asks him to dance. She’s only wearing a columbina, leaving her mouth visible. Just from that he can tell who she is, an actress who’s been in dramas with Yamapi. He accepts with some trepidation, knowing exactly what’s going to happen thirty seconds after the dance starts.
He’s left his own TEC on so that he’ll notice when it happens, though he doesn’t really need it for this dance (he never had time to learn them all properly), because they deliberately chose a simpler one in the hopes of minimizing the utter chaos they know will ensue.
It starts off normally enough, dancers moving precisely in pairs and Koyama making small talk with his partner. But then, suddenly, there’s the faintest hint of a strange whining noise as the computers Shige and Ryo had set up the night before kick in, and everyone’s TEC’s shut off.
There’s a second where Koyama feels sheer relief at the buzzing in his head quieting, and then people start falling all over each other.
It isn’t quite as bad as they’d expected, which Koyama chalks up to muscle memory. Intriguingly, his own partner doesn’t react at all until another couple runs into them, and her voice sounds completely sincere when she asks the couple if something’s wrong.
A potential ally or a skilled actress? Koyama wishes he could ask.
Five seconds is all it takes for the computers to get all the information they need before they stop running interference. It takes a few more for the dancers to collect themselves, filling the room with awkward laughter while they snap back into position like marionettes.
Yamapi is staring at Koyama from across the room. Koyama notices and misses a step, and his partner laughs.
“What’s gotten into everyone today, I wonder?” She asks.
Koyama apologizes. “I got distracted.”
Yamapi says nothing of the incident on the way home, but his face is oddly blank. He kisses Koyama and invites him in for a drink, though Koyama has already told him he’s meeting up with “college friends” later.
“Sorry,” Koyama says, apologizing for a whole lot more than not sticking around. He moves in for one last kiss, almost starts crying when he has to pull away.
He goes home, changes, and takes a nap to pass the time.
At five in the morning, he picks up Ryo and Shige and drives back to the dance hall. They tell the guard at the parking lot gate that they forgot something, and he lets them in, saying, “The door’s unlocked. You’re not the only ones who forgot things.”
Koyama’s heart jumps to his throat. They need to do this without being seen.
He opens the door with more than a little trepidation to find Yamapi sitting propped against the stage with his eyes closed. Cleaning bots whir around the floor around him.
“Oh, Koyama,” He looks up as Koyama and the others walk in. “So it was you.”
Koyama blinks and tries to look confused. “Huh? No, these two just forgot some thi-“
He pauses. Yamapi just called him Koyama. “Wait, Koyama?!”
“It’s Koyama Keiichirou, right?” Fuck. “You realize you went to high school with my best friend, don’t you?”
Ryo curses behind him. Koyama rather agrees with the sentiment.
“But Akanishi-kun’s out of the country,” he protests, weakly.
“And? He asked for a picture.”
Koyama doesn’t know what to do. Yamapi is alone, but the unknowing bots have cleaned the floor of all the patches that had run interference, meaning they can’t stop him from sending a TEC SOS. And now he knows Koyama’s name to report to the police.
He gets up from the floor and walks toward Koyama. “What did you do?”
Ryo tenses like he’s about to attack, but Shige stops him. “Wait.”
“Just tell me what you did.” He’s right in front of Koyama now, making it hard for Koyama to avoid meeting his eyes. “I won’t call the cops if you’re not going to hurt anyone.”
“We’re not,” Koyama says. He sighs, “You’re better off not knowing.”
Yamapi glares. “That’s for me to decide.”
Shige opens his mouth, but Koyama cuts him off. Shige could explain it better, maybe, but Koyama’s the one who’s been lying to Yamapi.
“We hacked their TEC’s.” Koyama says. “Well, they did.”
All he did was seduce Yamapi.
“Why?”
“To get TEC service providers’ account logins. It’s a lot easier to hack a TEC than their servers.”
And hacking a TEC isn’t easy.
Yamapi’s face darkens. “And what are you going to do with that?”
“We’re just going to take the TEC’s down for two days.”
“Whose TEC’s?”
“Everyone’s,” Ryo answers.
Comprehension dawns on Yamapi’s face. “You’re anti-TEC.”
“We prefer to be called ‘humanists,’” Ryo is taking over the talking, but Yamapi doesn’t look away from Koyama. “But yeah.”
Yamapi says nothing for a while, and Koyama waits on tenterhooks. Someone as phobic of being bored as Yamapi isn’t a likely ally.
So he’s surprised when he just asks if Koyama needs to help Ryo and Shige, and when the answer is no, lets them get to work and drags him to the other side of the room to talk.
“How long have you known?” Koyama asks, leaning against the wall.
“Two months.”
Gaping, Koyama meets his eyes for the first time that morning. “Why didn’t you break up with me?”
“I like you,” he says, and Koyama winces. “And you seemed harmless enough.”
There’s a brief pause in which Koyama feels a fresh wave of guilt pour in.
It’s Yamapi who breaks the silence again. “So why just one day? If you’re anti-TEC, shouldn’t you want to do it for as long as you can?”
“We’re not really anti-TEC,” Koyama explains. “Not exactly. What people want to do in their own time is up to them, and it has its benefits.”
“What bothers us is that it’s required for most jobs. You’re not allowed to think on your own, even if you want to, because a TEC thinks faster. It has better analytical skills. So you’re wasting the company’s time if you try to think yourself. In the end, they hire you to sit around while your TEC works.”
That shouldn’t be news to anyone, but it’s hard to tell with Yamapi. Actors don’t suffer from this problem, as TEC-aided acting is the stuff of comedies.
“It’s really boring,” he continues. “Your brain gets all mushy and you stop feeling human after a while. And you can only chat with your friends and read blogs for so long before you run out of things to say and read.”
“Even you?” Yamapi smiles for a moment. Then he frowns and turns to rest his arms on the wall on either side of Koyama, leaving him no room to look away, and asks, “How much of it was a lie?”
“The name,” Koyama says. “That’s about it. And I wasn’t always a waiter. I had a desk job for a while.”
He stops. He’s about to confess to something that wasn’t a lie, or wouldn’t have been if he’d ever said it, but before he can get up the nerve, Yamapi kisses him.
Not sure what it means, he wraps his arms around Yamapi’s waist and kisses back hopefully.
“Does this mean you’re not breaking up with me?” he asks when Yamapi pulls away.
Yamapi hesitates. “I’m not sure yet.”
It’s more than Koyama thought he’d get. He tries to smile.
There’s a cough in the background, and they look up to find Ryo and Shige staring at them, looking unimpressed and uncomfortable, respectively.
“Are you done?” Ryo asks. “We need to get out of here.”
Oh, right. Koyama lets go of Yamapi and pulls himself away from the wall. A hand grabs his arm.
“Take me with you,” Yamapi says.
Koyama shares an uneasy look with Ryo and Shige.
Ryo speaks first. “He already knows enough to get us arrested, how much worse can it get?”
“A lot,” Shige says. “He could get Massu and Tegoshi arrested, too. And then we’d be stuck in prison with them.”
A look of horror crosses Ryo’s face, followed by an irritated one. “Screw that. If I’m going to jail, they better be going, too.”
Koyama smiles.
“But you do realize,” Shige looks at Yamapi, “that if you get involved, you could end up in prison, too?”
“Or it could cause a scandal,” Koyama adds.
None of this dissuades Yamapi, so they let him tag along to Tegoshi’s place. They don’t ask why he’s so interested, but Koyama figures it doesn’t really matter. Stranger things have happened. Like Tegoshi, he thinks, as Tegoshi lets them in, so caught up in doing something on the Internet with his TEC that he doesn’t even notice the extra person until ten minutes later.
He spends the time while Massu cooks breakfast and everyone else works telling Yamapi how they formed as a group and as much as he knows about why three people good enough at hacking to do this would even want to do it. He also talks about how relieved he felt, the first time he shut off his TEC after months of using it endlessly for work, how he realized it had even been affecting his opinions.
In order to get the kind of complete shutdown they want, Ryo has told Koyama, every TEC in the country has to be infected with a time-bomb virus so that it can’t continue to do offline processes when its network connection goes down. The work involved in getting this virus distributed takes quite a while, so the actual shutdown doesn’t happen until weeks later.
They start in the morning, at the beginning of the usual workday. Koyama throws alibis to the wind and takes a few days off to take a road trip with Yamapi, hoping the trip will distract him enough to give the silence a chance.