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Fixer-Uppers, Monday

Ender listened to radio every day, despite the large amount of mostly apocryphal information it provided. It wasn't in his nature to pass up on a source of information. As such, he'd managed to come to the conclusion something terrible had happened while Karla was gone.

And that she was grieving about something. He wasn't sure his presence would be the most comforting thing at the moment.

Still, it meant he was burying himself less in his work than he had been a few days ago. The sun was shining outside, which made it a little harder to dwell on anything, too. In the end, he might have even spent some time sitting on the steps of the store, looking up at the sky, and thinking.

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The fact that it was Ender's day at work, she thought, had terribly little to do with why Hinata found herself walking up towards the shop today.

It was a nice bonus, however.

"Good morning, Ender," she said easily, stopping a foot or two away from the steps he sat on. It was still morning, if getting rather close to noon.

Which meant lunch was due in about an hour or so, but Ender still had plenty of time. He greeted her with a friendly, if brief, smile. "Good morning, Hinata," he said, warmly. "What brings you here?"

"I could pretend it was just your company," she teased mildly. "But I am afraid I have work for you, if you do not mind."

... It was his job, Hinata. He had to do it anyway. Sigh.

"It's what I'm paid to do," Ender pointed out. He sounded a little amused. "Whether I mind or not isn't really part of the deal."

"Perhaps not," she admitted, flushing a little. "But I do hate to be a bother."

"What's the problematic appliance?" he said, refusing to even recognise that as an argument. "Or do you need something built? We'll need to head inside, either way."

It wasn't really an argument to her, more of a statement of fact.

"My MP3 player," she said, with a bit of a sigh as she pulled the offending appliance out of her pocket. "It stopped working. I've tried charging it, changing my headphones, letting it rest for several hours before trying it again."

It just... didn't want to work.

Ender held up his hand to take it. "They tend to be pretty fragile, at least in this day and age," he said. "I'll screw it open and see what I can do about it. It just stopped working on its own?" He pushed up to stand.

She handed it over to him, with a slight smile.

"Just on it's own--it wouldn't turn on yesterday morning, but it had been working fine the night before."

Of course, Hinata truly had money enough to buy another but--why waste the money?

He walked up the steps and into the shop, dragging his closed-up laptop with him in one hand. "Sometimes something just gives out," he said, "And needs to be replaced. Or it can just be a faulty wire."

She followed him, smiling a little.

"Have you worked on MP3 players before?"

"Not specifically," Ender admitted. "Back when Stark still owned this place, he had me working on material that was a lot more sophisticated. Rikku mostly leaves us to our own devices, but we don't actually see that much business."

"Too many mechanical geniuses around, I suppose," Hinata mused, then laughed a bit. "Otherwise I would be more surprised."

She glanced at him. "What do you tend to work on, if I might ask?"

"I did some work on a satellite for Stark," Ender said, as he headed into the workshop. He gave her a little nod to indicate it was fine if she followed. "Right now, I'm mostly just trying to upgrade a laptop, and research anything that might be useful for the colonisation efforts at home."

Well, that neatly diverted her from what he worked on.

"Is there much information to find about that?" Hinata asked curiously, her eyes taking in the shop. "Where would you start to look?"

Possibly a good thing, because the last thing he needed was yet another person joining the 'why are you obsessing about the Formics' brigade. Not that he thought she was likely to, but it was always nice to divert.

"I'm getting data in from the colonies every day," Ender explained. "I'm just trying to help the specialists there weed through some of the worst of it. Sometimes I run simulations here that their systems can't handle."

"Ahhh," she said, with a bob of her head. "So the colonies are already present, in some form and this is not a future possibility project."

"The colonies were taken from the enemy we beat back," Ender said. He was trying not to dip too deeply into fraught topics around Hinata. "We left some of our soldiers there to make a home for themselves while we make ourselves ready to join them. They're the ones taking the brunt of it all; a lot of them have died so far. Casualties of conquest."

Her nod that time was less light-hearted. There was little to be so about a topic like that and she'd managed to walk right into it.

Time, she thought, for a graceful, if it could be managed, alteration of the topic. Off the realities of the present and... into the past.

"The soldiers would have been aware that there was a chance of this happening," she offered, after a moment. "Unless the area was declared entirely safe prior...?"

"It wasn't," Ender said, shaking his head. He made note of the sudden change of topic, stored it away to be examined later. "Most of them are probably happy they got to have a chance to be alive for as long as they did. Their march into war was supposed to be a one-way trip."

"Then this," she said softly, "is just their trip coming to an end, a little later than they thought."

And wasn't that morbid?

"The casualties of conquest," Ender repeated, giving her a little smile. "It doesn't make it any less of a shame. But at least the remaining colonists are holding strong-- the illnesses that plague them won't be a problem for us by the time we get there."

Ben walked through the door with lunch in hand. "Ho, Ender," he said, grinning.

Ender's head came up from behind his laptop as it usually did. "Ho, Ben," he said, pushing himself away from the desk. "About time."

[[ *TACKLES* WB!! ]]

"New drugs?" she asked curiously. "Or immunity from having survived...?"

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Fixer-Uppers, Monday

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