Take-out containers, plates, forks, and his mostly empty beer are all gathered together and balanced on the stand, and Clark scoots back again. Nearer than before, slotting himself against Bruce in an automatic kind of way to share in looking at pictures of colourful tiny dinosaurs. He accepts the phone back into his own hand, scrolls through until he finds the YouTube compilation of 'parrots being cute' he'd saved, clearly the defense's final statement.

It's dumb, he knows, but he lets it play as background, paying it less attention than his Travelling Companion, the things he's saying to him.

"Dogs with jobs to do," he muses. Chattiness mellowed, quiet. "Funny you should say that, a horse is my back up alternative. You should introduce me."

All horses have names, even the ones terribly exploited for sport. They have the worst names, but they're names.

"We didn't keep any," he says, because while it is a hilarious aristocrat thing, groundkeepers and Th Horses, it's also not always, out in the Sunflower State. "But there's always been a dog. We had a hutch of rabbits for a while. One hamster. A cat that hung out if we put chicken on the patio for her, or him. Chickens, a goat, but they weren't, you know. Allowed in the house. I don't think I'm forgetting anyone."

Thinking, then, to Bruce looming in his living room, attending to a wiggly Shelby. Clark smiles, and says, "I bet animals like you."