if she sees you, it changes you | dash

germany | february 2004

Neville had never quite gotten the hang of traveling by portkey. He much preferred more traditional methods. Even muggle transport was appealing to him in all of its terrifying glory. When he landed on the wet grass on the outskirts of the city somewhere in Germany, he paused to catch his breath that had caught somewhere in his chest. Distractedly, he ran his fumbling fingers over the compass before placing it back in the hollow of the tree, hiding it again with a flick of his wand just as Bancroft had described to him over and over again.

He took one last look over his shoulder to make sure it appeared untouched before venturing toward to city center just out of focus in his blurred vision.

It was the first time that Bancroft had entrusted in Neville moving product across country lines. And it wasn't just any product, either— Mel was rare honey from the suckle of a plant Bancroft himself had manufactured. At present being used in the healing of creatures mostly, its unique properties ideal for harmless sedation. On the particular journey he found himself on, Neville was bringing the set of vials to someone the man spoke only uncharacteristically highly of.

Arden Dasher was a familiar name in the last year. Bancroft's youngest son had allegedly briefly dated the woman who worked in the healing field, and it was no secret that he held something of a soft spot for her. The man was always spouting off when Charles was around about how he had lost a good one. Something about meeting her after knowing all of that was unsettling.

Neville took deliberate steps up the set of stairs to the door, number 8 as Bancroft included multiple times, in bold, in his scribbles. Hastily, he shoved the parchment into his front pocket. He knew was he was doing. He could handle it. Neville wasn't entirely sure if he was trying to prove that more to himself or to Bancroft. Carefully, he pulled back the door knocker and hit it three times against the door, listening as footsteps eventually approached.

"Hi, I—" Immediately he was taken aback.

@Arden Dasher

The knock at the door was a shock, though it shouldn’t have been. His timing was atrocious. God, why did it have to be today? The scene before her was a little terrifying, and the idea of someone walking in and looking at what she was looking at, without context, was mildly alarming. But other people’s comfort didn’t matter so much at this exact moment. She tried to brush some hair back from her face with the back of her hand.

“Just a second!” Dash’s voice echoed out from the bathroom, and she came stumbling out of there a moment later, loose olive-coloured linen dungarees covered in thick, opalescent slime, tainted red with a little blood. She ducked under a hanging plant – one of many in the room – and glanced down at her dripping hands, wincing a fraction of a second later at the sound of something in the bathroom being knocked off of a shelf. She tried to wipe a bit off it off on the sides of her thighs, but it was no use – it was just everywhere. It didn’t matter either, though. Being clean was the least of her worries. With some difficulty, the brunette pulled the door open, ready to hurry the person inside.

“Hey, sorry – Oh!” She didn’t recognise him, and was momentarily confused. “Uh, did Bancroft…? Come in, come in.” Dash stepped away, waving him in with one hand. There was a glassy smash from the bathroom. “I’m sorry, I’m just in the middle of something… If you could wait one – Or actually, could you do me a massive favour? My wand is just up there, could you grab it for me?” Dash gestured with one hand to the loft area where her bed was. He’d have to climb up, but she just wasn’t sure if she could do it, covered in slime and all. “Sorry, it’s just – â€œ she held up her hands and, as if to demonstrate the point, a little slime slopped off and landed on the floor. “ – Ladder,” she finished.

“Sorry, I’m being so rude,” she apologised again, stepping back, shutting the door behind him quickly, “It’s just a bit of an emergency.”

"Bancroft, right, he—" Neville began hurriedly before Arden swiftly came to the conclusion on her own. He had never been much of a fast talker, but the weight of his tongue seemed to double when he was caught off guard. And Merlin, had he been caught off guard. His eyes were wide as they flicked from the slime dripping to her hands to the leg of her dungarees that appeared to be marred by blood.

He'd been so distracted by it all that he hardly realized the door closing behind him.

"Are you alright?" He couldn't just not ask, not with the look he was certain was currently plastered on his face. "Sure, of course," As usual, Neville had blindly accepted the task without properly assessing. It wasn't until he eventually tore his gaze from Arden that he realized where she had gestured— a set of stairs leading up to a loft, what could possibly go wrong?

Neville gave one last look at her hands that were dripping with some sort of clear mucus before turning to the staircase. He hesitated slightly, shuffling the wet from his boots (should he have taken them off, he wasn't sure, but no time to waste) and then once more at the base of the stairs. "Oh," He said more to himself than to her before delicately placing the vials on the nearest safe looking surface.

Whatever Bancroft had in store for him if he were to drop those would be a far worse fate.

Miraculously he made it all the way up to the loft without any major mishaps, but then a new trial faced him. "Sorry is it just—?" Neville stood upright from where he had misjudged the height and had been crouching. In front of him was her bed, and all of her personal things. Even in an emergency situation, he wasn't close to comfortable with rummaging. He looked back over the railing, concern evident.

“Oh – I’m fine," she replied, a smile making quick appearance as she realised suddenly how she must look. “No, the blood’s not mine. Neither is the slime, mind you," she added. She watched him take the first rung and went quickly to the cupboard by the front door. Dash managed get into her heating system settings switchboard and, with some effort, she turned off the house heating with an elbow. The last thing she needed was to get slime all over it and have to warm herself with spells while she waited for some maintenance wizard to come and fix it.

“I’m a magizoologist, I don’t know if Bancroft would’ve mentioned...?” Her place wasn’t very large, so her voice carried up. She closed the cupboard’s door with her foot, then nearly slipped over as she stepped back. Catching herself, Dash looked at the wooden floorboards underfoot; she seemed to have dripped quite a bit. She tried to brush some more hair out of her face with the back of her hand, but it wasn’t very successful. “So, uh, sometimes people come to me with stuff, I work at the university here.”

Her mind was a little scattered, and she mentally listed what she needed to do. Wand first, obviously. She needed to freeze the water. Then she needed to get a note out to someone more knowledgeable than she was. Then she could finish processing this delivery. Dash moved back to the bottom of the ladder, looking up and trying not to feel too impatient. “Should be beside the bed,” she called. She hoped he wasn't in too much of a rush.

His timing had been terrible, but also probably good: she could use his help. She felt a little bad for the man who’d showed up to deliver something and had instead been greeted by a woman covered in slime and blood, who proceeded to order him up to her bedroom. But her thoughts were mostly with the creature in her bathroom. How scared that little thing must be. How stressed. ”Anyway, the short story is that someone brought me this big, damaged, unidentifiable egg last night? And I was going to take it into the University tomorrow – we’re licensed to deal with most kinds of things. But it just hatched in my bathtub.”

Neville was vaguely aware of the words from below as they carried up to the loft— something about being a magizoologist. Even with the luxury that the open-air layout had afforded him, he was too distracted by his own intrusion of her personal space to have fully registered. Besides, Bancroft spoke enough about her that he figured he might have had the gist of it. "Right, right," He agreed without thought, offering a nod.

Her wand was beside the bed. Of course it was beside her bed. After a steadying breath, Neville shuffled around a towel, being careful to not bump into one of the hanging plants, and finally inspected the area. His brow had pulled together in thought, verging on concerned. No matter which way he cut it, the intrusion was palpable.

Eventually, he spotted it laying in plain sight. "Ah," Neville snapped it from the bedside table and quickly retreated. "Got it," He held it over the barrier with a satisfied grin. As he made his way down the ladder (albeit more slowly than the ascension) what she said finally sunk in. "You're joking?" It had hatched, in her bath? He glanced around the area to the only viable door to where the mystery creature was wreaking havoc, his eyes wider than before.

Once safely on ground level, he held out her wand to her. "Can I help?" The answer quite obviously was a yes.

She felt like he was taking his time, and she did her best not to bounce impatiently on her feet as she waited for him to rifle around up there. It occurred to her that she hadn’t really tidied up, and that the man seemed to have a touch of that same stuffy very-English sort of properness that would make it difficult to intrude. She understood — she and her whole family had it too, that aversion to overstepping — but what he didn’t understand was that he needed to hurry up. She’d apologise for it later, of course.

“I thought it was a sea serpent of some kind at first,” she told him as he came down the ladder. She held her hand out for her wand, then headed towards the bathroom. “Cheers! – But now I think it might be a type of wyvern; I might need to call on a dragonologist…”

The studio was pretty small, and there were only a couple of spaces to sit: writing desk by the window (covered in parchment), couch (comfy, low to the ground). No dining table or anything, obviously, and her bed was up a ladder. The bathroom was bigger than it ought to have been, by standard ratio, and the bath itself was large and on the luxurious side, as if she didn’t get enough time in the water at work and needed somewhere to be submerged at home, too.

“Watch the glass,” she warned, stepping into the bathroom. He was wearing shoes, at least, she thought. Usually it was a pretty serene space: there was a mirror over a sink on one side, large bathtub beside a window, and a small seperate shower. A set of wooden shelves rested on the opposite wall; it was lined with glass jars containing the leafy stems of plants she was trying to propagate.

It was not serene today. Several glass jars had fallen and smashed on the floor, and both the bathtub (full with water) and the floor were covered in the same slimy stuff Dash had all over her. The least serene thing, however, was the creature that had gotten itself mostly up onto the side of the bath, and was seemingly trying to burrow into the tiles on the wall. “See look at those little claws,” Dash said, her tone a mixture of concern and affection, showing no worry for the state of the room.

It certainly looked how one might imagine a sea serpent baby to look: it more or less resembled a fairly large, slightly fatter-than-normal snake. It had smooth, black, slightly iridescent scales, a serpentine kind of head and a long tail. Just visible though, even with the writhing, were two back legs, curled up against its body.

Not bothering to explain, Dash pointed her wand at the water in the bath, and uttered an incantation under her breath. Slowly, the water froze from the center outward. She’d turned the heating off in the house, and there was a difference already — that, plus the ice made the room quite cold. She took a step forward and the creature turned its head to hiss at her; Dash instinctively held a hand up in front of Neville’s chest to stop him, or protect him, or something.

“C’mon,” she said, focussed, taking another slow step forward. The creature moved to face her and slipped with a loud squawk from the side of the bath onto the ice block she’d created. She held her breath for a moment, but a second later, it was burrowing its way down into the ice. Dash exhaled slowly, watching it go with some relief. “Easier than I thought.” After a beat, Dash glanced down at her hands and cleaned each of them with her hands, vanishing the gunk. Her clothes might be a bit trickier. “Um,” she said, remembering the delivery guy was there, beside her. “Could you light a fire for me? There’s a wood stove in the kitchenette. So sorry about all of this!”

It only took a few paces to get to the bathroom— his gait was long and her home was small. Even still, he was too distracted by the commotion in the bath to have noticed either of those things, let alone dwell on how strange the whole encounter had been. He'd gone from her bed to her bathroom without even having introduced himself. Shit. Neville's mouth popped open to do so just as Arden warned of the broken glass at their feet.

"Oh..." He thought out loud, sidestepping over the shards, pulling his own wand from inside his coat. Slowly, the broken pieces floated together and gathered in the corner of the room and out of their path. They could deal with fixing them properly once the problem in the bath was addressed. And, Merlin did it look like a problem?

Neville's brow furrowed worriedly as the creature tried to bury itself in the tiles, though he felt a sense of calm when Arden spoke up. The look on her face that he had noticed after a furtive glance, somewhere between unease and sentiment, was soothing. "She's beautiful," He had followed to where Dash had indicated, but he was distracted by the way that the iridescent scales shone under the light of the bathroom with every movement to notice any claws.

He also hadn't realized the tentative steps he'd taken forward to watch as she placed her wand to the water to steady it in ice. "Merlin—" Neville stumbled back easily at the touch to his chest and jolt of movement from the creature as it burrowed. "Will she be alright in there?" A shiver moved up his spine in the cooler air at the mention of fire though he stayed watching intently as Dash vanished the work from her hands.

"Erm, yeah— I can, yeah," Neville agreed as he spun on his heels toward the door, slipping on the oily slime that coated the surface of the floor. Thankfully, it was only a mishap and not a full fall, and while he was sure she had noticed, he moved along all the same toward the kitchenette where the standalone fire oven was pressed against the wall. He crouched down to open the squeaky door and inspect the inside.

"I'm Neville, by the way," A smooth introduction. "I work with Bancroft," As if that wasn't obvious. Neville was thankful his back was to her as he held his wand to the bottom of the oven, a slow burn quietly following, his face already hot.

Beautiful was right.

“Hope so,” Dash said to the next part, distracted still. “Once it hatched I thought it might be some kind of ice wyvern — they bury their eggs in glaciers, so I figured it’d be more comfortable in the cold? But the egg was already damaged, so. I hope it’ll be okay.” Her gaze lingered on the ice as Neville left the room; she caught him slip out of the corner of her eye and couldn’t help a small half-smile. Moving forward, just to make sure the creature wasn’t in any obvious distress, Dash pushed messy brown hair back from her face. Things were much calmer now in here, but, like she’d said, she wasn’t sure how long the creature would be okay for. Damaged eggs — not cracked, but damaged — were a bad sign for survivability.

So she should probably hurry up.

Dash pocketed her wand and headed back out into the apartment. “Right, sorry” she said, glancing at where he was kneeling as she headed over to her desk. “Actually, I think I kinda recognise you from school. Gryffindor?” The brunette picked up a bit of parchment, then dipped a quill in a pot of ink. She was ninety percent sure he was the kid from her fourth year who’d gotten like ten extra points, or something, pushing Gryffindor past Slytherin for the house cup. Some of her friends had been fans purely for the blatant anti-Slytherin sentiment Dumbledore had seemed to express through those extra few points.

She wrote a quick note, then moved over to crouch at the little wood stove, gathering a little pinch of floo from a pouch hanging on the wall nearby on her way. She held the parchment in her mouth for a second while she opened the metal door, then tossed the the powder into the fire. “Office two-oh-seven, block C, Cernunnos Institute of Magizoological Studies,” she said, plucking the note from between her lips. Carefully, she placed her hand in the now-green fire, hand delivering the note herself. She pulled back and straightened up with a sigh, leaving the little door half open.

There was a quiet beat, then she turned to Neville, an apologetic expression on her face as she finally let herself relax a little. “I’m so sorry for all of that,” she said again, shaking her head. An easy smile crept its way onto her expression, then a light laugh. “Not the easy hand-off you were probably expecting.” Dash glanced at her hand, which was newly clean-ish. She held it out to shake. “I’m Dash. Well, Arden — but my friends call me Dash.”

The greens in Neville's eyes burst with the flame as Arden sent off her letter to Cernunnos. The name and address were familiar. He had been urging Bancroft to engage more with the healing and magizoological institutes to get his product in the right hands. The financial benefit was a positive, of course, but more than anything Neville wanted to help in actually making a difference. Bancroft was a genius— a stubborn one, of course, but a genius no less— and to not put all of his work and research to practice was borderline criminal.

After a moment, he stood up from where they had been crouched around the fire. Arden had been markedly more graceful in her movement. "It's alright, really—" Neville began at the inference of an apology. It was in his very blood to try and alleviate the problems of others before they came to actually be.

"Gryffindor, yeah," His face had involuntarily flushed and Neville shrugged off his coat that had at once felt more suffocating than just before. "Do you mind?" He held it tentatively over the back of one of her mismatched chairs before gingerly folding it over itself and laying it down.

"Arden, right, Bancroft's mentioned," More than once, he thought with a grin. Neville carried on distractedly. It seemed that the scatter-brained nature of his mentor had rubbed off on him. "Charles and that—" Immediately, he regretted the slip of the tongue that felt like an invasion the moment it left his mouth. Thankfully, it was then that he remembered why he had been there in the first place. His face lit up. "Actually, I might be able to help," More than just cleaning up glass and making a fire, anyway.

Neville conjured the vials of Mel he'd brought and cradled them carefully. "Good for sedation," He offered, glancing back to the bathroom. It wasn't just good for sedation, it was the best in the market without a shadow of a doubt. "If she, y'know—" Neville waved a hand in a quiet demonstration that he hoped might allude to the creature's outburst from before. "...acts up again,." A grin pulled at the corner of his mouth. "Just mix in with a bit of boiling water and chamomile essence," A surprisingly simple method.

Dash waved away the question of his coat on the back of her couch.

“Has he?” she asked, mildly amused as she leaned against the wall, arms crossed. She’d gotten the feeling that Bancroft had liked her from the beginning, and that that wasn’t usual for the man. Of course she liked him, too. Understood the old guy, somehow, she thought. Just then, something shot out of her little wood stove with an ashy puff!, landing on the floor in front of it. Dash straightened up and summoned it with her wand absentmindedly, nodding along to Neville’s words. “Yeah, he’s a good guy,” Dash said with an easy smile, leaving it a touch unclear as to whether she was speaking about her ex or his dad. She skimmed the note quickly.

“Oh?” Dash raised her eyebrows, pocketing the bit of parchment in a slimy pocket as she glanced up at him. “Oh!” she repeated, more interested this time. “Yeah, I had heaps of questions before this whole thing… Is it that?” she asked after a moment. He was smiling now, looking a little less out of place, and she had a strong gut-instinct that she could trust him. But people weren’t always knowledgeable just because they seemed easy to trust, she thought. She smiled back regardless, thinking acts up was a pretty amusing understatement.

“I actually do have some questions about potency, and a few other things,” she said, holding up her hands, half in apology. “Did you wanna sit for a bit?” she gestured at the couches facing the large window in the middle of the room. “No worries if you’re busy, but I promise I wont keep you too long — someone’s gonna be here in fifteen or twenty.” She glanced at her bathroom door again, where things seemed well for now. She’d made sure to leave it open just a little.

The note that had come through her little wood stove had been from the dragonologist she’d sent a message to moments ago. “Honestly, I’m probably gonna have a cider if you’d like one? Or, a tea?”

Neville's brow furrowed in thought.

Bancroft, a good guy? He was many things, but a good guy wasn't the immediate thing that sprung to mind. At least, Neville assumed so for others. It took people a bit of time to unpack and understand the man's layers to get to a point that they might consider him that. For Neville, it happened more swiftly. The stubborn, hard-to-please attitude felt a bit like home in a way that was both strange and familiar.

"It is, yeah," He was particularly careful with the vial as he held it up between them. The golden flecks sparkled spectacularly even under ordinary lighting in a subtle mesmerizing way. For a moment he was transfixed, then his gaze flicked back to Arden, who, thankfully, seemed just as intrigued.

"Of course, I've got a whole manual—" Neville glanced to his coat where he hoped the aforementioned parchment was tucked tidily in his pocket as planned. If his track record was any indication, though, he might be out of luck. "Easier to explain it," He decided for them, clasping his hands together in some attempt to steady himself. At the mention of sticking around, he breathed a quiet breath of relief. No need for a manual.

"A tea would be lovely," Neville glanced to the seating arrangments and weighed his options— a couch with two cushions and an armchair otherwise occupied with what looked like a sea of coats. "Actually— a cider, maybe, why not?" The question was as much to himself as it was to Arden. He watched for a moment as she made her way to the kitchen before taking a careful seat. He ran his hands over the creases of his slacks distractedly, briefly checking his flannel for any remnants from the greenhouse.

The little vial, shiny flecks of gold catching the light, reminded her of Felix Felicis, which was appropriate, she thought, because that, too cost an arm and a leg. Because she was technically buying for the university though, and because Bancroft liked her, she’d managed to snag a decent discount. For someone who’d only gotten three NEWTs (one of them being in divination, for Merlin’s sake), she sure spent a lot of time writing grant applications for her research.

Her eyebrows raised slightly at manual, but she nodded when he said it’d be easier to explain it. So he was staying then. Cool. “Tea it is,” Dash said with a nod, giving another relaxed gesture towards the seats as she went around the corner to the kitchenette. “Cider it is!” she amended in response to his words. The woman grabbed two glass bottles, taking the brief moment to calm down a little. She knew she’d been incredibly distracted the whole time he’d been here, but there’d been a good reason for that. “So it’s primarily a sedative, correct?” she asked, coming back a touch more serene than when she’d left, handing him a bottle, then placing hers down beside the couch. “I’ll just be two seconds,” she said, gesturing vaguely at her clothes.

She made sure to glance into the bathroom on her way past, but it seemed very quiet now. “Keep talking though, I can hear you,” she added, leaving the sitting area to climb up to her “bedroom”. She drew some linen curtains across — not that he could see in from where he was sitting — and got changed quickly into something a little warmer and less slimy. She descended the ladder in trackpants and a soft, long-sleeved top, skipping to the seat across from him and pulling her legs up onto the couch to curl under her, drink back in hand again.

"That's right, a sedative," Neville replied, eager to get into the nuts and bolts of the properties the plant housed. As Arden handed over the cider, he took it appreciatively with both hands, a thumb out of instinct running over the label but stopping short of picking at it— a habit that Augusta had often chastised. "Thanks," Just as he opened his mouth to continue, she was gesturing to her clothes, excusing herself.

It took Neville a moment to realize what she meant, almost just as she got to the ladder, and he quickly turned, his head dipping a moment later. Of course she had to change. That was perfectly normal. And it would have been even more normal if he could stop thinking about the fact that her room was mere steps away and there was no threshold to speak of.

His face went hot and he sucked down a mouthful of cider. It wasn't a sweet as he imagined. Crisp, a bit of a bite.

Arden called out from the loft and he mistakenly glanced over his shoulder to see the lines of her silhouette behind a linen curtain as she pulled something over her head— on or off he wasn't sure. Silently cursing himself, Neville cleared his throat and steeled forward once more. "Erm, yeah," The label on the cider no longer stood a chance. "It's quite potent," He began, mind frazzled. Potent was an understatement.

"For one her size, she'd only need to smell it," Neville distracted himself by studying the half-cracked door of the bathroom. "It's better suited for large creatures," The largest. "And totally safe, as well," That felt like an important detail to include. "It doesn't quite put them to sleep, but more of a dreamlike—" He paused as she rounded the sofa and sat opposite him, casual as could be.

He was beginning to see why Bancroft felt so at ease with Arden. There was something innately calming about her. Even when she wasn't trying.

“Dreamlike state? Right,” she said, getting comfy. “So I think you know my work is mostly with big sea creatures — I’m actually technically a “researcher”—“ she put researcher in finger quotes, giving him an I guess? sort of smile and a shrug. It wasn’t that she thought academia was a joke or something, but she hadn’t come in the way most of her peers had; she’d been working for years before she’d even considered studying. She still struggled greatly with the academic side of things, still felt like an imposter using that title. “—but I have so many different projects going on.” She gave him an easy smile, pausing to sip her drink.

She wiped her lips with the back of one hand. “Uh, but it’s all sea creatures anyway. Big ones. Well, and dragons, sometimes,” she added, glancing over at the bathroom door before meeting his gaze again. “That’s a bit contentious, you know, dragonologists really have opinions on which creatures are and aren’t ours. Doesn’t help that the definitions vary between continents; you should hear the European-Asian debate about dragon morphology.” Dash laughed a little at the end of the spiel, shaking her head. “Not that it’d be so interesting to you, probably,” she said. “I’m sure you have similar arguments in your field.”

She took another swig of her drink, then tugged the ends of her sleeves down over her fingers. “I don’t know why I’m talking so much,” she said, “I think I’m just relieved, you know.” She glanced at the bathroom door again. “But, um, so. Potency. How does it compare to all of the other usual things — Sopophorous beans, Thurlie roots, asphodel and all of the potions you can make out of that…?”

Neville smiled faintly as Arden began talking about her profession and it grew broader when she went on about the nuances, alluding to the fact that herbology likely had its own to compare. "Not like that," He let out a chuckle at the admission, mirroring her and taking another drink, setting the bottle on his knee. He wasn't sure that he wanted to see the bad side of a dragonologist, the worst his field has was probably Bancroft if he were being honest.

Unsure of what to do with himself, or his body in general, Neville crossed one leg over the other in an attempt to make himself look as natural as he was sure he could feel— eventually. "Oh no, that's alright, really," Immediately he felt bad if she got the feeling that he wasn't interested. "I like hearing about it," He tugged at the bottom of his ear that suddenly had gone hot.

In truth, Neville was most interested in people when they were talking about the things that loved, in the way that they lit up.

"As you can imagine, Bancroft is about as contentious as it gets in the field of Herbology..." He shrugged with a good-natured smile that indicated nothing other than a fondness for his cantankerous mentor. The please continue talking was implied, he figured.

Neville settled back against where he was leaned against the back of the couch, pulling an elbow up to rest it over the top. The casualness he'd been faking earlier hit him without even having realized it at all. It was easier to be at ease when someone else was open. "It doesn't compare at all," He began honestly. And he wasn't just saying that. The serum-like herb essence came with quite the warning label.

"Take a..." He ran a hand over his jaw in thought, trying to conjure up a sea creature. "...I dunno, a Ramora, for example," Sea creatures clearly were not his area of expertise but they seemed quite large in the textbooks. "Just a dab, right—" He nearly reached out to demonstrate on Dash but brought his hand back as quickly as it left his side, using himself as an example instead. "Right on the chest, and that's all it takes," He said with a nod.