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Monday morning in the boathouse, and Nathan comes to a realization about his schedule for the fall. Angelo kindly refrains from any 'I told you so's' and decides to improve Nathan's mood by finally revealing the secret he's been keeping to himself for several weeks.


To have near-silence in the boathouse office wasn't an unusual thing; when work involved a lot of intensive reading, there were whole stretches of time when conversation was very much at a premium. Occasionally that silence was broken abruptly, however, and most often with some expression of frustration or another. This morning was no exception. There was a sudden noise from the vicinity of Nathan's desk, a snort that sounded half-irritated, half-despairing, and thoroughly disgruntled.

"Work, damn you..."

Angelo glanced up from his papers, half-amused, half-curious. "What's not workin'?"

"My fucking schedule." Nathan gave Juliette a dour look as she looked up from her desk at the profanity. She smiled mildly and turned her attention back to her own work almost ostentatiously. Nathan gave Angelo an aggrieved look. "For September. I can't make it fit. Why can I not make it fit when I'm no longer running around in black leather pretending I'm twenty-five?" Juliette twitched a little at that. Nathan ignored her.

"Because you're still tryin' to work one full-time job an' one almost full-time?" Angelo suggested mildly. "An' no, I don't mean the... leather stuff," he amended hastily with a glance at Juliette.

Lovely. At this rate the secretary would start assuming he was a frequent visitor to S&M clubs. Or something even more alarming. Oh, well. Maybe it would keep her from moving things around the office quite so freely.

"It should work." But his day planner for September was staring him in the face, and even if he moved this, and cancelled that, and delegated a whole hell of a lot more... "Shit," Nathan muttered, sinking his chin into his hand. Fiddling was not going to solve the problem.

Angelo sighed, getting up to wander over. "Okay. What's the problem?"

"There aren't enough hours in the day. Do we know anyone who can change that?" It was only semi-facetious. Nathan straightened, then shifted his arm in its sling, grimacing as the itch started up again. Next week and getting the damned cast off couldn't come too soon, as far as he was concerned.

"Don't think we've got anyone with time powers, no," Angelo said lightly. "What've you tried already?"

"Shifting meetings around. Assigning more of them to you and Bobby, rather than having you do in-office time quite as much... but then that leaves the in-office stuff to do, and Rahne's got a cluttered schedule herself, and..." Nathan stopped, closed his eyes for a moment, and took a deep breath. "It's not going to work. Damn it."

"Somethin's gotta give," Angelo agreed sympathetically, peering at the schedule. "So what's it gonna be?"

"I don't know. I have to think." Nathan rubbed at his forehead, sighing. This was beyond frustrating. "I could... change my teaching load a little, I suppose. Make the Arabic a reading course too - it's not like I haven't taught it twice before, and most of the students who were interested aren't beginners." That'd make two reading courses with one meeting a week, and only one actual course, the Russian... significantly fewer marking and preparation hours, Nathan thought, doing mental calculations.

"'s what I was talkin' about. If you don't have time for the teachin'... then you don't have time."

"I'll talk to Ororo and Scott." Shifting things around in that sense would help, but it wouldn't solve the problem. "I'll direct a few of our projects to the Tel Aviv office, maybe... they only have what, four times our manpower?" It was entirely possible that they were trying to run too much through the Westchester office. The proximity of the UN wasn't an excuse to forget that the bulk of their field and research staff was in Israel. Nathan leaned back in his chair, making another aggravated noise. But his expression was reflective, if frustrated, and he looked more tired than angry at himself now. "There's too much I want to do. I suppose it's a problem of expectations."

"It's always a problem of expectations with you," Angelo advised him dryly. "An' they're usually yours. You're runnin' yourself into the ground again."

"I am not." It was a half-hearted sort of protest, though. The fact was, term hadn't even started yet and he was tired. His injuries from San Diego hadn't healed as quickly as he was used to, comparatively minor or not, and the TK fits were a lot more wearing than he'd admitted. Someone sane would have taken a nice long vacation after San Diego and a self-lobotomy, rather than running off to Afghanistan and then trying to fill up the hours he'd ordinarily have spent training with more work for Elpis. Sometimes he thought he had a very poor grasp on the concept of pacing himself.

"Yes, you are, an' you know it. Not enough hours in the day, was it?"

"Smartass," Nathan accused wearily, then glanced back at his computer screen. "The Arabic," he said, coming to a decision - never let it be said that he couldn't recognizing he was being an idiot once events were rubbing his face in it, "and some of the work-shifting. And I think I might still go with having you and Bobby spending more time out of the office..."

"I don't mind the meetings, so I'd go along with that," Angelo said cheerfully. "Think Bobby would, too."

"It's the commute time as much as anything else..." Nathan muttered, rubbing at the spot right between his eyes now as his head started to pound. Everything on his desk rattled under a soft wave of - yet again - totally unconscious TK, ad he snorted in aggravation. The subsequent wave of dizziness came and went, as per usual.

"An' that's what you hired us for, remember? 'Cause you can't do it all by yourself. We can stand to take on a bit more work."

Nathan looked at him. "Point," he said grudgingly, and then winced again as the headache shifted upwards a few notches. "I will further investigate the art of delegation. But I don't want you overworking either."

"I don't overwork," he claimed, possibly lying through his teeth. "Anyway... I'm gonna need to take a little more time off, startin' from next month. But only a bit."

"Oh?" Angelo had the 'I have a secret that coincidentally, I'm now ready to share'. It was both intriguing and a nice distraction from the headache. "Do tell," Nathan said dryly.

The only answer he got was Angelo producing a packet of papers from somewhere inside his jacket, and shoving it across the desk with a grin.

Nathan skimmed through them, his eyebrows heading for his hairline. "How the hell did you keep this a secret... oh, right, it's been awfully easy to keep secrets for me lately." A real laugh slipped out, and part of Nathan marveled at just how quickly his mood had improved, headache or no headache. He looked up at Angelo, a definite twinkle in his gray eyes. "This is quite the surprise. I'd been kicking myself, believe it or not, for having gotten so caught up in events this summer that I didn't harass you to get yourself enrolled for classes. Good thing I didn't need to."

Angelo's grin widened, shamelessly pleased. "Yeah, well... I all but promised you six months ago I'd look into it, an' if I was ever goin' to... kind of needed to be this year. Went for the correspondence option."

"That's good for now. That gives you a lot of flexibility." Nathan laughed again suddenly, giving him a narrow-eyed look that was entirely put-upon. "Is this what you and Rollins were snickering about back in June? His part of your arrangement? Let me guess, you went to him for a reference letter..."

"I couldn't hardly go to you, could I?" Angelo retorted innocently. "Not an' keep it a surprise what I was doin', like I wanted to."

"It was a good choice. I bet his reference letter carried a lot of weight." Nathan kept skimming through the papers. Course syllabi, book lists... and a definite pattern in the course Angelo was planning to take. "I'm really proud of you," Nathan said more quietly, looking up at him with what the dullest person in the world would have been able to identify as a paternal smile. "This is great. I'm so glad you're doing it - you're going to love it, I know you are. You're ready for it, in a way you weren't a couple of years ago."

Angelo saw it, and his grin gave way to a quieter smile. "Yeah, I think I am. What with finishin' school a year late, an' then not knowin' what I wanted to study... but I do know now."

"Well, this just makes it even more important that you don't get overloaded with work for Elpis. And hell, at least you're not going to be late with essays because you had to go and blow up something in Uzbekistan," Nathan said, and then coughed as Juliette looked up from her desk, stared into empty space for a moment, and then shook herself, as if deciding that no, she hadn't really heard that.

"Not blowin' things up, true. Cavalry charges, now..." He ducked as Nathan tossed something at him.

"Brat."

"An' you know it."