I'm sure she'd like that. Very big on that sort of informal trading in general here. I like it, it's surprisingly familiar.

[Wellington had descended into essentially a barter community by the time Arthur left. Not officially, but...well. He's not the only one who'd found themselves buying old cans of beans and powdered milk for anything but actual money. His repair skills went a long way in that kind of society.]

And I'm familiar with keeping busy, of course for the opposite reason. Nobody ever talked about it, but there really wasn't much to do back in Wellington Wells. Outside of work and, well, the daily struggle to survive...we found the strangest things to try and keep busy.

[Claire is one of the people he's more comfortable openly discussing his previous life with. Or at least aspects of it. Understanding how very terrible and abnormal a society he comes from, he's taken to just giving very broad strokes. But the doctor is never judgmental and while sympathetic, has yet to seem shocked or deeply bothered by anything he's shared.

He doesn't like to make people feel badly.]