He sighs.

"Yeah. I guess."

He doesn't want to. He wants to live a nice quiet peaceful life in Thiyec with a minimum of politics. But he doesn't want Welce to have to suffer that much for it, and he expects he still won't when the time comes, and it won't be nearly this bad to go back if he does it when King Hector is dead.

"Thanks."

He appreciates that she's sorry. It doesn't make anything less bad, but it's a nice thing to have along with the bad stuff.

Hugs.

"Let Aleko say hi before you attempt to drown yourself, will you?"

"Okay."

He will probably wait until some dark hour of the night when hardly anyone is awake and no one is likely to be near the pond. Being rescued would defeat the purpose of the exercise.

"How about: because it would solve a lot of my problems if I died," he says.

That's not all of it, but it's the part that comes clearest, the most available to be translated into terms someone else might understand. All together, with the harder parts included, it goes something like this:

He has always been more interested in how he is going to die than when and this experiment, the way he means to do it, is an attractive prospect on that level. He just likes the idea of finding out the hard way whether or not he can breathe water. Finding out that he can't and dying, or finding out that he can and living, both sound better than not trying it at all. And trying it and finding out he can't and being rescued anyway... takes away from that. It would be almost like not having done it in the first place, except it would take away the point of trying it again, because he'd know.

The problems that would be solved by dying won't go away if he tries this and lives. But... it will be different, afterward. He doesn't know what will change but he knows something will. And it won't change if he lets someone rescue him. He will still be looking at this impossible decision that he doesn't quite entirely want to kill himself over, and he won't have a second way to not quite entirely try to kill himself over it.

As it stands, going back would be personally intolerable and staying would fuck over a country, and there are ways to go back that would still more or less fuck over the country, and he doesn't entirely have control of whether or not he'd take one - he is aware of how sharply limited he is when it comes to dealing with anything related to his father. He could go back and flood the Marisi high enough to sweep away the palace, and quite a lot of people would die but King Hector would probably be one of them, protected from prime powers or no - and there will be times when this feels like a great idea. He could go back and kill his father with his bare hands in the middle of court, and there have already been times when that felt like a great idea, and the main thing stopping him was that it would require going back and he would rather just stay in Thiyec.

When he first thought of trying to breathe water, it was irresistibly tempting on just the usual levels - something dangerous that would be a good way to die if it killed him and an amazing experience if it didn't. But now he is more and more convinced that he needs to, for the shift in perspective he can feel waiting for him on the other side. If it doesn't kill him, he will know he is prime, on a level much more personal and immediate than the obvious logic of steady rain in the middle of Thiyec centered on the only birth-blessed Lalindar descendant in the country. And maybe that will be enough to change what feels like a good idea. Maybe it will give him a way to go back and be the coru prime and not have that feel like a fate considerably worse than death.

But trying it and almost dying and then having that death taken away will leave him right back where he started, only without even the hope of making that change. There might be another way to force the same kind of drastic reorientation - there probably is another way. But he can't think of one, and he doesn't think anyone else in the world could know him well enough to come up with one that would work, mindreader or no. And he suspects that the risking his life part is pretty close to necessary. The only other idea he can think of that comes close to the right level of - intensity is probably the best available word for the concept he uses - would be going back to Chialto and talking to his father. Which would be infinitely worse than trying to drown himself, and he's not even sure it would be the right kind of push, and the scale of potential resulting disasters is much, much bigger than the death of one lost prime.

Kiri feels her way through these thoughts, pensive.

"Right," she sighs finally, pushing a wet tendril of hair out of her face. "Facefirst into the pond in the middle of the night for you, then."

"Yeah. I've been great. I really like it here."

He looks at Aleko assessingly, decides that this is probably at least a two-towel job, and says, "I'm gonna get more towels, just a minute."

In much less than a minute, he steps into another room and returns with more towels.

Kiri looks away - conveniently, Aleko is there to look at now. He's half-changed into a new outfit. "So if we're here overnight where are you putting us? If you don't remember, Aleko's a really light sleeper, so whatever room is farthest away from tree branches that like to scratch the roof or whatever..."

And farthest from wherever he's planning to let himself out in the middle of the night, if he doesn't want Aleko's company.