"I'm not thinking of anything in particular. It just seems like having something you can't talk about would be--worse than not."

"?"

Shrug. "I--don't want you to feel like you have to hide anything from me. Secrets can be stressful. If it's not that way for you then that's fine, just...I want to make you happy."

"Mm. I want to make you happy too." Kiss. "I'm not really the secretive type."

Kiss. "I don't expect you to have trouble with that."

Giggle. Kiss.

Mmm lovely kisses.

"Well, we can thoroughly scratch this room off the checklist."

Kiss.

"I love you," he says, hugging her.

Awww!

"You're a sweetheart," she says, hugging back.

He laughs. "It's a new look on me but I think I like it."

"I like it too!" Cheeksmooch.

He giggles delightedly.

"Is the sweetheartness-being-new part of what you meant by not perfect? --Alternately I can stop prying."

"Mm..."

He considers how to explain.

"...Me and my parents, back home, we had this thing going on where I'd do something criminally horrible and they'd find a way to cover it up and tell me how disappointed they were and then I'd do something else and start the whole thing over again. Eventually I got so fed up that I decided to stop being horrible just so they'd stop hiding it like that."

"Wow, that's way worse than my mom."

He laughs. "Oh? What'd your mom do?"

"My dad died while she was pregnant with me and she sort of--lost interest in parenting without her beloved coparent around. She wasn't materially neglectful or anything, I always had clothes that fit and food, but she never made more than a token attempt to pretend to be more interested in her child than her dead spouse."

"Yeah, that's pretty bad."

"Yeah. I mean, I'm fine, but lots of kids would have been hurt worse than me."

"Most kids probably would've been fine with my parents. Well, maybe. They only got really annoying when I started doing things I would've been arrested for if I'd been anyone else's kid. I don't know if they would've been perfectly nice to somebody who wasn't growing up into a violent bully, or if they would've found other things to complain about."

"Were you trying to get arrested or just undeterred by the possibility? I think most people who do horrible things would be glad to have the ability to get away with pulling arbitrary shit."

"I didn't exactly mind not being arrested, but... everybody'd act like nothing happened, if I hurt somebody bad enough they'd move away and people would just stop talking about them, like they'd never existed in the first place. It was creepy."

"That is creepy."

"Yeah." He sighs. "That's the north for you. I hear Okaiva's much more civilized."

"Yeah. Welcome to the City of Not Creepy."