If I came back after you were married I would have coped! I would have been fine if you were straight, too! It's wanting something just in reach that brings out, well, everything in me.

Are there other examples?

The minute it occurred to me that I might not have to choose after all between power and a personal life - and it took it a very long time to occur to me - I wanted it so intensely, and brought it about so carefully...

Was it much of a choice when you thought it had to be one?

I was going to be King.

That was my guess. Well, lucky you, you get both.

I did! It's lovely!!

Were you at least going to be King and then leverage your kingly power into being able to have a personal life eventually, it's a little tragic to think about otherwise.

...maybe eventually? It wasn't in the first thousand things I wanted to do with power, and - at the time I had some mixed-up thinking about the whole thing - it took me a very long time to stop believing it was an insult to people to want them, and certainly to have them...

...that's a really challenging mindset for me to imagine inhabiting so I can't envision how you got out of it.

Findekáno, obviously. All my intractable errors of judgment tend to be in situations where his instincts are better suited.

The thing where he teased you relentlessly?

I tried to imagine how he'd react if I explained to him that I respected him far too much to take him to my bed and my mental model of him was very good and kept slapping me.

- Kib snorts.

So then I tried to reconstruct the reasoning - I know people in the sense of knowing what they'll do much faster than I can identify what's motivating them - and that got me - part of the way, as far as 'wanting someone is not inherently incompatible with respect for him, any more than making a specific gesture at him, just made so incompatible by cultural context - and then I could rather disentangle it from there. It didn't help me that I found something appealing about it even when I thought it was deeply disrespectful...

I may or may not flatter myself to think that I could have reasoned my way out of a social taboo without help.

You could have. Findekáno did. I have no particular advantage at moral reasoning and take people and their motives and their status games much, much deeper to heart than either of you. And I still might have, eventually, but it was a very Elf-paced questioning.

D'you know how he did it or should I just ask him?

I don't know, actually. Worried there are other taboos you might be failing to notice?

Not especially, just curious. I am occasionally curious.

You are! It is adorable! You are welcome to quiz him on it. Well, not that my permission'd really be relevant, but.

Are you sure? It seems non-negligibly likely that this conversation will involve making fun of you.

Then I will throw you both in the dungeons for it!

Tempted to ask what your plan is for getting around my warservant, concerned you may have one.

No comment.