"We don't have to live in the same city as them?" Kib says. "Keeping it hush-hush is directly correlated with their ability to get divine favors and political whatnots - and also the whole breeding thing means they have these complicated social structures around that and those structures would go haywire with the information and this would also be bad."

"I will take keeping it secret very seriously. But I would have trouble - not putting the pieces together, as it were. I do however do inscrutable well, I'm told. Just not directly lying."

"I haven't had to directly lie to anybody," Kib says, "people don't ask, not unless they already know way too much. Inscrutable should be fine, especially if you are better than I am at restraining the impulse to sarcasm. The redhead is Maitimo, other one's Findekáno. They are both important in Valinor for breeding-related-social-structure reasons and Maitimo in particular also for reasons of overwhelming talent."

"What sort of, breeding related social structures are there? I'm - having trouble picturing them."

"Well, mercifully, unlike animals they only reproduce on purpose. So that's a significant thing, deciding to create a person, and it also comes with responsibility for the new person's upbringing - also it is I think invariably married couples co-creating children because Elves do marriage weirdly - anyway, they have strong slightly confusing social ties between parents and children, and co-children of the same parents, and to difficult-to-track extents with anybody else you can draw a line to on a map of marriages and child-creatings? They're important because they are both the children of different children of the king. It's weird."

"... Very," he agrees. "That sounds like a mess to keep track of."

"I'm getting sort of used to it? But yeah it's complicated as all get out."

"Wonderful. Well. I suppose whether or not I get the chance to get used to it depends on what we decide to do. It sounds like Maitimo and Findekáno should be involved in this conversation? Unless you'd rather they weren't, or...?"

"We can invite them in. Even odds they've actually been able to hear this entire exchange actually, Elves have really good hearing surpassed only by their stupidly good vision. Iiii should have told you that earlier, sorry." Kib goes to lean out the door and motion Elves in.

"We did hear," Maitimo says, "should we not have listened?"

"No, it's fine, I'm sure I would have remembered to mention it if anything really sensitive came up. So, Aydanci, this is Maitimo, that's Findekáno, and, uh, this is Aydanci."

And Maitimo beams at him because of course he does. "You're taking this remarkably well," he says, "though I trust Kib's - and by extention Aly-'s judgment and so am not surprised. A pleasure."

Kib waves everybody in. And plops on a sofa. First, so it's everybody else's job to decide who sits next to him.

Maitimo is going to look at him for half a second and then claim the other sofa and pull Findekáno onto it with him.

The Elves look at each other. "There are a lot of cultural differences between our peoples," Maitimo says after a while, "but among Elves marriage is - it takes precedence over everything. And if Kib didn't want that I'd be inclined to ignore it but Kib is obviously hoping you'll embrace him as your long lost love and spend the next several days doing nothing but kissing him and telling him how perfect he is, so it seems like we should enable that, and later compose sad songs that we cannot sing in public- that's the general Elf fallback -"

Kib chokes on nothing in particular and has to cough a few times. "Um!"

"I, yes? That sounds lovely? None of that 'compromising on stuff because reasons' unpleasantness, marvelous."

"..great," Findekáno says. "Shall we go get a room and find you two tomorrow for the trip back to Valinor?"

"I guess? Uh, how likely do you think it is the Valar will go 'okay they can be married one of them was a girl at the time'?"

"It's not 'you can be married' it's 'you are married'. One doesn't stop being married. That's the way to argue it, anyway," Maitimo says amusedly. "I - I'd expect it to work. They feel stronger about marriage than about homosexuality."