"I'm not sure. Maybe it's a fake sun. ...The stars are referred to earlier though, I wonder what's up with those..."

"Do you think you could participate in trying to puzzle this out with my alt or is it going to be unpleasant to be around while I'm befriending him."

"...I could probably partition the puzzle from the distaste as long as the topic stays put."

"Okay, can do."

"What're you going to do, invite him down by osanwë?"

"They seem to be alternating meals, I was just going to wait around until he next shows up of his own accord. I could invite him, though - if I wait another week he's going to be falling apart, and I'm not sure if that's a better or worse state to have him in -"

"Falling apart because...?"

"No one to interact with. I don't think his slave counts for the purpose, not really. I actually think I might have an angle on 'if you clear the oaths, then give him some time to bounce back, then you'll have company psychologically capable of disagreeing with you which doesn't hate you.' Depending of course on whether an unbroken Findekáno will hate him."

"Do you think he will?"

"Mine wouldn't. I don't know how different alts are."

"I'm honestly not sure whether to parse the immature snide remarks on Singularity as hatred or not..."

"I might need a little bit more of the picture? What snide comments, what context -"

"I've got notes but they won't have exact words..." He shuffles notes around until he's got the ones that remark on it.

"At a guess, not taking into account Vala-fuckery because I don't know how to account for it, this is what 'still in love, trying to correct for it' looks like it, at some point transitioning to 'sad about this relationship not being retrievable', at some point transitioning to 'painfully reevaluating a thousand happy years together in light of new evidence that we are really bad for and to each other' and I bet next time you go interact with them they'll be civil distant acquaintances with nothing to say about each other. We did all of that much more internally and much more gracefully, but Vala-fuckery and also the dubious luxury of letting off steam in a way no one in your society will recognize as such, I guess."

"I recognized it and thought it was too obvious and irrelevant to bring up until, well." The "what the Halls did you just say to me" incident is notated.

"I suppose in wartime it wouldn't have seemed very remarkable that anyone you happened to run across was straight, wouldn't have come up often enough to be an eyebrow-raising trend..."

"And I wasn't relevantly reminiscing or hitting on anybody, etcetera, yeah."

"I bet at any point before the end locking them in a room for two hours would have fixed it - not fixed the relationship, but fixed the snide comments - but if they had to be a secret then no one could gently tell them to take the two hours, and it wouldn't have seemed like a necessary use of time, not with the Enemy. Existing."

"Yeah."

"I wish I knew more about how much is attributable to Vala-fuckery - like, if I could treat all divergences between how they handled it and how we handled it as Doom-mediated, that'd be very informative, but I get the sense there were differences even before that."

"Some from the societal homophobia... I don't know though, I got there post-Doom."

"Maybe I'll go ask them when I'm getting them a therapist. ...societal homophobia alone would be sufficient to make me deeply dysfunctional in my personal life, but I wouldn't expect it to do that to him..."

"To Findekáno? Why not?"

"He'd be able to reason out that it was stupid? Tyelcormo'd do better than me too, same reason..."

"I mean, I guess that's better than the alternative but that's not the only way for it to fuck somebody up."