"Yeah. We'll figure something out. Well, they will."

"Yeah."

Sigh.

Snuggle.

"We've been on bar-supervising duty for a while and there are now more of me we could ask to handle it."

"This is true."

Matt, can you sit in the bar and if people enter be friendly at them and offer our assistance to their homeworld if necessary and if the other Maitimo comes downstairs avoid letting him fetch anyone from his world - you can just call one of us -?

Certainly.

This having been accomplished, he takes Cam's hand and the catalogues and goes upstairs.

Cam follows obligingly.

And he kisses him and leans into a lovely winghug and manages to not talk politics for ten whole minutes!

And a short while later Imliss wanders downstairs. 

She looks like she's seriously considering wandering right back upstairs when she sees him but instead does not do that.

"Hey! Looking for anything? Bar does - well, not quite as much as your magical alts, but if I hadn't met them I'd think she was the most miraculous thing I'd ever seen. And she's better at recommendations!"

"...Just a change of scenery, really." she sits down not that far from him, but not terribly close, either, and studies him.

"I know the hair is terrible, my alt has been torn between telling me demons can replace it because obviously I'd want it replaced or not telling me that because it's terribly out of line. I didn't want to quit jobs every ten years like Tyelcormo, and it's  - blasphemy of blasphemies, but still - only hair."

"You're losing your touch if you think that's why I was staring," she says, looking away.

"Guilty as charged, thirty thousand years in solitary confinement will do that to you.

Do you want to talk about it?"

"I love you and I miss you and I wish you could be okay someday."

"Luckily there are apparently lots of me and some of them are okay and taking over the okay-me duties, except inconveniently they're not your brother-in-law."

She shakes her head. "Yeah. Not the same thing. They don't know me. I'm not their sister."

"I'm still here."

"Tyelcormo says you haven't had a genuine preference except to die for a long time."

"Dying really didn't improve things; I haven't wished for it in centuries."

"Cease to exist, I mean."

"I hadn't realized our relationship was built on mutual non-suicidality."

"Oh. It's not. You're just really really different from before and I don't really know how to interact with you."