"...I don't think not having gotten extensive plastic surgery makes you ugly? Like, I realize I'm biased here, but Lily is in fact very very pretty."

"It's a noun, not an adjective, that's just what it's called." 

Well, that's fucked up. 

"Why don't they want to stay, uh, Ugly? In my world, if we were that good at plastic surgery, a bunch of people would still want to keep the faces they started with, and a bunch of the people who didn't would want to be lizardpeople or something."

"Would you want to be fifteen forever? Or — never move out of your parents' house, stay a little kid forever? Stay behind while everyone you know becomes an adult and moves on? That's what it would be." 

This society is very fucked up!

"You have to get surgery in order to be an adult?"

"That's just what you do when you turn sixteen. I don't know what would happen if someone tried not to, because nobody does. 

There are people who can't, but it's not — nearly everyone has a friend whose friend's boyfriend's parents' other child never leaves the building and that's why but I've never talked to someone who knows someone." 

Not that he talks to a lot of people. 

Wow, this incredibly pretty alternate universe version of his husband is incredibly pretty. It's kind of distracting. Lev keeps having intrusive thoughts about kissing him. 

"I guess that's not any stranger than Cascadia's norm of people having babies when they're sixteen."

"...you let —" not New Pretties, Lev's world doesn't have the operation — "sixteen year olds have kids?" 

"One of the ways my world is different from other worlds is that we have a pollutant called bitoxiphosphene, which as far as I can tell doesn't exist anywhere else. It makes people infertile. They're less likely to be infertile when they're really young. So in my home country, Cascadia, we really encourage people to get pregnant as young as possible. Of course, sometimes they're surrogates, not everyone wants kids."

"...I guess if it works for your world." 

This Lily is really really unsure of his opinions. It's weird. Lev guesses you shouldn't assume alts of the same person are the same in every way, but it's still strange.

"I really want Lily to meet you, I bet there's totally different poetry in your world."

"Does Lily like poetry?" 

He sounds a little doubtful. 

"Yes! I didn't like poetry much before Lily, but they taught me about how to read it so it actually makes sense. Sometimes they read it to me and it's really good."

(He is, clearly, so so happy when he talks about Lily.)

Not making sense has never really been a reason he doesn't like poetry.

"They sound great." He's smiling. 

"Do you speak English? I don't know how Milliways translation interacts with poetry."

"I'm speaking English." 

"Cool! Let me go talk to the bar for a sec and then I'll show you one of Lily's favorite poems."

He returns a few minutes later with a piece of paper that reads:

Monet Refuses the Operation
BY LISEL MUELLER

Doctor, you say there are no haloes

around the streetlights in Paris

and what I see is an aberration

caused by old age, an affliction.

I tell you it has taken me all my life

to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,

to soften and blur and finally banish

the edges you regret I don’t see,

to learn that the line I called the horizon

does not exist and sky and water,

so long apart, are the same state of being.

Fifty-four years before I could see

Rouen cathedral is built

of parallel shafts of sun,

and now you want to restore

my youthful errors: fixed

notions of top and bottom,

the illusion of three-dimensional space,

wisteria separate

from the bridge it covers.

What can I say to convince you

the Houses of Parliament dissolve

night after night to become

the fluid dream of the Thames?

I will not return to a universe

of objects that don’t know each other,

as if islands were not the lost children

of one great continent.  The world

is flux, and light becomes what it touches,

becomes water, lilies on water,

above and below water,

becomes lilac and mauve and yellow

and white and cerulean lamps,

small fists passing sunlight

so quickly to one another

that it would take long, streaming hair

inside my brush to catch it.

To paint the speed of light!

Our weighted shapes, these verticals,

burn to mix with air

and change our bones, skin, clothes

to gases.  Doctor,

if only you could see

how heaven pulls earth into its arms

and how infinitely the heart expands

to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

"— oh." 

That's beautiful. Sasha's fairly sure there's context he's missing — and he's not sure whether Lev is trying to make a point, given the title — but it's beautiful. 

Lev is staring at him adoringly. 

"Do you need things to be explained-- I'm guessing you're from an Earth because you speak English but I don't know if your Earth has a Monet or if you learned about him if it did--"

"I can tell there's context I'm missing but I'm not sure where to start. I did not learn about a Monet." 

"Sorry, I should have thought of this when I was getting the poem--"

Lev returns with a coffeetable book full of Monet's paintings and starts to explain who Monet is. He's smiling at Sasha kind of a lot.

He's... kind of cute. 

Sasha's eager to listen. Not just for that reason, but he'd be lying if he claimed that didn't factor in at all. 

"You might have to stop me before I show you all of Lily's favorite things."

"It's fine — I've. Never really liked poetry before." 

"Maybe you won't like Lily's other favorite poetry as much, then, I did show you their favorite."