"It's as much for my own convenience as anything else, holes in the wall are great. But — good." 

"...I assume holes in the wall are a tech thing?"

"Yes. It takes raw materials and prints things you ask for and you put them back in when you're done with them so it can reuse the materials, people largely use it for clothes — and needles if they're into that — but I can think of dozens of other things and you could probably think of hundreds." 

"That does sound useful. More so if they can be run off solar panels."

"— as opposed to — right, Rusties. We don't use fossil fuels for anything." 

He sounds vaguely disgusted by the idea. 

"I mean, as opposed to the power grid. --Fuck."

"Fuck?" 

"I have to... explain Cascadia. Uh." He thunks his head against the pillow. "I haven't had to do this with someone who doesn't know what Gileadites are."

"I'd ask questions but I don't know where to start either." 

"So... I'm not sure if this happened to the-- Rusties?-- in your timeline, but in our timeline America got taken over by extremist Christians who hate gay people and don't want women to work and don't think you should have sex before you get married and, like, censor all the media. And some states had a problem with this, so we left America and became Cascadia."

"I don't think that happened but I wouldn't necessarily know it if it did, everything anyone says about pre-collapse history is very broad-strokes. That set of beliefs is incomprehensible but I assume it was based on something?" 

"They think that's what God wants from them. --So they weren't super-happy about us leaving and they nuked us. Killed millions of people, disrupted a bunch of supply lines which killed even more people. You had refugee camps for years afterward." 

"I would definitely have heard of that." That's not the right response but he can't think of anything else to say. 

"I was in one of the cities that got bombed. I was a year old. I don't like talking about that but you should-- know. That I might not live to be very old."

"...how old is not very old, people in my world usually live to around two hundred —" 

"People in Cascadia usually make it to eighty. And-- it's hard to know, I could live to be 95, but I could get diagnosed with cancer tomorrow and have a year or two to live."

"Okay." He holds Lev a little closer. "Okay." 

"That's-- maybe a reason not to come to Cascadia, if you're giving up more than a century of life or having to watch everyone you know die."

"They've stopped giving me sleeping pills because I was requesting so many a day they thought I must be stockpiling them for a suicide attempt, and they weren't nearly as wrong as I would have liked. If I still want to be alive in eighty years that's better than I would have done, and if I don't then there's no problem, is there." 

Cling.

"If you decide you want to kill yourself and-- really mean it, not as a passing thing, I can arrange that."

He nods again and lets himself be clung to. 

"But even if you come to Cascadia you might want to arrange to become attached to people with... a longer life expectancy."

(He is clearly unhappy about this prospect.)

"...having one friend is new enough that I shouldn't bank on having two, I guess, but if there are as many ways to meet people as you said —" 

Hug. 

"You'll get to have so many friends, I promise."

"You're so cute." Sasha buries his head in Lev's shoulder.