Lev rests his head on Sasha's shoulder. "It really requires a lot of self-control," he says, "not to say 'I love you, run off with me to Cascadia, I'll take care of you and you won't have to worry about anything and we're going to be so happy.' Because-- you're so much like Lily, you're Lily with bigger eyes and different trauma who hasn't read good poetry or seen the stars and who had an entire society teaching you that you're stupid, and-- it would be really easy to just act like you're Lily? But you're not, you're your own person, it wouldn't be fair to you because-- because you're not going to be Lily and I don't want to set things up so you have to spend your entire life as a slightly inferior version of my husband instead of, like, a perfect version of you. If I love you I want to love you, for the person you are." He snorts. "Sorry about the big speech."

He curls a hand around Lev's head and holds him.  "...you use the word love in a way that I don't really get but that — I think I'm going to like once I do." 

"I am extremely upset about your entire society."

"I'm not unaware of the concept of romantic attachment, they aren't villains from a book. You just — use it differently." 

"Yes and it is very important to me that you get to experience the thing I'm using it for!"

He kisses the top of Lev's head. "You're sweet." 

He smiles maybe a bit more than is warranted by that. 

"You should ask me more about Cascadia probably. --Uh, one thing is that time doesn't pass in your world while your door is closed? So if you decide you want to go back to your world and you're a decade older that might be hard to explain. And I might stop getting doors at all and you'll be stuck in Cascadia."

He nods. "I think it's still worth it, though. What kind of tech level is Cascadia at?" 

"I'm not sure what sort of things you're looking for-- surgery is really expensive and basically permanent, we have self-driving trucks but not self-driving cars, we have the Internet in our pockets, we don't have uterine replicators?"

"...we can get blueprints for things on the way out." He leans over and kisses Lev on the cheek. 

"--Oh, Cascadian intelligence is going to love you." Kiss. 

"I'm not sure why, but I'm glad!" 

"Showing up with blueprints to advance our tech level three hundred years!"

"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."