He nods and curls up on Lev. 

"The problem is that-- if it comes down to a battle, we're going to lose. Fighting goes through pilots too fast. If we sacrificed everything else about Eros-- books and good food and movie nights and medicine and school-- we could maybe keep them out of North America indefinitely, as long as nothing went too wrong, and we didn't stop getting immigrants and people didn't stop having kids."

"Yeah." He nestles into Lev. "I get that. And I get why it would be controversial, but, like — I'm inside the area you protect from drones, I am directly benefiting from your policy being what it is, and I know that if I had learned about this when I was still ten days south I'd feel a lot differently about it than I feel now." 

"I think-- even if we can't negotiate with them, we have to understand them. We don't know what they want or what their resources are or what sort of things they'd find discouraging and-- unless we know that we can't even win a war, we have no idea of what kind of things would make them leave."

"Yeah." He is not going to stop cuddling Lev. "I'm not disagreeing — like I said, I materially benefit from this. And independently of that I don't think you're wrong, I'm just — thinking." 

"I understand that you're not disagreeing but I do like it when people disagree with me."

"I'm sure we'll find something to disagree about." A kiss on Lev's shoulder, and another on the side of his neck. 

"I hope so." Kiss. "Have you read the Ender's Game series?"

"I've read Ender's Game, Ender's Shadow, and Shadow of the Hegemon, but not the rest. — honestly I liked Ender's Shadow better, but you do have to have Ender's Game first or it doesn't work." 

"So you don't know about the Hierarchy of Foreignness?"

"I do not know the Hierarchy of Foreignness, although I can make some guesses about it just based on the name." 

"So there are different kinds of strangers in the later books in the series. There are foreign humans, framlings. And there are beings that aren't human, but can be communicated with, ramen. And there are true aliens, beings that are so foreign to you that you you can't even communicate with them, varelse. --The question here is whether the aliens are ramen or varelse. Because if they are varelse we are all going to die."

He's right, and Sasha knows it, and he's known that there was a real possibility that he was going to die from the time he was eight years old, it isn't a surprise to him. 

It still sounds different hearing it said out loud like that. He doesn't curl inward consciously, but. 

"Well." He holds Sasha tight. "Not necessarily. They might incomprehensibly decide to leave us alone."

That doesn't particularly help but being held does. Sasha is very small and very holdable. 

"And they might be ramen. If we can figure out the patterns in their messages. They seem to know we don't attack them outside Eros, we can communicate that."

Still very small. Still very holdable. "Yeah. Clearly we can communicate 'we'll only attack you here,' there's probably a way to communicate other things." He's aware that he's mostly convincing himself. 

"We have to act like we're in one of the world where we're not all inevitably going to die, because we can't do anything about the other ones."

"Yeah." It's hollow. 

(Coming back to Nova to find eight boneless corpses — hiding from a drone and being so so sure that he was going to die — dodging forklifts to get medicine that was probably expired anyway but you had to hope, what else could you do — Eros with everyone dead from the drones the aliens the Something a plague a famine a drought a —) 

"I'm sorry. I am really bad at picking topics that aren't depressing." He kisses Sasha's shoulder and rubs circles in his back. "In my defense I haven't had a non-work conversation with a person in more than a year and oh wait that is actually even more depressing. Shit."

He makes himself laugh. "Just a bit." Lev rubbing his back and kissing his shoulder is good and Lev should keep doing that. 

Lev is going to keep doing that and ban himself from talking. 

...honestly, at the moment, probably a good idea. 

When it starts to get close to sundown Sasha kisses him on the cheek and says "Be right back" and goes to his room and checks the window, nine times, and comes back with a change of clothes for tomorrow. 

"You could move in if you want," Lev says when he gets back. "I still have two rooms."

"...I don't know. I think I want to have slept here more than twice before I move in." He takes off his shirt and bra and pants and leaves his underwear on and cuddles back up to Lev.