All of which are the most fascinating, most important things in the world -

"...you calmed down?" Annie asks, after a few hours have gone by.

"I think so? Sorry, it's a bit - I can't imagine how you - and the first thing I knew was what I'd been doing to you, for years -"

"- it's honestly not as bad as you're thinking, I got pretty good at bossing the artifact around after a little while. I'm hungry, are you hungry?"

"...yeah, that's a good idea, I'll ask someone to bring us something -" she does that - 

"Thanks."

Sigh. "So. We should talk."

"Yeah. And did you tell Lírnith what happened -?"

"No, I want to think how to not freak her out - she'll take it okay, she's sort of been working around me for a long time, but it'll still hurt her a lot -"

"Yeah, she - wasn't expecting this result -"

"And I said I wasn't okay with this result -"

"...yeah -" apologizing will not help freaking out will not help

"And now I am okay with this result and I guess if it hadn't changed my preferences that'd be very unpleasant, whereas this is pleasant if abstractly terrifying - anyway I don't know how much about my reasoning she told you but it wasn't you it was that you're going to die and then I'll suffer forever and I really really didn't want to suffer forever. And that remains a problem now that I'm in love with you but it seems like fixing it by figuring out how for you to not die, or for me to die when you do, is probably easier than fixing the being in love with you."

"Probably. My healing factor might do it - it should at least help."

"Then that would be good and all this would be very silly. If all it does is buy you more time - with enough more time maybe the Dwarves could figure out how to do it with magic - I should have been looking into that anyway, I should have done it right away..."

"It's okay," soothes Annie, "we haven't been here that long and we didn't have money before anyway and now we have some surplus to get them to look into it."

Nod. 

"I love you."

"I love you. I don't even care if you're real."

"...well, I'm real anyway, but I'm glad you're not having a crisis over the possibility that I could be imaginary."

"I think it should be easier than it would have been to kiss you, having a lot of trust helps and I have a lot of trust - if I could get Lírnith to sing it then it'd be easy but we can't do that -"

"Okay, but so you know I really did stop dwelling on that much when I found out about the flashbacks, you don't need to push it."

"No, see, unless you have flashbacks or something I'm not going to be able to stop dwelling on it."

"...ah. Gotcha."

Food arrives. They eat. 

Uh, Laurië?