When she thinks she can see him without crying again, she holds her baby close and walks silently back to Rana's.
The room has been replaced with - something else. She has no idea what this means. She has nobody to ask but Rana. Everything she asks places her further in his debt, of course, but it hardly matters now.
She steps inside.
He asks her later. "I'm arranging for the linguists to fly in.
In the long term...what do you think a good arrangement for you looks like?"
"...I think in the long term you were going to try to make me immortal. And the kids will grow up, and they can decide what they want to do with themselves. I think we were going to go traveling, eventually. It's - better, living out in forests and seeing the world, in a lot of ways.
"Until then, I think I'd like to talk to people about poetry and languages, and learn the kind of English you speak here, and - most other things depend on what's best for the kids."
"All right. I look forward to talking to someone who appreciates Old English poetry."
He paces their room and pretends that the debt system tracked the thing where they got Cecelia's kids and now they're demanding this as repayment. For some reason that's much better.
"Yeah. Just - feel like they want me to say something other than what I said."
"Yes."
Something about Jason and the Argonauts, maybe, she doesn't think she's told all of those yet.
On some level he'd thought kisses would not be allowed until he was doing something useful again and he is very glad that's not so.
"It is a little bit harder, here, to feel - safe isn't quite the thing. I don't know. Like it's happening where nobody and nothing else can touch it, like nothing else could possibly seep into it and make it stop being good.
"But I like it when you kiss me, so."
"Someday the kids will be grown and okay and we'll be away from here and safe and there'll be nothing in the universe that can touch us."
Yeah, zoo!
It's a good zoo. It's spacious and the animals are mostly happy. There's bears and tigers and monkeys and rhinos and elephants and a herd of hundreds of giraffes.
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