Snuggle. Aw. I love you. If he didn't kill himself, I'm pretty sure he'd come out of it with no regrets, same as me - but yeah, it would be... different. So. I think we need some degree of cooperation from your alt or we're not getting anywhere.

He doesn't have a Findekáno and he misses him desperately, that much was obvious.

...I did not pick up on that. Well. That complicates some things and simplifies others... I wonder what happened to his Findekáno. Dead...? Farther away than that?

Dead he'd have been more excited you can do reembodiments.

Yeah, figures.

They have arrived in his family's rooms and now he can curl up in his husband's lap. He does that.

Well. How do we get your alt to accept the gift of a me? I could give him all my memories of you, in the hope that he will come to understand the appeal... of course it'll also give him an in-depth guide to refer to if he wants to try to break his Taliar out of spite...

I - think what I'd do is say to him - you'll like him, how vulnerable do you need him to be in order to give yourself a chance to like him - and I'm pretty sure I'd know if he meant to break his out of spite.

And his Taliar can be made pretty arbitrarily vulnerable. I could make a copy from the night my soul fell apart, if I had to. I'd have some trouble convincing him to go hand his soul to your alt, but I bet I can come up with an angle.

That I'm pretty certain would work. If you could convince him. 

I have all these lovely memories of our relationship to convince him with, he says.

Show him the explanation of why Maitimo is not Nahira, show him both bad days, show him trust songs, show him soul contact from its best moments to its worst - if it works, if he's convinced enough to try it at all, he'll go in with his soul already willing to pretend it is being touched by strangers for Maitimo-alt's benefit. And he will go in competitive, wanting to prove that he can handle anything the first Taliar could.

Well. Then, we could do it. Should we?

...I want to. I'm... I guess I'm afraid that it won't work out. I should have more faith in myself. But I - don't feel very successful or brilliant or good at accomplishing the impossible right now.

...hug. You saved the world from invading aliens.

And then followed them home and murdered their children.

They did have an interdimensional teleport, your strategic assessment was entirely sound - they could have taken you and put you in a sun somewhere where you'd die and come back over and over -

He shudders. There's a part of him that feels like that would be preferable to having committed near-genocide. But then Nuime would've been vulnerable without him - Nezhefena could've pulled him out of a sun but they might've been able to use some sort of interdimensional trickery to make him harder to find, delay her until they could get away with a bunch of soulbearers to enslave... he was right. It's just that being right doesn't make it okay. If he was really the person he aspires to be, he would've figured out some clever way to guarantee everyone's safety long enough to negotiate a truce.

I love you and I love the ridiculous standards you hold yourself to and we'll figure out how to really truly win but for that we need my alt in a more cooperative mood and so we need to seduce him.

I love you too, says Taliar. He hugs his brilliant beautiful husband and manages a smile. So much. Forever. All right, let's plan out exactly how we are going to send my alt to seduce yours. Are you going to wait until he shows up to talk about something and then bring it up - is he going to show up to talk about something...

I bet he'll send someone.

Be a little awkward to send an 'are you sure you don't want a present' through a diplomatic representative...

...and on a mostly unrelated note, it occurs to him that in the time between creating his alt and sending his alt to go seduce Maitimo's, there will be two Taliars around here... he's pretty sure that being borrowed before he's sent away will if anything help convince the second Taliar to go, if Maitimo would like to indulge himself and if he thinks his alt won't mind...

...also he should come up with a distinguishing name for the second Taliar. A different soulname, maybe, it's the most obvious thing. But his runner-up was Raika-linsi and the connotations seem really unhelpful, not to mention painfully ironic if the copy is going to be created as of the moment when Taliar's soul was the dimmest it's ever been...

Maybe I should ask Nezhefena for a ride over there so I can make the offer and become more confident he won't just torture his present.

You could do that. Would he object?

I don't think so. He's lonely and nervous, once he calms down he'll regret not being more civil -

Well, luckily for him, I don't mind him being rude to me about me coming to his world and murdering his friends.

Yes, but most people'd mind and so it wasn't very strategic of him.

He had all my thoughts the whole time. Plenty of opportunity to notice how I felt about it.