And I'm going to fix it eventually anyway, for everyone else it's not fair to. But -

I suppose we could shelve this for however long, come back to it later maybe?

Yeah.

You are the most astonishing person I have ever met and I love you.

If you're going to say things like that shelving it is going to be hard.

Sorry.

I was conceptualizing it as just - a crush, maybe a really dramatic one -

I'm - unclear on the relevant-to-you differences -

I probably should've taken the hint from 'moping forever' but moping forever is kind of inherently silly and being in love with me isn't?

Being in love with you is eminently reasonable.

...I'm not an Elf. "Later maybe" kind of meant "if nothing else comes up" and this is kind of a timescale on which something else might well come up and I feel differently about that in the one case than the other.

I am and always was totally aware that you'd probably find someone and that's - I want you to be happy.

I am all in favor of being happy, it is one of my favorite things, but I would also like you to be happy and not eternally pining...

I don't really think me eternally pining should be a consideration - firstly it's dwarfed by all the other ones, and secondly it doesn't entail me not being okay -

It can be a consideration on how hard we look for options.

If you like. 

I mean, if it's trivial on your end and we're having some kind of translation issue...

Not - trivial, but - Elves do the pine-forever thing and I have seen people decide to date someone off the 'they're going to pine forever I ought to at least give them a chance' and that - usually doesn't work even if the people'd otherwise be suited? It ups the emotional stakes unfairly, it's a lot of pressure -

I think it's different when I'm weighing against practical factors and not personal interest? 'She'll pine forever but I'm not that into her' is different from 'she'll pine forever but figuring it out would've been inconvenient' -

That does feel different, yeah. Just so long as it's clear that - I'm glad I met you, either way, it was utterly inevitable that I'd fall in love with you once I met you, I don't regret any of that and I don't-regret it in the expectation that it'd be a really bad idea to ever risk anything on it.

Okay.

If you have ideas to explore -

There's sort of three things - how would we hide, what kind of salvage would we need to do if we did not successfully hide, and what would we be hiding.

How do we hide - we already spend a lot of time together, we have half a dozen major political and infrastructure projects in the works that are excuses to spend even more, you can check for being actually walked in on or things like that, most plausible avenue of not-hiding is someone just guesses but - I think my people are mostly too loyal to me to say anything, humans aren't likely to guess because confusing nondynamic aliens -

Well, humans will guess but not - credibly.

And not at a substantially higher frequency than they probably will if we don't do anything.