Terel pats his shoulder and kisses him on the cheek. "I'm not going to disappear while you're gone or anything."

"I know you're not, but..."

"But vankire brain. Yeah. I want to turn eventually, seeing if you can go back or not just - influences the timing."

"I mean not just vankire brain, it's mostly that I—would kinda love to spend the night with you even if I don't sleep."

"Well, if you want to do that I have no objection? Except that it means doing overnight things later."

"—you. Have no objection? I thought—" Pause. "Okay I'm stupid. Okay. I—wanna do that—but maybe not tonight I should go—check—"

He is visibly conflicted.

"You've built your reputation for forthrightness with me enough that if you want things having to do with me asking is not a bad thing. But what's wrong?"

"Beeeeing with you is almost literally a drug to me and I've been holding back on spending nights with you because I thought you preferred I—live elsewhere, or something, for now, and now I'm thinking of all the nights I could have spent with you—not that there were a lot of those anyway but like the weekend and last night and—now I genuinely have something I should do soon and aaaaugh!"

"If it helps, two days ago I probably would have balked at you sleeping with me not-colloquially."

"...it does help. What changed?"

"I just got more used to you, got to know you, spent a day with you as a boy. And... That mess with Leah, if I had to point to something specific. Made me re-evaluate some assumptions."

"Might I ask which?"

"You might ask, yes. Mostly it was how much I care about 'proper manners and right living,' societal expectations as a full category, and it got me started on ignoring the aspects of that that don't make sense."

"Oh. Yeah ignoring that is generally good. Unless you're a politician, in which case you should be pretty private about stuff."

"Hence a lot of why I don't want to be a politician."

"I was on the track to, before I turned. Went to law school and all."

"Sounds... Fun."

"Well, I liked it, other than the 'having to pretend to be cis and straight and a nice religious boy' but." Shrug.

"I mean even without that other stuff it seems irritating to deal with ridiculous conflicting legal constructs that you have little if any control over. But it sounds like that got called off, so." Also shrug.

"The idea was to eventually get some control over and funnel money to appropriate places. Politics is just giving lots of people what they want."

"I guess if you don't have a full spread of revolutionary academic and scientific knowledge that probably seems like a much faster way to do it."

"Yeah, people were already cutting the edge of knowledge there, it... was probably not where I was best suited. But I did consider it, for a while."

"That's where I'd have been. It's why I'm here, at Suvak."

"Well, and here we are. I'm pretty satisfied with the current situation."

"And we'll be taking steps to computers and robotics soon."