" - I didn't mean I'd get bored of you, I meant I'd get bored of having you holding me be one hundred percent of my leisure activities."

" - oh. Well then I guess I am all happy."

Snuggle.

"I guess I don't actually know whether I'll stop - feeling like this. Never felt like this before, so."

Nodnodnod. "I - really want you to keep feeling like this but I'll be okay if you stop. Really."

Nodnod. "I guess some of it probably depends on what this... is. Uh, whatever this thing we're doing is. In a more general sense than the fact that at the moment we are snuggling."

“Yeah. Uh. We are adventuring companions and friends and - what do you want -“

"That - depends a lot on what you do, I think? I realize that's not a very helpful answer - "

“I want Elizabeth to kill Asmodeus and then you to want to marry me. And then to get married and raise Verita and, like, a lot more kids, but not so many you are always tired, maybe like six, or ten. And I guess we would have to adopt random ones we run into along the way. And we could raise a dragon so we can travel as a family once there’s too many of us for a carpet.”

She giggles a little. "Ten kids is a lot, I shudder to think how many the Osirian women who are always tired have."

"I think it depends how close they are, not just how many of them there are. And it depends if they have lots of interesting things to do and places to go and things to learn, and stuff. But that's not - I don't need all that. That's just - when I imagine everything working out wonderfully that's what I imagine, all of us flying around on a dragon fixing up Cheliax after Asmodeus is dead."

"That - sounds like it could hypothetically plausibly be nice, conditional on a bunch of other things. 

"In Cheliax when you start dating - actually dating, I mean, not just, like, people hooking up with each other for fun - it's - a lot of it is about getting to know each other and seeing how important you should be to one another, or whether you ought to find someone else. And I guess I kind of - even if Elizabeth became omnipotent queen of the multiverse and knocked creation completely off its course, I think - I'd still have to know you a lot better before coming up with any definite answers to the question of what exactly we ought to be, or whether you should go looking for someone else. Which, honestly, you probably should, but right now I - don't want you to."

"Well, I don't want to go looking for someone else. So I won't, not now, not anytime while you're still figuring things out."

"That could take a while."

“I’m not in a hurry.”

Snuggle.

"In the hypothetical where Asmodeus is dead and I am fundamentally wrong about the universe and also feel like I would like to - be with you for the rest of my life - I am maybe still kind of concerned about finding out which parts of the Osirian concept of marriage you're extremely attached to. But I don't know whether that's a good thing to talk about right now or not."

“I mean, we are going to need to talk about it at some point and now doesn’t seem bad?”

"I guess. Might make you stop snuggling me."

“I am already aware that you think Osirian marriage is not really different from slavery.”

" - yeah, I guess that's the main thing. Well, that and the taking other wives, that's - I am not going to say that that makes it not a marriage, because that would be - insensitive, and probably inaccurate, but it feels like the sort of thing that would make something not count as a marriage at all, if you just - have one person be stuck forever while the other is allowed to go find someone shinier whenever they want - "

“You’re not supposed to do that. Not to say that people don’t, just, it is definitely not essential to what I want from marriage. I would be happy to promise not to take any other wives and even happier to promise not to unless we both thought it was a good idea. Since that allows for - the sort of circumstances under which it’s generally considered okay to take another wife, if you happened to find them compelling, and not if you don’t, which is what any good husband would want anyway.”

...nodnod.

“Fazil is really really against men remarrying and he says he would consider it if his wife happened to ask him to, but not if he asked her, since then she might have made herself okay with it out of love for him.”

" - well. Good for Fazil."

“So. We could do something like that. If you wanted.”

"I guess. In this extremely dubious hypothetical future. 

"There's still the bit where as far as I can tell you all group wives with dependents and give them the rights of same. And - it's not even just the law parts, see, I'd be worried that even if we had something that sounded good on paper it would be kind of stupid to marry someone with a radically different cultural understanding of how women are supposed to behave, since I wouldn't meet it, and - even if I hadn't broken any promises you might be upset about, uh, the sense that I was not acting how I was supposed to. Do you see?"