"Yes."

"It makes sense to say there are things you can't do within a marriage if you can just walk away from it."

"I take the promises I made to you seriously. Having sex with you whenever you requested wasn't one of them."

"One of the things that was wrong with me before the helmet was that I just didn't expect enemy action. Outside of an actual fight against things shooting at me. It would never have occurred to me to specify in my wedding vows that if I was promising never to have anyone else then I expected to actually have you."

"I know.

"One of the promises that I made was that I would offer you everything that I have. I am - trying to interpret that liberally. I do understand myself to have a responsibility to meet your needs as well as I can. But I have a responsibility to myself, too, to not offer you things that will snap me in half to give up. I would venture to say that that's even a responsibility that I have to you, to keep you from destroying something you might need later by accident. And we did have a conversation about this, right, you said that it was wrong to habitually deny your spouse, but that of course you wouldn't insist or try to change my mind if I was tired or had a headache. I promise you that the things I am defending myself from are much worse than a headache.

"I'm just - I'm trying. I need you to not take more than I have."

Patpatpat. "I want you whole. I need you whole. I - believe you, that you're doing your best, here."

"Okay. Well. If you can think of something less hostile-sounding than 'you can't have that' that, uh, lets you know that I really really really mean it when I say that something is a horrible enough idea that I will not be party to it, then - I can try saying that instead. Or whatever."

"Fazil likes saying 'it is my duty to serve you even in making grave mistakes.'"

"...I don't think I should say that."

He kisses her hair. 

That's okay. Nice, even. She snuggles him.

"You should eat something else."

He does that.

She looks over her papers.

"Think you can stomach notes on what you should do at the meeting? We don't have to go over tax stuff after."

"Yeah, okay."

Then she can go over dinner party background and dinner party goals with him.

He does not really acknowledge this in any way.

"Do you wanna - do you think there are things we can do to help get you ready to do all that?"

"Dunno. Maybe."

"...do you have ideas? I realize it would be better if I came up with things but I've never actually been to a fancy dinner party before, so..."

"So people will say things to me, and I'll - know enough to be able to tell that there's some nonobvious way it's a trap and some reason I should be careful of answering, and then I'll try not to give the obvious answer and then I won't be able to think of anything to say. That's what'll happen."

Nod.

"...ideally someone who actually understood foreign and domestic policy would probably rehearse this stuff with you. But - I don't think I know enough to do it right."

"'s okay. You're not supposed to."

"Yeah. But it means there's kind of a limit to how much I can do to help you go over stuff beforehand. I guess we'll just have to - get you to a point where you can talk and get out of bed at all, and ideally memorize the list of things you're supposed to do, and then - hope things don't break too badly. Unless you want to practice with Fazil. He probably has a lot of other stuff on his plate, but I guess we could ask him whether he thinks it's more important than this or not."

"Don't wanna do that. He doesn't really know either."

"Yeah, that makes sense. Then we'll just go over the list until you have it and you'll do your best.

"You wanna do anything for a break before we go over tax policy stuff?"