Well she can just sit here and work on - building up more emotional buffer, or something.

And she'll do up the makeup, very quickly once she's picked the right shade. 

"There you go. And some people don't bleed regularly under stress and in new situations, if you need another excuse to not stay with him at some point..."

- nod.

She can head off to dinner, then.

"Hey."

"Hi."

(That's good! Smiling a little and not crying at all. Not suspicious at all.)

"How was your day?"

Uh, well.

"Spent it reading. Haven't been doing as much of that."

"That's good. Told Verita she should get some books for you, if she goes out to the bookstore."

"Yeah. That'll be good."

"Would you want to go with her?"

" - I figured I was obviously not allowed to?"

"You're really not supposed to but if it's really important to you there might be some way to figure something out?"

"It's not really important. But - thanks."

"Okay."

He stares at his food for a while. "What was, uh, the book about?"

"...marriage advice."

Snort. "Anything good?"

"Nah."

"Okay." 

"I figured it might help me understand the Osirian perspective better, or something. But it wasn't really for situations like ours, I don't think."

"The palace isn't really anything like the rest of Osirion. The palace is all about having as many children as possible, and there's no shortage of resources for them. That's not really the situation for normal Osirian marriages.'

"Yeah, I know that. Just - remembered that the stuff that Fazil had taught you had been important to you, too. Thought maybe understanding that better would be useful."

" - yeah." He makes a little bit of an attempt at a smile.

She can try to smile back. This works well enough, she thinks, even though there's no actual feeling behind it. Her feelings have very politely turned themselves off right now.

"I don't know if it'd be in whatever book you were reading. But the idea that men had - obligations, that the obligations weren't all to be invisibly taken care of by strangers so that you could proceed to have children while too young to be a husband or a father - it was good for me."

"That makes sense," she says, even though it doesn't really make sense at all to her, given, like, everything.