"Will you stop, if I give it my best shot and then ask you to stop anyway - "

"...once? Yeah. That can't - be the plan for the rest of our lives, it really can't, if I can't draft anyone else into this mess I need an heir."

"I mean the once. I mean that - I understand that we need a solution but it is going to be so much harder to fix if you won't stop."

"Sure. Once. I stopped tonight, didn't I, and I was just kissing you."

"Yeah. I know. Thank you."

"I want you to agree to this. I don't want to have to force you."

"Yeah."

Hug.

"I can do two weeks and then give it my best shot, if I think we're not making good progress. If I think we're making good progress and that skipping ahead would ruin things then I will ask you to push back the deadline. If we're not making good progress then I will try it your way. Once. If you will stop if I really really need it. And then we have to talk, which means talking the next day if I can't talk right after, and then figure out where we stand.

"Might want to find a way to get letters to Fazil faster, might want to find a way to talk to female clerics of - I don't know, Shelyn, I barely know anything about the church of Shelyn but someone there has got to do marital counseling, might want to look through your spell list and see if anything there might help. Mostly I will just - need you to try to work with me."

"I want to try and hit you with Heal and Restoration and Regenerate and maybe Greater Restoration and see if any of those help, in case you have some internal injury that healed wrong or something. And you can talk to clerics of Shelyn, if you want."

"Okay. That sounds good."

Snuggle. 

Utterly exhausted snuggle.

Well if they don't fall asleep for a while he has a spell for that.

Yeah, she's still crap at falling asleep on her own.

She wakes up first again. She's maybe kind of bad at sleeping in general. He'll probably dismiss her as soon as he wakes up, or right after he finishes praying, but right now he can't, and right now if you ignore the stupid helmet then he's basically indistinguishable from the good version of her husband.

Maybe it's unhealthy to pretend. But she misses him so much. She clings to him and thinks about how much she loves the person she married.

He wakes up. 

He leans over and kisses her. 

...snuggle.

- gosh. More kisses?

- okay. Yeah. Probably not gonna be in a better state of mind for it later. It's - maybe kind of incorrect or something to be thinking of the other him but it's - he's the one who said he wasn't dead, so - 

She kisses him back.

This is nice. He asked her to try and she's trying, and he appreciates it. He'll just hold her and kiss her and look forward to once she's worked on her other issues.

She misses him so much. She's not sure how much that thought even makes sense when she's literally kissing him right now, but - she feels like she's kissing a ghost or something and if she can just do it right then maybe he'll stay.

Just kisses. No words. Words'll make it worse.

This has also crossed his mind. Words are bad anyway. 

He's supposed to attend some meeting about the state of the country but if he skips it Fazil will come slink by later to summarize it for him. 

It has not remotely occurred to her that she might have to be the responsible one here. Anyway he's miserable as the pharaoh, probably he needs some time for something nice - somehow this is a nice warm thought when she's pretending he's not evil and loves her exactly the same way that he did - and anyway the country held itself together for four months and it's not going to collapse in the next fifteen minutes.

Just kissing. This is probably accidentally phase one of whatever brilliant plan she's working on and she doesn't want to ruin it. Possibly she can kiss his neck, because she really wants to, but she's not gonna go further than that, probably, she needs to not get ahead of herself.

He loves her so much. He's so glad he has her, sure, a Osirian woman would be less upset about having to follow orders, but he didn't like any of them, he wanted her, and she's very very good, and she's his, and they'll be okay, somehow. 

Probably they won't have the meeting without him and will just sit there waiting for him, all day if necessary. Too bad for them.

Eventually she will work on moderately gracefully deescalating back to clingy snuggles, since she does not actually think that it's a good idea to try any kind of sex right now, even though the part of her that is convinced that this is the Hagan from three days ago thinks that having sex would be a great idea. She'll just - have to protect that part for later on. 

Snuggles are good too?