"You, too, huh?" he asks, still a bit unsteady.

"I, too, wish to take over the world? And do something sensible with it?"

"Yes."

"Yes. Me too."

"Oh, lots of things. Did you know that it's pretty easy to mess with time perception in dreams? Subjective hours and hours."

He swallows. "I—I'd thought that was a myth."

"Well, maybe it is for regular dreams, I never remembered most of mine when I was little. But lucids? Yeah, hours and hours."

Swallow again. Lick his lips. "What, um, kinds of things did you dream about, then?"

"What did you dream about last night?"

"I—um. Many things. I don't remember them all." Pause. "You."

"What a coincidence."

"Is it?"

"Yes. Yes it is."

"It's fun." Pause. "Way down on my priority list, but a known thing that psions can do, is shared dreams."

"Oh. That's a thing. A nice thing."

She laughs at him and strokes his hair.

Shrug. "Good morning Alex, what are you having for breakfast, what, you slept too late again, no it's omelettes, at least get an apple from the cafeteria lady who likes you or keep granola bars in your backpack, or pop tarts if you must - that sort of thing."

"Your brother typically miss breakfast?"

"About half the time. He sleeps really lightly. It's worse if he has an alarm. So he wakes up five times during the night, and by the time it's almost time to leave for school he's short on sleep and Renée usually can't bear to wake him any earlier than she has to. She packs him extra lunch, which in theory he could eat earlier in the day, but the bus route's full of potholes so he doesn't like trying to eat on the way and then his teachers are jerks about letting people get things from their lockers or eat in class -" Shrug. "You know how if you're away from a place for a long time - even just a grocery store or something, or a friend's house - you come back and, even if you were really trying to keep in touch, they've changed all these things and didn't think it was important to tell you and the place isn't familiar anymore? Alex and I drown each other in detail so that won't happen, we try to live on top of each other as much as we can across state lines."

"I know I've said this before but you two sound really adorable. And an implication of that last sentence also belatedly occurs to me."

"Alex does not want - and I am not in the least tempted to give him - any pornographic details," Isabella assures him. "But he knows that I like you and what I like about you and where we have gone on dates and I have quoted some of your non-pornographic remarks to him and so forth."

"Alright. What do you like about me? Um, other than gender-swapping and looking at you a certain way and wanting to make everyone immortal?"