"I am not accustomed to having romantic feelings for people. I think you must just be unusually excellent." 

"...so that we're clear on what's going on here, Vanyel told me I was making you sad by trying to avoid being emotionally close to you, so I went home and talked to Hemaka about it for about an hour, and I decided I was going to seduce you, and then I did that. 'the pharaoh is unusually excellent' is what that feels like from the inside. I am very glad you're enjoying it; you're supposed to."

"- Ah, so one of us had a plan here, everything makes more sense now. I am enjoying it very much." He's so delightfully pleased with himself about it, too, it makes Leareth just want to look at him and appreciate his face when he smiles. "I am glad Vanyel pointed it out because I had no idea it was - that - and also I am now very curious what you spoke about with Hemaka that had you settle on this plan. I - confess I found myself feeling jealous of him, yesterday, which I am aware is objectively very silly and yet." 

"Mostly I wanted to talk through the diplomatic implications with him and make sure there were not any very plausible routes by which I ended up straining Osirian relations with Cheliax, and then rehearse my usual worries that seducing people while I am me is not very different from mind control and therefore less correlated than it ought to be with whether it is a good idea to let me do it.

You should be jealous of Hemaka, he is a very lucky man."

Awww. Leareth smiles and snuggles up against him. "Honestly, you have proven by your previous actions that you are someone I would trust to use a little bit of mind-control on me. It was such enjoyable mind-control, too." 

"Did you know that there is an enchantment spell which distracts the target with waves of intense pleasure so they are helpless while you do whatever else you like? I am very sure Aroden knows this but it might not have been one of the first things he shared notes about."

"Really! I did not know that." He's now wondering if you could even do that with Velgarth magic - you probably could with Mindhealing...

"As your host in Golarion I want to sincerely apologize for your cultural education being so incomplete. Maybe I will have the chance to rectify it."

"I will certainly forgive you the oversight if you make up for it." 

Is he flirting right now. Is this what flirting is. Leareth isn't sure he's ever flirted with everyone - not in this body, at least, he can't be sure what memories of past lives he's forgotten but he expects it's been a very long time. 

Khemet kisses him again. "It doesn't last very long so I will have to time it very strategically. It'd be a shame to waste its whole duration taking off your clothes, say."

"- Of course, that would be so unfortunate. I am sure your planning abilities are equal to this challenge." Has anyone ever taken his clothes off - for, well, purposes of intimacy, as opposed to because he's just been horrifically injured or something. He assumes at some point but he's retained literally zero memories of it. 

And he stands up, and tugs Leareth to his feet too, and stops flirtatiously beaming at him, for a moment, in favor of looking more restrained, more serious (he has been the exact same amount of serious the entire time, but -)

"I am very confident that this will be fun, and good for you," he says. "I'm not worried we'll go too fast; I'll notice. I'm not worried we will have the wrong proportion of terrifying new things and reassuring ones; I'll notice. I don't know if I can keep you safe from all the awful things in the world, but I can keep it safe, in my arms, to go to bed with me. I predict very confidently that this reassurance won't end up being decision-relevant. But: if you change your mind and want to leave, you can, there won't be politics about it, and it won't mean you have lost this source of hugs."

Leareth, serious as well, looks at him for a long moment. 

"I know," he says finally. "I trust you."

With this at least. Perhaps not with being sufficiently paranoid to hold off the Velgarth gods, but that's fine, for right now, he has to keep reminding himself that for all his ridiculous power and intelligence enhancement, Khemet is still far younger than him. He can learn. 

And he can teach Leareth some things first!

Leareth will be such a diligent student! Except for the parts where Khemet is very distracting and this makes it difficult to pay proper attention to his lessons. 

He's so pleased with himself. And Rings of Sustenance mean that even though they have to be up at dawn they have lots of time before they have to go to sleep.

In the morning he prays for his spells and reads a short set of notes that his servants brought with breakfast and briefly his ridiculously-good shield spell from yesterday expires before he's put today's on.

Leareth is very happy. He's not sure he's ever been this consistently delighted for such a long stretch of time before, not even when studying very interesting magic, which is the part of his work that he tends to intrinsically enjoy the most. The Dome has better magical protections on it than anything he's ever designed, which means he feels pretty justified in relaxing and staying that way. 

- he doesn't deliberately peek at Khemet's thoughts, but he definitely notices the lapse, and he catches Khemet's gaze and raises his eyebrows. He has passive Thoughtsensing open even here, he feels blind if he can't at least sense where people are in a room, and so he can't help but skim some of the surface. 

He is contentedly thinking to himself that maybe it is okay to have some nice things, sometimes.  It takes him a moment to figure out what Leareth's raising his eyebrows about, and then he casts Mind Blank again. "If it's in fact possible for you to design me an artifact that does the same thing but permits Mindspeech, I remain in the market for it; it makes things awkward when I'm talking to Companions. We can get a Telepathic Bond made permanent and then we could Mindspeak but that doesn't solve the Companion problem. I guess maybe Valdemar is too mad at me for it to come up much."

That snippet of thought is both startling to Leareth - he hadn't realized Khemet's life had any shortage of nice things - and makes him kind of sad, in a way he's not sure what to do about. 

"I can definitely do that. The design is not all that complicated, it just ended up quite far down my priority list, but - I think recent events ought bump it higher. I do not think Valdemar is angry with you, by the way; I think Savil was, personally, but Vanyel thought King Randale would understand and find your actions reasonable, even generous to Starwind and Moondance, and they certainly do not blame you for failing to prevent it." 

He looks thoughtful. "Telepathic Bond is intriguing, if it would allow you to have projective Mindspeech as well. What is the range on it?" 

"Depends on the skill of the caster. If we asked Aroden it'd be seventy-five feet or so; if we try to buy it in Sothis it'll be half that. I don't know how that interacts with the fact you normally have Mindspeech with much better range than that. The convenient outcome would be if it effectively functions by giving me Mindspeech with that range, and then you could Mindspeak with me as well as you could Mindspeak with a person with that range, which is to say at considerably better range; the less convenient outcome would be if it only works when we're that close. I bet Aroden can - see which one is closer to the way the spell works - but I know he has a lot on his plate."

"He may be able to intuit it from previous research, he has done very in-depth work with enchantment-type spells. I do not think he would mind my asking."

Leareth finds himself smiling again. "He will probably be very pleased about - us. It is not exactly me succeeding at finding a wife, but it does help me understand better what Aroden thought would be good about that, if it - could be like this... Though I may struggle to find any eligible Chelish women as excellent as you." 

"Hmmm, I wonder if you could make an arbitrary Chelish woman into someone as excellent as me by wasting a lot of diamonds on it. It's possible to Wish intelligence and charisma and wisdom higher, and the bonuses from doing so stack with the bonuses from a crown like mine. You need five Wishes in quick succession to get the largest class of bonus it's possible to get, which is more than two standard deviations, and the cost is generally prohibitive enough that I, for example, haven't done it. But you could pluck a perfectly ordinary woman off the street and get her to an unusual level of ability that way. And then you could get her a crown like mine. Works even better if instead of an arbitrary Chelish woman you pick one who has already distinguished herself in some way. Maybe ask Abadar, or Iomedae, who can sort the population by loosely how aligned they are..."

Leareth just stares at him for a moment. 

"Are you aware that your world's magic is ridiculous? Because it is. I suppose five Wishes is...a couple of hours of Vanyel's time. Not nothing, we are still resurrecting the war dead and at this point most of the remaining casualties require True Resurrection. And it would be all of Aroden's ninth-circle spells for a day and then some, I am not sure he can do five Wishes in a go. But - he seems to consider this very important, and I suppose I am his heir and apparently a king's wife has several people's worth of important duties, so..."

He frowns for a moment. "Aroden seems very, very happy with Parmida, who is - lovely, but in many ways still an ordinary person. I am not sure why I still feel that the same thing would not work for me." 

"I'm not sure. I observe that Aroden is more powerful and in some ways more secure than you, but when he met Parmida the opposite was true, so that can't be it. He was a god, maybe it's - possible to usefully complement him just by being a human? Which isn't true for you..."

"Yes, I think that is part of it. He - badly needed an anchor in the world. Did you know the story of how he rescued a toddler in Cheliax while trying to escape the natural disaster there, and ended up adopting him and teaching him magic? It was very sweet and also - quite baffling to me at first, how load-bearing that was to him, but I think part of it was needing - a way to remember how to be human. Which is not exactly the shape of thing I need."