"I... want you to be happy and okay?"

"I... gathered the happy thing."

"But like in the way where if you're not okay you should tell me so I can try and fix it not in the way where you should fake it."

"I don't want to bother you?"

"It wouldn't be bothering me."

".........uh okay I realize this is probably going to piss you off because you have a whole, like, rich-guy savior-of-the-oppressed thing going on but if I don't keep you happy I am going to starve and I am trying really hard and I can't figure out what you want so if you are like 'Lev, I need you to get sane so you can help us fight the evil cult' or 'Lev, I need you to help me do journalism research' or-- other things-- just tell me what it is so I don't have to play mind games."

"............what? I-- mostly what i have is really really really hating asylums."

"That's fair."

Lev is really suspicious of "hating asylums" as a reason to take care of someone indefinitely. Mordred is presumably not planning to live with Douglas Henslowe.

"I, uh, can try to come up with things I want that make more sense to you than 'I want you to be happy and okay' but... that's what I'd be doing. Is coming up with something that made more sense to you than that."

Fuck.

Mordred won't tell him what he needs to do-- probably doesn't know himself-- and that is dangerous. If there are rules, Lev can navigate them; if it is unpredictable-- there's no way to know whether or not he's safe.

Well. There's one way. 

"...weird hobby but I guess so is slumming."

"I'm not slumming."

Lev looks skeptical.

"I know that sounds a little absurd but I do mean it."

"How are you not slumming. I've met your brother. --Unless he went the other way."

"......he did not go the other way but I would not talk to my parents if I was dying. I don't know what the word for that is but I don't think it's slumming."

"In my experience, that is mostly what people say five years before they get tired of tiny apartments and not having enough to eat, and suddenly being a starving artist feels less glamorous, and they go back to their parents and start summering in the Hamptons again."

Mordred just kind of stares at him.

The world Lev is assuming he lives in and the world he actually lives in are extremely different worlds, and he doesn't know where to start bridging that gap.

This is so stupid. Lev knows it even as he's saying it.

But Mordred says that he wants him to be happy and that can't be true and-- there's got to be a limit to how much Mordred is willing to tolerate. 
 
If he pisses off Mordred enough Mordred will punish him. Maybe he won't hit him, maybe he has too much of a self-image as a good person to do that, but Lev needs to know how far he can go so he can stay away from the ledge.

"It's so fake. You're walking around pretending like you're one of us because it-- makes you feel good, I guess, to be one of the normal people, you can be a good person who writes articles exposing injustice and rescues people from asylums-- but you can just leave, any time you want to you can just leave. And I could never just leave."

It's not like I never lie to people but there's lies and then there's lies, he'd said to Gale over the phone back in Los Angeles.

"I --" he says, because this is different, this isn't the thing he'd objected to saying to Genial Brooker, and he doesn't know how to get Lev to understand that he cannot just leave without saying the kinds of things that leave him too raw to have a conversation at all.

"And you didn't ever go to bed hungry and wake up to a rat biting your face, you've never been fucked by a man for food and a place to study so that you have any chance at all of getting out of here and no matter how hard you worked you might fail because the colleges don't like Jews-- you just-- got in because of your name--"

"You're right," he says, "I didn't, and I've also never pretended I did," stop thinking about Morgan gone and Agravaine bleeding and Gaheris -- stop it it will not help--

"No, you just tried very hard to imply it. And whether or not you lied you can go back. Guess your parents aren't too happy about a queer as a kid but if you went back and married a girl would your life even be that different."

"...yes," do not think about that do not think about that do NOT — "Yes, it would."

He's grabbing for the things that will hurt the worst-- "Do you really think Gale doesn't know you're in love with him? He has eyes."

"I —"

He should have something more eloquent to say than that but he's still reeling from would your life even be that different, Lev is probably imagining something very different from the truth but Mordred is remembering years and years of being terrified constantly and Agravaine bleeding and Gaheris's face when —