"Yeah. And running yourself into a wall repeatedly in the hope that this time it'll work isn't a great time even when the stakes don't involve the fate of the world."

Tiny smile. "I'd hoped you'd be. Impressed. That I know so many languages."

"I am also impressed that you know so many languages."

Lev twitches like he very much wants to reach out and touch Mordred. "I've always been good with them, ever since I was a little kid. And, you know, growing up where I did--"

Does he want to be holding hands. They can be holding hands. "Yeah, I bet."

!!!!!!!!!

He tries to compose himself and not seem overly excited.

Lev's hands are smaller than Mordred's and the calluses are different. Mordred isn't thinking about that, or about the implications of the impulse decision he just made.

"...sometimes I wonder how many languages I might have learned if I had actually grown up in New York," he says instead. "Or -- what my real accent would have been, if I'd had one."

"Depends on how rich you were, I think. Whether you were"-- he gestures vaguely with the other hand-- "a real American."

"No, I mean -- so the thing about my accent is that it's fake no matter what? The New York one I taught myself and the mid-Atlantic one was taught to me."

"Presumably you had some accent when you were a little kid."

"Presumably. But I don't remember what it was."

"That's sad. I-- haven't had anyone to speak Yiddish to in, god. Almost twenty years."

"That's also sad. I'm sorry."

"We both made ourselves different than we were."

"Yeah." He would like to put his head on Lev's shoulder. He does not do that.

"I don't regret it," he says quietly. "I'd rather study people than Talmud. But no one I talk to knows what Talmud is. It's weird to miss a place you never belonged in."

"It really is. ...Italian might be more practical but I think I want to learn Yiddish anyway. And not even just because my dad would have an apoplectic fit, although he would."

"I'd like to teach you Yiddish. It'd be-- good-- to have someone who knew the first language I ever learned."

"It'd be good to know the first language you ever learned." There is an unusual amount of intensity in this sentence for the sentence that it is.

Heart eyes.

"I don't know that I've ever belonged anywhere really."

"I'm sorry." He's said this over and over again but he keeps not having any better ideas for what to say.

He doesn't say something stupid like 'maybe I can belong with you.'

"I think anthropologists aren't supposed to belong anywhere. We're supposed to be sitting away from everything. Watching."

"Sounds lonely. But then I'm not an anthropologist."

"Aren't you lonely?"

He has Agravaine. He has Gale. ....he's not really sure what's happening with him and Agravaine and Gale is, well. ".....yes."