"...oh god I do not know enough about what's good for kids to decide that. Dorms are probably easier to build and offering a choice between dorms or an elf family is probably better than not offering a choice at all?" 

"--But you just were a human kid! Very recently!"

"By some definitions I still am a human kid actually. But, one, children are very different from one another on many, many axes, and two, generalizing from my own experience mostly just gets you 'exit rights are important, don't trust doctors, and treat weird people better than that,' which I already knew." 

"So, uh, not so much for the plan where we can just ask you whether human children actually need school and if so what characteristics should it have?"

"At least not so much for the plan where I can give you an easy answer without having to do a bunch of thinking and research about it. Uh, I will probably arrive at the conclusion that some amount of school is a good idea but I don't know yet what it will look like other than 'not typical American public school' and it's way lower priority than most other things that need to happen." 

"OK, so, dorms, human-friendly food-- uh, do you know anything about what nutrients humans need or is that also something you don't really know enough about-- weather-appropriate clothes, and the things the kids request?"

"That sounds great. Water, protein, fat, iron, calcium, fiber, most vitamins but especially C -- and D since it's the North Pole in winter -- uh, and calories are the most important nutrient but I don't think you're likely to be short on that." 

"Right, okay, I think we can figure something out. --Thank you."

Tired but genuine smile. "Thank you." 

"I mean. For saving the kids."

"And thank you for giving me somewhere I could save them to? You will notice that I have never saved several hundred children without somewhere to bring them and people who can magically create food and make ludicrous amounts of clothing and give them weather protection and -- probably a dozen other things I'm not even thinking of -- and are endlessly willing to help." 

"Well, we didn't do anything without you either."

Mysterious sad face.

"Right. So we can both thank each other for making it possible to do anything at all." 

Pause. 

"...also do you want a hug or something I'm bad at feelings."

"...........a hug is nice."

Then Mordred will hug him. Mordred is... not great at hugs but he's doing his best. 

"Sorry, I-- you were my kid."

Mordred's first parse of that sentence makes no sense at all, 

And then he realizes. 

"...ah."

"We-- we don't watch every kid, we randomly sample, but all the elves adopt a kid and watch them because... because children matter and it's important to remember why we're doing what we're doing and it helps calibrate our systems, right, to have a fuller sense of some children, and you were mine--"

"And I was an unbelievably worrying child and -- I'm sorry for the very graphic lesson in what razor blades do to human skin, if it helps I got significantly less concerning a few years after I stopped believing in Santa."

"No, it was just-- you didn't ever know that there was someone who cared about you."

Mordred can't think of anything to say to that so instead he just hugs Lev tighter. 

"And then one day you stopped believing and-- I never got to know what happened to you or if you were okay or--"

"I was -- very much not okay but a couple years after that I figured out I was trans and also stopped believing in God and was more okay, and then when I was fifteen I got a GED early so I could go to college and then I was a lot more okay." 

"You don't have to be sorry that I was worried that's-- not what it was about at all-- it wasn't your fault."