"Shit."

"Yeah."

"--does that mean that any of us could."

"I don't know.

I'll tell you if I find out, one way or the other. But-- I don't know, I'm not sure if anyone knows."

"Great! That's. Great."

He doesn't say anything about the one person who might know.

"Yeah. That's-- almost exactly what I said. I sort of wonder about Morgan, but--"

"She did vanish. Do you think--"

"I don't know. It seems plausible, I guess, and-- if anyone we know-- but I don't know."

"You've always been the ugly one."

It's a joke, and not a joke.

"I wish you would stay home. You wouldn't let Gale join you."

"...I know. I'm really sorry. But I genuinely don't think there's anyone else who is going to be both willing and able to do the thing I did in Malta."

"You know what you'd say if Gale told you the same thing."

"Agravaine, I'm not arguing that I should be the one to sacrifice myself because nobody else can feed themselves to a Mouth effectively enough."

"Am I supposed to feel better that it's only very likely and not a certainty?"

"...I think it does in fact make a difference that I'm not doing this as a form of indirect ritual suicide."

"Indirect non-ritual suicide is so much better."

"And," he continues as if Agravaine hadn't said that, "I think it does make a difference that four people I cared about, myself included, were in a room with an evil god and a cultist with a gun, and the only way we had to kill the god was for someone to sacrifice themselves, and now the evil god is made of stone and all four of the people I care about are alive.

I got everyone out alive. It shouldn't have been possible to get everyone out alive and I did it anyway and, yes, I think that it matters that I'm not telling you it's okay because I should die, I'm telling you I am much better than anyone else would be at getting everyone out alive."

"I just don't think it's going to be good enough.

Whatever. I'm going out. Don't bother to wait up."

"...okay. Have a good evening."

And Mordred finishes making dinner alone, and eats alone, and leaves food out for when Agravaine gets back, and writes.

Meanwhile:

Lev holds Oswald's hand. "It's okay to miss her."

"They keep -- they keep saying that she misses me too."

He sighs.

"I don't know if I want her to or not. But I'm here right now. I'm not-- I'm here."

"She probably does. But that doesn't mean it's-- safe, to be with her."

"Yeah. And there would be more people who miss me. If I did."

"I would miss you.

Tereza would miss you."

"I'd better stay home then. How would you two ever hold down the fort without me."

His smile is small but objectively dopey. Good thing his face is shoved against Lev's shoulder so he cannot see this.

There's a lot less they can get away with, with a lonely 8-year-old sharing their space. It's worth it. You can't be sad with a kid demanding your attention, you can't sink into a pit of despair, you are needed for something, and for once the thing that's needed from him is to be happy and present and supportive. He is willing to trade in a large number of the intense and hurried moments of passion for quiet nights together talking about books. (Sometimes Lev has facts to add to his occult research and sometimes he has opinions and many of those opinions are wrong. What a terrible and marvelous discovery.) And he keeps on crying on him at 3am over the same things he's spent the last half a year crying over. It still helps.

And in the middle of it all it turns out Lev is great with kids, or at least great with Tereza, which is in fact the most important quality anyone could ever have. So. So that's cool. (It's really great.)

All his latent self-awareness about his increasingly unhinged emotional state and how stopgaplike a month with Lev and Tereza might be was unfounded. Playing happy families is fantastic.

Meanwhile--

Montgomery said she'd call when she reached land; Mordred is wildly unclear on how long to expect that to take but he makes a point of spending more time than usual where he'd hear the phone if it rang.