"Okay.

- I do think it is reasonable to expect prospective rulers of the world to closely investigate the circumstances of mass murders whose perpetrators they are going to interact with. Even if you want to consider anyone else's willingness to go beyond a heuristic a - nice thing that happens, or whatever - can we agree that you deserve it from me, and have the right to expect it of me?"

"Insofar as you plan to interact with me, yeah, I would be legitimately disappointed if you issued summary judgment on things in general and I'm not going to special-case myself."

"Okay. That's all. Thank you."

"...what for?"

"Do you want a list of all the things I'm grateful to you for, because it's not like I have anywhere to be, but everyone else might wonder what I've been monologuing about for an hour straight."

"I meant in the immediate context, although I'm separately skeptical of the hour figure."

"Putting up with a conversation on what can't be your favorite of topics, and I'd bet with you but you're inconveniently a demon."

"So inconvenient."

"It means I can't get you nice presents and I derive a lot of satisfaction from getting people nice presents."

"Well, I'm sure it's my birthday somewhere but not in any worlds we're currently concerned with."

"I am grateful that you ended material scarcity in your world and know exactly how big a deal it is and appreciate it properly which is good because someone really ought to. Every single person living on the Moon or Mars in Revelation, or pontificating about the moral importance of elephants, is because of you and if they are not grateful then I will gather up all of the gratitude and harbor it on your behalf because it matters, so so much, and it's inspiring and the things they have invented with the tools that you handed them are now going into the hands of every single world we can find and I'm grateful for a hundred inventions I haven't even heard of yet because they'll delight me once I get around to reading of them and they'll change lives once we get around to distributing them and they happened because of you, all of them, centuries and centuries of gifts that we can scatter across the multiverse because you had the nerve to say 'yes, it'll change everything, but magic should not be a secret while people die of hunger' - and that particular sentiment is one I understand well enough to be properly grateful for it, I really do know, and I know a lot of things about the kind of person someone is from the fact they are the kind of person who notices - and doesn't immediately think 'if that were true, someone would have done it' -

I am grateful you were summoned by whatever fluke it was to Arda and that the kid didn't know enough to immediately send you back which I take it you probably wouldn't have prevented him from doing. I am grateful that when you found yourself in the middle of a war with terrifying powers and squabbling people handling the first side you met you figured out what due diligence would be and did it and structured your assistance to still achieve a lot before you'd satisfied yourself it was worth intervening.

I am grateful for how well you handled what sounds like a completely horrifying amount of constant background nightmare fuel while meeting a planetworth of political entities and having a bunch of clever insights about how to use your powers to verify oaths and taking personal responsibility for, like, everything while also interfacing constructively and usefully with the governments involved, which I have trouble doing even under way less pressure and with way more cultural knowledge of the relevant governments. I am grateful you were thoughtful and perceptive enough not to escalate, and were able to warn everyone else, and you were right about that and probably saved a billion lives by deterring attempts at nuking Angband which I take it would probably have been tried. I am grateful that when the thing to do seemed to be handing out tens of millions of suicide triggers you did that, even though it must have been hell, my alt had a note to check whether you needed any form of support or distraction in order to not burn out and concluded you didn't, you could actually just do what needed to be done, do you know how rare that is, do you know how reassuring it is to me to know that you are like that...

I am grateful that you were so careful, with the oath, that you knew who to ask for help and you worked with them and you worked thoughtfully and you did a meticulous and careful and clear-headed job on the most important problem in the universe, all in secret while people were dying. I am grateful that you trusted our alts and accepted their help and I am grateful beyond measure that you got it right, that it's over, that the war ended and the peoples are rebuilding and the torture stopped and the world is safe and you could not have known in advance that it would work out that well - you could be sure enough to do it but not completely certain and still go ahead and live with that - I am so, so glad it was you, even if it was a very altruistic person there are so vanishingly few people who would have been enough - 

I am grateful that we met. I am grateful that we did not meet when I was twelve and bore no particular resemblance to my Elf alt and wouldn't have been well enough positioned to fix everything right away; I am grateful that we did not meet when I was twenty and Azkaban would have existed for three more years. I am grateful that whatever you thought of my alt personally you trusted me with the things I needed to know to figure out how to pull this off, I am well aware that you had countless good reasons not to tell a wizard with yet-unspecified powers what you could do let alone what you had done and I am grateful that you did. You're better at risk-assessment than me and I'm glad, we're going to need it. I'm grateful you have a comprehensive understanding of summoning and I didn't have to waste at least a year or so getting up to the level of competence at which I'd feel comfortable with the things that I've been able to do so far, I'm grateful you have such delightful and adorable acquaintances, and so much patience with the peculiarities of my world, and so much - caution about condemning - the things we're doing that your society regards as unconscionable - I don't think that's even the unhealthy 'well I don't get an opinion I'm a mass murderer' thing, I think you're just really good at meeting people where they are in terms of understanding - I appreciate the way you explain things, you're really unreasonably excellent at it, I appreciate how infrequently I've felt like our conversations make no sense despite the vastness of the gap in expectations -"

Did he want Cam to stare at him and blush because that is how you get Cam to stare at you and blush.

Well, it hasn't been an hour, so he'll keep going. "This one's probably a cultural thing but I appreciate how much effort you put into being unreadable about my inexplicable-to-my-family incompetence at romance, I wasn't sure how well you knew my alt or if that sort of thing's even the same for several days and I hadn't and wouldn't have asked you to lie for me - I guessed how you'd feel about Legilimency just off how deeply and seriously you respect privacy, that and the fact that you actually take your beliefs seriously and notice and care about their implications, that's rare too and it's so hard to teach -

I am grateful for how clearly you think, just in general, you know, I wish you were less miserable but I really do believe you that you figured out how, on reflection, you wanted to feel and that you feel that and are not deceiving yourself either about your emotions or your needs, it makes it so much easier to do right by you and I really do love doing right by people, and I'm not as good as you but I'm familiar enough with the ideal to know that it's really hard to pull off even on problems much much less fraught than this one, and there you are, totally masterful at it - there are a lot of forms of trust in people but trust in someone to be who they want to be is very rare and very special and it delights me to experience it and I admire it deeply in you.

I'm grateful to have your trust. I am in general fairly flippant about my intent to take over the world and you haven't known me long enough to know I'll do good with it and haven't known him entirely in a positive light and it is fairly apparent that you're evaluating the plans on their merits but still you seem to lack the instinct that sufficiently qualified people just shouldn't have unchecked power, on principle, and I think that that trait of yours - if I'd met you just a little sooner, just somehow in time - would translate to absolutely adorable quantities of hubris and I appreciate it tremendously and am going to be patiently nudging it back into existence as much as I can because I would be doing the world a disservice otherwise. I am grateful you are entertaining protectorship of Mars because I really honestly sincerely can't imagine anyone better and I know so many people. Maitimo knows literally millions of people - knows them well, I'm not sure if that's a thing that is apparent about he and I or not but we don't form casual acquaintanceships, we walk by someone in the street and assume personal responsibility for lifting them up to the stars, and he had thousands of years to do it in and he spent them obsessively and happily meeting millions of people from a very advanced society and I'd bet all of my not-even-demon-duplicable worldly possessions that he does not have a better candidate for rulership of Mars.

I am grateful that you've been making things for us. I know it doesn't actually take much time but, you know, people who are not you who spend a hundred fifty years making things for humans only in a extremely circumscribed dehumanizing transactional capacity would take that to heart on some level and I am allowed to be delighted that you didn't even if I'm also utterly unsurprised - I am outrageously grateful for the humane moon arcology prison, it was breathtaking, when Ister was making it, I do not even know what combinations of talents someone needs to come up with something like that but any of the solutions I would have come up with would've been vastly inferior - if there were a prison that embodied the belief that people are never fundamentally deserving of suffering, it would be that prison, and we tore down Azkaban and put it on the Moon and you made that possible, you made all of this possible.

I am absurdly impressed that you threw off the Imperius. I was absurdly impressed even before I learned how you experience it, and then I was kind of heartbroken but it didn't take me that long to bounce back to being even more absurdly impressed, because the level of willpower and self-awareness and self-knowledge - 

- and I'm glad you don't want me to do it again, I don't know if I could, I don't want to hurt you, I am so grateful in every sense and from every angle that whatever cosmic forces govern this place brought you here. And there are so many worlds out there I don't understand the notations of numbers that you would need to use to describe them, and we are going to fix them, and you made all of that possible too, and apparently I am not great at handling the kind of pressure inherent in the scope of horror in the universe being effectively infinite and going on every single minute I waste sleeping or eating or complimenting shirtless demons but I'm going to get better at it and in the meantime it is unspeakably reassuring to know that you do not have that problem and that there will be steady hands steering the fate of as-many-worlds-as-we-can-reach."

...at "compliment shirtless demons" that might be a little bit of smile.

He has totally cracked the 'how to make Cam less sad' problem and it's tremendously satisfying. "I appreciate how conscientious you are. I am delighted and awed by the list of specialties you picked up in Hell and I want to hear you play the violin sometime and I sometimes imagine you living in a place where nothing was seriously wrong for a century and a half and I am so grateful that won't happen again. I appreciate how seriously you take important things while - not making it harder for people to be young and silly and happy in your company. You like fixing things, you like changing things, you like saying 'well luckily I have unfathomable cosmic power so that problem can stop being one now' - you're going to find it fun to save all the worlds, and that matters, it's contagious, it gives everyone else permission to find it satisfying too. Minor likes you. He's not like this at all around people he doesn't trust. I have never seen my father like a person who was not at that exact moment teaching him a language but he's comfortable here too. 

I appreciate how practically grounded your principles are. It comes up a lot - when we turn kittens into dishware, when you were explaining why it is that you think people are warranted in treating you as not credible, you think in very clear terms about what morality means and what it's for and I trust that no matter how bizarre or upsetting or confounding the worlds we find you'll - hmm, how to phrase it - when we are powerful enough to stop bad things, then anyone who can happily live in that society will be welcome in it, there's no purity test, there are uncompromisable foundations but the kind crafted to give everyone good lives, not the kind crafted to bring them in line - so few people I know do morality at all, and they're not generally better than the ones who don't. But it's a delight to see it done meaningfully and principled-ly and - I feel like no matter what sort of world you'd been born into you would have ended up the same, the foundations are that firm, that's not even true of me, but you - you chose who you were going to be and you chose so well. I appreciate the complexity of the balance you are trying to strike with - not making conversations about what you did about what it was like for you to do it - and I am very deeply grateful that you are willing to grant me that you deserve from me trust, and respect, and being taken seriously on everything. Because I'm going to need you, and it'd bother me a lot to... feel like you felt that my willingness to listen to you and take your advice and run plans by you and ask your help with hard problems was - some kind of luck, instead of an absolutely nonnegotiable condition for being competent enough to rule the world and go off fixing other ones...I like people to be clear on when I would be wronging them, and I would be.

Because you did the right thing. And I am so so grateful that you did. 

I am grateful that you're smiling. I wanted to pull that off for a long time and it is every bit as satisfying as I imagined it. I am so so grateful that you're going to live forever because I am certain there is something out there that will fix it and I trust completely that no matter how long it takes you will find it. And I would worry that this will be psychologically unhealthy but here you are and I successfully achieved smiling so I think you will be able to scour the universe for whatever unthinkable power it will require to bring back weird dead magic gods without being continuously miserable and I am grateful for that because Merlin, Cam, if 'deserves happiness' weren't a terribly silly concept I cannot think of anyone it'd apply to more. You've done so much. You're going to do so much. Eventually you will even publicize one of the nice things and people will appreciate you properly for it, and in a very long eventually you will be known in many worlds only to a few very obsessive historians but the good owed to you will be everywhere, every single prison where someone is visiting their mother and every single elephant-person and every single life with no end creeping up on it."

He looks at his watch. "You win the bet," he says, "that's only been thirty-two minutes and I think I have covered most of the points I had in mind."

...self-conscious wing-rustling.

He beams and slips off the barstool and goes upstairs.

When nobody's looking Cam grins quietly to himself for a minute, and then picks up his reading again.

When they have been discussing music and playing music and debating music for a couple of hours he yawns. "It may still be some ambiguous time of day in this place," he says, setting the violin down, "but I should probably get some sleep."

"You gonna dismiss me or bring me along?" Amriac wonders languidly.

Pet pet. "I thought I can't dismiss you until I've given you everything you want? It'd be hard to smuggle you into my dormitory, though. That really is one big building, maybe it contains an inn and I could get a room."

"I'd let you. You'd miss me sooner or later." Nuzzle. "Worth checking though. Hee, 'get a room'."

"Oh, is that 22nd century innuendo of some form? I cannot think of any reason to send you home, and also if I offered you the same terms again when I summoned you back everyone would regard me as very stupid and if I didn't I would feel like was being unbearably stingy. Clearly the solution is that you should stay as long as you like."

Nibble. "It's 21st century, actually, but my English isn't up to date and you and Timothy didn't exactly catch me up to modern idiom."

"Don't take summons very often?"