"Are you into women, then?"

Lilith pulls a face. "I'm not into anything. Caleb is the family slut."

"I am not a slut! I am a romantic."

Peter nudges Caleb on the side. "You're sitting naked in your couch with me and we are not even official."

Caleb looks at Peter seriously. "Do you want to be my boyfriend?"

wait what

"Iiiiiiiiuhhhh eheheheheheh."

Does he? Does he? He kinda does? Except for how Caleb is still not a person even though he is the most interesting not-a-person around (except for occasionally when Sage Dyer becomes almost reasonable), and... he's hot, and cute, and kind of bossy but Peter kind of likes that, and super opinionated about everything, and a bit hot-headed, and self-assured, and decisive, and wow why has Peter spent so much time analysing all of the details of Caleb's personality like that.

He's seeing a meltdown just like the one he had about having sex with Don years ago fast approaching and he wants to head it off.

Did fucking Sage Dyer see this coming, he swears to plumbob if she did—

No, stop that. He'll. Uh.

"I need a moment in the bathroom, please," he says, and he immediately flees because help.

(Not now, dick, a boy asking to be your boyfriend isn't a reason to get all uppity.)

Hahhhhhh he washes his face and slaps it a couple of times for good measure.

Is this... a crush. Is it love. He had dismissed feeling real emotions for people here because, well, NPCs, but... but...

Is he limiting himself? He's not taking the world as it comes, is he? He's still acting as if this is some sort of "backstory world", a place where things happen before he can get to his real life, with other people like him.

But...

Caleb isn't going to die. And realistically, unless the universe sends a comet his way, neither is Peter. Even though he's not a vampire, he has the Potion of Rejuvenation already, he's not going to die of old age, and the Potion of Plentiful Needs covers almost anything. He has gotten ill, but nothing worse than a mild flu, and spellcasters have plenty of concoctions for general health and specific cures for diseases.

And it's probably going to take Peter years to really crack the code, here. Denying himself sex on the basis of waiting to have it with "real people" would have been the wrong move, he thinks, and a similar logic extends to denying himself emotional companionship. It's not like Caleb is proposing to him, and Caleb is very much just as polyamorous as Peter is so they're not trying to be monogamously tied to each other. And he can let himself... feel things. For people, even. He doesn't need to make everything about his ultimate future eternal life. He can just...

...have a boyfriend.

With that decided, he walks out of the bathroom and back to the Vatores' living room, shuffling his feet sheepishly.

Lilith and Caleb were having a casual if kind of awkward-sounding discussion, but once Peter shows up again Lilith hides behind her phone while Caleb folds his arms and looks... not very happy.

Okay, Peter will walk over to the sofa again and pull both of Caleb's hands into his. "I'm sorry about fleeing like that," he says to start. "I was feeling a bit insecure and needed to think. But... I do want to be your boyfriend."

Caleb mellows down a bit at the apology and goes all the way to soft at the end. "Do you mean it?"

"Yeah." He lifts Caleb's hands to his lips and plants a kiss on Caleb's knuckles. "Yeah, I do."

"D'aaaaaawwwwwwwwww!"

"Shut up, Lilith," Caleb says with no heat as he pulls Peter in for a kiss.

Sage Dyer continues to be approximately useless for anything practical. Peter tries to sound her out about what to do to improve his cloning spell, or even just confirm his hypotheses about enchantment magic, but she does not have anything to say that doesn't sound like woo bullshit. The other Sages indulge her but they can't hope to match her in knowledge and skill, and they sound surprised and awed by the idea of a cloning spell like that. Clearly it is not even known by them.

He gets one extra potion called "of Immortality", but it turns out all it does is make sure you can't die of old age. Experimenting with it, however, turns out to be the breakthrough he needs for the Potion of Prompt Resurrection. It borrows from familiars' ability to protect their spellcaster from death by creating an artificial familiar-like magical construct that does the same. When you drink the potion, it draws some of your energy to create it, and then if anything would happen to kill them the construct is spent to entirely restore the spellcaster to the physical state they were in when they drank it. The construct only lasts for about a day or two, and it's entirely undetectable to any but the most powerful spellcasters—or the person who drank the potion, themself. But it can be Copypasto'd, and so with the combination of the Potion of Plentiful Needs, the Potion of Rejuvenation, the Potion of Prompt Resurrection, and the Copypasto spell, Peter is pretty much entirely immune to dying of anything at all, even meteors thrown at him by a spiteful universe.

Peter makes sure to get enough copies of it going to spare them for the Vatores, even though they are somewhat bemused—the idea of being doubly immortal does not seem like one they quite understand. They're willing to indulge him, anyway, and that's good enough.

And he does make use of the cloning spell every now and then. It kind of finishes killing his already-dwindling social life—the Vatores are much more interesting than anyone else, as he has mentioned in this narration multiple times, and between them and getting fuck buddy clones, he sort of neglects spending time with anyone else. Relationship numbers start decaying over time, and pretty much anyone other than the people he interacts with at work eventually gets reduced to acquaintances.

One day he gets a call from someone he hasn't talked to in a while—Dina Caliente, one of Don's regular Hot Beach Babes^tm and erstwhile fuckbuddy of Peter's. She eventually got married and had her own kids (Peter is still not thinking about NPC babies, aaaah), and Peter mostly lost contact with her since, so it's kind of surprising to see her call him.

"Dina?"

"Hi, Peter. Do you have a moment? It's about Don."

Peter is kind of past being unsure about his feelings. Yeah, he does have feelings for people, even as he yearns for more. He has a boyfriend, now, and Lilith is a really good friend of his, and Lilith's girlfriend Morgan is pretty cool (he's still not sure what they've got going on there but it's cool), and he has whatever the shit he has with Sage Dyer. They may not be quite people but his feelings for them don't really give a fuck about that, not after he started letting them.

And Don is not the first person he's met who's passed away. It's not even that... bad... objectively speaking. Don's ghost will still be there, and resurrection is possible, and if Peter ever finds out how to turn other people into people then everything will be fine.

But he...

"I'm sorry," he says to Don's ghost at the graveyard. They're both sitting on the freshly-planted grass atop Don's grave, next to each other, watching the sunset.

"Hmm? What about?" asks the ghost, his echo-y voice a constant reminder that he's not really of this world.

"I could have... kept you. I chose not to." He knows Don will not really understand what he's saying. But it's fine. He wants to say it anyway. "I chose to let you age and die. To let you go, to not spend that much time with you. I don't know if I regret it. But I'm sorry anyway."

"Well, I forgive you," says Don, even though he definitely does not sound like he really understands it.

"Did you live a good life? Did you have fun, are you proud of the person you were?"

"Yeah! My life was great. I was very happy."