"I mean, is he safe now?"

"From Tobias, yes."

"That is something."

"We always eventually get rid of him, it seems. They don't typically care much by the time we're about fifteen or sixteen so if we have the means to leave we do. That... can change depending on circumstances, but seems to be the general rule."

"Did you do that?"

"Oh I ran away from home when I was sixteen."

"What happened this time around? I'm not entirely clear if you're reborn or just manifested fully formed out of sea foam."

"My birth parents gave me up for adoption and I was raised in an orphanage. But I set this up in advance."

"Huh, did you remember everything? That would make for a weird childhood."

"Did the orphanage handle the genderfluidity well?"

"I only started remembering things once I learnt to talk, and after that it took a while to get everything, but I was fully myself by the time I was sixteen again. And no, it did not."

"Katur, please hug him."

"Why Katur? Aren't my hugs any good?"

"Feel free to add to the hug, but he is our best hugger while Felix is away."

Well, that is very tragic, but Katur will just go over and give Eriol a hug.

The hug startles a laugh out of him. "Really, by the time I was twelve I remembered most of my nearly four hundred years of life, an orphanage mishandling my gender identity barely registered."

"That is not very reassuring!"

"I really, really didn't care. It sounded petty and funny to me and I had no reason whatsoever to pay them any mind. You don't need to worry about it."

"That is good. But have you met Fernando? Inside that resting-bitch-faced shell he is consumed by righteous fury on behalf of all genderqueer children in the multiverse."

"I seem to have a deeper appreciation now of why mes seem so fatefully drawn to all of yous."

"Took you long enough."

"Oh, I understood it on an intellectual level, before."

"I literally couldn't believe that many wonderful people existed."

"I was including you in my 'all of yous.'"

"That was one of the nicest things someone has ever said to me." Hug.