He accepts them and starts putting them back on. "Yeah?" he says, clearly confused about where this is going.

"I was... very infatuated with him, when I was young and he was teaching me to fight. And when I got not-so-young that infatuation turned, ah, more carnal. Achilles tried to hide how terribly embarrassed he was and told me such physiological reactions were perfectly natural but I think he knew they were not entirely only physiological.

"But I believe I had a bit of a strong association in my mind between fighting and... that. I died more than once to letting my guard down in some of my escape attempts because of that association and its effects in me.

"Perhaps put more plainly, my dick has at times distracted me enough for a shade to get a lucky hit in."

"...oh. Yeah, that's happened to me too, when I left the leggings off. The part about my dick distracting me to death. Not the getting all carnal about Achilles—really? He's objectively lovely, I don't deny it, but—really?"

"I don't understand your confusion well enough to be able to help with it," he says, flopping back down onto a seat on the ground.

"I can't... want someone who I see as a teacher or a threat. I don't think. And you can?"

He puts his own knee guards back on.

"...huh. Yes, and from what I have been told mortals often do have such relationships between mentor and mentee, which Father has of course used as ammunition to berate me with, being like a mortal.

"I don't think it would have been remotely a good idea, mind you. He was just... the first person to show me affection, I suppose, and I was young and foolish.

"Well, there was Thanatos, but if yours is like mine you'll know what I mean when I say he doesn't count."

...blink blink. "Your Thanatos... shows affection?"

"In a fashion. He is not so skilled at... even knowing what his feelings are, let alone expressing them, so the sort of thing he will do is help with some task and then vanish, or bring something up he thinks I would find neat he saw somewhere and then get embarrassed and vanish again if I point that out."

If Other Zag is paying attention he'll notice this affection is very very much mutual, here.

"Oh."

He takes a few seconds to process this, and starts pacing again along the way.

"So... oh, it's going to be much harder to tell whether they're the same person, or whether they just—rhyme—like you and I do—" Pace pace pace. "Did you ever—I asked him his favourite colour once, and he said he'd have to think about it, and then ten years later by which point I've forgotten about the whole thing he pops up and says 'light grey' and fucks off again, and it takes me all day to figure out what he was talking about—?"

Zagreus cracks up. "Yes."

He laughs. "Maybe they are the same, I don't know. Or maybe that's just part of the rhyme. Tell me a story about yours, maybe we can find something different."

"Hmm... something from before the escape attempts, probably. Ah, this one time when Hades was still attempting to make me, what did he call it, 'develop a work ethic' by working at the records, Thanatos showed up one day, chatted to me for a little bit about something innocuous, vanished, and mysteriously all my work was done for that day. ...night—period of time."

"Oh!" He thinks about it. "Oh, that did happen. I didn't notice until later and then I thought I might be going mad but Thanatos is a much better explanation. Hmm, let's see... oh, did yours ever spend a weird amount of time just watching you from the shadows at all hours? I never did get a straight answer from him on what that was about. It was after that fiasco with Meg—did you have a fiasco with Meg—I started seeing him out of the corner of my eye all the time, and then he'd disappear when I looked straight at him. He's mostly left it off these days, or maybe he's just gotten better at hiding, but for a good long while it was like having an extra shadow."

"...that didn't happen, huh. I did have a Meg fiasco, yes—nice to know Lord Hades is still that much of a piece of garbage across other, uh, whatever they are, worlds? Anyway, he used to do something a bit like that to me when we were younger but it wasn't all the time, it was just some of the time for a bit."

"It was definitely all of the time. I wonder what the difference is? Maybe something about him, maybe something about us? It can't just be something about what happened with Meg, because yours was following you around like that earlier and mine wasn't..."

"This could just be because you and I are different people so he relates differently to us."

"Could be. But I still want to know why, you know?"

"Yeah. It seems you don't have a close relationship with yours? That makes it harder to suss it out. Mine is my best friend, I could spend all day—night—whatever—talking about him."

"I know mine but I wouldn't say we're close. I wouldn't say I even know what it would mean to be close with him."

"Yeah, I see what you mean. ...after I'd been trying to escape for a while he showed up one time and stopped time for both of us so that he could berate me for leaving without telling him goodbye, then he helped me kill the shades trying to find after me, and then he gave me a Centaur Heart and disappeared. Sometimes I suspect he's the one who leaves the random Hearts I find. He was bewildered and offended by the idea that he could've been sent by Hades to stop me.

"And he's been... doing that since then, occasionally showing up and being cryptic about what he's thinking, helping me kill shades, and leaving.

"He's openly defied Farther in front of his staff, took a lot of time off work to just spent with me, opened up about many of his feelings...

"So, that. Kind of. Is what it looks like."

Is it obvious yet he's very in love, because he's very in love.

"I've never caught mine having a feeling I could see. But I think you might see more than I do."

"Thanatos might just be a very difficult test case, anyway, I don't know how we'd be able to tell just from talking whether they're the same. I wonder if Master Chaos would allow either of us to visit the other's world."

"...huh. I suppose it's worth asking. But wouldn't it confuse everyone enormously?"

He grins. "Yes, it would."

He laughs.

"All right. Let's confuse everyone in your world, then, if you're volunteering. Master Chaos, may we?"