"I don't - it's not like I had a threshold for how tempting someone had to be before I'd rape them and you fell short of it -"

"You're over that thing now, right, you're not gonna carry me around and tell me how tempting I am and then neglect me, right -"

"It, ah, seems pretty obvious that I could have made you happier and I very much wished I had and I can certainly not hurt you again -"

"Vague sense of obligation, sexy."

"I have no idea what you want from me." Pause. "- well, I mean, in some senses it's abundantly clear? Clear enough I wasn't actually expecting to have to worry about it any further?" He turns her around in his arms, removes clothes. He hasn't touched her hair yet. 

Even if all he's touching is skin (the circles on her shoulder are interestingly textured) he can get her shivery and gaspy like that; she is currently set to Easy Mode. She switches to osanwë. I want, I want - mm - I want you to want me and have me 'cause you want me -

No one has ever in all of Arda wanted anyone half as badly - 

Prove it.

She's squirming too much, he shoves her onto the couch and climbs on top of her and holds her there and undoes whatever remains of the braids and then runs his fingers along her scalp until she is definitely too distracted to make fun of him.

aaaaaaaaaaaa~

Beka's alive, Beka's alive, Beka is forever alive and safe and he is so so so happy about it.

So so so alive. Very much alive. Delightedly alive.

An Elf teleports over to Minor and Finis and Miranda. "Hi!" she says in English. "I've been told you'll want to go home, we can help with that."

"...Hi. Can we also get some kind of - executive summary of what's going on -"

" - yes, sorry, there are briefing packets!" Briefing packets. She doesn't know Miranda so she hands her one without anything sensitive. "The short version is that there are lots of worlds, maybe infinitely many of them, and someone developed a systematic way to go between them and many of them have different magic systems so we borrowed and combined until we could do all kinds of things and now we're going around doing humanitarian work everywhere - we scan for Ardas in particular because they're high-leverage, Melkor is terrible and Sauron is terrible and once they're both gone Elves are super willing to integrate with existing multiverse projects." She nods at Finis. "We owe his alts the original means of travel between worlds and our most scalable form of immortality and anti-aging for mortal species and faster-than-light nonmagical transit within worlds and pending interworld portals - they're really close, just not reliable -"

"...cool. Congratulations, Finis."

"Are there alts of Miranda -"

        "Michael asked that about Rebecca and Timothy asked it about Karen, too. There's a way to check but it demands the time of someone whose time is very very valuable so it'll get checked but possibly not for a couple weeks - you happened to catch us at a busy time, we've grown sixty percent in the last two months when circumstances demanded finding a bunch of worlds real fast. The packet says 'operations on more than four hundred worlds' but it's coming up on seven hundred."

"How much population is that - order of magnitude -"

"Ten trillion? We're not highly involved everywhere, some places we hand better crops and vaccinations and a robot to teach germ theory and economics and then leave."

"Do we need to be very conservative with your time - if you leave and we read the packet and have questions can we write somebody -"

"There are instructions in the packet on how to reach us but your magic system's novel, I'm going to be here for a month or so making sure we don't miss some minor thing that interacts brilliantly with what we already have, feel free to ask questions."

"Cool, if you're going to be around that long we should probably go home. Can you put the house back where it was - the land will have sort of pinched in around the gap -"

" - I should probably have someone with more experience moving chunks of land do it, then, so I don't cause a minor earthquake or something. Your husband gets security clearance for my teleportation spell automatically - well, almost-automatically but we already checked the thing - so you'll have access to the house."

"And Miranda doesn't?" says Minor. 

"It could pretty easily be used to teleport planets into their suns so we're cautious, you can vouch and we'll clear it especially if there's reason she'll need it - I take it you can already teleport locally -"

"...what would I need to do to get non-automatic clearance for that and other things calling for clearance if nobody happened to be convenient to vouch? Oh, and before I forget, some people were also apparently-vanished by the same spell before we were, everyone thought they were dead but it could be they were just moved -"

"Make a case you were going to do something valuable with it, agree to magical screening for honesty about that, if you have alts they check if your alts have a history of genocide or conversely of heroism -"