"Well, she doesn't think I should kill you, but she agreed to prevent any civil wars if I do and she survives."

"Preventing civil wars is nowhere near that simple, trust me."

Shrug. "I bet there's fewer if there's someone to step into the power vacuum."

"That really, really doesn't sound like the words of someone who's responsible about power."

...She gives him a Look. "I've mastered 'slavery and torture are bad.'"

"Oh, for crying out loud," he mutters.

"These are kind of non-negotiable points! I get that it must be exasperating for an argument to keep circling around to the same points but they are, uh, important."

"I'm not exasperated that you keep coming back to that. I've noticed it's important to you. The thing that's beginning to tick me off here is that you're acting like since I hurt people for fun it must obviously be true that the empire would be better off without me, when it seems pretty clear to me that if you somehow managed to take it away you'd have no idea what to do with the results, and more people would die that year than have died any decade since I got serious about my responsibilities, and you'd be completely unprepared for it. And, to make matters worse, you think you can kill me, and you seem totally indifferent to my warnings about why that's a bad road to travel. You're fucking around with millions of lives that are mine to protect and you have no concept of what it takes to protect them. That is why I'm exasperated."

"I mean that's...fair...but, uh, you are immortal? And you continue to torture people? So, like, if I kill you, and everyone has a real bad decade, and in a hundred years she and I and some presumed quantity of advisors are as competent at running the world as you are now, but with Bonus Not Torture, then over the next several thousand years it seems like the math turns out in our favor."

"...no??? Okay, leaving aside the part where I very definitely can't die. And leaving aside the part where your friend probably won't survive this because most people don't. And leaving aside the part where you still might not come out on top of the nasty bloody civil war full of every reckless teenager who survives self-dedicating without me around to weed out the troublemakers. I've been running this place for five thousand years. You can't shortcut that kind of stability. It's not possible. It's—" He shakes his head sharply. "These are my people. You can't just—ugh!"

"I don't get you. You're talking like the whole world is your enclave but you're still torturing some of them."

"The whole world is mine. My empire, my responsibility. I don't know what you mean by enclave but—look, it's not that I do everything right, it's not that I don't have flaws. I threw a guy off a roof last year because he wouldn't stop pestering me. A perfect Emperor with no thought but the good of his people wouldn't torture them and he also wouldn't impulsively kill them for annoying him. But I put the work in, to find out what actually makes things better, and do that. It's hard work and there's a lot of it and it never stops, you can't just be like 'nobody starved this year, good job everybody' and call it quits. Things that used to work stop working. People screw up, they cheat, they fuck each other over on purpose. No amount of threats will ever stop them doing that, you just have to keep it down as much as you can and then deal with the rest. And I'm one of the people screwing up, and one of the people fucking each other over on purpose, and it's just—that's the job, the job is to make the best of things even though that happens. Keep it down as much as you can and deal with the rest."

...She nods, slowly. 

"It's not--about not having any thought but the good of one's people. It's just--I don't--understand--how anyone who understands that other people are real people, with interiority, as real as one's own self, can--hurt people just to hurt them. I don't not want to kill you because I'm worried about the stability of the Empire--didn't, anyway--it's just, that I understand, that you are a person, who doesn't want to die."

"I feel like I'm arguing with a wall. You can't kill me! I cannot be killed! Trying to kill me does not work and instead just causes problems, and the nearest other person problems can happen to is your friend, who by the way you still haven't convinced me is a good idea to leave alive!"

”—The question of whether I can or cannot kill you was so far from the point, there!”

"And yet still you said 'I don't want to kill you' as though that's an option you have and are considering."

“Yes! We have established that I believe that!”

"Well, you shouldn't."

“Well you shouldn’t torture people!”

"...???"

Yeah that was about how she felt when he responded to her passionate argument about the interiority of people by bringing up the disagreement about whether she can kill him. 

“Saying I shouldn’t believe I can kill you is about as likely to cause me to actually discard this belief as just saying you shouldn’t torture people is to cause you to stop,” she explains once she has gathered the patience to do so.

"...hearing you talk about killing me is like hearing someone talk about, I don't know, dousing the sun. You can't, and if you could you shouldn't, and the fact that you're so confidently talking about how you can and should makes you sound like someone who is going to mess around carelessly with things you don't understand and maybe cause a lot of destruction on the way. D'you see what I mean?"

"I'm not confident I should! If I were confident I should you would already be dead!"

...Could she douse the sun? Probably she could douse the sun if she tried hard and believed in herself. Well, eat the sun, same difference. 

He takes a deep breath.

"I am very confident I should not douse the sun, which is good, because I expect I could do that too."