"Yes. Tomorrow."

Kiss.

Kiss. "Should ask my fork if he was this thickheaded - could've warned me -"

"That'd be fascinating. I'd sort of like to meet your fork, actually - your alts are really interesting to look at, I can't guess exactly how much overlap there is in what I know but I can tell it's a lot, I'd just get more false reads than with you." Snuggle.

"You can meet him. His older kid's near your age - maturity, I mean, Elves your age aren't out of diapers - he might judge me."

"That'd be hypocritical of him and you can judge him right back."

"Hypocritical?"

"He could've been you, the day before you were forked from there was just him and then -" Fork-evocative gesture.

"And then it was just him, for fourteen hundred years, and then I got plucked out of the past. He was me once but it was a really long time ago, and lots of people do judge their past selves."

"I guess. Maybe hypocritical's the wrong word. Still."

Squeeze. "I am going to go sing and think."

"Aww. Okay." Cir disentangles.

"No being disappointed, it's you who gave me so much to sing and think about. And maybe Milliways'll make it five minutes for you, anyway. Do you usually experience as long as me when I'm gone for weeks?"

"No, but days."

Squeeze.

Outside.

He doesn't actually sing, it would make it pretty easy for everyone else to guess what the problem is and that doesn't sound helpful.

Cam has apparently been out flying around. He swoops down, after Bright's been outside for about fifteen minutes. "Hey. What's up?"

"Am I that obviously out of sorts, I've been spending too much time around the person who can magically read me perfectly even when I'm lying and perhaps it's making me careless."

"...uh, no, where I'm from 'what's up' is a generic greeting, would you like me to pretend you said 'nothing much' and move on?"

"Or I could evince dire curiosity, whatever floats your boat. This is, to clarify, another idiom, to my knowledge you don't have a boat."

"I don't. I have secured permissions to install all the clinics, Minor's coming up with a sufficiently elaborate fireworks show for Cefax's grand summoning opening, we've got thrity thousand people trained so if this works in Godspring we can do it elsewhere also...I asked my fork about whether his Maia coparent knows any other Maiar that biologically competent who could maybe go around in the stupid kingdom that hates magic and considers technology magic, incorporeally take up residence and magic away their infant mortality and so on - 

- I'm hurting Cir. By not being good enough at lying to him, though I think he'd contest that that's the problem."

"...It's probably possible to hurt people that way somehow but I would be surprised if I agreed you'd managed it."

"Okay, I'm hurting Cir by defaulting to handling complicated things with 'well, let's think about it for a Year and see if that helps any'."

"That I have no trouble believing at all. I'd go ask my Elf alt how that psychological thing works but her manifestation of it is just being really enthusiastic about frontloading effort where that's efficient in the very long term and having a security in her immortality it took me awhile to come around to after I died. What are you thinking about for a Year?"

"I like him - tried for a while to figure out if I would without the love magic, but he's been a redmage since he was five, there's really really not much point -"