Nod.

"Nice to meet you," he says to Cir and Ruviri.

"Sure," says Ruviri.

Cir does not appear to like Clerus at all.

Well. "I'm tremendously grateful to him," Maitimo tells Cir quietly. "A lot of people would still be suffering if Alatess hadn't found him. ...not being infallible I sometimes do things I absolutely should feel badly about, please don't get annoyed with the people who bring that to my attention, I don't want there to be fewer of them -"

"I don't think I'm likely to be annoyed at him to the point where he ceases to exist," Cir whispers back.

Giggle. "If I were a bad person you'd be glad he was prepared to pick a fight for you. I could've been."

"You aren't." Snuggle.

Kiss. "And you Know that, no one else gets such an advantage. I could have acted a great deal less like a bad person."

"Well, I do Know it and he ought to know I do and I wouldn't hurt my family by protecting you if you were awful to me, they'd be miserable over it."

"I could be a person who shouldn't be trusted to have the amount of power I have without being awful to you. And the thing with you is evidence of that kind of problem too."

Harrumph.

"Thanks for coming out here," he tells both of them, and then there are more settling-people-in logistics and the Noldor can make a formal statement that they consider slavery in all its forms unacceptable and appreciate the cooperation of every government on Godspring in abolishing it as quickly as possible. And he can apologize to anyone who Clerus thinks would want to hear it. Cir can stick with him if he pleases. 

Cir accompanies him.

"To be clear," he says when they have a moment in private, "the thing I am regretting is not dating you, it is failing to have set up a trust with your universal income and the money to pay for Ruviri in your name and had some lawyers not under my authority come over to explain it to you, and having somebody meet with you to explain how you could pursue a complaint against me through our legal system should you have one, and formally getting you citizenship three places that would be willing to pick a fight with me over it. It's - you know me, so telling you was enough, but if that weren't true I would have failed to do enough work ensuring that you believed me nothing at all was contingent. And people can't verify externally that I did that work, and they have the right to expect that evidence."

"I don't see how people have that right at all."

"It's - the contract between a prince and his people is that they will obey me and I will not abuse that trust. Which includes, if I look an awful lot like I'm abusing that trust, making a substantive effort to make available to them evidence that I'm not. A random private citizen would not have that obligation but that is because they are not expecting their word to be law. And outside home, I'm operating all-but-autonomously on projects affecting a billion people, and if I fail to be demonstrably good at that then people will be scared my future decisions will be bad, and being scared of that imposes a lot of costs on them. I don't know if Clerus changed his order of operations or the distribution of his resources around the possibility I was in fact casually keeping a couple of slaves and he needed to be prepared for the repercussions of taking me down and freeing them, but he might have, and if he did innocent people suffered as a result of my carelessness."

...snuggle.

Snuggle. "Should I not have asked you two here, I didn't want to upset you and I could probably just have sworn to enough things."

"You needed me. ...Ruviri is a little annoyed."

"Okay. You can tell her I'm sorry." Snuggle.

"I will." Kiss.

"It is of course precisely because she has the capacity to get annoyed with me that she is a more useful witness but I still regret annoying her." Kiss.

"I could be annoyed with you," objects Cir.

"You have a terribly high annoyance threshold for me! I would have to be astonishingly annoying."

"That's because everything you do is adorable."

"And that is because you are biased."