"Okay."

Cam goes and finds Timothy and occupant, later.

"Hi," he says. "I can have him write you, if you'd like."

"I was about to tell you not to say anything but that's not a bad idea."

The Yeerk rolls his eyes. "May we have pencil and paper, please -"

Cam looks away and supplies them.

I'm sorry, he writes. 

Cam conjures to check, reads it.

"I'm not angry at you. You bought me time with very constrained currency and very enforced credit checking."

I recall promising after the wedding planning demon not to commit away our lives for the greater good.

Thank you for making good use of the time.

"Spent most of it sending Theodore on errands." Sigh. "Kib remarked once while doing one of his disconcerting rambles that Sunset had a habit of insisting on saying 'I love Kib' instead of 'I love you', didn't want to say it to Sauron, and Kib said he doesn't have that habit because whenever he knows enough about what's going on for it to make sense he figures everyone in the conversation knows exactly what he means. I love you."

I love you. I'm okay. Remember how I was way more upset about you being in Ganymede than you were, it's like that. 

"I was still not pleased, but I believe Afternoon when he says you wouldn't appreciate being deprived of your steering power."

He's just scared he'll calm down maybe get someone who can tolerate him to talk to him. Whether my word means anything is forever. 

"I wasn't entertaining the idea of obliging you to break your word, just making it false that you could issue promises on behalf of those around you too."

"We're done here," Orik says.

Cam leaves.

I put the entire future of my people in their hands and they can't even -

       I did recommend you not rape him, says Timothy. That would have helped.

He agrees to be reembodied. He is in a bit of a mood about it. Findekáno sits and sings with him for a few days and then gets an update on what's going on and then goes to talk to his alt.

And the day after that he heads downstairs to the main bar. 

 “Hey. Orik, right?”

             “Yes.”

“I’m sure Timothy already pointed this out, but – the way you’re doing this right now is a bad idea. Because we want Timothy back, so we’re scouring the multiverse for the minimum satisfactory consenting person so we can meet our end of the deal as fast as possible and get you transferred. And also Timothy is the only person involved in any of this who cares about you, like, as a person, and has a sense here of what you want and how you’ll be happy, and more than that he’s the one with investment in Yeerks as a species being okay. Well, I guess the Elves have vague humanitarian sentiments. I can tell you that you would really rather a project like this be managed by a Timothy personally invested in it than by a international commission handling it because they hate your guts but have standards.”

               “All of you,” Orik says, “are astoundingly ungrateful, considering how much information you have about how things would’ve gone if I’d decided differently. I staked the entire future of my species on this and you’re furious that I want to be conscious until you have it worked out -”

“Can’t speak for anyone else but it’s hard to be grateful for people giving you things you had a right to in the first place.”

                 “I risked everything for you and the only thing I asked in return was the right to hold onto my assurances until you got around to implementing them –“

“If holding onto your assurances took a different form that would be great. Timothy’ll do what he promised. You know Timothy’ll do what he promised. And if you were testing whether everyone else will treat Timothy as competent and his commitments as meaningful, you have your answer. But Timothy is definitely the person you want working on this problem and Timothy can’t work on it until you leave.”

                “And swim around insensate in a pool until –”

“We’ll just pause you.”

                “That leaves you very conveniently positioned to change your minds –”

…he nods. “And the advantage to staying in Timothy is you’ll see it coming if we change our minds? Look, I have never managed to get even the most trivial deceptions past Timothy, so: we are not going to change our minds. We haven’t changed our minds while you are currently actively doing something that pattern-matches really hard to torturing Timothy just because you can –”

                 “That is not what I’m doing or why –”

“I did say pattern-matches. But I think you are maybe very much underestimating how bad we consider Yeerking people to be, because Timothy did mental gymnastics into not being mad at you.”

                “Oh, he was mad at me, he made detailed plans to annihilate my species and the only respects in which he anticipated feeling guilty over them were that he thought, if he was wrong that Michael would be a demon and he had to use Minor to hole the planets, it’d be emotionally hard on Minor. He was just also capable of seeing me as someone who had never ever been presented with any kind of alternative and needed a couple fucking weeks to get to a place humans would consider adequately saintly. And I’m not torturing him.”

“He’s Timothy. You’re not letting him talk to people. That’s kind of sufficient.”

Orik shakes his head. 

“You, uh, didn’t answer my earlier points – about how right now they’re going to find the absolute minimum satisfactory arrangement, but if it’s Timothy handling it then it’ll end up a lot better –”

                  “I see the logic but would feel better about it if it weren’t coming from people who loathe me despite the fact I saved their lives and their civilizations –”

“I don’t hold grudges. If you leave I bet in a week or so I’ll like you just fine.”

                 “I don’t want to be paused for longer than a year.”

…nod. 

                 “And none of that floating in midair nonsense, I want a pool –“

 "Yeah." He writes Cam.

Cam comes down. "You want a pool and not a basement-dweller?"

"- I want a basement dweller wizard -"

"Do you care what it looks like or should I just use some guy I knew in high school."

"That's fine."

Wizard version of Mike Newton.

Orik pulls him over, pulls their heads together - 

- makes a face. "It'll do."