"Okay, maybe in a hundred years the flexibility would be useful."

"Or a thousand! Or ten thousand! Human lifespans are appalling and I will be so pleased when they're a horrifying footnote in the history books and that's it."

Giggle. "I suppose you're optimistic that I'll get along with unobtrusive boyfriend on some level or another?"

"I suspect you'll like each other very well." They would if there weren't any complications and ordering Findekáno cooperative shouldn't make it worse.

"Why's he so unobtrusive?"

"Politics. His family led the other side of the civil war and for a while in the aftermath it'd have been destabilizing and then we'd just settled into an arrangement where he does most of the behind-the-scenes domestic policy work and it suited and we left it."

"Huh. I do think I want to check if I like him enough to share with him, before -" handwave.

"That makes sense. I can suggest to him he meet you for lunch tomorrow."

"That works. He got a name?"

"Findekáno," he says very fondly.

"...how sure are you that you want to drop me into this centuries-long thing. Or am I reading too much into this and you actually just want to fool around with me for some shortish period of time and then go back to your centuries-long thing."

"I am sure of what I want, and what I want is to have you for as long as I can make you happy and give you leverage to do interesting things."

"You think you can pull off the 'sufficient, central' thing?"

"Yes."

"Okay. I'll have lunch with Findekáno."

He beams at him again. He opens a mirrored garden door. They're outside his rooms. "Good night, Cor."

"Good night!"

He goes back to his rooms.

It's not very like you to work really hard for trust you intend to be betraying.

I'm not planning on hurting him.

And you weren't planning on hurting me. Finding out will hurt him, and eventually he'll find out.

I suppose he'd better not.

I would enjoy nothing more than getting lunch with him. He seems like an extraordinary young man.

I wasn't born yesterday. You're going to swear to take all my goals as your own, now, or something would slip. 

For the next day? Or the next hundred years?