I like you, I don't want you erased for a century. No, just tomorrow. Once he's mine it won't be in your interests to let anything slip, it'll just make things worse for him.

Maitimo, don't do this. I know it's complicated, I know you're under a lot of pressure, I know that you genuinely think after the war given enough space you can somehow - straighten out the ship you are currently steering straight into a cliff -

See, this is why I don't want to erase you for a hundred years, sometimes you say things that make me feel like you care about me.

Is that the appeal? Someone smart and idealistic and ambitious and capable enough who could also love you?

I told you what I want you to swear.

He closes his eyes. "I swear until tomorrow is over to swear no more oaths and to take all your ends as my own, and serve them faithfully."

Maitimo ruffles his hair and holds him close and eventually falls asleep.

And the next day he visits Cor for lunch.

"Hi!"

"Hi! How goes symbolically representing 'fuck this one god in particular'?"

"Goes pretty well. Lots of triangles."

"Triangles?"

"Triangles! A specific variety of triangle without a common prior use."

"Huh. What's the artistic convention for, like, eradicating disease -"

"Paisleys and long sort of ribbony shapes -" He grabs a spare bit of paper and doodles it.

"It's pretty. Is there an explainable logic to it or is that just the first thing someone got to work -"

"Pretty much that. Sometimes we know what they were thinking but if you get too explicit about it the artistic convention gets too symbolic."

Nod. "It's nice to properly meet you."

"You too! So you do domestic policy stuff?"

"Mostly! Maitimo does people, you know, and he's very nearly perfect at it, but once you're operating on a larger scale than a slow-paced peacetime Elf kingdom in Valinor you need systems for the people to work within and places where the systems are flexible and feedback mechanisms and when we got here and were overstretched I took that up."

"Cool. What have you done that you're proud of there?"

"The local Elves were all nomadic when we met them. Well, recently ex-nomadic, they'd fled into hastily-constructed cities when the orcs took the continent, but they coped very poorly with it. Set up a nice Elf-paced integration program for people who wanted to learn to read and write and help with the war and function in groups of more than twenty without feeling like they'd shot and buried everything about their lives before the war.

Then we met humans who were for different reasons also illiterate and innumerate and interested in integrating, and we tried the same setup but they found it too Elf-paced, so we just sped it up until it seemed like a miserably breakneck pace and then they were happy."

"How fast is miserably breakneck?"

"Two years - I know, I know, but the Elves take eighty."

"I'm twenty, ten percent of my life is a long time!"