"They're not all bad. The Sun's been doing the same thing every day for half a millennium at this point."

Welp that sure is a smile and you were doing so well at not having any of those kinds of feelings for the unfairly hot elves who consider you jailbait.

She very carefully packs that reaction into a corner of her brain where it won't bleed into osanwe and replies, "My world's sun is billions of years old. Older than the planet."

"Ah.

I am not older than your Sun, then."

"Doesn't surprise me. If you were billions of years old centuries would be...less of a big deal than they seem to be." She giggles. "There's actually something where I think in larger spans of time than you!"

"There are probably many things. I've been told I'm impulsive."

"Fair enough. I meant the general-you, though, elves in general rather than you in particular."

He nods. "Elves in general are very different than Men. Some try to spend more time together, learn to bridge the gaps, but it's challenging with Men who die so young."

"Yeah. Illia and I are working on fixing that."

"If all goes well, you won't experience aging and you will not die? Will you maintain your current apparent maturity?"

"Oh. Yeah. Mages do that. Atennesi Cohen is like three hundred years old and he doesn't look much older than me. The only reason there isn't anyone around more than a thousand years old is that five hundred years ago something happened and a lot of mages died."

"That's good."

"If I didn't expect to have arbitrary time to get powerful in I would probably be less cooperative with you distracting me from it for my own good."

"If you didn't expect to have arbitrary time to get powerful in we would fix that."

"I appreciate that."

"It's not entirely selfless. This front would look a lot uglier if we'd had to take that dragon ourselves."

"Well, no, I'm rather assuming that if it were easy enough that you could do it out of the kindness of your hearts humans in general wouldn't keep dying of old age. I'm quite aware of my status as an impressive military asset."

"And admirably disinclined, so far, to use it either to take stupid chances or make demands of us. We appreciate it."

"I really don't want to die, and you guys have been fighting this war a lot longer than I have. I can't even think of any particular demands I would want to make. You're already taking care of my material needs, and my emotional ones as best you can."

"It's ....fairly typical ...for people who suddenly find themselves in a position to make demands to do so regardless of whether they actually want anything they couldn't get through normal avenues. You are correct and sensible but might be underestimating how commendable those traits are."

"That sounds...gratuitously confrontational."

"Maybe because it's more common in your world for people to develop extraordinary power, people have more examples to work from. Or maybe we're being very unfair to Men and the vast majority, upon realizing that a magical kingdom of Elves would do anything for them, would say 'remind me to eat between protecting you and killing your enemies'. If so, they are much our superiors."

"...No, you're right, people in general can be pretty shitty sometimes. I just try to make a habit of judging myself by my own standards, instead of theirs."

"And your standards are commendable, and have earned you the respect of everyone you've worked with."

"Even though you all think I'm a kid."

"You're not a kid. You're an adult mortal. We are not treating you the way we'd treat a twenty-one-year-old Elf with your abilities. But - 

Hmmm.

I have a cousin who went out and found a nomadic tribe of Men who'd never been in contact with Elves before. He walked into their camp at night while they were sleeping and enchanted them with a beautiful, magical song of Valinor and when they awoke they thought they'd met a god. He invited them to become his vassals, gave them new names in his language, built them homes in his land - their descendants are the people you rescued a day ago - and took one man he took a fancy to as a personal attendant of his for decades. He changed that man's name to Beor, which means vassal, and by all accounts they were inseparable and my cousin delighted himself for a few decades.

I don't think I'm necessarily implying Men are children, when I say that - I'd like to not do that."