Overnight

[darkest_evening]

There are things to do, of course, besides being Aya's cuddle buddy. Prime is usually quite busy, and now is no exception. Just because he's personally out of mana, doesn't mean he's utterly useless. His plane's got mages in it, after all - and many of them owe him favors or are amenable to being paid. And they need mirrors, for communication. After longer than was strictly prudent spent comforting Aya, he bids her goodbye and goes to handle the less glamorous moments of being him. That is, talking to people, asking for favors, paying favors, persuading them to say yes, they'll use some of their precious magic stores to make mirrors.

Ironically enough, the one thing missing when he's finished is the mirrors themselves. Easy enough to fix, with Revelation. But he'll take care of it tomorrow - he's tired, and it's been a long and complicated and emotionally exhausting 'day,' even if he doesn't properly have them anymore. Sleep, and then he'll get back to dealing with it all. The mirrors, first, they're easiest, then continuing to figure out what to do about Aya.

When he wakes, he goes to talk to a demon about that. Knock, knock, calling Inferno, is Revelation in?

Comments

[darkest_evening]

He hugs her back, petting her hair soothingly.

"Hey," he murmurs.

[namesthesky]

"Hi," she mumbles.

[darkest_evening]

Hair pet, hair pet.

"I'm guessing it didn't go well?"

[namesthesky]

Squirm.

"You remember how I said I was trying very hard not to try to get everything I want without compromising? I don't have any methodology geared at not doing that. The more I wrote down the more I - I'm practically afraid to talk to you, because I have to choose topics and words somehow and every time I do it there's a chance something in my brain that I cannot dig out is going to hijack those decisions to -" She interrupts herself and goes back to crying, on him.

[darkest_evening]

He's perfectly all right being with being cried on.

"Okay," he says. "Do - would it help if I was aware of your ultimate win condition, without any compromising, and the one you're aiming at, so I can inform you when you're doing the one you don't want?"

[namesthesky]

"It's what you'd expect from somebody who touched a magic love necklace."

[darkest_evening]

"I figured," says Prime, calmly. "I mean - personally, my ultimate win condition, in your situation, would be 'find a way to make the person I was in love with return my affections without forcing them to touch the necklace.' But I don't know if that's your ultimate win condition, or if yours allows for more flexibility." Pause. "I'm not, by the way, upset at you for wanting things, Aya."

[namesthesky]

"I usually allow myself arbitrary license to want things. This is different."

[darkest_evening]

"I know. There is a conspiracy evil love necklace involved. But I'm - it's okay to talk to me about it. I will not freak out and flee because you've been fighting something desperately and feel like it would be best if I were informed of what you're fighting."

[namesthesky]

"I let them kill me because I was afraid of what I might be able to talk you into. And part of me is telling me to give you enough credit for hundreds of years of successfully detecting manipulation, that I couldn't get you to do anything you didn't want to do, and I don't think any of the people you've interacted with over those hundreds of years were this motivated and I'm pretty sure that part of me lives next to the part that wants me to stop watching what I say. It might be reasonable for you to flee."

[darkest_evening]

Predictably, Prime does not flee.

"That's a pretty reasonable worry. You're right, I don't think the people I'd dealt with were quite as motivated. If you're willing - and by no means do I want you to do this if you don't think it's a smart decision - you can give an example of how you'd try to manipulate me?"

[namesthesky]

She opens her mouth. She shuts it, biting her lip.

She says, very carefully, "If I thought it was smart I would have done it before."

[darkest_evening]

"Is it likely that you'll slip?" he asks, seriously. "Later down the line."

[namesthesky]

"I've managed this long. I - don't know."

[darkest_evening]

"Okay. It - might be best to have a test run now, when I'm warned beforehand and as prepared as I can possibly be, instead of slipping later and catching me unawares, if you're unsure."

[namesthesky]

Aya takes a deep breath.

"I'm vulnerable. I don't like it. I'm not even remotely concerned about my ability to consent, and if you don't believe me you can interview all my alts, and if you don't think I'm in a good position to determine if my alts are capable of proxy decisionmaking for me you can ask them about that too. I'm not vulnerable to being taken advantage of, Adarin, I am vulnerable to neglect, that more than anything else is what you could do to hurt me, and I cannot begin to tell you how unsafe it makes me feel that the only concrete reason you have to pay even modest amounts of attention to me is that I'm a victim, how much time I have spent literally weeping over the fact that I have gone from moderately useful to an active drain on your time and emotional resources, that the only things you have seen fit to ask of me have been to tell you things that are hard for you to hear. This is in no way what I want, or what I would have wanted without the necklace, I am not accepting of the quiet background redefinition of the word 'burden' you're doing so that you can reassure me because you think you could somehow hurt me more if you let yourself love me back. And I think you could, that's the thing of it, there's every reason to think you could even if you've got a tournament-winning poker face and think it could possibly hurt me more to let me see more than hints that you might."

[darkest_evening]

There is a pause from him as he processes all of that.

"I'm sorry for asking you to tell me things that are hard for me to hear," begins Prime, sincerely. Because apologies are easy. "That was rather callous of me."

Next: "It also seems that - most of that was actually not about me. You framed it around me, certainly, and the guilt trip was marvelous, but you're upset because you haven't had a chance to prove that you're not a victim after two days. Two days is a ridiculously short period of time. It is okay, in the grand scheme of things, to require two days of adjustment before you become 'moderately useful' or, more likely, more again. I am genuinely not considering you an active drain on my time and emotional resources, and believe me when I say I have seen what is. I've met and, actually, dated one person who was, so let me just go ahead and consider myself an expert in it. My dear, you're not. Not for me, anyway, I'm rather emotionally stable, despite the sarcasm wall and the buried trauma and the large swaths of emotional distance from just about everyone I meet.

"And - I'm actually not stopping myself from loving you back. Behold, how I've kissed you. Callous and poker-faced as I might seem, I am not going to do that to literally anyone, whether they're in love with me or not. It was not a decision of, 'Oh, I should kiss her because that would make her happy,' because that would be cruel, and it would be leading you on, and it would be tormenting rather than helping you if I had zero desire for any sort of follow up. It was, 'Do I both A: Want to kiss her, and B: Am I willing to own up to whatever emotional fallout might occur there if various terrible events happened because of the kiss and C: Do I find it worth the trouble if aforementioned terrible events occurred.' Because I am paranoid, and that doesn't have an off switch. Congratulations, I deemed the risk of such emotional delights as - 'Aya is cured of necklacedom and now wants absolutely nothing to do with me because of events that occurred during the necklace's influence' and 'Maybe become an emotional crutch for a while again' and 'get dirty looks from my alts during mealtimes' worth it to kiss you.

"Lastly. It sounds like you need a project. You should have mentioned, Aya, I would have handed you one, I'm the kind of cold hearted bastard to hand one to people that don't want one if it is necessary for something excessively important I'm working towards. Because that's what I do. That's what I have done, actually, because it was very necessary. But I was giving you space. I can stop that, want some projects?"

[namesthesky]

"Were you expecting it to be about you? It's myself that scares me - my moving parts won't move anymore." She shudders and leans on him. "I don't know what sort of project I'm good for right now. Something easy, I guess. Playing tour guide in Tayane and turning my alts loose on anything that requires complex problem-solving, maybe."

[darkest_evening]

"I was expecting emotional manipulation," teases Prime. "And emotional manipulation is very much about who it's aimed at. Tour guiding works, but I suspect there are better options, too. Something easy, hmm. ... I should clarify, I have zero desire to give you a useless busy work project or, for example, make you some kind of secretary. That would be a hilarious waste of your time and talents, and I like being efficient. Please don't worry about something like that, I'm a callous bastard, I don't give people fake work to make them feel good about themselves. There's a colonization effort going on in my Kystle right now, it's rather small scale and people are all very confused about day and night being a thing. I've also been adapting borrowed technology specs for their use, and I'm trying to make a stable supply line so I can get the delightful things called 'factories' up and running. It's going to entice people to lessen the strain on New Kystle's magical resources, because the fancy roads that climate control are not free, and really, Kystle's more livable and better for farming anyway. Do you want to go organize things there and make people all behave, or would you like another problem entirely?"

[namesthesky]

"Are you claiming to have had no emotions in reaction to my little speech? And I think the cultural gap between me and people from New Kystle is more than challenging enough when I'm proselytizing like I've practiced for most of my life and when my brain's behaving itself, so unless you don't have another obvious candidate for the job -"

[darkest_evening]

"I have emotions in reaction. I just shove them in a box and ignore them. I'm offering it to you because you would actually have a basic understanding of how things work in a non-tidelocked planet, which is in short supply. Considering there are about five people alive who have actually lived when it was normal and not bizarre and strange. I'm one of them. The others are: my sister, and Lynn, who are busy, my father, who is still quite culture shocked - and I'm not actually so callous as to throw him at something when he's recovering from being resurrected - and Nereus, who is not allowed to go near anything sharp, ever. Let alone people. Essentially, none of them are in a position to tell people that it's okay for the temperature to change along with the sun disappearing and that it doesn't mean they'll immediately freeze to death. Or - actually, they're not experienced with seasons either, a fourth of them bolted through a portal when winter arrived. There is not another obvious candidate that knows about that sort of thing unless I outsource, and you are my first pick there."

[namesthesky]

"Okay. I can - tell people about seasons. I'm familiar with seasons."

It was part of the plan that she fail at manipulating him. That was the idea. If she truly wanted to succeed she would have done something else -

A box. That's where reactions to her go. Okay.

[darkest_evening]

"Okay. And -" Pause. "... Do let me know if you don't actually want to? Help with things. Please."

[namesthesky]

"I want to help you. Explaining seasons doesn't sound hard. A project might be good for me."

[darkest_evening]

"... Would you be doing it entirely for me?" he wonders.

It's - uncharacteristically vulnerable.