I see. Sure.

Thank you.

If I do want him I'm not going to cater to his every whim just so I can have someone around who loves me.

He's not expecting to be catered to, he's expected to be tortured.

Might do that. 

Okay. I just want you to be happy and I think having someone around who adores you like that will make you happy. And he's a useful resource.

That did not escape me.

And he goes home and reports this to his husband.

...I genuinely can't imagine where he got the idea that I might want to be catered to, says Taliar.

Might've just picked up that I was nervous about how he'd treat you.

Aww. Taliar snuggles him. Love you. Okay. So how do you think he's going to treat me - I think I need a pretty clear idea of the possibilities before I can start figuring out how I'm going to sell it to my alt...

I'm guessing he's going to be a bit cold, and pointedly opposed to you regaining divine powers, but probably less inclined to torture you than I was because you don't fascinate him yet -

That's actually not very promising; I handle torture a lot better than I handle rejection... my alt won't necessarily need yours to love him or even like him at first, but he's going to have a really hard time if he's not appreciated on some level.

Squeeze. I am absolutely certain he'll be listening to him constantly and spending most of his time trying to figure him out, he just may not give any outward signs of that -

Then he'll have a really hard time unless he knows that, but it might not be worth telling him if it'd annoy your alt. It's not like mine will be expecting a walk in the park.

Maybe we can - I don't know - I can be attentive enough that he infers that my alt will be, you can at least tell him that I listen to you every waking minute -

Maybe, yeah... I'm definitely concerned with making sure not to tell my alt anything that'll end up making it harder for him when yours inevitably reads it in his head. Like, I have the feeling that if I show my alt the night my soul acknowledged you, I might as well not send him at all. I don't know how right I am about that, though, your alt is really hard for me to predict.

You're probably right about that. If my alt feels that we're doing this to redeem him, or because he's unacceptable to us and you can change that -

If my alt thought we were trying something along those lines, he'd get enormously offended and refuse to go. Or he'd go but he'd be trying to prove he could make your alt happy without changing him at all. I actually don't think I can stand to let my alt think that about me, though, even if that turned out to be the right attitude to send him with.

I love you. Okay, so - with reasons to stick with someone who's going to at best torture him and at worst pretend to ignore him, without telling him the actual reasons in more detail than 'both of us are happier than we imagined possible'?

The way to get him there is to tell him that we are both happier than we imagined possible, and we think he has a chance to find that same happiness with your alt, so we want to give him to your alt as a present. And we have to warn him that the possibilities range from torture to being apparently-ignored-occasionally-analyzed. He'll tell me he should tell us both to go fuck ourselves, and then... I send him some memories of our relationship, to make the point about how happy we are and to give him a foundation for being able to love your alt the way he is, and I tell him that no matter what he thinks he's strong enough to handle whatever your alt does to him, and I maybe challenge him to prove it, and -

- he starts giggling.

If he does turn us down, how would you feel about keeping two of me? Because I am absolutely the sort of person where if I can honestly offer him that option, he'll look at the choice between being happy with us forever and going off to suffer enormously for a chance at maybe having the same sort of thing with your alt, and he'll want the second one more. I am so hopelessly myself, Maitimo.

I am happy to commit to keeping two of you if you make another one and he doesn't want to go to my alt.

Taliar kisses him. I love you. Okay. So we tell him that, and I bet he'll want to try being yours to see what it's like, and then I bet he'll be dissatisfied because there's another you out there who doesn't have one of him and all he has to do to fix that is go hand your alt his soul.

You are a delight. Okay, sounds like a plan. From when are we forking him?

Taliar considers his memories.

...Has to be from between the moment my soul failed and the moment you told me you loved me. Anytime after that would make it much harder for him, and if there's anything after that point that we need him to know I can send him the memory and it won't be the same as having actually experienced it. Maybe I'll take him from right before he woke up that morning, and have him wake up in Nuime somewhere with me right there to explain things and you a short distance away to come in and meet him when he's ready for that...