"Do you have an example in mind?"

"I do."

Her expression softens a little.

"I think it would hurt you to hear, though. I think you're observant enough to have noticed, if you let yourself. I wonder if you can guess."

"-if you mean Scyelen, I... no? For lots of reasons?"

She gives him a flat, mildly exasperated look.

"I was not implying that you should be fucking her. That isn't even in the category of: things you are already doing that you haven't noticed are hurting her, because you lack rules about them."

"Okay."

"I know she's frustrated, a lot. I know she's not doing well, though things do seem to be improving. I don't know how much of that is me. Most of the time I'm not sure what I could be doing differently at all. Trying to talk to her doesn't help - she doesn't know either. I am - trying to be very sure I can still come back; I'm not sure you understand how hard that's going to be, it's not in my nature at all. If there's something else I seem to be missing I'd appreciate you telling me."

"All I know is what I see when you're together. I don't know what you're missing."

She sighs.

"I suspect that you're feeding into one of her kinks, in a very unhealthy way. Has she ever asked you to stop, to go away, to leave her be, or anything like that? Has she ever stood up for herself, with you?"

"Not well. Not - directly, at all, I don't think."

She nods, like she expected that, and it's bad news.

"Alright. And how many times have you---how many times has she gotten inexplicably upset when you were alone together?"

"Regularly enough that I couldn't tell you. Daily, easily."

"Daily?"

That gives her pause. Enough to slide off the instructor's desk and stand up.

"Alright, that might be more serious than I'd thought. What can you tell me about how you two act around each other in private?"

"It's very - she's stuck? Trapped outright, even. I can't - it's not just that she can't leave the school or her arranged marriage. She can't even think about it, it terrifies her to. Her magic terrifies her, too, being a void mage. Not the magic itself, but what people will think. And - she wants to talk about them - she's hoping I'll make it better for her, I think - but I don't understand the problem, I keep blundering into whatever it is. I want to get her away from here, but that's - there's good reasons not to, when someone is scared of leaving, it doesn't work if they're not ready."

She mulls that over for a moment, breaking it down into its component claims. It's kind of telling by itself, that she asked for his observations and he gave her a set of assumed conclusions, including the major one that she has a suspicion is just him projecting. After all, if his assumptions about what Scyelen's behavior meant were correct, they wouldn't be having this conversation.

"When she tries to confide in you, and it backfires, what does that look like? Walk me through it."

"It's -" he pauses to consider, and then takes out a notebook to refer to.

"All right. She slept with the princess while she was here - they're very cute together - and I noticed and congratulated her, didn't particularly mean anything by it, I just wanted her to know I didn't disapprove. It confused her, which she hates, and we couldn't talk about it right then, but I brought it up later; I'm not sure it's the best idea to do that rather than letting her figure things out on her own, but I think it'll give us a better working relationship in the long run even if it isn't perfect for her. It - took some effort, to get her to understand what I was talking about, and then she was unhappy that I'd called it sex at all, and tried to convince me that it didn't make sense to categorize it that way. We talked about that; I mentioned my nephew who's married to a man and how gay relationships aren't usually different from straight ones - there was something about having children but we didn't really get into it, I pointed out that gay couples can adopt or use surrogates and she dropped it, but I assume that'll eventually come up more squarely later, it seems important to her. We got into - I'd forgotten how, by the time I wrote this down, but we ended up talking about how in my world people usually marry for love? And that bothered her; she said it was bad for people to have more reasons to get married than just to have children. I think I'm missing part of how she's thinking about that, but she did say that - marriage being so narrow means things like her relationship with the princess are allowed, because they're separate enough? Which makes sense as far as it goes, here, but it's still - obviously hard, trying to wedge what someone really wants into the margin that leaves, and I pointed that out, and that other ways work better, letting people get married to who they want to and not demanding they do at all.

"She seemed kind of unsettled at that point - we'd been doing okay up to then, more or less, she was frustrated at being asked to explain what she was thinking but nothing worse than that especially - and repeated that it's bad to have more reasons to get married, that it'd make people miserable to have marriage intrude on a relationship they like. And I stopped there and pointed out that that sounded like the idea of marriage made her miserable, but not everyone feels that way. And we talked about marriage being a set of rules, and the way marriage is here those rules don't work for her, and in different places the rules are different - not in any detail at all, just the idea that it is different in different places - and then suddenly she said she doesn't want to come to my world after all, that she doesn't think she can handle being in a place with different rules." He sighs. "I tried to salvage it, tell her that people would understand that she's foreign and doesn't do things the same way, but it didn't work at all, she just shut me down and cried on me."

That's a lot to unpack, but...

"Well, first of all, I did warn you that this culture doesn't acknowledge homosexuality. On top of that, I think the thing you tripped over is that this culture also doesn't really do love marriages. If I put myself in Scyelen's shoes, it's easy to imagine seeing marriage as mutually exclusive with having anything that you might call a 'relationship'. To her it's more like... medical quarantine."

"I'd caught that," he nods.

"She's not wrong. That is more accurate to the Tristanian concept of marriage than your concept. It's probably even more accurate than the truism that in a lot of cultures marriage is simply ritualized prostitution by another name."

"Sure. But that doesn't explain why she reacted that way to the idea of things being different elsewhere."

"Doesn't it? She sees marriage as a burden." Pause. "Let me put it this way: Involving a officiating institution of some sort in blessing one's relationship is a kink Scyelen doesn't have, and I bet, from her perspective, this culture has an 'okay, you do you' policy while you made it sound like yours has a 'we don't care if you don't have this kink we're going to impose it on you anyway' policy."

He looks through his notes again. "I did say that we don't demand it. Repeatedly, if I remember correctly. I'm an example of that, I pointed that out to her."

Wry smirk. "There are a lot of things that a society will say aren't demanded of you, which they'll still expect of you. And that's even assuming that what you thought you were saying was what she was actually hearing..." She shakes her head. "I think the kink analogy applies. My leading theory is that you were squicking her out."

"All right. I'm still not sure how that generalizes but I think I can give it enough space."

She frowns.

"How that generalizes might be the important part. You say she gets upset like that often. Can you think of any reason you might have been... pressuring her on one of her squicks... any of those other times as well?"

"I don't have notes on most of them. Let me see -" he flips through the notebook.

"This one also touched on marriage, but differently - when we were on the way to Mott's mansion she brought up that she was jealous, a bit, that she doesn't expect her fiancee to like anything about her and at least Siesta knew Mott liked something, and I tried to reassure her that there was plenty to like about her and it didn't land well."

"That could be a manifestation of the same disconnect between you two, but even if I'd never met Scyelen I'd have an immediate guess about what happened there. Scyelen still lacks the framework of kink that allows the compartmentalization of her fetishes from her reality, remember? She's slowly getting the idea, but that kind of process takes a lot of time even for someone good at introspection. So, it sounds like she was trying to reconcile the reality of Siesta's situation with the fact that she apparently kinks on being stolen away and kept as a sex toy."

She takes a moment to be careful about her phrasing.

"Scyelen kinks on being desired in the specific way Mott desired Siesta. She is also pessimistic enough to have realistic, non-kinky expectations of her politically-assigned breeding partner. And I know you've noticed that she lives her entire life by the fear-driven principle that she must at all times present a mask of only her most inoffensive traits to the people around her. In that light, it is easy to see why bringing up the possibility that her non-kinky politically-assigned breeding partner might get emotionally attached to her mask would be the opposite of reassuring."

"What a mess."