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?
"Oh," says Prime, poker face not even cracking at this new delightful knowledge.
His emotions are complicated. Someone just died and was resurrected. Aya just died and was resurrected. Regardless of the other circumstances, that can't have been pleasant, and Prime's good at telling his feelings to shoo for a while so he can focus on more important things. He picks up the hurt at not being told and the worry over how it affected her and the desire to tell Aya that she should never lock him out of the loop while he's asleep again, and puts them into a neat little box in his mind to deal with when it's appropriate. Right now - she just died. That is probably upsetting.
He retrieves the mirrors, drops them off, and then goes to see if Aya needs a hug.
He's torn somewhat between seeing if she'll tell him herself, or being frank and honest and starting with, 'Also I'm aware that you tried suicide and it didn't work, and it seems like you scheduled that for when I was not here.' Let's - not bombshell her, to start with. He needs to get out of the habit of doing that.
Is there a way to word what he wants to say without being confrontational? At all? In any way? He doesn't want to get into a fight, he understands why. He just - doesn't want it to happen again. Both the 'death' bit and the 'Let's not actually tell Prime before the suicide and subsequent summoning' bit. More the second, the first she's free to do if she really wants to.
"How are you doing?" he asks, because he's still trying to figure out wording in his head, and also her mental health is important to him.
"I don't think Annie would care that some alt of her fiancé she's barely met doesn't rank her particularly highly. Even when Katydid warned everybody not to use their Adarins' numbers as a scoring system for an inter-Bell contest no one took the opportunity to wonder about other Adarins' numbers for them."
"Did that help or make it worse?" he laughs when he deems that there has been Enough Kisses For Now.
"I am officially out of ideas of things to ask the alethiometer about the necklace that might yield helpful results, even the second wave of oddball wacky questions after last night," apologizes Ice. "I can't guarantee that the spellbinders can't produce anything - but I think Chamomile has no help for you."
"Well. Thank you. I still need to - be able to self-regulate. Like I'm supposed to be able to do. Not even my - necklace programming wants to require you as much as it made me do, not when it's nonreciprocal and you have other priorities. It is not a very consistent necklace."
Is it morally questionable that he is extremely attracted to her right now? Mentally, anyway. He likes people that are self reliant and intelligent and self aware. It's probably morally questionable. Let's not bring it up.
"I don't have anything pressing that needs to be done immediately," he clarifies. "But it is a tremendously high priority to me that you have - everything in your power to help arrange your head in whatever manner you prefer. Because you prefer very nice things, and also 'because morality.' As my sister would put it. I suspect the necklace has rearranged your head to put my desires in a priority?"
And Prime goes and does work. It's pretty run of the mill and ordinary. For him. He's sort of vaguely worried about Aya in general every time he has free moments to spare, but - let's not screw with the small sanctity of the test, hmm? And if he's clever (which, he likes to think he is somewhat clever) he can play his cards so that he doesn't have many free moments. There, problem solved.
"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.
"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."
"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."
"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?"
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."
"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?"
"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."
"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?"
"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 -"
"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."
"We're both immortal. You seem convinced that I'm going to - get better, at some point, that the necklace is going to be a footnote in the next brochure we hand out to new alts, 'oh by the way Spring is irrevocably in love with Prime to a degree for which magic is strictly necessary, but don't worry about that, it doesn't affect anything, she has it under control except for perfunctory kisses every third week. And. I'm. Not sure of that."
"I'm convinced that there is a win condition here, somewhere, not - necessarily that you get 'better.' I'm not, for example, ever expecting you to fall out of love with me, now, or for you to stop considering me your main priority. I'm - not expecting to go through the period of a year or so, and then be able to say, 'Okay, now that we've done that, and pretend everything is as it was before the necklace.' I'm quite certain that's strictly impossible, at this point."
"Okay. To put it shortly, I'm - upset. For various reasons. And I would like it fixed, I'm not going to proclaim that the universe goes right back to where it was before. But I want a solution. Because I'm afraid that no matter what I do, I'm letting you down, because I - can't live up to disturbing love magic."
"But - that's the old lady's house. It barely looks any different. Those flowers are annuals, they'd have had to be replanted, why would they be the exact same flowers she had me plant hundreds of years later with her dead and me gone...? The shutter's still broken - why would the shingles still be there, they're wood, shouldn't they have had to be replaced...?"
"If they're still alive they're more urgent than I'd previously thought, though mostly as a subset of the dealing with slavery thing. Meanwhile, the fallen wagon probably hasn't even been reported yet. I've been technically free since the first time Ice resurrected me, any magic that rids a slave of the heel mark frees them - Aelare's blessing, it's called - but they won't have that on the books, and that annoys me."
"... The former. A piece of paper that says something but can't be enforced is a piece of paper. But I would still like to make it go away, because a piece of paper shouldn't have any capacity to turn people into chattel, in any circumstances." Pause. "Thoroughness, and all."