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"Yes," Mimsy murmured, hoping her voice sounded more reverent than disingenuous. "I think that's it too." Maybe repeating it would work. As she watched him push another chunk of cake into his mouth, she told herself that just repeating it was safer than making false claims of her own.

Because these were definitely the type of statements and questions that the woman who still felt excited over this particular pair of deaths did not want to deal with.

"I was not told anything about a ceremony." Presumably because I desecrated the scene of her death and ended the existence of her girlfriend. "I recall a mention that there were others who wanted to attend a ceremony, however. They might extend the information to you."

Distracted, she stared at the icing on his hand, which he was making no effort to remove by himself. Was that uncharacteristic of him? It was an even ratio of 'yes' to 'no' from her own observations, which were proving to be unhelpful.

"Do you need some assistance with cleaning that off?" she asked, nodding towards the icing. Hopefully there was another cloth somewhere that had not been used to clean blood off of her face and hands.

Would he kill someone? Really kill them? Mimsy eyed him thoughtfully instead of making any more comments about a funeral; she was out of any insight that she could possibly offer without getting into the 'horrifying information' territory.

Thankfully, he did seem to be as easily distracted by the icing as she had been, even if watching him lick it off of his palm was not at all what she had expected she would be doing right now. He requested a towel (a little too late, in her opinion) and reacted to his mention of Clarice in a way that made her think that the cake really hadn't helped much.

"I can only aspire to be as well-prepared as Clarice, but I do think that I have a towel." She turned her back to him for just one second as she searched through her clothing and effects to fish out a small, fluffy hand towel.

There was a pause when she turned back around, and all she could do was stare.

Maybe a cloth alone wasn't going to cut it. She held the towel towards her nightstand and tipped what remained of a small cup of water onto it before extending the wet cloth towards him. Kostya might have taken the time to clean all of the blood off of her, but Mimsy did not share his patience.

"Before you take this..." She looked very serious again. "Are you still hungry?"

Mimsy wasn't sure what had done it - maybe it was the cake after all - but Robert was smiling, and that was an improvement. She regretted not being more careful with the stimuli that she offered him, because she would be forced to try a cake and a towel and a mention of how she was not as prepared as Clarice all separately if this ever happened again.

But the smile (quite literally) disappeared as he lowered his head as if he had been reprimanded. It was just a question. Were other people who interacted with him disallowing him from feeling hungry? How odd!

The laugh that she stifled at his shameful appearance surfaced as an awkwardly toothy grin, and she fetched another cake instead of offering any of the legitimate varieties of sustenance. Because this was a time to eat cake, not anything sensible, obviously.

"Here." She pulled the remnants of the last cake away and set it down on the floor beside her, and pushed the new cake into his lap. "This time we don't have to be concerned with the mess that you will inevitably create, because we have this."

She raised the towel, which was truly proving to be just about the most massively useful thing an interstellar researcher could have.

There was no 'thank you' in response to Robert's comment on the cakes, because Mimsy never intended for them to be good. She just intended for them to exist, and her attention to detail must have dictated that following directions worked out well in the end.

It was a logical conclusion, which was nothing to be impressed about.

"I'm glad that they are properly serving their purpose in the best possible way." I'm glad you like it, in many more words. She watched with a distant smile as he finished the rest of the cake, which really didn't take very long at all, and leaned forward to hold one of his hands steady.

She had not thought this through on many problematic levels.

So she focused on just one of them: her hand was sticky now too, covered in icing and probably saliva. She held her breath as she dutifully cleaned all of the icing off of one hand, remembering the thorough method that Kostya used, and steadied his second hand (with a very shaky hand, which kind of defeated the stabilization attempts) to scrub off the remainder.

Until she couldn't anymore. Luckily, the icing only remained on one finger. This was workable.

"The rest is for you," she claimed, because it felt vaguely sentimental, as she wiped her hands clean.

"I would not classify you in that category," Mimsy began, eyes fixated on the pillow that he was holding. "And you are correct, but there is the important distinction that you are more like a--"

She stopped, eyes widening, still staring at the pillow. Her breath caught in her throat and she wasn't sure that she could make herself breathe again. Nothing felt as if it were functioning properly, because none of this felt as if it was a proper interaction, especially because he said he really loved her.

One extremely important adverb, loved more than her cousin had been by one adverb. Everything was perfect. Clerise was dead. Her blood was on her hands, as it should have been. She understood power, and thought that she might be close to understanding happiness.

And someone loved her.

He rubbed his face against the pillow. Her fingers twitched. A tiny noise of uncertainty escaped with her breath when she finally exhaled.

"Do you mean that?" Her voice was so quiet that it was barely audible, and might not have been were they not alone in an enclosed space. "What you said you felt before 'tolerating'?"

Emotions were easy to read at this point in Mimsy's life, and even when she didn't quite feel them, she could at least register them. Of course, this had many loopholes that complicated it, and feeling loved or adored was not something that happened without knowing that she was supposed to try to feel it.

He said that she knew this. Remember? That was...wait, how was she supposed to remember this? He had certainly never told her that before, unless she forgot it sometime along the way. Those were words that she had not heard associated with her for a very long time.

Nineteen years, in fact.

But 'goddess' made her think of something else - something in what felt like another world - and she thought that she could remember, if that counted as reality. Did it count as reality?

She looked at him as if she expected an answer, but never asked the question.

She stared even longer, as if that would help anything, but it only created more questions that she didn't have answers to. They were not simple. She could not feed them cake to make them go away.

"Oh," she finally responded, in that uncharacteristically tiny voice. Her eyes watched the pillow. Her eyes examined the plate. Her eyes were anywhere but on him.

It was her turn to look ashamed, anxiously picking at her thumbnail. She was supposed to know. He said she knew this. She was massively uncomfortable knowing that she didn't know something. And there was that underlying concern that the other world had been reality after all...

When she spoke again, it seemed a little more like her, words stronger than they had been before.

"I love you too, then."

It wasn't a lie if she didn't know how love felt.

Really, Mimsy was not sure what she had been expecting.

That was not entirely true. She had been expecting to make some sense of any of this, but it only got worse when he fell asleep in her bed after uttering the words: "Damn right you do."

She leaned forward to cross her arms on her bed, put her head down on the crook of one arm, and did nothing but stare some more.

As much as she wanted to leave him to have some time to himself, she knew that Kostya would probably be alarmed by a man in her bed that really, really liked hugs. With no reliable phone service, she had no way of warning him, so...logically, the best option was to stay here.

Logically.