[It is a strange, perverse sort of irony that the god who revels in chaos should be so deliberate and resolute in his devotion, and that Liem, who is deliberate in all aspects of his life, cannot help but want him, long for him, against all his caution and common sense. He is not, and has never been, a man who chooses to feel. It has always been something that comes upon him without his say-so, lures his heart into snares and makes everything in his life more complicated. Would that he could be content to keep to his habits, and not blunder into the same mistakes over and over again because of his own loneliness.

But perhaps Set would not love him for that. That is a strange thought—and a familiar one. Wondering what about him might be lovable, and what is not.]

Deliberately, [he repeats, breath ghosting over the desert god’s skin. It seems, to him, incongruous: just short of impossible. The warm hands wandering his body spark an apprehensive, untrusting hope beneath shivering skin, greedy and suspicious all at once.]

You will still choose to love me, even if I offer you nothing in return?

[Senseless. Impossible for him now, surely. He must gain something from such a love, after all.]

Even if loving me is difficult? Even if… [Somehow, horridly, this is the thing he struggles most to say out of all of it.] Even if I disappoint you, in the end?

[Even if he is not worth it after all?]