Author's Note: The previous chapter really was supposed to be the last one, but some of the reviews inspired this addition. This is the last-last self-insertion you'll see from me, and yes, I do talk to the fictional characters I write about. So far, nobody's caught me doing the Fight Club thing.

Ari blinked and yawned, crawling out the sucking gelatinous mass that was her afternoon nap. Work had been hell. And dull. Dull hell - the worst kind there was. At least with your grocery-shelf sort of hell, there was some excitement whenever your luck racked off, but what else could a girl expect from civil service? Not anything interesting, surely.

She scrubbed at her eyes with both hands and got up in stages from the couch. Living with small children - and why did Mom's I-hope-you-have-children-just-like-you curse have to be so effective? - had given Ari a certain immunity to being awoken by little things like earthquakes and the sonic booms of speeding jets. Only if the kids actually jumped on her, which rarely happened more than a dozen times a day, would she get dragged out of sleep.

First, she looked for the kids. There, in front of the TV, were two small shapes enthralled by the cartoon adventures of Spongebob. She fumbled for her glasses, frowning as her hand encountered nothing but empty space on the coffee table where she'd laid them before going to sleep. She felt down on the carpet, the arm of the couch that had served as a pillow, even the sleeping cat on the back of it. The cat gave Ari an annoyed look before taking herself and her ruffled pride over to sleep on top of the bookcase.

"Damn it," she muttered, bending down to squint at the floor. "Where are Mommy's glasses?"

It took four repeats of the question before her son responded. "Mommy, you're awake!"

Saying things like 'Precisely, Darth Obvious,' was not, according to Dr. Spock, conducive to raising children. She smiled and nodded, "Yes, sweetie. Mommy's awake. Mommy is also blind. Mommy wants her glasses or she's going to sell you two to a pet store."

He chortled, used to odd threats like this. "Alice wanted to try your glasses on."

Ari sighed. Alice was the cat. "She's not wearing them now. Where are they?"

"Where are what?"

No, it was not fully legal to bake the kids into pies. "My glasses," she said patiently. "Where are my glasses?"

"Over here," said a shape sitting at her computer.

She couldn't see much more than a vague, pale blob in front of the glowing blob of her computer screen, but she'd fantasized about that voice too many times not to know who was sitting there. "Don't tell me you were watching the kids while I was asleep?"

"I do have some experience with herding small beasts," Nuada replied mildly. "I had to lay a few snares to cease the incessant running through the house, but fortunately they found something wholly inane to distract themselves. Do all children engage in bouts of frantic energy followed by that?" he asked, waving a hand at the two children who were still sitting perfectly still.

She nodded and sighed. "Yes, it's normal. They're recharging."

"Ah," he replied, looking back at the screen. He tapped the edge of the desk with a long, elegant finger, indicating where the glasses were. "I don't know if this is a common thing in your parenting strategy," he added as she picked them up and settled them on her nose. "But your daughter was wearing them and seemed to delight in running into the walls while doing so."

Ari sighed again, took off the glasses and bent the frame more or less back into place. "No, it's not common. It's my own fault for leaving them where the kids could reach." She glanced at the computer screen and her eyebrows drew together. "What are you reading?"

He rested his chin on one hand as he read. "Your reviews," he said simply.

"What?" she yelped. "I don't even let my husband read those!"

"Mommy!" her daughter crowed, just now noticing Ari was awake. The author made a low 'oof' sound as the five-year-old barreled into her midsection. "Spongebob is over. Can I watch Tom and Jerry?"

Nuada waited while Ari changed the program before continuing the briefly interrupted conversation. "Then it is a good thing I am not your husband," he remarked, using the mouse to scroll down a page. "You know, I happen to agree with some of these most recent comments."

"The ones that gush about how sexy you are?"

"Those too," he leaned back in her chair, and the light from the monitor cast the chiseled muscles of his chest and stomach into sharp relief. Even in "real life," she imagined him without a shirt. So far, if he hadn't mentioned it, she wasn't going to either. "I was, however, referring to these... here, here and here."

Ari glanced at where he was pointing. "The ones that were voting for you to get laid?" she asked, puzzled.

"None other," Nuada replied. "I find it somewhat distressing that in a story written by one of my fangirls, I get left out of such activities."

"What about the face-sucking in the corner?" she protested. "And the lesbian-by-proxy sex - which you got plenty of, I might add?"

He let his head fall back against the chair and rolled it to look lazily up at her. The gold in the dark pits of his eyes glimmered with amusement. "Teasing and more teasing," he said. "You really don't understand men very well at all, do you?"

She crossed her arms and gave him an offended look. "Are you referring to the 'if I can't screw it, I'll kill it' mentality?"

Nuada blinked, then conceded, "Very well, you do understand men somewhat. But, knowing that, you would still write such scenes without allowing your subject some form of release?"

"You 'released' all over the floor of your room and the library," she pointed out.

"Not the same," he said with a sigh, looking back at the reviews. He tabbed out of the Firefox browser and went back to another window that displayed the contents of one of the drives. The fine hair fell over his shoulders, shading from moon-white to gold at the tips. She tried to resist pushing some of it back, but decided to give into temptation. This was her fantasy after all. "Not nearly the same," he repeated slowly. Was that... longing... in his voice?

The wistfulness under his words made her eyes widen. "Nuada..." she said slowly, sitting on the arm of the couch that was tucked against the side of the desk. "You sound like either you're setting up some false confidence on my part before you break my neck, or that you're letting your closet romantic show."

The prince smirked, "Closet romantic... you'll have to remember that for a story later."

"Don't worry, I will. And you didn't answer me."

"I noticed," he said dryly, lifting his arms to stretch slowly like a cat. Her attention was immediately diverted by the flex and play of muscles under his ivory skin as he arched in her chair, then lowered his arms again to lace his fingers together over his stomach. "My 'closet romantic' is something you really haven't addressed," he commented.

"You don't strike me as a romantic all that often, unless it's with Nuala," Ari replied.

"Only because you haven't bothered to ponder it that much," he retorted.

She lifted one foot up onto the arm of the couch, folding her arms around the knee next to her chest. "I have so," she said. "I think that, under the right circumstances, you'd be a very devoted, mushy, romantic, hypnotic lover. I just haven't imagined the circumstances yet, and between you and me and the rest of the FFN community, your dislike of humans is obvious enough that there's no way you'd fall in love with one. In fact, aside from your twin, I don't think anyone could wiggle past enough of your defenses to be more than a dalliance."

He inclined his white head slightly in acknowledgment. "Are you so afraid of your darker side?" he asked lightly.

Ari's eyes narrowed behind the glasses. There was a small smile playing about his lips. "What are you talking about?" she asked.

Nuada rolled another indolent look at her. "Kain," he said simply.

"That's not fair."

"It's perfectly fair," he replied. "Your fascination with that other character has led to a remarkably full file of quite interesting fiction on your computer."

"Oh no," she said, recognizing the window and which drive it was looking at. "You did not read those!"

"I did," he said smugly. "I must say, you have a way with dominance and making your Kain somewhat softer and more affectionate without taking away from his... what is the term? You've used it to describe me before as well."

Her voice was muffled by the hands covering her face. "Badassness," she replied. "Why did you go snooping through my stories? Nobody has read most of those!"

"And I can see why. This one about the X-men is rather old, isn't it?"

She glared at him between her fingers. "Say it sucks. I dare you. Your next story will be slash and you will be on the bottom."

Nuada laughed, "No, I would like to think I'm possessed of more sense than to antagonize a writer. However, there is a marked difference in style and quality, and I was simply wondering why you do not rewrite them?"

"They're a roadmap," Ari explained. "Graduating from different levels of suckage to better ones. Rereading some of those-," and she leaned over to see which one he'd been in the middle of when she'd awoken, and cringed, "and especially that one - makes me feel a little better about posting stories now."

"I see," he said. "Why not keep them, then, and write updated versions?"

"I don't really have time," she pointed out. "Between work and school and kids, I barely have time to write about you."

He shrugged elegantly. Very few men could be graceful and still make it look manly. "Very well. But, I still think you should continue to explore your darker side. Kain is an excellent start, but really I think you could do better."

"I don't see you taking a human slave at all, except maybe during the early wars," she began. He grinned at her and she shook her head, "Huh-uh. Do you have any idea how hard it is to write period fiction without a history degree of some kind? Fey period fiction, no less? Plus, it'll be an OC and I'll get barbecued by flames. No way."

"I thought you'd resolved this with Wednesday and Ryan already," he remarked. "Not all original characters are Mary Sues. In fact, I'm not even certain your last one qualified," he said thoughtfully. "Since everyone miraculously came to their senses at the end there, thanks to that technique of yours."

"It was a parody," she said. "And the term you're looking for is deus ex machina, or 'god in the machine'. It's the term for any improbable contrivance in a story that provides the solution to a seemingly impossible problem."

"You do spend too much time on Wikipedia," Nuada said. "And, if you hadn't noticed, everyone came to their senses before Agent Silver cleansed the air system." He finished the older story and double-clicked on another.

"Oh, shut up about that plot hole," she said irritably. "Write it yourself if you can do better."

"I just might, since I'm not going to be having sex in any of your stories. You may want to rethink that fangirl thing. By the grace of the Four, you even wrote that tin man having sex. Do you have any idea how much the other characters laugh at me?"

"All right!" Ari sighed explosively. "So, you're here now, not to watch my kids or to give me a bit of fantasy-thrill, but to complain that I don't give you enough spotlight?"

"I've no complaints about the spotlight," he said calmly as he read. "Only the lack of companionship. Thousands of years in exile, as you pointed out several times, gets quite lonely. Wink is my brother, not my lover."

She cringed. "Oh, I did not need that image."

"Consider it revenge for your threat about my next story."

"Fair enough," she said, hugging her knee again. She pushed her fingertips under the glasses to rub the bridge of her nose. "So, you want another story. You want to get laid in this story. And what else?"

"By a female," he said, raising a single finger.

"All right, all right. Get laid by a female. And?"

He turned his attention back to the dominance/submission story on the computer screen. "And I'd like you to rewrite this part, or write something similar, in more detail. You glossed over the most interesting tidbits."

"Pervert."

"Celibate," he corrected her. "Which is rather more dangerous, if you think about it. Do we have a deal?"

"What deal?" she asked. "You're issuing commands. Where is the bartering here?"

Nuada waved one hand dismissively. "I don't barter. Are you my vassal or not? I seem to have a vacancy among my retinue."