It was Caelum who asked.
Not Vaelor. He had been thinking about the conversation for a while, the shape of it, what it would require, but he had not pushed for it, because pushing for it would have made it something it was not supposed to be. So he had waited, the way he had learned to wait for things that needed to arrive on their own terms.
Caelum found him in the workroom on a Saturday morning when the house was slow and nobody had anywhere to be.
He stood in the doorway for a moment.
Vaelor looked up.
"Can we talk," Caelum said.
"Yes," Vaelor said. He closed what he was reading. "Sit down."
Caelum sat across from him. He had the posture he used for conversations he had prepared for, slightly forward, hands on the table, the quality of someone who had thought about what they wanted to say and was ready to say it.
But he did not say anything immediately.
Vaelor waited.
