"Handsome as you are now, it doesn't surprise me," Hermes said, standing only after Carrick himself had. His hands felt most protected in his pockets, brief flashes of the Duchess' torture flashing through his mind as he flexed his left hand, feeling every bone shatter at once all over again. He moved it in his pocket again just to make himself calm in the certainty that it did work.
"As you wish, Erastes," he said, settling into easy step with him. They walked in near silence for a short while before Hermes broke it. "I've been thinking," he began, quiet and definitely apprehensive. "About the options that lay before me. It's been a strange thing, feeling like I have a future to consider instead of living moment to moment." Which, essentially, was what he'd had to do up until now. "Freedom might clear my divine debt, but the only means I can attain freedom and remain with you is if you turn me. Perhaps one man's life shouldn't revolve so completely around another's, and I'll admit it's been a strange thing caring about someone other than myself, but I do and a life without you in it isn't a life I wish to live."
He licked his lips and kept talking. "So once I'm well enough to hold down a meal and to sleep through the night without waking to the sound of my own screams, if it still pleases you, Erastes, my decision is for you to train me...and for you to allow me to selectively return to work of some kind. I don't do well in idleness."