[ He shivers once, lightly, at each kiss, and feels no urge whatsoever to lift his face from the crook of Miles's shoulder. One hand blindly reaches behind him to find whatever part of Kitty he can grasp onto, realizing a moment later that it's his bad hand and stilling abruptly as the sensory input comes in belatedly, remotely. It leaves him just resting it flat against her rather than grasping.

He intentionally tries to redirect away from anything too intimate, even teasingly. Gregor feels alarmingly like he might be making at least a brief return to that all too familiar feeling of finding any close physical contact unnerving altogether. That worry is one he can't attend to right now either; it's too profound, touches on too much, and accordingly it is wiped away into an abstract pondering in the back of his head.

Instead, he sighs. ] My horrible fate of having to act as Emperor while drugged to the gills, or in pain. It's going to have to be the latter. [ Because duty always filters back to him first. ]