"Maitimo. Usually."

"...is that something you want to talk about more?"

"After I died he got tortured a lot and now he's--not okay. Maybe never again."

"I'm sorry."

"I miss him a lot and I don't know if I'm going to stop when I see him again."

"When did you last see him?"

Wryly: "Thirty thousand years ago."

"Wow.

Uh, no wonder you miss him."

"I mean, I was dead most of that time. Subjectively it's been a couple decades."

"And you're worried when you see him he'll have changed too much?"

"He was tortured really really a lot. Um. The way one of his brothers put it was that--he could behave like he did when I knew him, and my sister said she wouldn't want him to put on that act for us, and he said that whatever he did was going to be an act, there wasn't an authentic anymore."

"How do you feel about that?"

"Before I found them I thought they were all dead. I thought they were dead the way Elves die, and that I would have to rescue them but that I could, and now I find out they're all alive but one of them is so much worse than dead, and it's the one I was closest to, and I can never, ever save him from that, and I--I mourned him twice, once for his life and once for his happiness..."

"Do you think it's true that you can never ever save him from that?"

"I don't know what it would look like to begin to try."

"Do you feel like, if you don't have steps in front of you to do something, it might as well be impossible?"

"...'Wait' is a step. 'Learn the steps' is a step. 'Research under what circumstances it is possible to gain the opportunity to learn something that might possibly be the first step' is a step. If I don't know any steps then I don't know that a thing is doable at all."

"And none of those things seem like they might do it for this situation?"

"'Wait' is the only thing I can think of that conceivably might and I don't trust that it will. ...That or therapy, but I'm even less sure that would help and even less sure than that that it wouldn't hurt the therapist."

"There are lots of therapists trained to deal with trauma."

"The amount of trauma he was subject to is literally only possible because of magic."

"It would be a shame if he felt like he'd damage anyone he reached out to for help."

"...This is true."

"Sometimes therapists encounter things they're not equipped to handle, and they offer a referral. That seems likelier than that he'll traumatize someone."

"...Yeah. Of course that gets much harder when any therapist who gets involved has to be convinced about," she waves a hand. "Everything."