"Last one might be a problem."

"Possible."

"It's really not very urgent," he says to Fëanáro, "I'm pretty good at the things I do."

"Bella can help."

"Well, we'll discuss it later."

He finds her later at Macalaurë's prompting. "Bella. Good time?"

"Sure," she says, looking up from her crystal ball.

"I think your Fëanáro will be very disappointed if I don't give this a try."

"...well, there are probably worse reasons to sit through a session, but I really can't do anything very useful if you aren't on board with it."

"I think that if I wanted things I'd want to be better."

"Okay. Is here good?"

"If it's convenient for you."

"It's not less like my office than anywhere else accessible, anyway. So when I arrived in Valinor the state of the art was 'therapy, what's that', and while they have the concept here I don't know how familiar you are with it and it doesn't involve subtle arts..." And she proceeds to summarize how this generally works when there is a subtle artist involved and the nature of her professional ethics.

"Those precautions all sound sensible. 

...things that require my consent because that's ethics you have my consent for, things that require me to have a mind in certain states or whatever so you can tamper aren't going to be okay, I'll explain why in a bit -"

"Mindstate cooperation is mostly useful for helping me find things, or flag things that for whatever reason I am not looking at, both of which may be relevant since you're old enough to have a lot of memories to search through the long way and since there's trauma history probably better dealt with in some sensible order rather than as I happen to encounter it."

"That should be fine, then."

"What did you have in mind when you said things requiring your mind in certain states wouldn't be okay?"

"It's an outside chance at this point, but - could still be in Angband. If so, I don't want to facilitate tampering with my head. If it's a mental state it'd be trivial to have gotten me in without my cooperation that's not a problem."

...that's not something anybody came out of Utumno thinking. "How would that be the case exactly?"

"I have had - definitely ten, possibly eleven, possibly a lot more than that but my memory was subsequently tampered with, detailed hallucinations of escaping or being rescued, some of which played out for subjectively a century or so. This one would obviously have played out much much longer, but most of the time was in Mandos which is as effective a form of torture as anything in Angband itself and also low-fidelity, easy to leave a hallucination at for a while."

"Okay. One thing I may be able to do if you'd like is un-tamper-with your memories even if a Vala did it directly; I assume I couldn't do this if the tampering was done with me in mind but it wouldn't have been. I can't look at them to see what they are until I've unfuzzed them, but if you would only like them back under certain conditions, I can do it while you're unconscious and cover them up again before you wake up if they don't meet your criteria."

"...I think I want everything back."

"Okay. Is that what you'd like to do first?"

"Probably, if it's just going to give me more to do on other fronts."

"I did see a few Utumno survivors and some of them wanted help with things like nightmares or panic attacks, and while recovering your memories might mean that sort of thing has to be done over again it would make the intervening time healthier and memory-recovery can be very time consuming."

"Time-consuming on what scale? It's been thirty thousand years."