"Sure. I took a week off work, I need to be back in nine days..."

"Which isn't enough time to make a large dent in the memories since you're missing so many, but is enough time to squeeze everything else we've discussed in if we meet daily. Is there anything else that might reasonably jump the priority queue?"

"Nothing comes to mind, no. Thank you for your time. I gather there are many demands on it."

"I like to be busy. It's probably maximally efficient to do two sessions a day, one morning one evening, so we can get the most use out of my stamina; I'll have to skip a couple evenings if a morning is spent doing something that can't be usefully chunked and runs long, but still. Nine tomorrow?"

"Thank you. I'll see you then." He has noticed that she is not asking him to make choices; there's a flicker of appreciation that the affect reader will pick up, and a solidifying positive judgment of her.

"See you."

He comes and finds her. "I can't ask if you can help, right?"

"I can't answer you, anyway."

"I'm sad and mad and I want him to be okay."

Well, she can produce hugs, these are not a violation of confidentiality at all.

Hugs. Shaking. It's all my fault.

It isn't. The Valar are really, really bad at their jobs.

But I tried to fight Melkor and I lost and other people got hurt for it.

Squeeze. That was the other one of you, and anyway fighting Melkor was really important even if it didn't go well - we don't know what would've happened if he'd just sat around instead -

I just want him to be okay.

Yeah.

Stupid evil Enemy. Stupid evil Valar.

Yep.

They teach each other things. Tyelcormo and Idaia barely leave their rooms. Maedhros has therapy twice a day.

She places dream blocks - "They'll last about a year, give or take depending on how much you sleep and how intense the nightmares normally are; if you don't get the hang of lucid dreaming reliably in that time I can replace them" - and she induces a panic attack and watches it play out and inserts interruptions in the feedback loops and she sweeps great swathes of fuzz off long-ago happy memories and she determines that he is not architected for the context switch to work and lays out the list of possible side effects if she makes any mistakes directly addressing traumatic associations in case any of this prompts him to decline.

"...I don't really want to trade off being functional against being happy."

"That's an entirely reasonable" preference "decision. You're coping with what you've got and I can't make a particularly strong guarantee that it'd be an improvement. You can try a lightly applied temporary version or skip it entirely."

"Temporary's worth a try."

"Okay. I'm going to go very gentle on this, you'll probably be able to knock it loose in hours if you try and days if you don't, but it'll give you an idea. Ready?"

"Yes."