"You could get your vow renewal! It was lovely! There is also a possibility you'll dream it all back anyway, Lórien's going to try to prevent that but your memory-dreams are weird, and if that happens we'll just have to hope that getting it in that format isn't vegetative-state inducing." He rather clings. "Oh, Kib."

Squeeze. "Hey, it's okay, I'm fine, I'll go through my notes between 'what happened to the Trees' and 'being comically interrupted while writing, midsentence, by my capture' and pick out what needs to go back and - huh, I'm more filled on Aly than I thought I was, not entirely but way farther along, I guess that didn't get snipped by removing the times in which I had the dreams -"

"Really? Well, that's convenient, we know nothing in Aly's life was vegetative-state inducing. And all your notes are - um. The continent sunk. When we killed Melkor."

"...All of them? Shit."

"I think so - Aydanci was busy carrying catatonic you onto an evac golem-"

"I had a couple of the indexes in my go bag for mostly sentimental reasons," Aydanci says. "And I wasn't carrying you, Charp - you named the talking golem line Charp - was, so I had my bag. But that's just the indexes."

"Well, indexes'll at least tell me that I probably want this date or that, I suppose."

"Do you want to stay in Lórien until you're satisfied with the state of your head or do you want to go back, meet your Charps, everyone else'll be ridiculously glad too - Findekano's desperate to see you, it just would have looked very fishy for the merry four of us to go along - and then come back once you've got the complete list of dates to restore?"

"Mm, how long's the trip?"

"A day and a half in a boat. The walk from Lorien's longer but we didn't walk, we took the flying golems there too - oh, and Aydanci can finally tell you how he got picture-printing golems up and running to rescue you -"

"What, how does picture printing have anything to do with - tell me all about it -"

And Aydanci does.

Awwww.

He is no longer desperately hoping this is a hallucination. It still probably is. Maybe in a couple years he'll ask Lórien to meddle with him until he thinks otherwise.

Kib decides to stay in Lórien until they have a chance to see how Lórien has done with staving off weird otherworldly dreams. He stays up late catching up verbally on what he's missing, writing on conveniently papery tree bark with a conveniently ink-sapped stick to make sure he doesn't forget to ask for this or that restored. And then he curls up with his husband and falls asleep.

To judge by the wordless screaming, the answer to the question of how Lórien did is - not well.

Aydanci doesn't have his earplugs in. He wakes Kib up.

Kib glares at him.

"So that's a no on keeping the memories out? ...you're going to have to go through it all again? Fuck."

"Well done," Kib says. "That was a really pleasant day. Might even have been worth having to fucking re-do this."

"- no," murmurs Aydanci.

"Kib - the Enemy can't read minds, just memories - it doesn't even help - please -"

"I'll give you ten minutes. Explain the distinction, do, I find that my memories contain a lot of me thinking in them -"

"I would have adopted your strategy too if I thought he could gain from everything that crossed my mind. And he wouldn't even need to lean on the hallucinations, not nearly as heavily as he does, and sometimes I noticed things were wrong but he didn't reset until I'd indicated things were wrong, and that occurred even in hallucinations he erased from my mind as soon as he was through with them and so his intent there clearly was not to mislead me about his capabilities - without Lorien I wouldn't even have known this - my honest best guess is that he gets memories but not first-person, somehow. Like being in someone's memory palace. The Maiar and Valar don't think like us, it took them millennia to even manage to osanwe in a way that was comprehensible to us, they do not have the psychological capacity to read and interpret surface thoughts, he can get senses and I am pretty certain that's all he can get. I can't prove this to you from your own hallucinations because you'd already gone for the annihilation option by then, it's achingly transparent in my own hallucinations and you know I didn't try to avoid thinking even when I thought I was hallucinating, but if that's not enough then I don't yet have enough."

"If you told me this before he got me," Kib says, "I don't remember it."

"Please," Aydanci says, "please, please - stay with us and we can get Lórien and he can put everything back and you can see if it matches -"

"Even taking the premises at face value I'm not a very good actor and with my brain turned on I'm dramatically easier to manipulate -"

"Please no please don't -"

"Do we have permission to ask Lórien to erase your memory of sleeping every time you wake, get a couple more days with you, see if we can think of something better together -"

"You hardly need my permission," Kib says, "if that's what you want to do with me."

"Lórien we need you right now I don't know how long it takes him to -"

Kib closes his eyes.

Lórien's there. What went wrong?

"Dreamed - something - put it back put everything back maybe it'll snap into place or at least he won't have to dream it again - Kib wait just a minute -"

He puts it all back.

- Kib flinches, opens his eyes -

"Kib. Kib please."

"- nope, didn't have any of that before he got me," Kib says, "can't -"

"Don't go don't leave me."

"Love you honey."

Closes his eyes again.

"...I just have to tell my father to work out a way he doesn't need sleep -" he says, "it's okay, it's okay, Aydanci, he's still there he is still going to be okay if we just figure out how a human can go without sleep indefinitely -"