Yeah. I wish that too.

He has a momentary impulse to try it again, to see if it's any better now - but, one, that's terrifying, two, he is not the one currently wearing his soul and can't actually accomplish the impulse before it passes.

Later, almost certainly, unless you want to spend the next six months away from me downstairs somewhere in which case I will let you do that.

He does not feel like he wants to spend the next six months avoiding Maitimo. He's also not entirely sure he follows the logic of that statement.

I'm not going to be able to do consent, if I need to stay functioning and there's nothing to lose I'm not going to be able to spend the next six months being very careful never to brush it or never to kiss you. I can do - I can do 'if you don't want to be around me I will send you somewhere you're safe from me'. I am offering that.

Well. That's... complicated.

He can't immediately think of a way that staying near Maitimo is obviously necessary in the same way that throwing his soul at Maitimo in the first place was, unless there's something being elided under that 'I can do' that turns out to involve Maitimo needing to borrow some virtue over those however many months and coming up empty and his kingdom suffering for it, or Maitimo being miserable and distracted from governance and his kingdom suffering for it, or the separation introducing enough cumulative inconvenience into the process of general soul recovery that it adds up to a significant delay...

...he is pretty sure he does, on at least some levels, want to be around Maitimo. He still loves Maitimo. That... does not, by itself, add up to definitely wanting to stay near Maitimo even when this will predictably end badly for him... but it does introduce some complexity to what would otherwise be a fairly simple question. Figuring out how much he values his future comfort against other things he wants turns out to be a lot harder when the stakes aren't high enough to make his future comfort totally insignificant by comparison. But - he is glad Maitimo offered, even though having to figure it out is scary and difficult. He appreciates it a lot.

Maitimo hugs him and closes his eyes.

So either the concerns he thought of aren't operative or Maitimo wants him to figure it out without them, okay, he can do that.

He snuggles up and thinks it through.

He loves Maitimo, he'd miss him if he left, he wants Maitimo to be happy and staying seems like an avenue for making Maitimo happy. It... feels like that shouldn't add up to deciding he doesn't care about the consequences and staying. He checks with his soul and it has no opinion on that, though. He can even figure out why, it's not that hard. Feeling like there shouldn't be an amount of 'I love this person and want them to be happy' that gets someone to stay in a dangerous relationship is a feeling about what would be good for people in general, and his soul is fine with him doing things he'd never ask of anyone else or would even actively discourage them from. No simple answer there.

He doesn't actually know how bad it would be. He has guesses but that's not the same thing. Maitimo touched his soul and that's undeniably the worst thing he can conceive of experiencing but he doesn't know how the rest would factor in and it might not be as simple as 'probably a rounding error next to soul-touching'.

He also doesn't know if the soul-touching is going to be better now, his feelings are a mess and it's a differently shaped mess from last night but he doesn't exactly have a lot of information to go on. If he had to guess, he'd expect it to be tied to what he thinks of Maitimo at the time, but that is itself a bit hard to predict, and he doesn't know how close the link is likely to be...

When he threw his soul at Maitimo he was deliberately and rather spectacularly giving up on being safe from him, and he could decide that now that he's thrown that away there's no picking it back up again before the show's over and he might as well stay because concerns for his own safety come neatly pre-disregarded. But Maitimo is offering him his safety back; it seems like it would be perfectly in keeping with the spirit of the original commitment to accept...

Why is he even having such trouble with this, it should be obvious that if he doesn't need to stay he shouldn't - but he does, actually, get to decide how much he values his future comfort, it's not as simple as 'self-preservation comes first except in case of cosmic stakes and then it comes last', he is having legitimately complicated feelings about a legitimately complicated situation and he doesn't have to act like a hundred other vulnerable people are all impressionably watching him struggle with it. Hypothetical impressionable people: don't be like Taliar about this, self-preservation totally comes first.

And now that he's appeased that corner of his mind, back to the decision itself...

He can't know how bad it'll be ahead of time, not exactly. If he disregards the unknowns and asks himself what he'd think of Maitimo holding his soul every night for a year, as compared to a year without the two of them seeing or touching each other in any capacity...

...it's worryingly close. As in worrying that his judgment might be impaired because it seems insane for it to be this close. But he's the only one of him he's got; there's no getting a second opinion from a not-in-love Taliar.

What happens if I ask you to try touching my soul again before I decide, so I know more about how bad it is under different circumstances...?

So he lifts him up, effortlessly, and pulls him into his lap on the bed, and whispers I love listening to you think. And then pulls the necklace off - carefully, carefully - and puts it around Taliar's neck, and pulls Taliar firmly close against his chest and touches it.

When Maitimo picks him up he feels a little flutter of fear, but he puts it aside and focuses deliberately on love, on the comfort he still finds in Maitimo's arms and the words I want to do better than good people at the things they care about and the memory of feeling filled with sunlight. He's trying to find out if feeling more positively toward Maitimo makes it better and the experiment will fail if he turns into an emotional wreck the second it looks like it's going to happen.

It is better this time, he was right about that much.

There's still horror in it, a sense of wrongness, a this-shouldn't-be-happening feeling. It's still painful and terrifying on a scale too vast for his mind to contain. But somehow at the same time it's... peaceful. Transcendent. The feelings he was focusing on - the comfort of being held in Maitimo's lap, the aching adoration of understanding exactly what he fell in love with Maitimo for and knowing that it's absolutely true - are magnified until they overflow all available space, and it doesn't make sense to compare the magnitudes of things that are each individually too big to fit in his head at once but nevertheless there is definitely a lot more love and comfort than pain and fear. And hardly any self-hatred at all.

He still can't hold onto more than fragmentary thoughts amid the emotional hurricane. He still can't connect to his senses well enough to notice that he's sobbing helplessly into Maitimo's chest. That part is no different.

He holds on a long time, it's so achingly perfect and fascinating and beautiful. He cuddles him. He lets go.

He presses his face against Maitimo's chest and tries to steady his ragged breathing and collect his scattered thoughts. That must have been longer than either of the previous times—he feels like he's been crying for a while—but—

Okay, proof of concept, he thinks. That was... much closer to not being torture... I'm going to need a minute. And he resettles himself in Maitimo's lap and closes his eyes and breathes. His capacity for coherent thought comes back gradually, piece by piece.

When he reaches the memory of Maitimo saying 'I love listening to you think' - he was too distracted to respond to it at the time, but apparently not too distracted to remember it for later - he feels a warm spark of affection, and smiles. I'm glad. I love you.

Squeeze. He'll sing something softly.

The next thought he manages, a few seconds later, is prompted by the topic of Maitimo listening to him think. He forms half a suspicion about his soul's mental privacy enforcement, and a soul-sourced certainty in the back of his mind confirms it: where in most cases it's still maintaining his privacy based on his intentions and preferences rather than his successful use of metaphor, in the case of Maitimo specifically, his soul is preventing him from ever hiding a thought even if he wanted to, even if he tried.

This is an obvious and reasonable thing for his soul to have done after last night. He also thinks it is probably the sort of thing Maitimo will like. He isn't entirely sure how he feels about it himself. Nervous, a little, even though never hiding his thoughts from Maitimo was exactly what he was going to do anyway...

Hug. If you weren't doing it I'm not sure I'd be - able to let you build your power back, I'd be too afraid of losing everything -

...Taliar hugs him. He's outright glad he can't have mental privacy from Maitimo if it means Maitimo isn't afraid of him when he would be otherwise. He loves Maitimo and doesn't ever, ever want to make him afraid.

Squeeze. He wonders if Taliar's noticed yet that Maitimo put his soul back around his neck.

Well, it has yet to come up in his conscious thoughts, although there's a background awareness in there - it's just too familiar a feeling to have registered as meaningful yet.

Okay, he thinks he's back in working order now, at least enough to get back to examining his feelings about being safe from Maitimo. Comfortable lap-snuggles, and...

What are all the things he wants about each option - personal comfort and safety, on the one hand, fairly obvious; getting to be near someone he loves, on the other hand, likewise. He specifically wants to make Maitimo happy and, as previously observed, he has more opportunities to do that if he's near him...

Something more complicated seems to be trailing off the edge of that thought. He tries to trace it out. It links back to a few other thoughts he's had about wanting to stay; and to what he thought just now, about not wanting Maitimo to be afraid. It's hard to pin down, but he keeps at it until it clicks.

Oh.

Taliar contemplates his newly revealed self-destructive urge to make up for his soul's demands on Maitimo by putting himself in a position where Maitimo can hurt him. That is not a perspective that has his best interests at heart, and it will now be summarily excluded from this internal conference.

His soul flares faintly, exalted by his resolve. He looks down at it. The golden spark is noticeably bigger, and also he's wearing it, when did that happen...?

"Before we tried touching again. You were very distracted; I wasn't sure if you were too distracted to even notice..."

"Oh."

Snuggle.

"Why...?"

"It was bothering you, not having it. I can ask for it later if I want."

He smiles. "Okay. I love you."

And back to the topic at hand.

So. If he's going to stay with Maitimo he's going to do it for good reasons, reasons he's willing to listen to even after they've been dragged into the light of day. How many of those does he have? Safety is definitely the default choice, here; staying is the one that needs to justify itself.

He loves Maitimo, would miss him, wants to be near him, wants to cuddle him and spend time with him. That's valid, but it's not enough by itself, not even close.

He wants to make Maitimo happy. Yes, a little bit because he feels guilty for the situation his soul is putting them in, but even with the self-destructive parts cut out, he still wants to give Maitimo nice things, and mostly because Maitimo is someone he loves and cares about. This wouldn't be enough by itself either, but they're starting to add up. Leaving all other considerations aside for the moment, he thinks that if it was always more like the most recent time than the previous two, he'd be genuinely willing to let Maitimo touch his soul once in a while, just for the sake of how much he seems to get out of it. And maybe a little because Taliar is starting to get something out of it too, but it's hard to tell, the experience is just - too big to think about.

...It occurs to him that if putting himself in danger from Maitimo is a choice he makes for his own personal reasons rather than something he's doing because it's obviously right, that introduces some complications to the simplicity of 'anything as long as it ends in the Enemy's defeat'. It might make it harder, or at least less automatic, to forgive him afterwards. This seems to set up some horrendous incentives regarding not giving Taliar choices about things, so he immediately resolves that he won't let it work that way.

He laughs. I don't have to have you for this to end with the Enemy dead, no. It would be - very easy to pretend I did, but - you are trying really hard not to make it better to toy with you -

It doesn't actually feel like I'm putting in a lot of effort in that direction, but I might very well be doing more than I'm noticing. I - want to be the sort of person that people benefit from dealing honestly with.

Squeeze. 

Snuggle.

I'm missing a factor and I don't know what it is.

There is a noticeable gap between the sum of his consciously listed reasons and what he feels like when he ignores the list and weighs his options intuitively. Whatever the missing list item is, it favours staying. He could be estimating the costs differently in different contexts and not noticing, in which case there is no missing list item and the decision probably balances out to 'go be safe', but... when he considers whether that's his final answer, it doesn't sit right. The decision still feels too close to call without further examination.

Making decisions for personal reasons is so much more difficult than just noticing what the right thing is and then doing that. He wonders, if he hadn't grown up around the concept of soulbearers, whether he'd have more trouble with the second kind. He's had a pretty good idea of what exalts his soul even before he brought it out to confirm his guesses, and the last time he can remember genuinely struggling with the temptation to make a soul-debasing choice, he was a small child who really wanted another small child's beloved toy and had calculated a flawless plan for stealing it without anyone noticing. He resisted in the end. That probably wasn't the literal last time he ever seriously considered doing something he'd disapprove of himself for, but it might have been the last time he had a really hard time stopping himself.