He's dead. He's gone.

Yeah, he says, and then more firmly, Yeah. He turns toward Maitimo and snuggles up, feeling small and warm and cozy and protected. Love you forever. I may not have a great day today, I usually don't after one of those, but I'll try not to let it drag me down too much.

Mood songs help or hurt?

He gives this question fair consideration, and concludes: Couldn't agree to one right now, I don't think. Too rattled.

Squeeze. Okay. Good skill.

Thanks.

He snuggles up and basks in the coziness a little while longer, letting it wear away at the lingering fragments of fear until they're much smaller than they started out. Then he gets up and gets dressed and goes to start his day. It's a pretty reasonable day, all things considered - engineering-heavy, but within normal variance. Focusing on technical work lets him both improve his quiet, withdrawn mood and cover for it.

By dinnertime he is almost but not quite back to normal. Still a little distracted, a little distant, tending to startle at inconsequential things and freeze for a moment before getting himself back on track.

"That bad, huh? Someone might be able to find you a ring for untroubled sleep, they even do something for people released from Angband."

"That sounds useful. It's - it was worse than this for the first couple of weeks after the war, and then I got used to it and you almost couldn't tell on any given day what I'd dreamed the previous night, and then they tapered off and I started having more trouble again because when they came they took me by surprise... at least this wasn't a Nahira dream, they're invariably worse."

Squeeze. "I'll ask about rings. Maybe after the war your soul'll manifest something for Angband survivors, that's a hard problem."

Snuggle. "Well, my soul and I have never been the type to turn down a challenge."

(He's still a little unsettled, still a little inclined to jump at shadows, but being cuddled in Maitimo's lap is pretty decently restorative. He'll probably be fine tomorrow morning, unless he has another one.)

And he hums something nonmagical for half an hour or so, petting Taliar's hair absently, then picks him up and carries him off to bed - "It occurs to me that in hindsight I could have saved you a fair bit of trouble just by making it less obvious I had you every night, sorry about that..."

"Apology accepted. Love you forever."

And he still wouldn't give up a second with Maitimo for the sake of that nonsense. And now he once again feels motivated to have the world's healthiest relationship out of spite. He grins, and leans on his beautiful brilliant boyfriend, and he's... almost okay...

And his boyfriend kisses his hair and says "is being motivated by spite exalting, because it's adorable," and pulls his shirt off.

"...I actually think it might be," he says, contemplating his own emotional state, "it's a close cousin of the feeling from my infamous try-me moments, might be near enough to count. Well, that's hilarious." And it is always so good when Maitimo calls him adorable. Eee.

And he'd been mildly worried Taliar was going to be difficult tonight. 

"So adorable," he says, and kisses him some more, "and so very very mine."

He giggles and kisses back. The dream is still affecting him a little, but it's easy to distract himself, he has his beautiful brilliant boyfriend right there kissing him and it's amazing. Hardly any work at all, to focus on love when he has so much of it.

And eventually - if I sing something nice will it help with the dreams?

He feels a lot better now - Maitimo is so good for him - but still not quite in the right frame of mind for mind-control songs; plain old enchantingly beautiful singing might or might not help with the dreams but it'll give him lovely happy affectionate admiring feelings while he goes to sleep and he thinks it is plausible this could be an effective intervention against nightmares. Also: Love you forever.

Plain old enchantingly beautiful singing it is, then. Love you. Good night.

It is lovely and he feels happy and safe and deeply in love.

He sleeps well and has good dreams and is fine in the morning and actively grateful to Maitimo for being so helpful, that day went way better than it might have without him.

His pleasure. Taliar is making everything so easy, it's great. 

Well, Taliar loves him, and will love him forever. It only makes sense.

He has a few uneventful days before his next nightmare arrives.

There's nothing out of the ordinary to cause it, the night before; it's a perfectly lovely normal evening. They have dinner, talk about what they've been doing all day, Taliar admires the touch of gold beginning to colour the mist inside his soul and then on a whim he hands it to Maitimo and drowns in a storm of perfect love - they've done this enough times now that it's becoming obvious that except in case of mind control, soul-touching is never exactly the same twice, and this particular time it's a giddy sparkly bubbly feeling and when he comes out of it he wants to get high on trust songs and have fantastic sex, and this can certainly be arranged. There are approximately two moods to Taliar on trust songs, affected by his energy level going in; one of them is dreamy and cozy and doesn't want to move around much but is very adoringly obliging about it, and one of them is energetic and excitable and virtually incapable of keeping his hands off Maitimo, and this is one of the latter times.

After that he goes to sleep, and has a few perfectly normal lovely dreams, and then—

It's late at night and the corridor is dimly lit and his memories of the day are fuzzy but weighed down by a heavy sense of despair. He trudges toward his room, and he hopes Seofar was joking about having a girl waiting for him because that would be somewhere between embarrassing and sickening depending on the exact status of the girl, and with his eyes on the stone floor he sees an unexpected shadow, and he looks up.

She has the most exquisitely beautiful eyes. They're the first thing he sees, huge brown eyes, perfect in every detail. The rest of her face comes into focus a moment later, smiling at him; the smile is deeply unnerving in a way he can't quite pinpoint. Then he sees the soul hanging around her neck, and he freezes in his tracks. It's even worse than Seofar's. The first thing it wants him to know about her is that she fundamentally sees people as prey.

"Den-aminde Rysher Nahira," she introduces herself - the soulname means 'long shadow'. "And you must be dear young Kazaryne Taliar. I've heard so much about you."

The way she says his name, bare of titles, is deeply uncomfortable. The way she looks at him is much more so. Her soul tells him that she is tenacious and cruel and intelligent and he wants to close his eyes so it will stop telling him these things but he doesn't dare let her out of his sight for a second. Not that he could do anything about it if she decided to hurt him. He can't think of any possible scenario in which she has not already decided to hurt him. There is nowhere to run, and even if he could somehow call for help, he's sure none would come, not in this castle.

He finds himself unable to move or speak. She takes a step closer, and he so badly wants to run away, but he can't. He can only look her in the eye while she leans down and whispers, "I knew your mother, when we were younger, before she met that relic Corino. What I wouldn't give to get my hands on him. But you'll have to do, won't you, my dear?"

And then she leans down farther, and kisses him on the forehead, and he wakes up shaking and crying and wanting to claw his skin off.

"NIghtmare," he says automatically - "should I wake you up in the middle of them -"

It takes him a couple of seconds to process the sound into words, another couple of seconds to reorient himself from dream into reality, and then he curls up and huddles close to Maitimo and tries very hard to calm down. He's not quite up to thinking coherently enough to answer the question. He's going to bruise his own ribs hugging himself this tightly.

"Your emperor couldn't wait until you were twenty or something to throw this at you, huh."