He goes. It takes effort but Dawn-shining Taliar does not run out of effort.

At least he doesn't feel sick today, so he can actually eat dinner properly. There seems to be a problem with his emotions, though. They aren't working.

He considers him for a while and then says, should I tell Findekáno so he can go 'I told you so'? 

I'd really rather you didn't, says Taliar, glancing up at him with a hint of a smile. Few things annoy me more than a premature 'I told you so'.

He is going to be fine. It's not a question, it's a certainty. He is not currently fine, but he's going to be.

You going to be more okay tonight?

More okay but not actually okay on an absolute scale. I was planning to take today to figure out what circumstances would help or hinder my recovery but then I slept later than I intended and only just got up in time for dinner.

You can figure that out tomorrow. Come over here.

Okay.

He goes over there. His emotions aren't working and that includes fear, which makes it much less unpleasant than last time, but it's still effortful for some reason. Maybe the sensation of fear and the underlying drive to avoid expected suffering aren't inextricable and he's got one going but not the other. It's sort of interesting, actually.

Fascinating, he murmurs, and kisses him.

It takes him a few seconds to figure out how to get himself to kiss back, but he manages it. It feels very strange, kissing Maitimo out of - habit rather than any kind of emotional drive. He's not sure he likes it. It seems aesthetically incorrect. Kissing Maitimo should be an emotional experience of some kind. It's been sweet, cozy, ecstatic, desperate, beautiful, terrifying, transcendent, miserable... it's never been neutral before.

I could make it scary, if you like.

I'm not actually sure you could, Taliar observes. Something is seriously wrong with my ability to process emotion right now and I don't know if it'll wake up for death threats.

Sigh. 

He doesn't kiss him again. He does pick him up and carry him off to bed but he doesn't kiss him again.

Taliar catches himself about to say 'I love you' out of habit and manages a tiny spark of some kind of actual feeling, something in the genre of determination and certainty. He is not ever going to say those words unaccompanied by the associated emotion. It would be an insult to both of them and he won't do it.

You're beautiful and I don't regret choosing you and I am going to love you forever, he says instead.

Is that so? I'm still going to fuck you, I just won't make it affectionate if that's not going to help.

Taliar smiles slightly and shakes his head. And? You're still beautiful, I still don't regret choosing you, I am still going to love you forever.

Good.

He closes his eyes.

He does not insist he open them.

At some point, he feels an emotion. It's vague distant sadness. This seems appropriate to the situation.

It's more interesting than 'nothing', at least. 

He doesn't kiss him. He doesn't feel like sleeping; he leaves and goes back to work.

Taliar manages to get to sleep this time.

He wakes up in the morning and checks on his soul and finds that it hasn't completely stagnated; it's experiencing a slow but steady gain that can probably be attributed to his exercising the virtue of taking a break when you really need one. That's good news. It would feel like cheating, and not the good kind of cheating, if it turned out that Maitimo had to leave him alone for a while for strategic reasons. Taliar let himself get broken like this on purpose because Maitimo asked him to, he knew exactly what he was getting into, it would be unfair if anything other than Maitimo interfered in how Maitimo chooses to treat him while he puts himself back together.

Okay. What are his priorities, here? What's his path to recovery? What does he need and how can he get it?

In theory, he could ask Maitimo to give him a week off, a week of the right to refuse. That would almost certainly work. It might not be enough time to get all the way back to normal, but it'd be at least enough time to find his balance. But Maitimo is really unlikely to do that, so Taliar is probably going to have to find a different solution.

On that assumption, then, the first thing he needs to do is figure out a way to start enjoying sex again rather than effortfully enduring or apathetically tolerating it. That has to come first, because until he manages it, every night that goes by is going to set back his progress on everything else. He needs to reclaim his love and trust for Maitimo, and it's really difficult to trust someone when you know for certain they are going to violate that trust, and he can't affect whether or not Maitimo is going to fuck him but he can affect how he feels about it.

In a way it's sort of fascinating just how big a piece he ripped out of the foundations of his emotional stability with the simple act of checking whether he would have said no if he could. It changes everything. It's not that he was previously operating under the illusion that if he said no, Maitimo would honour that - he definitely did not believe that at any point - but by denying himself the option, he kept them both on the same side, he made everything that happened into something he was actively supporting. Not an illusion of consent, but a reality of cooperation. Take that away, and he couldn't coast on the simplicity of 'given the facts of the situation, how do we help each other' anymore, he had to force himself into compliance because free cooperation was no longer available.

It's like the exact polar opposite of the thing that makes recovering from his bad days so easy - asking for a bad day gives him a choice to hold onto, a stable foundation of 'I asked for this, I wanted this' where he can build a way to be okay in the face of incredible suffering, and admitting his hypothetical refusal does the reverse.

But that doesn't mean he can't be okay after this. It just means he can't skip directly to the final stages of recovery in a matter of minutes or hours. He's going to have to actually work for it. He will get there, though, he is utterly certain of that. And the first step is to start wanting Maitimo again.

...he's going to have to figure out how to bring back his emotions, isn't he.

Yeah, there's no way around that, and it's probably going to be pretty awful. But lying around in vague abstract dread of it won't make it feel any better when he does get there, it'll just waste his time. So.

His emotions stopped working right after an intensely upsetting experience. It seems logical to conclude that he is in some sense avoiding his own reaction to that experience, and that maybe if he makes himself feel it anyway, the rest of his emotions will also come back. It might not be the only way, and it's probably one of the least pleasant ones if there are any others, but it's the clearest path he can think of and he has a lot of trust in his own tolerance for unpleasant things lately.

With that in mind, he curls up under a blanket and makes himself remember. He has a very good memory, and he reconstructs every detail of that night as vividly as possible, from the intense effort of checking his hypothetical consent to the time he spent snuggled in Maitimo's arms feeling safe and okay to the moment when Maitimo kissed him and all safety vanished from his universe, right on through every kiss, every touch, through the determination and misery of giving Maitimo his soul, until he reaches the numb sleeplessness that came afterward—

Now he is crying hysterically. This is exactly the result he was looking for and he feels an appropriate level of pride and satisfaction but he doesn't stop crying hysterically. He fills the room with his healing aura to make the crying not hurt so much and so that he won't have to worry about drinking a lot of water afterward, and he lets himself cry, lets himself inhabit the intensity of the moment, it's okay, it's okay to be hurt, hysterical crying is a fully reasonable reaction to the situation he finds himself in, he needs and values his emotions even though right now his emotions are mostly pain. This pain is a part of him, and he can embrace it, welcome it, if that's what it takes to regain his ability to feel anything at all.

He listens. 

He closes his eyes in delight at a few pieces - Taliar would be upset with the cheating if he had a simple way out of this, isn't that fascinating -

- he listens and is utterly absorbed -

Taliar cries for a while. A long while. (It's about half an hour but he's in no position to count the time.)

Eventually he gets to the point where he can breathe without his throat aching, where he can think about something other than pain and self-acceptance. He rubs his face with both hands. He takes a deep steadying breath, and another.

He reaches for love.

He finds it.

And that, that hurts. He half-sobs half-screams into his shaking hands. He can't even tell exactly why it's so painful, the feeling is too big and too tangled to pick apart, he just knows that he loves Maitimo so, so much and it feels absolutely awful and he doesn't think he can stand it, he's afraid, he misses not being able to feel things -

No. He is not going back to that. He cries and cries and cries but he refuses to let himself run away from the feeling. This pain, too, is a part of him.

It takes him closer to an hour to cry this one out. He dries his face again and hugs himself and gives his healing aura a few seconds to clear away the pain in his throat, and then he asks himself what exactly hurts so much.

Some parts of the tangle are more obvious than others. Of course he is upset that Maitimo hurt him like this. He's not surprised, but he is upset. Being in love with someone who raped him is upsetting. It's a little more surprising to find out that he's upset about how - distant Maitimo has been with him since then. In retrospect he almost gets an impression of contempt, or dismissal, or disappointment - it feels like Maitimo expected him to power through this like he did with his bad days and is annoyed with him for taking so long, or like Maitimo doesn't even believe he's going to get better at all and is annoyed with him for failing in his commitment.

Well. If that's so, the correct response is not to resent Maitimo for his opinions. The correct response is to get his fucking head back together. Which he will fucking do.

He holds onto the feeling of love a little longer, trying to get used to the pain. It almost works. Almost.

And then he proceeds to the next step. He needs to want Maitimo again. He doesn't think the rest of today will be enough time to get himself all the way to the point of sex not being horrifying, but he has previously demonstrated the ability to be into some pretty horrifying sex, so it's time to aggressively cultivate that perspective. He dives back into his memories, remembers all the times he was afraid and loved it - remembers hearing Maitimo's thoughts that first time, remembers the end of his first bad day and the start of his second, remembers afterward, remembers asking Maitimo to scare him...

Well, now he is conflictedly aroused, that's a start.

Taliar?

A flash of fear - in a sense that's good, it means his emotions are definitely still working -

Yes?