Snuggle. I hope it helps.

And he writes Boots to set up a time.

She's got lots to do but it's all pretty shuffleable and with Olórin on hand for mana purposes she can skip sleeps with that one song, so she's available at his next convenience.

"Hi. Thank you for the crystal ball setup, it's marvelously convenient."

"You're welcome!"

"What do you need from me?"

"Do you want anybody sitting with you while we work? And have a place in mind?"

Here is a place. He has a husband and a boyfriend but they're both busy people, if his emotional stability isn't necessary for this to work he probably won't bother them.

"It's... not necessary, per se, but it's good to have for other reasons. I don't think Kib at least would mind being called over."

"Neither of them will mind. I am - not great at needing people." 

But he calls Kib.

Who comes promptly.

"How much do you want him looped in to the actual goings-on and how much do you just want him present?" Boots inquires.

"He can definitely be looped into goings-on - he knows, I think, better than anyone anyway -"

"Okay. If there's anything you'd like to keep more private than that let me know. What are you hoping to accomplish today?"

"I don't know what's realistic to accomplish today. End goal would be for existence to be moment-to-moment - 'pleasant' is probably aiming too high, maybe 'neutral'?"

"Can you tell me more about what's currently making it unpleasant?"

"Can I send it, might be easier than describing -"

"Yes, that's fine."

Everything has horrible associations he's beaten down into tiny grooves in his consciousness, everything is a flashback he overrides, everything is moving in the corner of his eye and if it doesn't trigger panic anymore it still leaves an unpleasant lurch. When it's dark or quiet his imagination does the work. He mostly doesn't feel things, except the aggressively suppressed terror, except pain, except the gaping sense of what he would have felt, here, which is detailed enough to let him pretend but not very much fun to experience. Acting and responding and interacting with people is happening through several vague levels of filtering, like watching himself watch a movie of his life. It's desperately lonely but trying to strip away the filters is terrifying.

And he wants to die, very badly, all the time.

"This is going to be complicated," she murmurs.

(Kib takes a very deep breath, lets it out.)

"There's a few - separate pieces - none of them are necessarily intractable individually but it may be very important to address them in the right order - I can disrupt associations, and imagination spirals, and anhedonia, and the rest of the emotion gap, and if I did that all exactly right you might be able to take down the filters on your own without further artistic intervention..."

"But doing that all exactly right is hard and could go wrong?"

"Yes. I could probably fix any given thing that might go wrong, and unlike when I practiced in Valinor I can actually call in help if something I can't fix comes up - I'll need advance consent to bring in another artist in such a case, incidentally - but it'd be a setback."

"That seems like an acceptable risk. And yes, you can bring someone else trustworthy in if something goes wrong - is the idea that it might go wrong enough I couldn't give consent under the circumstances -"