"I'm trying to not do that. I know you - know yourself to be in principle capable of liking it, I'm just not at all sure it'd be wise of me to indulge -"

"...more than just 'in principle', I think, but - if there's lines you don't want to cross because you're not comfortable going there, I can arrange not to be disappointed..."

And that's not a commitment a Taliar makes lightly, with something that he feels challenged over the way he feels challenged over enduring torture. But it's important to Maitimo, so it's important to him.

...he does kind of need a better idea of what to avoid being disappointed by, though.

"See, if I weren't trying to stop leaning on - hurting people until they were in a configuration convenient for me - then I'd just torture you into being grateful for precisely and only what I was interested in giving you. But -"

...his soul shines blue, with a hint of silver. It seems, on the face of it, really unlikely for torture to succeed in achieving that goal.

But it also seems really counterproductive to start arguing over whether it'd work, so he just says, "I think I can manage to avoid being disappointed by you not doing that."

(And falls a little more in love, that too.)

He laughs. "It wouldn't even be hard. But I want - I want to undo it, as much as I can, and -"

Taliar hugs him. "I love you," he says.

"I - I think it would probably help if I stopped being so extreme about trying not to second-guess you - because as this morning demonstrates, you are capable of hurting me by accident, and I think I would've had an easier time of it if I'd let myself notice how... misaimed that comment about me being high-maintenance was."

"I agree that - given how aggressively you steer yourself - steering as if I definitely must have intended whatever wall you crash into is a terrible idea."

He smiles wryly. "Yeah."

...'wouldn't even be hard', really—okay. He is curious. And he can live with not finding out, but he is still curious what the angle is that makes that seem easy.

Pat pat. "I'm good at it and you're already very malleable."

"Yes you are, and yes I am." Snuggle. "But - the space between 'torture is redundant next to asking nicely' and 'asking nicely can't do it, so torture probably can't either' is really narrow? I suppose torture is also more fun than asking nicely, and there's always combining the two... anyway. You're not going to do it, so there's not a whole lot of point in speculating."

...and he's still left without a clear picture of what to do to avoid tempting Maitimo to really hurt him.

"Me too. Sorry. I'll let you know if I figure it out."

"Okay," he says, leaning comfortably on him. "Love you."

It's sort of fun watching the little shifts in the background of his thoughts as the changes settle in. He's a little hesitant about pushing some of them, and there's some he's not sure how to implement at all - 'refusing me occasionally when you don't expect me to back down', okay, but how does he decide when to do that because if he waits until he doesn't want to give Maitimo something Maitimo wants he is going to be waiting a while... and at first glance it sounds sort of - well. In the genre of things that Taliar suspects he should be arranging not to be disappointed by the lack of.

"What happens if you just do - less arranging? If something isn't working, that's one thing, but all this paving over in anticipation does not seem - the best possible way -"

"Yes, I could be doing less of that, but - how much of that thought came through, it's sort of hard to tell—"

"The thought about things you should be arranging not to be disappointed by?"

"Yeah."

"Go ahead and expand."

"...It seems pretty straightforward that if you don't want to really hurt me I should stop - being prepared for you to really hurt me," he says. "Especially since it costs something to stay this way. If it was something you wanted, I'd be fine with giving it to you, but if it's not..."

"Yes, please don't stay in mental states that impose ongoing costs to you so that you'll be less affected by what I do, that definitely does not sound like something I want."

Snuggle. "Okay."

...it's surprisingly hard to take it apart. He tries to figure out why that is. It's not about not trusting Maitimo, exactly, but... okay, what exactly is the trouble here?

Well, when he looks at it up close... say what you mean, Taliar: the thing he's trying to do is stop being prepared for Maitimo to rape him, and another way of putting that is 'start expecting that he can say no to sex', and - he feels like he has not been given sufficiently explicit permission for that. Which is maybe silly of him, but it's what he has to work with.

"I'm really not seeing that even coming up, and you have a teleport -"

"I'm not seeing it coming up either unless you were specifically trying for that outcome, which seems unlikely to say the least, but - it's sort of the principle of the thing - the fact that I have a teleport is wholly irrelevant, if it did come up I wouldn't leave unless I thought me leaving was what you wanted."

"I - what does consent mean to you if not that you can leave even if I want you to stay -"

"It means, well, the difference between—"

His own memory: Maitimo having him after the song experiments, when he couldn't move, helpless in such a delightful way -

Dawn-shining's memory: nothing in his head but pain, exerting enormous willpower to make himself comply, because he did not own the right to say no but he would have if he could and he knew that and it hurt him so very badly but no amount of pain is enough to make a Taliar back out of a commitment.

"So...you feel like you've committed to do whatever I want, and therefore won't say no unless I want you to say no, and - I didn't ask you to commit to do whatever I wanted!"