"Love you so much," she say, easily, and she can try to kiss and touch him but honestly doing things is kind of hard?? She will do her best even though it is confusing.

"Tell me - that you're mine, and you want to be mine, and you're happy -"

"M'very happy," she says, automatically, and then has to think and remember the other part. She is not sure she understands the other part? And she only maybe remembers how to make the words go around the other way? But he said to say it!

"M'yours. And I'm very happy. I'm happy that I'm yours."

"Mmm," he says appreciatively, and tries not to worry about how long the spell has left, if they can make this work then they can be okay -

Everything is good! Kind of confusing but that's okay.

- and then it's not.

It's kind of like waking up from a nice dream and discovering yourself in the middle of being tortured, if that were even a thing that could happen to people. The pain - the whole situation, really - hits her like a truck. She sobs before she can stop herself, then clenches her jaw shut and wracks her brain for anything to think about, anything that isn't what's happening, anything that isn't herself or him or this.

Sacred watch goes off.

 - he stops. 

"Heal -"

She lies there trembling, with her eyes tightly shut. She tries to get a hold on her breathing. You have to breathe to do anything else. Hurts less badly than it did before, maybe, he stopped right away this time - maybe it'll go back down if she can manage to get her thoughts working -

Last time she said it hurt her very badly, that he misinterpreted her pain as disobedience. He shouldn't do that. She isn't stopping him, she's doing her job, he decided to stop because he didn't want to hurt her, he has nothing to be angry with her about. He lies next to her and pats her clumsily. If she's healed he can't do anything else.

She doesn't really wanna be touched. She can't say that. Can't say things. She'd have to be able to breathe right to say things, and think right to say things, and as long as she doesn't do anything bad then he won't get angry with her, probably, he said he wouldn't. 

Her breathing gets a little more even. She tries to think of something to say and ends up producing a bunch of tears instead of words. She shouldn't cry, she's been trying not to cry, that's not good, that's not right - why does her brain even care, it was only a couple seconds - 

She can't stop crying, but she does keep getting marginally better at breathing. She doesn't really do anything else.

"I appreciate you trying," he says eventually.

Nodnod. 

She should probably say something back to that but she can't remember what.

"Thank you," she says, quietly, after a kind of weird amount of pause.

"I know it's hard. But I love you and I'm not gonna - misunderstand your trying -"

Nodnod.

She's still crying. She presses hand to her mouth. It's not really necessary, she's crying pretty silently.

Well. There's not really more he can do here. He lies there and holds her and waits for her to do something or say something or - something.

This is not really an ideal algorithm because she's still kind of waiting for him to do something that she can respond to. 

She gradually gets a little calmer. She wipes her eyes. She's feeling pretty bad about touch, but she snuggles a little closer to him anyway, in case that helps. He won't be upset about it.

"Do you ...need anything?"

"I dunno."

"Is this - fixing the thing you said you needed last time -"

"I dunno.

"It's - better?"

"Well, that's good. I - we can figure it out eventually, but not if we're making things worse with every attempt."

- she cries a little harder. She goes back to trying to quiet herself. She can't quite manage it at first.

" - hmmm?"

It's hard, trying to get her words back, knowing she's crying and she shouldn't be. Or maybe she should be, maybe he wants to know things. She doesn't know anymore. 

"I dunno how to - how you tell if a thing makes it worse, for sure - "

"That makes sense." Hug. "I've been figuring, if we try, and something goes a little better than last time, then that means we're headed in the right direction, like, this didn't work, but it was less of a disaster than last time, so, right direction, we will just keep trying and eventually we'll figure it out."