.....nod.

"It's been less than two weeks. It's okay that we're not good at stuff yet."

Nodnod. Words are still hard.

Well that's about all the comforting he has in him but he tried. 

She's still really tired and sad and kind of confused, but she's a little less scared, and a little less against touch, and - honestly she doesn't know that snuggles are actually making her feel better and not worse, right now? But they make her feel less like she's going to keep irretrievably messing everything up, so maybe there can be more snuggles?

There can be more snuggles. 

"My wonderful wife?" he whispers, very tentatively, quiet enough that she could maybe just pretend she didn't hear him if that too is now on the list of bad things he's not supposed to say.

- it's so important, still, that he thinks so. She doesn't have any words, doesn't know how to tell him, doesn't know how to do very much besides silently cry tears that don't know what emotions they represent.

She kisses his cheek and snuggles a little closer. She can do that. Maybe that'll be enough.

Eventually he will sleep them both.

She has odd restless dreams about Hell. She's trapped there, wandering through various torture chambers running errands, being told matter-of-factly that it'll be her turn soon. Hagan is there, the good version of him again. At least she thinks it's the good version, from how he acts, and how concerned he is, and how she doesn't feel scared of him at all. Asmodeus doesn't see everything, in this dream, and so sometimes, when he isn't looking, she and Hagan can slip away, closer to the exits, wherever those are. As long as Asmodeus doesn't see them moving, he can't tell that that's where they're headed.

At some point they have sex. She doesn't really want to, which is weird, for dreams, and maybe for reality, too, because it isn't even the kind of sex that hurts, and it's Hagan, and she's spent all this time in Hell wanting to be with him again. But in the dream she doesn't want it, and it happens anyway, and before she can say anything about this, they have to run away again. It's not such a big deal, she decides, in the dream. She can explain later, when they have more time.

She'll wake up long after him, if he's still wearing the ring, even if she doesn't get enough sleep herself.

He is awake. Playing with Fy, fiddling with the helmet. He smiles at her. 

She smiles back, a little. Doesn't feel anything to go with it, she's back to feeling just about completely empty, but it seems like the thing to do.

"I have a lot of work today. See you this evening? Maybe get Verita for dinner, too?"

"Yeah. That sounds good."

- the whole idea here was that she didn't like it when he dismissed her, so he was going to try gently making plans for later instead, but not dismissing her only works if she takes hints. "Dismissed," he says irritably after a moment.

"Okay."

She realizes she'd been hoping he would leave first, that she wouldn't have to get up yet - she's still so tired - but she gets to her feet and pulls her clothes around her and pushes the door open and walks down the hallway back to her room, ignoring the distant protests of her mind and muscles like a warlord ignoring the screams of women and children in a village he's burning down. She shouldn't have expected anything. He probably wouldn't have been angry with her if she'd paid closer attention to what he wanted and only done that.

She looks around her room to see if Zakiya is in yet.

Not yet.

She sits on the corner of her bed. She stands up again. She paces.

She has her answer, she thinks; she knows the way to do what he wants. She doesn't like it, but she knows it, and the whole idea of this experiment was to - do everything he needed, be everything he needed, give him everything she had, and see if 'everything' was enough. She just hadn't anticipated the scope of 'everything' until she'd thought about it more.

Hagan needs her to have sex with him. But he needs more than that; he needs her to not despise having sex with him. He needs to believe that he isn't wronging her by having it, and needs to believe that she doesn't think so, either. And he needs her to - not manipulate him, not go on trying to influence him, not have visible needs that move him as the moon moves the tides. He needs to believe that he is meeting his obligations, the obligations which he claims were so good for him, but without - ever failing, without the thing he tries to nurture wilting in his hands, no matter how incompetently or incompletely he cares for it.

The problem is that people with unmet needs are inherently manipulative; most of their actions will be influenced, on some level, by the desire to see them met. If they can't meet them on their own, this will come out in their interactions with the people who might be able to help them. Avoiding this is impossible, as even Hagan understands - at some point, the tears will come, no matter how hard you try to keep your body from signaling how much pain you're in. He just wants her to try as hard as she can to repress those signs, forever, at all times, unless she's already past breaking. He wants her to try very hard to look like something that isn't being hurt. He wants to be able to believe that she isn't being hurt, that nothing awful is happening to her no matter what he does.

The obvious solution, however little she likes it, is to have as few unmet needs as possible. Stop having wants, stop having desires, stop having preferences, stop maintaining the pieces of herself that feel entitled to more than what she has. Stop caring about what happens to her. Stop caring about whether she has to be in pain. Then she'll be someone who can interact with Hagan without being very hurt by it, or at least without being any more hurt by it than she would be hurt by ordinary rape. It won't sting, not if she's no longer hoping for him to remember how to be the person who told her that she should want things from him without any very good reason.

Then she can have sex with him. Then he can be angry or rude to her or violent or uncaring, and it won't matter. Sex with him won't be connected to her desires, because she won't have any. She won't rise up in defense of herself if she doesn't have any independent interests to defend. She'll rip out everything, everything except her duty to her husband, and run everything off of that, and - it won't be pleasant, or nice, or safe, or good, but - it may be the thing he needs. It may be enough to accomplish what he needs to accomplish. And then, maybe, if he recovers enough, if he notices what's happened to her and is moved, through his own love for her - if he still has any - to help her, then maybe she will be allowed to have a preference.

She cries for a while, at that thought. She decides that she'll have to let go of the hope of recovering her desires, too, or else it'll poison the whole project. She has to be content with things going on like this forever. She has to be content with never recovering, with dying a person who can't want things, with standing at Pharasma's court and shrugging as she gets back the pronouncement that she's being condemned to Hell.

It is a very great price to pay, to be willing to suffer that much. But it will hold up her end of the bargain. It will avoid a civil war. It will create an heir. And then, when the heir is ready, he will still have enough loyalty to her to give up the helmet. He told her that she was entitled to that. It is the only thing she can remember him saying that she's entitled to, the only thing that she is still entitled to even if he disagrees with her. If she can give him enough that he feels that she held up her end of the bargain, then he'll hold up his. She thinks she can tie the desire for that to her duty to him, even if she lets the others go. It isn't about having him, after all. She will never have him again. When he returns to her she'll be a wretched, crippled being, lacking any of the elements he chose her for. He will not be capable of loving her. But he will take the helmet off, if she asks, and that will keep him out of Hell, and he will have eternity, even if she has nothing. 

He will be safe.

She thinks she knows, intuitively, how to cut her sense of self up and sew it back together such that the new state of mind will become her natural resting place, something that doesn't take any active effort to maintain. She will need to write a story. She'll need to write it now, while she can hold the words and the feelings and the magic in her mind, while she can see the whole thing clearly, from start to finish. 

She takes out a piece of paper, and in the quiet of the very early morning, sleep deprived and still exhausted from the night before, she writes away her sense of self.

When the story is done, the magic of it all tied up and spent, she blows the ink dry and folds it up. She hides the story inside her book of Osirian history, and puts the book in the drawer of her nightstand.

She writes a letter to Fazil, asking if he thinks it'll be possible for Verita to eventually spend some time staying with him and his wife. She knows they're not related, and maybe the sex-segregation rules apply, but she's worried about Verita ending up without anything resembling a parent in her life. She's worried she may not be able to meet both the needs of Verita and the needs of her husband. She'd hoped she would get better at it, but it seems just as possible that she's instead getting worse at it, and in that case she desperately needs someone to step in and ensure that Verita has anything resembling a trustworthy adult authority in her life. She understands that this is a lot to ask and stuff, and also understands that it's kind of shitty for her to need help with this, but for Verita's sake she is going to ask for it anyway.

She leaves the letter to dry.

That's her only other obligation, really, the only other desire she's not willing to give up for Hagan. Once she sorts something out, the transformation will be safe; there'll be nothing inside herself to pull her back. 

She goes back to sleep.

When she next wakes up Zakiya is there.

She takes quite a while to say anything. She doesn't know how long. Time is hard.

"We should have new clothes made," she says, eventually. "Ones that aren't mourning."

"Yeah, that's a good idea. How do you want them?"

"I dunno. Covering. Comfortable. Easy to put on and take off."

"Favorite colors? Yours, his, whatever -"

She doesn't know if she has a favorite color. If Hagan has one she can't call it to mind.

"You could do combinations. Blue and green. Or blue and white. - anything that looks good together, I don't especially know anything about clothes."

"Sure, I'll tell them to do whatever looks good on you."

"Thank you. And - someone should bring Verita dinner tonight."