"I guess that makes sense. But you've got to give yourself credit for wins, somehow, or you never feel good even when you do everything right and it works."

"I don't know how to feel good about things."

"Do you like...massages? Desserts?"

"I don't know."

"Well, want to try?"

"We could probably try."

Then she will try to give Korva a massage! She has hot towels and scented candles and lotions and a lot of practice. 

She's incredibly tense just about everywhere.

She's not sure whether she likes the experience, exactly, but it's only a little bit painful and her muscles are a little less horrifically knotted, after, and she feels like that's probably objectively positive?

"Well, I'll take it for now." She gives Korva a hug.

She can be hugged. Hugs are okay.

Hagan leaves her alone for a couple of weeks to see if that helps. He suspects it won't but maybe she just needs space or something.

She eats, and sleeps, and reads a little. She has a nightmare that Hagan has taken all of her clothes away and required her to walk around naked, and she wakes up sick and humiliated and entirely too afraid that it might be some kind of premonition of something real. A month ago she wouldn't have been afraid. A month ago she would have accepted it. A month ago pain and humiliation were too distant to matter.

She wishes she could go back to wanting fewer things. She could, probably, if she could get over the fact that this would be going against her husband's stated wishes. (She doesn't actually remember whether he gave her an order about this.) She considers asking for express permission to try to go back to being numb, but it breaks too many rules, and is too obviously a move that leaves her more vulnerable than she was before. She cries a lot, trying to reconcile the responsibility to want things with the responsibility not to hurt and the responsibility to be an acceptable wife.

Eventually she decides that it seems possible that if she wants to be numb, and knows that numbness won't hurt as much, and knows that she'll be more capable of holding conversations and not breaking rules when she's numb, then maybe numbness is the available state that satisfies the most of her orders. It is not a perfectly obedient state, but it's at least as obedient as what she's doing now. Maybe she can move to something else when she's better at thinking.

She spends a lot of time thinking about various horrible things that could happen to her, and accepting them. She cares less about things. Her mind quiets a little bit. It is possible that her husband will be very angry with her, but if he is she will accept that, too.

"Are you excited about the baby?"

"Not especially."

"I think it might be better for you if you were excited about the baby. It's - something to focus on that's not him."

"I could... plan for the baby. I don't think - it doesn't seem very useful to feel things about it."

"I dunno, I think it is specifically useful to feel things about it. Or really to feel things about anything at all other than the pharaoh. I think you should spend much less time thinking about the pharaoh."

"I am trying not to feel anything about him either."

"If it were me I'd be trying to feel mad at him, but not, like, often, just once a day or so when I need to think about it?"

"That doesn't seem useful either."

"The thing you want to do is steer things enough he'll listen to you about taking off the helmet in, like, twenty years, right?"

"...yeah, I guess so."

"And the...default way that things will go here...is that you will never be able to get an audience with him in twenty years."

"Oh."

"But the kid will."