"I don't actually know how to reliably inform people that I have permission to do this.

"I guess when his wife arrives I could send letters through her."

Sigh. "Shouldn't - shouldn't be this hard - in our own palace - but yeah, maybe do that."

"I will.

"Do you want me to ask more questions?"

"Yes."

"I don't understand why you mocked me for being in pain."

"I was angry with you for having this problem. I need you to not have it, I need it very badly, and - a lot of bad things are happening because of that, it sort of feels like everything is impossible and doomed because of that.

I wasn't thinking of it as you being in pain. Were you still - once I'd stopped -"

"Yes.

"I dragged myself off the bed, bit myself to stop crying long enough to put on my dress, walked back to my room in pain, collapsed against my door in pain, and spent the night there."

"Oh."

"If someone else had done that to you I'd kill them."

"I see."

"If I say something that makes you angry, right now, are you going to send me away or retaliate?"

"Not for saying it. Conceivably for the contents, if they were 'and then I ran off' or something."

"Are you going to retaliate against me for giving you my experience of events that you were there to witness?"

Headshake.

"Do you want to hear it?"

Snort. "Do you want to say it?"

"Yes. If you're not going to make me immediately regret extending this amount of trust."

Headshake.

"I was trying very hard to give you the benefit of the doubt, the night you tried to heal me. I was trying very hard to trust you, to be affectionate, to be the thing you needed, in case you needed it very badly and it was the only way to help you. I don't know whether I succeeded at conveying any of this, but I was trying.

"Waves of Ecstasy was incredible but I didn't think that it had gotten me physically ready to have sex with you. I asked you to touch me first, to make sure I was actually prepared. I thought that this had annoyed you. I decided that I would try not to interrupt things and would explain my reasoning after. You tried to have sex with me. It hurt very very badly. I decided that I would try to endure it, this time, because I understood it to be very important, and I thought that the discussion after would go better if I hadn't asked you to stop partway through. You tried more things to heal me. They didn't work. I tried to be as quiet as possible so that you wouldn't get annoyed, even though I was in very serious pain. You hit me with Euphoric Tranquility. It worked. It also made it very hard to think, and impossible to even consider that I might need to be preparing for pain. It wore off. Everything hurt again and I hadn't prepared for it at all, so I yelled. But I managed not to ask you to stop.

"You stopped. I was still in a lot of pain. You ordered me out of your room. I tried to follow your orders, even though I was still in a lot of pain and it was very hard to think. Tried to find my clothes. Wasn't entirely sure whether I was supposed to be trying to find them, or whether leaving naked was part of the punishment.

"You - mocked me for being in pain, after I'd just tried very hard to trust you and to allow you to hurt me very badly, for the sake of making things less bad between us. I bit myself to be able to think. I put my dress on. I headed back to my room. Bit myself again in the hallway, to make it back without collapsing. Healed myself. Collapsed against the door. You didn't contact me for almost forty-eight hours.

"I decided that trusting you had been a tactical error."

"Oh."

"I would like to be able to believe that trusting you is not a tactical error, but it's getting harder with time."

"I - I knew that the thing that happened was really awful but I didn't think you were trying at all."

"Put me under a truth spell if you doubt it, I guess. I was trying very hard. I - understood you to be angry about me crying, but I think it was probably physically impossible for me not to, so I didn't really bother worrying about it during the failure analysis."