"What a weird thought." She sips her wine. "Anyway, I'm trying to think of when we can schedule that trip out. I think we want a whole day or at least an afternoon, for travel, and I'm busy tomorrow. Maybe three days from now?" 

"Let me see . . ." He writes down assignments as he gets them but the list is in his room. :Yfandes, do I have anything scheduled in the afternoon three days from now? And do you want to come watch me and Savil do experiments with weather-barriers?:

:I think you have a Healing lesson but you could move it to the day before, you don't have anything that day except Mindspeech relay: 

"I'll need to ask Shavri if I can move our lesson to the day after tomorrow but if she can then that works."

"Excellent! I'm excited to try this out."

Her smile dims. "...How is, er, everything else going, with being back in Haven? I for one still keep walking into things that are upsetting." 

Time to stare at his shoes. "It's not just you. I keep--I'll have a thought and then realize it's an hour later I haven't moved. It's not as bad when I'm working because there's something to snap me out of it." But it still takes him twice as long to do things as it ought to, and he's only getting away with it because his schedule is so light and other people are so willing to cover for him when he misses something entirely.

"I'm sorry, ke'chara. I know it's really hard." Savil's voice sounds a little bit as though she's relaying a script (possibly given to her by Kellan), but she's looking right at him and her eyes are gentle. She reaches to grip his hand. "I'm not going anywhere, all right?" 

"I know." He squeezes her hand and drags his eyes up to meet hers. "And--I'm not either. If I can help I want to. But I don't know if I can."

"Hey, look at me. Just seeing your face around every day is helping." 

He tries to smile and also to not cry. "Seeing you helps too." And it does, for all that her rooms and she herself are familiar reminders of before. Because she's a reminder of k'Treva, too, and because he's not alone in grieving.

She hugs him. 

"...All right, you, better get to bed." 

He yawns, and nods sheepishly, and goes off to bed, and misses the Mindspeech relay the next morning because he imagined doing it with Tylendel but Tylendel is DEAD and now he can't face the thought of doing it at all.

Yfandes is gentle and supportive about it when she passes on the message to Tantras. 

A few candlemarks later, she nudges him gently. :Chosen? Lancir wants to check in with you this afternoon - think you're up for that?: 

He really doesn't want to talk to Lancir even more than he doesn't want to do most things, but also it's very reasonable of Lancir to want to know what's gone wrong with him this time. :Okay. I'll head down to his office.: It takes him a while to get up and actually do that, but eventually the thought of Lancir showing up in his room is worse than the thought of moving, so he does it.

"Come on in," Lancir says when he arrives, standing up to clear off a chair for him. "Having a bit of a tough day?" 

Shamefaced nod. If Lancir asks him why he didn't use the calming loop to go do his job anyway he isn't going to have a good answer.

Lancir looks down at his desk. "I'm sorry. I know it's really, really hard. No one's expecting you to have this down yet – it hasn't even been a whole year! If you need time, you need time. I know the calming loop isn't going to help with all of the challenges that come up here. Er, has it been helpful at all, though?" 

"It has. I've been able to do things I wouldn't have been able to do without it." It's just that sometimes he can't bring himself to use it because then he would have to go and do the thing.

"That's something." Lancir folds his hands over the desk and looks into Abras' eyes; his gaze is blue and piercing and a little Companion-like. "Is it feeling sustainable, right now? I'm thinking it does you good, to be able to do some concrete helpful things, and work up to more, but - if it's going to burn you out, doing that now, then it may not be the right tradeoff. What do you think?" 

"It definitely feels good to be able to do things. I don't think anything is getting worse but I don't feel like I can promise it won't and I don't know if trying to do more things would make it better or worse. . . . Probably worse because if I try to do more and fail at the same fraction that's more work other people have to pick up unexpectedly."

"Then let's keep it at the same number and work on getting your success ratio up with that," Lancir says. "I'm certainly not asking you to make any promises about it! It makes a lot of sense that how you feel on a given day is going to be unpredictable even for you, and - well, it's hard for me to make guesses from the outside because your situation is kind of unprecedented. So we'll just have to take it one step at a time. If the calming-loop is overall helpful we'll keep it, but I wasn't expecting it to solve everything in a single bound - you oughtn't be feeling bad that it's not, all right?" Pause. "So, can you talk me through what was hard about this morning?" 

"I was thinking about doing Mindspeech relay with Herald Tantras and then I thought about the idea of how I could have been doing work with--" turns out he still can't say his name. "And I can't."

"Gods. I'm sorry. It's - really, deeply unfair that you don't get to have that. I think it's legitimate to recognize that and - need some time to grieve it, right? But, also, it's good for you overall to be able to do things like the Mindspeech relay, so we can talk about strategies for how to help that happen." 

"Good for him" is a weird framing--the important thing is that the work should get done--but surely there's enough work that they wouldn't make any up just to make him feel useful, that's paranoid and ridiculous, so the framing doesn't matter. 

"Yeah. More strategies would be good." He can't seem to make himself come up with anything. It really feels like he should be able to just notice he's sad and then do the thing anyway.

Lancir nods. Looks thoughtful for a long time. 

"What do you think he'd want you to do, in this situation?" he says finally.