Belrun gets them down from Amshalan, still without breaking contact. Pets Amshalan's neck with her other hand once they're down.

He's feeling pretty shaky by now. "I probably need to go back to bed now. Do I need to be in the infirmary or can I go back to the bedroom I had before." 

"I should maybe ask one of the Healers here, but you seem pretty stable now - Belrun, what do you think?" 

"I think his old room should be fine. I can Mindspeak a Healer who knows more about what they're doing in a pinch."

"Sure. This way, then." 

Leareth needs them to walk slowly, but he can make it all the way on his own feet. 

And then she can tuck him in and sit beside him and pet his hair.

Leareth closes his eyes. "I am glad to be home again. Very glad you are here... I am maybe going to sleep again now." 

"That's fine. Sleep well."

The next week or so passes uneventfully. Leareth sleeps a lot, and then gradually a bit less, though it's still kind of an unreasonable amount of sleep in absolute terms. He takes walks around the hallway, a couple of times a day, more laps each day as he regains his strength. He starts reviewing his notes, though he needs to do it in short bursts because it's still hard to concentrate for long. 

After a few more days, it's pretty obvious that they are developing some sort of weak partial lifebond; Belrun can feel Leareth from several rooms away now. He still finds it unpleasant when she leaves, reasonable or not, and his preference is to be touching her all the time; when they're in physical contact, they can feel each other almost as well as they could before with the full lifebond. 

Leareth is still kind of background sad and in pain, a lot of the time, which is really stupid of his brain but his brain isn't listening to reason on this one. 

It's harder to keep busy and drown the pain in work when she's trying to stay by him. She has her eggs brought into the room so she can work on them while holding his hand with her left and writing notes and drawing sketches with her right. She discovers that under certain conditions some microbes can be killed with cranberry juice and occupies herself investigating various aspects of whether that could ever actually be useful in actual people.

Her research is neat and Belrun is wonderful and very impressive and Leareth sometimes asks her to talk about it, when he's having trouble focusing on anything else. 

About a week later, he wakes up and rubs his eyes and checks if he's still quietly miserable. (Still miserable). 

"I think we should ask Nayoki to look at the lifebond again," he says to Belrun. "If you do not mind. I - would like to know if it is going to get any better than this, before I am old enough that we lifebond properly again. If not, I think I need to figure out some better way to cope with it." 

"Yeah. She can look."

And Nayoki will come over promptly when Leareth Mindspeaks her. She does ask each of them individually, again, if it's all right for her to look. 

"You have some level of bond," she says once that's approved. "I can show you my Sight?" 

"Yes please."

So Nayoki can slip into close enough Mindspeech-rapport with both of them to share her Othersenses. 

Her Sight looks different from Melody; her view of their minds, rather than resembling a tapestry, seems to be...loaves of bread? 

- that startles her into a half-giggle.

Nayoki glances at her with slightly raised eyebrows and a crooked smile, but doesn't say anything. "I will go in closer." 

And she can show them the lifebond, which appears as some stringy ropey bits of what looks like half-baked dough beginning to link their loaves, from underneath; it's solid at this point but not exactly complete. 

"I assume you can't directly, uh, bake... that...?"

"I do not think it would help to do that; the problem is that it is too limited, not just that it is fragile. I think it would slowly fill out a little more than this, and perhaps I can make that happen now instead of later? It would be somewhat invasive, though, and I am not sure it would work, though I am confident it would not cause harm." 

Belrun shivers a little. "It's just - it's hard to do anything more than very routine things with it this bad, and I can fill up on routine things, plenty of science is very routine stuff I can do going down a checklist, but it makes me feel like I'm brain-damaged. I guess I am. I would like to stop all else being equal."

"I am having difficulty even with routine work," Leareth admits.

"That makes sense. It is hitting you harder because you are still, well, reassembling yourself after being murdered and coming back."

Nayoki focuses her Sight more closely on Leareth's mind, still sharing it with both of them. It comes out differently in bread; rather than fragments of new tapestry being woven on the weird square-grid scaffolding, it looks like two loaves sort of crumbled and shoved together, the Leareth-one gradually taking over and absorbing the remaining bits of a dead innocent thirteen-year-old. 

(Leareth really hates his immortality method, sometimes.) 

Nayoki points out how Leareth is having trouble consolidating the pieces of himself, due to what looks like a large hunk sort of nibbled and hollowed out from the loaf, underneath. The fragments of unbaked-dough-stuff are trying to form around that hole, but they're not providing much stability yet.