:You are welcome. I hope it is easier now. It should not at all affect the full lifebond forming whenever it chooses to do so: Nayoki nods to her, and ducks out. 

Sleepy kind-of-confused Leareth curls against her. He's already drifting off again, it's hard to stay alarmed when Belrun is definitely right there. 

She snuggles him. She snuggles Amshalan. She sits there, awake, nauseated, trying briefly to touchsight the glass of water in the next room over where she usually sleeps to Fetch it to her and get the taste out of her mouth. She gives up. She chases herself in circles, trying not to start crying again about how she's using mind control to patch the holes left by more mind control while comforting herself with still more mind control out of the hopes that slightly less of her life going forward will be spent falling into mind control holes and she can have anything left from before she was MIND CONTROLLED.

Eventually her misery is enough to wake Leareth all the way. :Belrun? Do you need something?: 

:Having a hard time getting back to sleep:

:I am sorry. I - am so glad to be with you, because you are wonderful, but lifebonds are very bad and half-broken ones are even worse. Is there anything I can do to help?: 

:Snuggling me helps. Though I think it'll help more when you've grown more. Mostly so I can stop thinking about Essi involuntarily quite so frequently but also because I miss there being perks instead of it just being a shitty way to have met an interesting person. Puberty had better hit you like an avalanche:

Leareth is also looking forward to not involuntarily thinking about Essi so often. :The gods had better not murder me again until we have figured out how to improve the management around here and I can put both of us onto one of the less horrible methods without fatal interference. I think I can dig up some magic that will help me grow faster, although it might have side effects on cognitive development in which case I would prefer to be conservative: 

And he can snuggle her. 

Eventually she falls asleep.

Leareth wakes up earlier than usual and kind of stiff, it's not the best sleeping surface. 

Belrun probably didn't sleep great, so he stays still and cuddling her rather than try to get up and risk waking her. He can feel her again. Not as well as before, he thinks, and there's still a faint undercurrent of badwrongpain, but mostly he feels better than he has in weeks. 

She wakes up groggily a candlemark later than she usually does. Sighs. Fetches the bile off the floor into the nearest suitable receptacle and manages, now that she's more fully awake, to also get her water from the next room.

Yawn. "How are you?"

"Better than I was this time yesterday."

"So am I. And, thank you for doing that. I think it was much more painful for you - I know you did it for your own sake as well, but - it helps for me, a great deal." 

"It sucked. But it didn't last very long."

"True. The maximum intensity of badness before was less, but the duration was far longer, and - years is a very long time... I think I will be able to concentrate better now."  

He hugs her.

Hug. "I miss my old brain," she mumbles.

"I am sorry I was insufficiently paranoid and got myself murdered." 

"That was very bad and you should never do it again but lately I am actually just kind of wishing it was last year and instead of my brain the arc of history had required heroic amounts of microbiology research. It's not comfortable to - be leaning on my closest relationships for comfort about how awful it is that I have them, and for a while I was pretty good at not doing that, but this week is not a great one on that front."

"That would have been a much more reasonable arc of history. I am still sort of worried about what the Power that arranged this is planning. We are both going to be less effective, for a time but not permanently. I suppose it seems that more than one god is involved, with different goals..." Shiver. "I am sort of uncomfortable about having been rescued from losing you permanently by a god, but. Better than the alternative." 

"Yeah. I assume that if there were any convenient immortality methods around you would have gotten around to it before I even went to Haven but at least I'm probably going to wind up in storage on account of inserting myself into the Companion pipeline, maybe you could grab me out of that if you had to."

"There are feasible ones but certainly not convenient, and all require your presence and participation. I would feel more comfortable if we went ahead, of course, but I would not pressure you into a method that involves killing anyone else - now or later - even if I thought I could succeed at that, which I do not. Maybe we can put our heads together and see if your rare Healing talents allow a much greater delay to aging than I have been able to enact just with magic. Also I ought to set you up with said magic, if you accept it, it works best when started young." He looks down at himself. "Perhaps not quite this young." 

"Well, I'm reasonably young, I'm 23. - you were dead during my birthday."

"I am sorry!" He hesitates. "What does one usually...do...for birthdays. I have not celebrated any in a ridiculously long time. I could give you gifts? Belated gifts." 

"Gifts are traditional. My mom also baked me a pie but I wasn't really paying attention to the calendar and didn't realize at the time it was birthday pie."