He hugs her back. "You are welcome. - Do you want to come back to my rooms? If I am going to take down my shields so you can read me, I will feel more comfortable there." 

"That sounds good."

He takes her hand again and walks there with her. Asks how her day was. When they arrive he gestures to the sofa for her to sit, sits down next to her. 

She sits down. Shivers, a little bit. "I want you to read me first so then when I read your thoughts they are about me, which is the topic I am most interested in."

Leareth nods, seriously. "Of course." Conveniently, it'll also mean he isn't thinking about any state secrets he plausibly shouldn't share with her yet, though he's at this point prepared not to be that careful about it. 

Gentle and nice and sweet... He keeps holding her hand. He extends his Thoughtsensing; is she still wearing the Nondetection hatpin and giving him the sense of extremely good shields? 

Yes (not to protect from him, at this point, but other people might try to read her mind, and they agreed it was a good idea for her capabilities to be mostly secret.)

(That's very sensible of her, she's clever and careful and Leareth is pleased.) 

He squeezes her hand a little. "I need you to take off your Nondetection sword-pin so I can read you." 

She nods. She slips it out of her hair. Now her shields look more like a Golarion caster of about Mahdi and Fazil and Hagan's level.

He tries to read her, boosting his Thoughtsensing with mage-gift if necessary; it’ll give him a headache but Lesser Restoration will fix it.

At first she still hedges him out; then she shakes her head self-consciously and - stops that, and is no harder to read than a normal person -

- she is pleased with herself that hedging him out still worked without her hatpin, even though it's not what they're here to do tonight, at all.

He's hot. It would always slightly annoy her when she had to read people at work and they were thinking about that, especially if they dwelled on it, but perhaps it's slightly less unprofessional if the job being applied for is literally 'his wife'. He's very scary - moreso, in some ways, when he's paying less attention to it, which suggests it's not intentional at all - but he's also very earnest, and trying so hard at her fairly silly instruction to be nice about it, come up with on the spot because - the really important thing was that she was allowed to impose conditions, even silly ones, and also because this feels like the kind of thing that could be better than all right, if he's holding her and giving his instructions very softly and levelly and -

- she was expecting he'd ask some questions or her thoughts are all going to be like that -

Leareth slips his arm around her, for once confident that he’ll be able to tell if she wants not that; does Khemet feel like that all the time, he’s jealous - it’s silly to be thinking about Khemet now, though.

“What do you think of...” It’s hard to figure out how to phrase his question; ‘what do you think of me’ is far too unspecific. “My - I am sort of the opposite of how Asmodeus wants people to be, I think - I refuse to be small, I want things very strongly, I try very hard to shape the world... How do you feel about - people like that...?” It’s still not quite the thing but it’s closer, he thinks. 

Having his arm around her is good. 

She thinks about it. 

He can get away with it, right, is the thing, because he fought Asmodeus - not directly but fought the forces Asmodeus was willing to bring to bear on this world - and won - if most people she'd met in her life were declaring that they wanted lots of things, and meant to go get them, and would make the world a better place - then they would die and go to Hell and suffer forever for it. It feels - tragic, right, in the same way as the clerics of Aroden who insisted they still got spells from him or the parents of dead babies who carry them around swaddled insisting they'll wake up - a refusal to live in the world you actually live in, ugly and awful but at least there, and real -

- obviously saving up to raise your baby from the dead is not applicably tragic. And if you have the power, the resources, the history, then refusing to live in the world you don't like isn't about playing pretend, it's just ...planning. She's not quite sure she has wrapped her head, yet, around everything that means, it's something so different than all the things it vaguely looks like, but - there's a thing where it makes all the other pathetic tragic human ambitions less so, it makes the people who want to travel the world writing romantic poetry reasonable, it makes the people who want to see their dead children again reasonable, it makes the people who want to write angry pamphlets about Asmodeus reasonable -

- you can expect everybody to grow up and face the real world, awful as it is, or you can turn the real world on its head so they can stay where they're standing -

- and she is still a little bit too scared herself to entertain any wishes that feel like they'd have that pathetic quality, of disengagement from reality, but she can see the shape of it, and she can see why Iomedae thought it was important ('Iomedae thought this was important' is so much easier to think than 'I think this is important', Iomedae is allowed to want things, She is a god - Leareth is allowed to want things, he's only not a god because he says it'd be redundant and maybe unpleasant - his Queen would be allowed to want things, maybe, but that's not really the draw of the job, the draw of the job is that Cheliax will be allowed to want things once they understand what she thinks she's starting to -

Leareth holds her and - lets himself lean in rather than away from the pain of it, there's an ache in his throat and a burning behind his eyes and a quiet, simmering, not-quite-anger, anger wants to break things and this feeling wants to - keep laying one brick over another until he's built a wall and behind it everyone is safe and, and–

"I do not necessarily want a world where everybody is like me," he says, thickly. "I - nobody should need to be like me, in a sane world. But - I want everyone to be able to - want things, and take up space, and make plans and build castles and, and grow, be more not less..." He swallows. "You have to see reality as it is. Wishful thinking is the opposite of planning, right, if you are not seeing what is already there then your plans are not shaped to work. Honestly, seeing reality for itself is very hard and many people are stuck on that step, and - I think you can do it, so you have that advantage. What I want for you is to be able to plan to shape the future of Cheliax the same way you would - notice you were thirsty and go get a glass of water, it does not have to be any more complicated than that..." 

Things are only really simple if no one else cares about them. Choosing which socks to put on was always simple, because Asmodeus wouldn't care; choosing how Cheliax will work is really complicated. It feels kind of like wishful thinking just to imagine that you won't get crushed if you try anything that complicated. 

But they tried the war, and didn't get crushed, so - she is probably just wrong about that, and similarly there are probably lots of other things that can be attempted and survived now. And being wrongly pessimistic is also a way of failing to live in the real world, right.

- a memory of kneeling in the demiplane in Aroden's presence, and he'd said he was impressed, and she'd - talked herself down, that's in the book of tactics from a class she took, it's meaningless, she can feel the draw of the world where he was saying that sincerely and pull away because she's not an idiot - except he had meant it, and she doesn't exactly know if she made a mistake there because it's still overwhelmingly true that when you are arrested and your interrogator says that they're impressed they're nearly always lying but -

- but the fact is that the world she was trying to pull herself away from believing in was real -

He holds her.

"If you try complicated things, or fight powerful adversaries, then you will sometimes fail," he acknowledges. "It was not guaranteed we would win in Cheliax, however hard we tried to overdetermine it. That is - a fact about what problems are difficult and what limitations humans have - though if we use some Wishes to make you very clever, and a headband you can wear in addition for strategy-planning in private, you will be able to meet greater challenges. Nonetheless, I have failed many times, when my plans were built on incomplete information, or faulty predictions about the world or people in it. Sometimes my failures caused great harm. Often they resulted in my body's death. I - cannot promise you that success will be immediate or easy, or that letting yourself want things and make decisions on a larger scale will not hurt. But I have never been crushed, and in this current situation I am confident I have the allies and resources that I will not be. And as long as you are with me, my resources and allies are yours as well. If you make a difficult call and are wrong, I will not be angry with you. If you are killed, I will bring you back. We - might need to be willing to try very hard, for a very long time, and fail over and over, but - as long as you can keep deciding that failure is not the same as being crushed, then we can try again. For however long it takes." 

Huh, is he worried that - her interest in trying to fix things is premised on him always winning and not being wrong - she guesses she was kind of thinking about it that way - she figured that she was probably going to lose, and die, when Iomedae sent her to the palace, and that was fine because she was expecting that this was worth it for Iomedae - it didn't have to be guaranteed not to utterly crush her, it certainly didn't have to be guaranteed to work, there just needed to be some reason to believe it wasn't stupid to try, that there was a thing that might be achieved and would be important to achieve - entering a lottery because you calculated the payout is positive isn't refusing-to-live-in-the-world even though you almost never win the lottery -

- though it had helped, a lot, knowing that Aroden wouldn't send her to Hell and might in fact let her go to Axis, maybe she hadn't been entirely ready to be crushed -

"That makes sense. It - was important to me, I think, that you were willing to take that gamble even before you knew who I was, because - what I am asking for here is very, very hard, and most people are quite reasonably not interested in doing things which are so hard. - It will be easier for you than it was for me in Velgarth, I hope, you will never have to do it alone. But - even gods can gamble and be wrong, sometimes. Aroden did. I think there is absolutely no way he could have known in advance what would happen, and his bet was a reasonable one, but - nonetheless he bet wrong, and was murdered horribly for it. He woke up as a human with no magic and no resources or allies, in a country drenched in torrential rain, and he nearly starved to death in the famine, and he watched Asmodeus take Cheliax and could do nothing to stop Him. It - is not impossible that if you stay with me, and become immortal as well, that someday we would have a loss on that scale. If I try to evacuate Hell and kill Asmodeus and fail, for example. I hope I can help you become someone strong enough not to be crushed by that."

He squeezes her a little. "And I think your presence will make failure less likely than if I did not have that aid." 

It feels odd and asymmetrical to think at him while he talks to her but talking is a little hard.

"I think - almost anyone Iomedae sent you - would've had that. Think it's the thing she picks for. Talked to a lot of people, asked them what they'd have done if they got the visions - asked them if they worry, about fighting a war forever in Heaven - kept hearing - well, it's not forever, it's until we win - and I wasn't sure if they were doing the living in a pretend world thing, but I don't think so.

I think I can keep going. Maybe not alone but - with you."

Hug. "That makes sense. ...Is there anything you are still nervous or scared about, with this?" 

Nervous or scared about - 

- she's still jealous of his boyfriend but she thinks she's getting better about that, it objectively makes a lot of sense that people you can pick just for romance are going to be more fun than people you have to pick under a dozen other constraints -

- she still feels like she has only the vaguest inkling of his capabilities, which is mostly not nervewracking and is the good kind of scary, but maybe he should show off sometime -

- she's a little worried that she can't really keep up, that she can impress him but not, you know, ever actually beat him, but she is going to revisit that in a year, this has been a lot of expanding her ambitions and so on and she can worry about it if it still seems like a problem then -

"- Showing off could be rather fun. And - yes, I think give yourself time on the last thing. You do have the advantage of arcane magic, I do not have any of that." He's not sure what to do about the jealousy, romantic jealousy still doesn't quite make sense to him, but he's glad to know about it. "Anyway, I think that was all my specific questions - would you like to switch now?" 

"Sure."

Leareth lets go of Thoughtsensing, takes a deep breath, checks the shielding on his room one more time, and - drops his personal shields. 

It's a lot easier to do it now than it would have been before. He is, in fact, far more comfortable than he was before they started this.

He's feeling a lot of fondness for Carissa, right now. 'Protective' isn't quite the word for it, because the last thing he wants to do is build walls she can be safe behind. A lot of people need that, he thinks, in the someday-future where everything is fixed, but - it would be importantly underusing Carissa's capabilities, not letting her be her full self and grow into what she can become, if his primary motivation were to keep her safe.

He's musing on what it took, to create a Leareth out of the raw material of a teenage Ma'ar, eighteen hundred years ago in the awfulness of pre-Mage-Wars Predain. And Urtho was an important component of that, he thinks. Urtho saw him and wanted to give him something better than that, but what he wanted was to put tools in Ma'ar's hands and teach him how to use them. (And he regretted that, later, and fought a war against his former student, but importantly he doesn't seem to regret it now.)

The thing he wants with Carissa is a lot more than just that, he's not looking for a student here; in a lot of ways she isn't his equal yet, gods, she's in her twenties, but in some other important ways she is, and - that's the kind of negative space he wants to leave for her, anyway, he wants her to want that and reach for it and unfold all the parts of herself that had to be small and unassuming and not draw Asmodeus' attention, before -

- he's in pain. Wishing he had been faster, somehow, because he can shape the future but not the past, he can't undo that Cheliax was under Asmodeus' reign for almost a century, and - now there's even more to come back from, to get to the place where they finally win, Asmodeus is stronger and has more souls in his grasp, that's part of the cost Aroden paid for every day he chose to wait. It was the right call, Leareth thinks, trying and failing would have been so much worse and so Aroden had to wait until winning was as overdetermined as possible, but - it still hurts to look at, a hurt tangled up in a thousand other regrets, costs he paid, sometimes for no reason because he bet and lost. And normally he keeps that folded up, out of the way, it doesn't help him win faster to dwell on the pain of losing, but - right now it feels important to let Carissa witness it.

...he's trying not to think about Khemet too much because that won't help, but he can't help remembering when Khemet took him to Aktun, and noticed that what he needed was to be held while he cried, and - that was important, he wouldn't have thought to look for that before, it's felt out of reach for so long. Because he, too, had in a way been carving off parts of himself, cutting off some of his wants, the ones that would only make carrying out his mission harder. It feels like a different kind of tragic from what Carissa was gesturing at before; it's the tragedy of limited resources, of deciding not to save to raise a dead baby because sending her surviving sibling to school matters more. (It's the tragedy of his long-ago baby sister in Predain, killed at birth because too many of their livestock had died the past winter and they couldn't feed another mouth; that's one of only a handful of memories he's kept from his original childhood as Ma'ar.)

It feels like maybe he needs to let himself grow in a new direction too, in order for things with Carissa to be better than all right, and it makes sense to now and he wants it but it's still - hard, and even a little scary. 

She leans against him. She has - no idea how to comfort people, she isn't sure she's ever even tried it, but - but it makes sense in the abstract, that people would want comfort if there was anyone they could trust to be that close to - even people who are very very strong - maybe them more, for the same reasons being a prisoner was more terrifying once there was the hope that she could still survive -

Leareth leans his head on her shoulder. Notices that this is, itself, an example of how he's suddenly having all sorts of new emotions now that there's space in his life for them to feel productive, not because they help him directly achieve his goals in the outside world, but because he can get hugs and reassurance about them, and feel closer to people as a result, and that in itself is good - the same way raising a dead baby is good, he thinks, and he made a straightforward resource tradeoff not to have it for a long time, but he's in a new environment where different things makes sense. He suspects that unfolding that part of himself and his desires, again, might help him be more ally-shaped to others, the thing Iomedae was trying to gesture at in their conversations -

- he remembers Iomedae holding him while he wept, and how he felt like a small child again in Her arms, and how much that seemed to help... This is probably not normally how people relate to gods, but, well, he's unusual.

Leareth remembers being in his room, feeling lonely, even though he had literally just seen Khemet and it was very unreasonable to go back to Sothis and make the pharaoh neglect his wives because he didn't want to sleep alone. He never used to feel lonely. Maybe he was anyway. 

Does Carissa have questions? (It's probably going to be easier not to end up repeatedly thinking about Khemet and making her jealous if he has somewhere else to put his mind.)