"That - I died fighting Hell with the Andalite ships - I am not sure how much if anything he knows about the peace treaty. That I am very impressed with his search engine..."

He trails off. He can't actually think of any other content, and adding that he hopes Alloran will be okay seems - probably offensive or something to say to Alloran directly, at this point, after everything.  

She adds marks that presumably correspond to this. "I can take it over to the friend who is a lawyer and will know where he is."

"All right. Thank you." 

He waits in the nest, shivering again for some reason. 

She isn't gone very long. "He said to expect a response in a day or so."

That feels like both a very long time and somehow not long enough. "I feel stressed about waiting," he admits. "And - scared of hurting him more." 

"That makes sense. I would expect you to have a lot of pain and hurt and complicated feelings about this whole subject. One of the greatest kinds of injury is the injury caused by harming another person."

"I do not think most people would be very sympathetic to the harm it caused to me." 

"Hmm, why not?"

"Because if I had wanted to not be hurt by it, I could have decided not to enslave and torture someone for fifteen years while living in their head?" 

"Do you think that people should not get sympathy for pain they're experiencing that they could have avoided by trading it off for some other things?"

"I - no - I think it is less of a 'should' and more just how I expect the world to be, that in general people will agree I am much less deserving of sympathy than Alloran, in this situation." 

"- I don't think there is a fixed amount of sympathy to distribute such that he is getting less if you get more."

"Hmm." Mhalir feels like they keep bouncing off each other's points, in this conversation, and he's not sure what to do to stop that. 

She does not say more about it.

He spends most of the next day or two either flying or singing, and sleeps a lot more than he usually has lately. 

Another bird comes two days later, with a letter. 

Caroline reads it. 

"It says 'I am glad he is done hurting people. I have no particular desire to speak to him unless he can get us some better computers, in which case I will do it.'"

"....Well. I suppose that is better than wanting to hunt me down and kill me again. I have been thinking about how to obtain better computers but - not very effectively because I keep being very tired and then not doing it for days. Though I also do not really want to talk to Alloran, so I suppose that works out." 

She puts her wing around him. "That makes sense to me."

"Thank you for doing that." He shuffles up against her, closes his eyes. "...I still feel as though I do not know what he is thinking and I wish I did. I - suppose I got used to knowing all of his thoughts. But then it seemed as though maybe I had never known the person he really was, at his best, and - I wish I could. I want to appreciate his cleverness and diligence the way I could with Carissa, when we were choosing to work on the same team even though we were not fully aligned - and I think that is not ever something I would be able to have with Alloran, because enslaving someone against their will closes that door." 

"I think it definitely puts that - very far away. Not infinitely far away. We have forever."

"As long as no one lets Rovagug out." He says it lightly, though. 

"Do you want to respond to the letter?"

"- do you think it would make things better or worse if I did?" 

"I think that interactions with Alloran probably have more potential to hurt you than most things you could do, but I think you know that and can evaluate it, and hurt is fixable, the point of NIrvana is not to avoid it at all costs. I think that if you had ideas about the computers that would be good for you but that trying to make yourself have them isn't wise. You could ask him more technical details about the current computer system?"