Probably at some point Ma'ar should take Mhalir himself and then they can bond over....being a Ma'ar/Mhalir person things...but she thinks if she makes the suggestion now Ma'ar will be too nervous to get any use of it. She is trying to solve the loneliness here but she doesn't really know how, if it's not about holding him. (She could kiss him? It's probably also not about that, that's not hard to get even if there's a war...)

"I think - Urtho - I don't know how much it'd even mean to have his approval because he has bad judgment and stupid values but he said he cares about you and I expect he'd want to fix ...things..."

Ma'ar's breath catches. "I - never thought his values were stupid - I think he is stupid about them, and - confused - not being consistent... But, the first time I saw his Tower, saw all the lights, and the stars above it, and I thought - he built that, he made it exist, drew an idea out of nothing and made it real, and - he made a place where anyone could learn magic, even me. And– and it was so beautiful. I always knew the world was broken but until then I had not been able to imagine it whole." 

His eyes and his throat hurt, his chest is tight, it's so confusing why it feels hard to take a full breath right now. 

Carissa is not very good at imagining the world whole. Mostly in her experience Good people just make it differently broken. She holds him and waits for him to figure out what he wants, here.

Carissa is so confusing! He feels less - something - with her there, but also more confused! 

"- What are you trying to do here?" he says. "You put yourself in danger to try to stop the war. You were...trying to make things less broken, at least." 

" - well, yes! I don't want people to die." Wave of bitterness and sadness that she would rather not think about right now.

"What is...being Good, if it is not that? I thought it was a Good god who mediated the war ending, with the Andalites and Yeerks, because they did not want people to die."

Cities incinerated under starship fire, leaving glass in which you can sometimes see the ashy imprints of buildings, or of people.

Grief, pain, regret. 

Ma'ar sucks in his breath, involuntary hugging her more tightly, almost but not quite hard enough to hurt her. It hurts in a way that feels almost like being actually injured; it feels like everything stable under him is crumbling, as he learns too late about precious things that were lost before he even knew they were in danger - a vow he made to save everyone and it doesn't actually matter if they weren't in his world and he had no way of knowing - 

After a moment he manages to recognize the feeling as 'wanting to cry', which seems so stupid and unhelpful and he tries to clamp down on it, except that this also turns out to block his capacity to...move, or speak, or do anything, he can barely think his head is fully of cities slagged by unimaginable weapons of another world. 

If there needs to be any moving or anything Mhalir will have to do it, she's just kind of going to withdraw rather than cry a lot about something stupid.

Mhalir doesn't really know what to do! Ma'ar seems overwhelmingly upset, in a way he remembers experiencing sometimes in Nirvana - oddly it hadn't happened before that, he could shove his emotions away better in emergencies. He tries to remember what Caroline did when that happened... She would snuggle him under her wing, and tell him it was all right to be in pain from the world being awful, and that it was normal for very traumatized people to have a lot of strong emotions to process after they were somewhere safe. And she would try to get him to talk about it, and tell him that whatever he wanted to do was probably his mind telling him what he needed... 

This seems very awkward to suggest, because he doubts Ma'ar thinks of himself as especially traumatized, even though how could he not be. 

It seems like he just needs to be held for a while, and...maybe to cry? Mhalir didn't really cry when he was a baby bird, because birds don't, but there were times when all he wanted to do was to flail around being very visibly distressed. 

Ma'ar is not going to think this makes any sense, if he suggests it. 

"It makes sense for many aspects of the situation to be upsetting," he tries. "And you did not have time to process that before because you were at war, but - now you are ending the war, and I think it is normal for it to hurt more. For you to - be feeling a lot of grief about how much was lost, and how it was stupid and wasteful, and - to be angry with Urtho at how far he would have been willing to go..." 

- ow. Now Ma'ar is simultaneously overflowingly sad and incredibly angry, and he feels brittle, like he might explode and shatter into a million pieces if one. more. thing. happens to him. He feels like he wants to break something else, to throw something, and also that desire doesn't make any sense and is kind of an upsetting thing to be feeling. He shivers and then holds himself very still, trying to just not do anything until he feels more in control. 

This is harder said than done, for a mage. The bed shakes slightly under them. 

Which nearly startles Mhalir into casting one of Carissa's spells, he's not even sure what spell he's reaching for, and he forces himself back. Takes a deep breath. "Ma'ar, you are safe here. This is my ship and these are my people who I selected carefully and I trust them. You can relax. If you need to cry, this is a safe place to do that." 

He is so confused. 

"He was in Nirvana. It is one of Golarion's afterlife planes, and they're really into - processing and accepting your emotions and stuff..." Shrug. "If you want to hit us you should do more of the mind-control first because Mhalir's very flinchy."

Mhalir supposes he wouldn't mind if Ma'ar wanted to do that, it would be incredibly stupid to seriously injure them and Ma'ar isn't stupid, but he would be very confused if this turned out to be the thing that helped! And more mind-control is scary, but would be a good idea in that context, since he's already noticed that they're both very flinchy and this is less than ideal when they're startling each other. 

Ma'ar is thinking that hitting Carissa wouldn't help at all, but communicating this fact would involve - talking - which seems to not be working right now. 

"It can be hard to figure out," Mhalir says, sympathetically. "If you cannot tell what you are feeling, you could...try to pay attention to what your body wants to do? I find that helpful." 

What a bizarre prompt. On the other hand, it's feeling very obviously when Mhalir is the one speaking, and that he's talking to - someone at least very similarly shaped to him. 

He wants to...curl up and have his head in Carissa's lap? Which is weird, but he does feel pretty safe, given that she isn't capable of harming him. 

He does this. 

...okay. She runs her hands through his hair, gently, and doesn't say anything.

He's not sure why that helps but it does. Ma'ar has no desire at all to hit Carissa but - in some bizarre twisty sideways way, it's reassuring that she would offer? He doesn't understand it. 

Eventually words are possible again, though he stays curled up on top of the bedspread with his head in her lap. "- Why do you...feel the way you do, toward me? You do not know me at all, but you - want me to be all right..." 

"Well, I like Mhalir, and you're - him, sort of - you have the things I like about him, at least - and you're - a safe person to trust? Trusting you won't turn out to have been stupid?" Shrug. "And I don't think the things people hate you for were actually bad so it feels unfair. Assuming that blood magic doesn't destroy peoples' souls, if it does you should stop that."

He recoils a bit. "Gods! No, it does not. I - took some observations, trying to figure out how it worked and when it is safe, and the souls go to exactly the same place as usual. It is not actually different in principle - magically speaking, that is - from a mage's Final Strike." 

"A what?"

"Oh, has that not come up yet? Mages here can - burn their own life-force to fuel a very big fireball. Or perhaps more complicated spells, even, for the obvious reasons it has not been extensively tested."