:Well, now you've checked: 

:Yeah.

I know some other bad things have happened to you though. And I asked Lionwind if hypothetically I would be ready to see a patient alone if it was you and you weren't comfortable with him and he said I should still be supervised but it could be written-up summaries after the fact - maybe not even with him, sometimes Mindhealers send letters long distances with anonymized cases in them to get advice without spreading somebody's secrets around identifiably:

Ma'ar hugs his knees to his chest. :You're - still worried that something's wrong with my gears and I'm going to end up turning evil?:

:There are reasons besides being worried you're going to turn evil to be at all worried about the state of your gears!:

Ma'ar seems dubious of this! :Like what:

:Do you want to just read an actual Mindhealing book - I can be there to answer questions -:

Ma'ar takes a deep breath and - makes a deliberate effort to calm down and remind himself that Azabel is his friend and hasn't turned into a different person just because he's in some sort of obscure and confusing trouble about saying things in class.

He considers it for a while. :I - think that seems less efficient than you explaining it, or showing me your notes, it's not like I think you'd lie about it and I could always go look it up in the library later: 

:Okay. My notes are mostly at home though and the library's here in the Tower:

Ma'ar nods. :I - guess we could go to the library. I don't think I really want to right now. Maybe in a bit once I - feel less stressed about class today: 

:Okay: Does he want a hug - no, probably still not only no but also don't ask.

Ma'ar spends a while fidgeting with the edge of his bedspread. 

:...You can look at my gears if you want: he says, finally. :I - I would want to know, if there's something wrong with me: 

:Okay. You can tell me to stop any time - say when?:

It doesn't seem like there's anything in particular he needs to do to get ready. :Go ahead: 

Attempting to control visible signs of fascination somewhat, she peeks.

Ma'ar's eyes are closed. He seems, if anything, calmer than before. 

His gears are - very unusual, but a lot of the unusual parts aren't along dimensions related to trauma. He does have a lot of the patterns she's studied before, the outer 'surfaces' of his mind almost entirely oriented toward threat-detection, strung with the sorts of long gear-shafts that would instantly propagate a reflexive response. It looks...organized, though. Almost as though half of it was deliberately planned and then tidied up on purpose, and the rest just hasn't been gotten to yet. The organized aspect seems newer, somehow, layered and partially rebuilding whatever used to be there, and a lot of the linkages are - not really about triggering a fight-or-flight response, if anything the opposite. Ma'ar's mind contains a lot of patterns aimed at deliberately calming down. 

And that's mostly the edges, anyway. The deeper core of him - almost resembles Azabel's own mind, in a way, with a single central gear linking to nearly everything, though the layout is different in some hard-to-describe way. It's incredibly purposeful. ...One of the easier-to-describe aspects of the difference is that his mind is more layered, the central driving gear deeply buried and protected, visible more in the way it connects and directs everything else than in itself. His mind is also more... 'Tightly constrained' isn't quite the thing, neither is 'bunkered down', his attentional structure is very outward-oriented and not just in the sense of immediate threat-sensing. But it does look like the centre of Ma'ar is - shaped by danger, and by a lack of something, in a way somehow fundamentally different to how Azabel ended up with her organized layout. 

: - what do you want me to tell you about what I see?:

:Umm, whether there's something wrong with me? ...And I guess I'm - curious in general, I know what my head feels like but not how it'd look to you from the outside: 

:You're really organized in there. I am too but not this way... It looks like you're really oriented toward reacting very fast if anything happens around you, not in a panic way - there's a little of that but it looks kind of like you're re-doing it on purpose so you can be calm instead - that's so cool - it looks like you are very shaped by having been in danger a lot but not in a conventional presentation... and I don't know quite what's not here, I can maybe figure it out...: Lack of what, clockwork mind.

Ma'ar looks pleased. :Oh, good, is that working? I thought it was but I wasn't sure how well: 

It's in general tricky to figure out that kind of context just from the clockwork structure, and Ma'ar's mind in particular seems to in some sense not want to be figured out, but... It's not a lack of safety or security, not quite, though that's close, and definitely part of it... 

Most people's minds, especially young people, have very deep-set structures around interreliance on other people, attachment to loved ones, love and connection - the parts of them that, in times of stress or of striving, reach out for those supports. Ma'ar has very close to literally none of this. 

This is a pattern Azabel recognizes, but most minds she's seen with a similar lack are deeply unstable. His isn't. The central gear and structure are very strongly self-stabilizing. The lack is still costing him something, probably; all of the self-soothing patterns he's effortfully building in to replace the panic reactions need to be anchored just internally. But it works. His mind holds together as a structure and it looks like he ought to be able to exert deliberate control over most of it, if not quite all at this point. 

:You've got almost a - a gyroscope in there -

- most people especially kids kind of grab at people around them, family and stuff, to do things without going too far off course, and people who don't have that are sort of collapsey... and you aren't collapsey but it means you're kind of psychologically trying to balance on one foot, even if you're good at that...:

:Whoa, you can just see that!: Azabel's Gift is sososos cool actually!!! :I - huh - that makes sense. I...think that's a good way of putting the thing that...confuses me a lot about some people: Moreso back when he made a habit of reading minds all the time, but the confusion hasn't gone away, people are presumably still like that even if he's not reading them and sometimes he can notice the pattern just from their words and actions. :The...grabbing at people. Even when it's - obviously not going to work, because their grownups are bad at plans too: 

:Well, grownups can be bad at plans and still know more about what's going on just because they're older - or even if they don't have a good plan a nice grownup can still get different kinds of attention from other people, and reach things off high shelves, and stuff, and people go to them for that and it's close enough as long as nothing really bad happens - this might be one of the reasons bad things happening is so damaging? Because then it much more obviously doesn't work:

Ma'ar fidgets and spends a long time trying to pick out the right words. 

:I - think it's really bad to believe things that aren't true: he says finally. :And - it's not true, almost ever, that people's grownups could stop really bad things from happening. And they do happen. Less here but still, and - and everyone knows they happen more in Predain, but...: He can't figure out how to explain the next piece. :I don't know, just, it feels maybe related to why most people are crazy about blood-magic. Because it's a really bad thing, and it - only makes sense when it's instead of an even worse thing, but...people have to believe that things that bad couldn't happen to them? Or something? And...I feel like that makes it so people have to not notice problems in other places and then no one fixes them and it's BAD: 

:People need to feel safe. Usually - usually never feeling safe makes people worse, not better, at doing most things:

:I think knowing whether or not it's true that I'm safe makes me better at doing things: Shrug. :I was...worse at doing things at the start, here, because I was used to places that were less safe and so I kept believing wrong things, you were right about that, but then I noticed and changed my mind: