"You... know Mindhealing can help with that, right? I don't like to be pushy and you never ask but."

"...Can Mindhealing fix it? It - said maybe, when I read the library book about it, but...usually I assume 'maybe' means no. How would it work, if - I wanted you to fix it?"

"With Mindhealing maybe doesn't mean no, it means sometimes, it depends. I think yours would probably be pretty easy because they're probably to do with things that happened to you, so I can find where the memories live and muck up the gearshaft between that and your dreams, but we don't have a way to fix kids' nightmares that are just about monsters chasing them that happen for no reason, say."

"Mmm. I don't mind having nightmares that much? It's - inconvenient when it bothers other people too, like when I'm stuck here, but..." He trails off.

"You... don't mind?"

"It's fine, I just go back to sleep after if I wake up?"

"Isn't it unpleasant?"

Ma'ar still seems confused about why this would be relevant. "I - guess it's not fun? And it's annoying if it means I get less sleep. But I'm good at going back to sleep fast. ...If I had this many nightmares all the time it'd be annoying, I guess. I think it'll go back to usual once I'm back in my own room and...it's been longer since the fight..."

"It is okay to put effort into avoiding things if they are both unpleasant and unhelpful!"

"I know that! I - guess it also depends on whether I expect your idea to work and how well. If you think it'd work because I have nightmares about things that happened to me, well," another shrug, "a lot of things happened to me. Seems hard to block all of them."

"Well, I won't know for sure without trying but I'd have a better guess if I looked."

He takes a slow breath. "I guess you can look."

She nods; she looks for nightmare-looking gearshafts.

He has quite a lot of them! It does look like something recent, probably the stress and fear from the fight and being hospitalized, have put a sort of shear pressure on the overall shape of his mind, bringing the various gears that represent nightmare-worthy memories closer to the area where dreams happen. They don't look like they'd be that far away at the best of times, though.

"I think I can make this a little better pretty easily because it's worse than usual right now and probably won't bounce back immediately if I just give it a push to normal," she reports, "and it'd be more elaborate to make it a lot better than that."

Ma'ar nods. "Would it - do other things too? If you give it a push back to normal?"

"I can check, if you might want me to actually do it." What else is around here that she'd be nudging.

Nudging the stress-distorted area related to nightmares would also affect his situational awareness reflexes, but not hugely. More relevantly, it's close to one of the regions that Ma'ar has obviously been trying to restructure on purpose away from fear-reactions, but where the process is only half done. Given the incompleteness, it's not totally clear what nudging at this would do, whether it would undo some of his work or the opposite or some third thing, but it seems very likely to affect it somehow.

"It might propagate to all your tinkering with your reflexes. I don't know if it'd help you or undo your progress or do something weird at a glance but I might be able to puzzle it out if I stared at you long enough."

"Oh." Ma''ar frowns. "I - don't really like the idea of a weird thing happening to my head. I don't mind if you look more, though."

He's very tired. He closes his eyes again.

She can look while he dozes.

Ma'ar's mind is complex and intricate to begin with, and made even more complicated by both the patterns of fear-reflexes imprinted on it by his past experiences, and the systematic nudges he's been making all on his own. If she stares long enough, though, she can find a spot to poke that looks like it ought to soothe the uptick in nightmares without affecting too much else.

Ma'ar drowses for a while, squirming to get comfortable, and eventually falls into a deeper sleep. He's so tired.

She writes herself directions to the correct spot and leaves him a note saying to Mindtouch her if he needs anything and goes to say hi properly to her mother, and to Skan, and then have dinner.

Ma'ar spends the rest of that day alternately sleeping, yelling himself awake from nightmares, slipping in and out of a half-doze, semiconsciously checking Azabel's wards, and being prodded by the Healing staff when they want him to drink water or take painkillers. He doesn't manage to drag himself to full alertness and actually notice and read Azabel's note until after sundown.

:..Azabel?:

She's going over the notes from the class sessions she missed. :Yes?: