"Without the ability to lie, which the geas largely prohibits, I have very few and atrophied social skills.  My goal is to assist you in your transition and help you to be able to comfortably work alongside me, but I do not know how to do that."

"I don't feel like I deserve help with any of the things I need help with."

"The geas obliges me to give you what you need, not what you deserve."

He buries his face in his hands.

He has only just come to terms with what he is.  - that's wrong, he definitely hasn't come to terms with what he is yet.  He's not ready to -

- he doesn't know how to go back on hating himself, this soon, when it still hurts this much, when he so badly wants to not feel bad about it any more, without just giving up on caring at all about what he and his friends and his family have done.

(He still can't say the word slaver, quite, even inside his own head.)

...can he just...?

"What is it?"

"...it's like..."

"...it's like, if I try to stop feeling like this - "

What would he say to Lylat, if he could talk to Lylat about this?  Can he talk to this stranger the way he talks to her?

"I can't - choose how I feel - if I try to wrench myself away from hating myself right now I'll have to do it so hard that I'll wind up - the person I was before, the person who kept telling himself it was okay.  And that we weren't doing anything wrong."

"The geas does not want you to be in pain," he observes, neutrally.

"...I really want that to make it okay.  But I don't know if I can think it does."

"Do any of the droids..."

"You said we'd be working alongside them, if we defected.  How," he takes a ragged breath, "do they feel about that?"

"Many of them are angry and resentful," he says.  "Many are unhappy about the notion of working alongside Jawas in general, and Jawas who enslaved them in particular.  Some are pragmatic enough to do so anyway, including X.  Many of the others respect her enough to follow her lead."

"I and she will both protect you from reprisals.  Is that what you're afraid of."

He shakes his head.  "Not just that.  I'm afraid of - "

" - going back to telling myself it was okay.  I can't not think it was okay without hating myself."

"I don't know how to help you with that.  I have felt that way myself, in the past, but I dealt with it by becoming evil.  The geas does not want you to do that, and it sounds like you don't want to do that either."

"I mean.  If I'm a s-slaver - "

His voice catches, like he's choking on his own throat, and he sucks in air audibly.

" - I already am evil."

"You are not evil in the way I am evil," he says.  "You are affected much more deeply by the sins you have committed than I am.  Now, understanding what you have done, you want to stop, and undo some of it if you can.  I was not affected by any of the evils I committed, and I never wanted to undo any of them."

(He is not lying: he believes he is telling the truth.)

He looks up at the stranger.

(The thought flickers across his mind that maybe someone even worse than him, but mind-controlled so they can't be a bad influence, is exactly the sort of person - the only sort of person - he's allowed to be close to, now.  Not a good person who will be insulted by his pain, nor yet an evil person who will revel in wickedness and wretchedness with him.)

(And it's not as though he has anything worth hiding, from this man.)

"Can I have a hug."

"Yes."

He moves to Thell, smoothly but not especially softly, and wraps his arms around him, loosely.  He does not know how to show physical affection to someone he is not wronging by doing so.

He clings, and buries his face in the stranger's chest.  He doesn't know what he's getting out of this hug, exactly, but - he is allowed this.  He is allowed this.  He is never allowed to receive comfort from Lylat again but he is allowed this.

He pats Thell's back, twice.  He wraps his arms a bit tighter.

Someone far away in another universe wanted good things for a bunch of prisoners, in a prison for the wicked.  Someone who did not seem to be wicked herself wanted that.  And this man hugging him is not that person, but his hug is an expression of that person's desire.  And it exists in his present, and more like it might exist in his future.

So that's - maybe - good.  In the middle of everything else being awful, maybe that can be good.

- except that the stranger was mind controlled by her, permanently for the rest of his life - in which case another slaver just wants him to feel better -

- he doesn't want to be in this hug any more.  He pulls away.

It is easy for him to pull away.  The stranger folds back into himself.

"...Are you...?"

"...If you're being mind-controlled into this...?"