He puts it on.
It's starting to become a familiar experience, the way his mind - opens up, a sudden new spaciousness, the sense he could pick any of a dozen lines of thought he wasn't even consciously aware of a moment ago and follow them. The sense of - transparency, in his own thoughts, of having space not just to have them but to be an observer of them. And the emotions - intensifying, some, but mostly just spreading out, as though his emotions were previously a dozen different shades of paint, present in various ratios but all mixed together, are now neatly separately into swatches of emotional color that he can pull at one at a time and name and examine.
...He is not currently too upset or overwhelmed to easily form his thoughts into Mindspeech, but it feels like it might be more useful to Iomedae to just see it, so he opens his shields further and offers a deeper Mindspeech link to her, if she wants to take it.
He's happy. It actually takes a few entire seconds to figure out what the feeling is, because apparently it's been a very long time - flag that observation, it...probably explains some things about his recent confusing reactions to things - and it's a different flavor of it from the happiness he had, in hindsight so briefly, at Urtho's Tower. There's safety there, and separate from it - though it's easy to fail to distinguish them when he isn't the headband - the feeling of not being alone. Which, again in hindsight, he had such a bare taste of at Urtho's Tower, it never felt like he was one of them), but it's so much more than just that flavor.
It's more than just that. He admires Iomedae, possibly more than he's ever admired anyone, and he thinks he basically endorses that, who could possibly disagree that Iomedae is one of the more impressive people in the world, but it's a distractingly warm and bright feeling and he could definitely see how it could - block out other quiet notes of dissatisfaction, make it hard to notice if in any given case he actually disagrees with Iomedae's decision or Iomedae's reasoning.
(He appreciates her so much -)
He wants her to be proud of him. This is not an entirely unfamiliar emotion - he wanted it very badly from Urtho, and over years learned to ignore the itchy pain of not having that - but the way it feels when she is proud of him (happyhappyhappy) is....a different flavor of the thing. ...He thinks this is actually fine, to the extent that the kinds of thing Iomedae will be proud of him about basically just match the kinds of action he endorses doing anyway, though it maybe shifts the relative weighting on things and he should keep that in mind.
It feels very good having saved her life. It especially feels very good when she thanks him for it.
He wants to be around her. Now that he's staring at it, he thinks he wants it even apart from wanting her advice or her reassurance or for her to make him not afraid, or wanting to be nearby enough that he can have her out of a dangerous situation and through a Gate in less than a second, or wanting to be nearby where she could protect him from an attack and so he could coax his mind to relax and stop obsessively tracking all of the potential threats. But even if it weren't any of those things, it feels - warm and happy and good to be where she is. Though he doesn't completely blame himself for not noticing the distinction before, since most of the time either one or the other of those conditions did hold.
He wants her to be safe and happy and achieve everything she wants. Which is something he wants for everyone, and the combined emotional force of wanting it for everyone still feels like it's probably stronger, overall, when he's focusing on it - but Iomedae is right here and she's very very salient to his mind and it's easy to mostly focus on the Iomedae-related feelings at the exclusion of all the others. Though this is mitigated by the fact that, as far as he can tell, one of the most important facts about Iomedae is that she too wants everyone to be safe and happy and have everything they need and want, to the extent that probably this is most of what it means for her to be achieve everything she wants. And he thinks he - probably endorses to some extent focusing on what he can do personally for Iomedae's safety and wellbeing more than what he can do personally for the wellbeing of a randomly selected peasant in Predain, because she can do so much with it, but - not infinitely. And not always, because Iomedae faces greater dangers than most people but she's also far more equipped to protect herself against them.
- remembering the awful feeling of that not being true, the moments when Iomedae was severely injured and helpless and Ma'ar desperately wanted her advice and the only way he was ever going to have her advice again was if he could manage to stay in control of the situation, on his own, without her advice. And he was scared for a lot of reasons, the future of Predain looming high among them, but - yeah, to a significant extent he was scared because losing Iomedae, specifically, felt like one of the worst things that could happen. It would in fact have been pretty bad for a whole range of reasons! But probably not all of the strength of that fear was for strategic reasons.
He gets a lot more out of her hugs than with most people, and - can appreciate her touch from a much wider range of emotional states? Normally, when he's in the mode of - orienting toward threats, even very abstract threats like faraway troops that definitely aren't about to attack him back in the Citadel, often even non-agentic threats like storms and droughts and plagues - this is fairly incompatible with finding it comfortable to be touched, let alone actively wanting it. He can barely remember being young enough that his parents ever cuddled him, even when they were still alive - older children were more likely to be whacked with sticks for misbehaving, not that this particularly bothered him - and after that was a journey of months that (actually he is definitely not going to think about with the headband on.) It took multiple years after he reached the safety of Urtho's Tower before he learned to really ever be in the right headspace for physical intimacy, though he did eventually put a lot of effort into that for...reasons...but since the beginning of the war, he suspects he's mostly fallen back on much older habits. With Iomedae, it's - well, probably a lot of it is just the no-fear effect, but he thinks it isn't just that, she's also - given him some very costly demonstrations that she wants him to stay alive, and is competent to achieve that, and that he can afford to feel safe in her arms.
...Ma'ar doesn't especially think this aspect is a problem. He thinks he's just right about the implicit factual claim that Iomedae isn't going to hurt him. It's a good thing, that he hasn't had in a long time, and - never really had alongside all of the other good things, like Iomedae being one of the most objectively impressive people in the entire world.
(There is definitely an undercurrent of thinking that it would be very enjoyable to kiss Iomedae right now, but Ma'ar is mostly not focused on that, it seems - not unrelated to, but mostly downstream of, the other things that are actually likely to be compromising his judgement.)