Nod. :I think I see why you said that I would find to valuable to meet the people from your organization. They sound incredibly admirable.: 

He has to take a moment to close his eyes and retrieve his previous train of thought, because he's not actually sure he was done debriefing all of his decisions with Iomedae. 

:- Right. In that case I am very glad I made the decision I did, even if your plan is not information I had at the time. ...I am trying to think what else. I brought you here. I decided to stay with you until I was actually due for my meeting with Urtho, which - might or might not have been a mistake in expectation in the scenario where the Nameless God did turn out to be an enemy, and - which was a decision I made mostly because I felt very reluctant to leave, as opposed to on strategic grounds. In practice it went fine, obviously, and I am very glad I stayed, but I am not sure if the decision process was one I endorse.: 

:It seems possible that you are having the problem where being in love with someone compromises your judgment. When I was young I found that quite hard to compensate for.:

What are you even supposed to say to that. 

:I - should - probably try to figure out if I am having that problem and if so how to compensate for it: Ma'ar manages, even though this feels like a very inane response, because he's pretty sure he can't just sit here not saying anything.

(And he's separately confused about why he feels so put on the spot and like he has no reasonable response to this lined up. He...had in fact thought to wonder about it, before.) 

:You can have the headband back to think about it, if you like. It - takes a lot of practice - I'm happy to try to show you how I do it, but it's not something I am wildly experienced with either.:

:Mmm.:

Is putting the headband back on going to be terrible. Iomedae said it wasn't supposed to be terrible, so the fact that it's often kind of terrible probably points at some different kind of mistake he's making. He's pretty sure it's a separate mistake from the - maybe having his judgement compromised because he's maybe in love with Ioemdae?? That does not seem like a problem that should cause him to be miserable. At least he doesn't think so. 

Focus. :I - think I would like to know how you do it. It might help to have the headband but - I am slightly worried about the thing where both putting it on and taking it off seem to be...difficult transitions...which you said is not really supposed to happen. ...Um. I cannot actually tell if you are - bothered if I feel this way - and that is probably going to factor in to whether I end up concluding that I did something wrong and then analyzing it in an exhausting way.: 

:Of course I'm not bothered! That would be wholly unreasonable of me no matter who you were but you saved my life and ended the war and I'm quite in love with you myself so I really wouldn't call myself inconvenienced by it! I just want you to be able to think about what you want, here, what rules you think should guide you, instead of having feelings and then looking back on them and wishing you had walked away instead.:

Oh. 

That's...a thing. Which he has positive, if confusing, feelings about. Which should probably not actually be incredibly surprising? He's replaying the actual things Iomedae has said to him over the last few days and...this is not especially surprising. He just - hasn't been looking at it straight-on, for some reason, probably because it kept repeatedly not feeling like a good time. 

It's peacetime. They're as safe as they're ever likely to be in Velgarth. There is really no reason, at this point, not to look at it. 

He takes a deep breath. :I think borrowing the headband would be useful, and we definitely need to have this conversation before we - decide anything. ...I think it is possible I might get upset for some completely unpredictable reason, I think that is happening a lot right now and I am not entirely sure what is going on, it is not - about you.: 

:You've been enduring a lot for a long time.: And she takes the headband off and offers it to him.

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.) 

This seems like a totally reasonable analysis along the lines she herself did the first time she fell in love with someone and she approves wholeheartedly! She's not going to interrupt him with commentary, that would be rude. In general she's trying not to - be persuasive, here, about anything, he should figure out for himself what he wants and how he'll know if that changes, and until he knows that she should mostly stay out of his way.

He lets her see, but thinks through all of it in silence without saying anything. 

...He doesn't want to decide to stop having the feelings that are plausibly going to compromise his judgement in some situations. He wants - the thing they can have if they both love each other. It feels like a step toward being a whole and happy human, it's not - unbiased - but it feels like at least some of the time it might be the kind of thing that biases him in directions that are better than the ones he was biased in before. Maybe. 

He thinks he can reason around it, at least well enough not to accidentally make decisions that are very bad for his other goals, and he thinks he's - willing to accept that sometimes his priorities will be slightly shifted around. The obvious path is just to write down all the cases where he has strong feelings about something Iomedae-related, and invest in building some very firm mental habits to catch himself in those patterns, that will work with or without the headband. He should make a regular habit of keeping his private notes up to date, that's one of the best ways he has to replicate the headband effect of being able to observe his own thoughts and emotions, he's just - had less time, lately. But it's peacetime now. He can afford it. 

He plausibly also wants Iomedae's help to notice if he's in a situation of the type where his judgement might be compromised by being in love with her, and reminding him to think about it. And he maybe wants to borrow the headband for a few minutes every day, at least until he has non-headband-reliant mental habits really solidly down. 

Both of those are things Iomedae should get to have input on, so - what does she think? 

:I will definitely let you know if I think your judgment might be compromised, and I think borrowing the headband every day is a good idea. We share it around for major decisions in council, at home.:

:That makes sense. It is incredibly useful once you are - used to it.: 

...He's not sure where this conversation goes from here. 

Well, she's not going to rush him on the thinking-through-everything.

He'll spend a while mulling on it, turning over the various thoughts and emotions and looking at them from different angles, but he...feels like he's poked at most of the main considerations here? 

...The part he's now confused about is that he's never actually had a romantic relationship of a kind that - feels like what he would want with Iomedae? He's slept with plenty of people, sometimes on a recurring basis, on one occasion over a period of years.

He's assiduously avoided any kind of intimate relationship with people in his chain of command. This was not a preexisting norm in Predain, but Predain before his time mostly just didn't have women in political let alone military positions, and it's a norm that Tantara has that, after years of watching his fellow students at Urtho's Tower making baffling decisions in the pursuit of romance, he decided he approved of. It didn't feel like much of a sacrifice; he can't think of a time where he would have romantically pursued someone, or more likely allowed himself to be pursued by them, if not for the fact that it was against the rules. 

He's generally liked the women he courted, or who courted him. Respected them, even. But it's...different...it was always at least a bit the case that they lived and moved in different worlds, and he thinks that mattered to him, that it usually didn't feel like anything really important was at stake. 

Right now it feels like something very important could be at stake. It's...scary, actually, though of course he doesn't feel scared right now. 

(He continues to hold all of these thoughts open to Iomedae.) 

:'no one in your chain of command' is a good rule. You should definitely stick to it. It can be inconvenient, for example if every single person who believes in your cause and your vision joins your paladin order, but it's in fact worth it. 

I don't know what you want. I can tell you what I want, if you don't think it'll distract you from figuring out what you want.:

:...I suppose I should not join your paladin order, then.: He shakes his head a little. :Assuming you would even have me. ...I think it would be helpful, and not distracting, to know more of what you want.: Just so he can get a wider sense of the space of things people might want at all, if it's neither the thing he had before nor, what, getting married in a temple and raising children, which feels faintly ridiculous as a concept applied to him and more ridiculous than that applied to Iomedae. 

:I want to spar at whatever the appropriate handicap turns out to be and figure out the logistics and side effects of using Urtho's contagious magic-eating weapon on a plane of Hell and invent interworld Greater Teleport and have sex and smile knowingly at each other and build the Church of Aroden in Predain and pet your hair and so on, for about the next decade, until I ascend and become a god who I guess I should warn you won't - I love human things, I'm human, I'm not ashamed of that, but I'm not planning to keep it. I'm going to be the god that we need to fix the world, and I won't be like Shizuru, I won't have - love, I won't have weaknesses.:

:That makes sense. I would not expect you to be that kind of god, I cannot see how you could be. It is not - really the thing about you that is important to me, that you love me, though I - it does make me happy. All of those things sound - good. And–: 

He considers it for a while. 

:I want to understand how you think. As much as I can, in the time that we have. I want - your world has so much history to build on, and you have - built so much on it - I know it will still be there but I want to learn it from you. I want to know all the stories of your life and meet your friends and see the organization you built. I want to do something completely ridiculous like built a nice cabin in the literal Void and have sex with you there. ...Also I would really like to kill the Star-Eyed for you but I am unlikely to be able to pull that off.: 

: - only because we will probably kill her before you grow that strong! I would bet on you getting it done eventually.:

Heeeeee kind of wants to kiss her for saying that! And also currently has headband-supercharged powers of noticing what Iomedae wants purely from body language. Does it seem like she would be on board with this plan? 

(He's so happy. It's a confusing dizzy kind of happiness that almost hurts, he's so happy.) 

Yes, absolutely she would enjoy that! She's felt that way for a while and not especially been concealing it except while he was thinking about whether his judgment was being compromised.

Ma'ar kisses her. 

(He's kissed a lot of people. Insofar as there's a generalizable skill there, he's good at it. Most of the times, he even wanted to be there kissing whoever it was, though he's not sure he's ever been quite this thoroughly delighted about it.) 

This is really not what he was expecting when he Gated here today, but it's peacetime, and he is explicitly taking at least today off, and they're as safe as they can reasonably be and Iomedae is okay. And he...is probably not entirely okay, not really, Iomedae is right that he's spent a very long time enduring a lot of things, and Predain is still waiting for him with its parades but also its unsolved problems. But for right now, he's deciding not to use any of his headband-boosted faculties on thinking about that. 

Iomedae is okay. She has a terrifying assault on Hell to plan but honestly she absolutely loves that kind of thing, and she has allies, and she has friends, and she has peace, and she has someone who would try, with or without her, to make the world better, who conceives of himself as someone who could never stop, and he's not in her chain of command for once, and she is human and yearns for human things.

She is not particularly good at kissing. She has spent precisely eight days of her life trying out a romantic relationship and it was several decades ago. If you could kiss with a sword she would probably be much better at it.