"I don't think you need to be worried about the welfare of Yeerks who go into your head if any do so."

Shrug. "I think I've told you literally every consideration I can think of and how I feel about them. I'm not very likely to be mad about it, whatever you do."

She sighs. "If you will stand just there and not move, I will go and have a look and then come right back out into Josefa again. I will go ear-to-ear to minimize uncomfortable handling procedure." She gets up from her desk.

Does freezing in terror count? Because that's what he's doing.

Yup. That counts.

She plants her ear on his and extends into his brain.

He is really very miserable about this, but then, he's really very miserable about almost everything. He's terrified of it happening at all, and disappointed because he caught the implication that they can also control bodies and wanted to test that, that part would be new and easier to verify and have a lot of implications. But he genuinely doesn't think his preferences should get any weight at all so he's not really considering asking her to do more than take a look and leave.

He does have a detailed mental map of Hell, one that might even be useful if they couldn't just conjure it all anyway.

It wasn't much like Angband. It wasn't as bad, and the lies weren't as competent. The place was presented to him as Purgatory, the torment as purifying and exalting. It should have been easy to suspect something, if he'd been thinking straight, but he never really got that chance. There was literally never a moment when he was neither in pain nor at work; they trained him out of even wanting to eat, and tried to do the same with sleep; they kept him desperately lonely and interacted with him mostly to ask things of him. And the things they asked weren't usually horrible - copy books, construct a printing press, scrub the floor, learn new languages - but sometimes they were. Sometimes he was asked to be the one to wield the knife. Sometimes he was asked to take responsibility for the minute details of when and how. He was asked to help teach.

When he got away he cut his tongue out because it was their tool and it didn't even work the first time. He put his eyes out because he couldn't trust them, because he wanted to stop being tempted to believe anything he saw, because gaslighting per se never happened to him other than through sight or hearing (and he thought for a long time about whether he would rather be deaf). He didn't want them back; he didn't parse himself as having a choice; the sense of ownership of his body he was starting to build back shattered when Missut healed him and he doesn't endorse even suggesting that anyone change their behavior in any way over his stupid preferences that were obviously installed by demons on purpose to cause problems, but it feels just a bit silly to be so precious about something he obviously wants and asked for and to just decide to reshape his body on a fucking whim. He thinks it might have taken days to get it all set up stably so he wouldn't just heal. It might be faster now. It wouldn't be nearly as fast as what Missut did, though.

He's exhausted - he still doesn't eat and sleeps even less now, though now he has enough to drink and regular social contact - and he wants so desperately to stop. If ceasing to exist were an option, it'd be a very attractive one. He'd take laying down somewhere comfortable and never moving again, if it seemed like there wasn't anything useful for him to do. He'd take being a yeerk host, probably, if it didn't involve being used for anything he wouldn't endorse and he got along at all with the yeerk. He misses sleep; he has a tendency to have some unholy bastard child of flashbacks and hypnic jerks whenever he tries, and if he waits enough of them out to actually fall asleep he has a tendency to proceed to immediately have horrible nightmares. And then wake up almost immediately. And then have flashbacks about it. He'd take being tortured if it'd convince his stupid half-asleep hindbrain that no one was coming after him.

That's - really most of it, though. Just sheer exhaustion and a little gaslighting that probably did involve illusions but not immersive ones. He was pretty confident about living on Earth right up until he got teleported, a thing demons and no one else he knows of can do and which he was concerned about demons doing to him if they ever found him. He's got a friend and a hobby and a favorite coffee shop.

He's got a lot of languages, so hey, that's something. He'd forget them all in a heartbeat on the principle that things he was taught by demons are probably a negative amount of useful to know, if he could, but he can't.

He thinks it's pathetic to hope for but he's trying and failing not to wonder if Ristrell can tell him that actually it's obvious where all the landmines are and it's fine for him to talk to people and fine for him to take his own preferences into account.

She rearranges his position slightly to get his ear above Josefa's. (He can probably hear that Josefa is breathing kind of oddly now but is waiting to accept her Yeerk again.) She goes out.

She straightens up and goes to transcribe the map of Hell. "You aren't a memetic hazard. You can go straight back to the Lórien and lie there indefinitely and I will send you a messenger when they've figured out how to go to your Earth. It is possible you can be annihilated but it would be something of a research project since your sort of immortality is new so you would probably be advised by relevant researchers to try at least one of those things first."

"...Thank you."

He doesn't have any better ideas than taking her advice and he does already know where to go to get teleported so he'll just go do that.

The teleporter is up for popping him right back to Lórien.

These people are so invested in him being in the creepy mindreading forest. Whatever. Hey, creepy forest, can he have a really hard surface to repeatedly bang his head against in an attempt to knock himself out?

No. He can have soporific-smelling flowers?

Stupid horrible creepy forest! He’s tempted to rip the flowers up but what if that hurts the forest? ...What if it hurts the forest when he stands on it?

Whatever. The yeerks have better ways of making him hurt people than sending him to the forest in a bad mood. And the horrible forest is allowed to drug him if it likes the idea of getting to watch his nightmares. He lies down and grouchily smells the flowers.

They send him aromatically drifting off to a dreamless sleep.

He would find a way to complain about that were he but conscious.

The flowers back off at the precise right time, of course, leaving him to awaken pleasantly in the exact best sort of sleeping spot.

He doesn't get up right away. He just lies there and thinks for a while.

If the yeerks were actually evil he'd have some huge problems but they wouldn't have much reason to lie to him, right? They can do whatever they want. If what they want involves not enslaving everyone they meet, that's nice, but there isn't actually anything he could hold back from them and so it'd be stupid to try. There is really nothing he wants them to only have if they're evil, after all.

Ristrell and also the creepy forest presumably already know that's how he feels about it and probably no one actually has any use for him, or at least no use worth putting up with his horrible memories for. And if they're going to destroy Hell, that's... well, that's great, that's the only thing he's really sure he cares about. And with that done or at least out of his hands he really doesn't have anything else to do. And it's not even exactly that he wants to do things, really. There is definitely some part of him that's glad that, since he's completely useless and cannot affect anything that actually matters, he can stop. There's just - nothing else. The forest can be interesting if it wants, or it can be obnoxiously paternalistic, or whatever it happens to feel like, and it doesn't matter. Lórien just... inherently lacks most of the good things about nature. Because it isn't. Because there isn't a story in the shape of every tree. Because it isn't real, it's just a work of art that seems superficially like a forest if you don't think too hard about it. And boy does he ever hate that there's anything with the ability to read minds and construct unreal space-warping scenarios optimized to provoke specific responses, though given that anything like that exists he's not going to complain about the specifics of its behavior. It could do so much worse than being extremely open about what it is and optimizing for comfort.

It's just that it's a suffocating cocoon of false beauty that can't quite actually hide the gaping pointlessness of his existence. But this is where everyone has seemed to think he should be and it's not like he has any reason to prefer anywhere else.

Hey, Lórien, got any brilliant ideas for how to fix that by cleverly arranging trees?

A spruce rustles sadly. It does not solve his problem.

I'm sorry your problems are fundamental to the way you are. They seem worse than mine, if you were looking to wallow.

The forest has no obvious reply to this.

He'll just stay here until someone wants something from him. He's not sure if he wants them to or not. On the one hand, if they did, he'd have things to do. On the other hand, if they did, he'd have things to do.

He goes unbothered except by the forest trying as hard as possible to be relaxing and lovely.

He discovers within himself a preference other than to end Hell, and it is to not be in this forest. The people who have so insistently tried to get him to experience the forest can either live with that or possess him and make him go back. Goodbye, horrible forest.

The same Elf is waiting on his way out. "Hello. Where to?"

He blinks confusedly and shrugs.

"Humans aren't actually welcome in most parts of Valinor," says the Elf apologetically.