"If you wanted that your redmage wouldn't tell people."

"It is an awful lot of plot work to let go to waste for no reason."

"That's a yes," he says quietly. "Love you, Maitimo."

"Mmhmm."

Cir's aunt is hired again. She's supposed to jump if Cir tells her to on the grounds that he'll know how optimistic Ruviri actually is even if Ruviri is motivated to be cagey about it.

Ruviri goes to meet Sunset. "Hi."

"Hi. How'd you get drawn into all this?"

"Uh, you made my brother sad and he thinks a redmage could fix it but not a boy one."

"I'm sorry I made your brother sad. It would surprise me if a redmage can fix it."

"Well, if I agree with you after my aunt will come back in time to, like, now, and tell us so." She looks around. No aunt.

"Okay. Do you need me to do anything?"

She takes off her glove and holds out her hand. "Only works if we're touching."

He goes very still. "Okay."

"- would you rather I do it, or - I have no magic understanding you powers beforehand."

He grits his teeth and takes her hand and now she has magic understanding him powers.

He's watching her, trying to guess who is puppetting her; Sauron is happy to be a girl but this one has yet to smile like him. She's either genuinely adolescent or that's an angle to which they gave specific attention. She is not nearly as worried as any real person would be at the thought of their wants and desires being twisted to passionately care about a stranger. Perhaps because it wasn't actually happening; though really, making some orc swear itself in love with him is probably more effective than making them pretend. He doesn't care enough to figure out why she's not afraid, and that scares him; he knows it is one of the places where the gap is widest with what he used to be.

Inside his head he is very far away. He is as far away as he can possibly be while still noticing the things about the world that he clings to like lifelines - not because he expects they mean anything, he expects they are carefully orchestrated lies, but they are lies designed for him, lies he was once very good at making sense of, and they're easier to steer with than desires-he-once-had or things-he-once-cared-about. So he is as far away inside his head as he can possibly be while still seeing people. Findekáno - they're good at Findekáno, lots of material to go off - far enough away that there is no risk he'll touch the redmage, quiet and watchful and braced for something horrible. Findekáno is always braced for something horrible around him. Maitimo is the something horrible. Maitimo hurts everyone he loves, all the time. This is the first reason he wants to die.

The second reason he wants to die is that existing like this is exhausting. Every movement and every comment sends his brain lurching towards agonizing paralyzing horror and every time he steers it back and keeps his face smooth and says the correct thing - except when he can't think of it, sometimes he can't think of it - and every single second is worse than death and he had an eternity of such seconds to anticipate before they dangled in front of him the hope that he could die. There are no things that are pleasant; there are things that are nearly empty, and he yearns for them, seeks them out wherever he can.

Very far away, he feels warmth in his hand and wonders if for some reason the touch of a redmage tortures him and that is the way this plot connects with all the setup for it. The sensation does not get torturous but also isn't empty. It does not remind him of anything else in Angband. He spends a long while trying to wrap his head around it.

- Ruviri bites her lip and watches him carefully and figures out a way to sit that isn't terrible. There are surprisingly, terribly few, but not zero.

She holds his hand and waits.

Right, okay. Engaging with the premise - "I am not experiencing this as unpleasant, are you?"

"It's not recreational but it's important and I think I can help and I think I can do it without my brother freaking out."

"It's not really important." He believes that.

"Well, I think it is."

"There are millions of me. It's not worth pouring all the resources of the multiverse into saving us all."

"I'm not. I'm just trying to help this one of you."

He doesn't let go of her hand. "What's it like?"

Hers can read minds (poor Cir, his can't) -

It's like:

Everything he does and everything he doesn't do is worn smooth with affectionate familiarity and she can see the outlines of the history and personality behind it all, and what she can't see she can guess, why he braids his hair that way and what it means if he goes still in a tenth of a second rather than a half-second and the desperate indifference with which he breathes, she can track his gaze to tell what he's reacting to and follow lines of tension either present or forced away to find what the reaction is or ought to be. When a moment of contact goes by she gets updates, little drops of context behind when he blinks and the length of the pauses between words, tracking changes as he reacts to the passage of time and to her, but most of it was transmitted all in one go at first touch and she knows and loves and loves and loves -

He giggles. He is still very still, but he giggles. "Oh," he says, figuring out the warm sensation, "oh, it's nice. It feels nice. Should've thought of that -"

She giggles too (carefully, doesn't want to salt an open wound, but it's not hard to be careful, it's like balancing when she walks, too comfortable a skill to be really a skill).