"I don't know if the not caring about things is a consequence of mental tampering or just of having murdered so many innocent people that I'm burned out on having emotional experiences."

"...I'm not sure either, but we can try to find out. Do you have an idea of when it started?"

"Started, probably some time in Angband, because choices weren't, wanting things didn't matter...it definitely got worse during the war, though...I thought dying and coming back might fix it but I think it's just made me more functional around it..."

"Well, Mandos is a terrible therapist. Learned helplessness is definitely a known phenomenon but it getting worse during the war suggests it may be more complicated than that. What did being less functional around it look like?"

"Getting paralyzed by choices, because it felt like expressing a preference let alone actually having one would be used against me - I used to just outsource that, Macalaurë tells me what to answer when people ask me questions that are too hard..."

"Has this expectation been reinforced since you left Angband in any way?"

"I mean, we were Doomed. I wanted things, badly, and I made all of them worse instead of better, and everyone I cared about died mostly under my command."

"How did the Doom work, I'd like to be able to disentangle that from other factors."

"We don't know. The Valar said -

'Tears unnumbered ye shall shed; and the Valar will fence Valinor against you, and shut you out, so that not even the echo of your lamentation shall pass over the mountains. On the House of Fëanor the wrath of the Valar lieth from the West unto the uttermost East, and upon all that will follow them it shall be laid also. Their Oath shall drive them, and yet betray them, and ever snatch away the very treasures that they have sworn to pursue. To evil end shall all things turn that they begin well; and by treason of kin unto kin, and the fear of treason, shall this come to pass. The Dispossessed shall they ever be for ever.

'Ye have spilled the blood of your kindred unrighteously and have stained the land of Aman. For blood ye shall render blood, and beyond Aman ye shall dwell in Death's shadow. For though Eru appointed to you to die not in Eä, and no sickness may assail you, yet slain ye may be, and slain ye shall be: by weapon and by torment and by grief; and your houseless spirits shall come then to Mandos. There long shall ye abide and yearn for your bodies, and find little pity though all whom ye have slain should entreat for you. And those that endure in Middle-earth and come not to Mandos shall grow weary of the world as a great burden, and shall wane, and become as shadows of regret before the younger race that cometh after. The Valar have spoken.'"

"...okay. So - damning but not in such a way that it can be concretely identified as the cause of specific details of any kind..."

"Exactly."

"And the Oath?"

"Also can cause the not-having-preferences thing, as apparently you know. We tried to resist it, by the end. Could hold out for a couple decades. Could have held out longer, but - if you know you're going to eventually sack a city it's better to do it while you're still capable of caring about things..."

"It shouldn't be ongoing in causing you not to have preferences right now, unless you're actively resisting some part of it for reasons I don't know about."

"No. Silmarils are lost forever, the one that's sort of possible to get back we're going to get back because of the fading..."

"But it may have contributed to forming a habit of not generating preferences, over long enough..."

"Possibly, yeah. 

I wanted to die. More than anything else, those six hundred years... I wanted to die. And then I did, and it wasn't any better..."

"What prevented you from acting on the impulse before that time?"

"Still people counting on me."

Nod. "Does it seem likely that having preferences again should be the highest-priority project?"

"Possibly not? I'd expect preferring to die to be the first thing to come back and that wasn't very useful."

"Can't rule that out," she agrees. "Besides memory restoration does anything else seem like a particularly useful avenue?"

"You said you did nightmares, panic attacks, presumably aversion to touch -"

"Yes."

"Maybe some of those."