Do you want me to calm you down?

He takes a while to parse the question and then nods. 

She calms him, hesitating at the doorframe rather than go in in case that's all he needs right now.

Angband Leareth is thinking that he should plausibly have come up with some kind of PLAN before he became unexpectedly INCAPABLE of thinking or communicating or understanding what people were saying to him, due to being too upset. Not that he was very capable of planning before.

He thinks he wants to talk to her, but also saying words is incredibly hard.

"Can you. Read my mind again." 

"Yes." She sits. She starts.

Leareth is thinking that he's pretty sure he isn't in Angband anymore. He thinks this for a number of reasons but mostly because the war and his captivity would both have looked very different if Melkor's powers included the generator behind 'give people random agnosias', and at a certain point it was just definitely more parsimonious to instead conclude that not that.

He remembers having that thought and still being stuck for days on having forgotten how to have beliefs about what reality is and it being too terrifying to try, and then he made that leap, and then he was stuck again on 'what now', and it seemed like maybe some actions still weren't safe but having emotions was, and then...this.

Apparently being not in Angband is really scary! This honestly seems kind of stupid of his brain! 

"You might have thought you were out before, if he got any of the fake rescues close enough, and then soon after you thought you were out things got bad," she speculates.

That would make sense, but he doesn't think it's right?

For one, he's numbered at least fifty fake rescue memories, there can't be that many more, and he was always upset and scared, and sometimes genuinely caught off guard, when things inevitably became horrible again, but - it wasn't because he'd formed a belief about being out, he was never confused enough for his brain to start gnawing on itself until it generated hypotheses about reality, he was trying really hard to not ever do that. 

He did find a couple of memories, eventually, where he was left alone for weeks or months, long enough to get bored - initially he'd been thinking that didn't usually happen - but he had still been in Arda, without inexplicable compulsions and definitely without weird agnosia-causing otherworldly powers being used on him, and so he hadn't been confused enough to get really frustrated about it. It turns out he really hates being confused. 

"Hmm. Uh, is the - magnitude of the implications of how many worlds there are getting to you?"

Maybe it's that? Implications of something feels right. Implications of his actions having real consequences? There are stakes, and he - there was something he cared about once - he doesn't know what it was because it wasn't safe to try or care or have goals in Angband, it was just a lever that could be used against him - but it's got to still be out there, and still matter, and...and that's terrifying, that maybe it's over now but it's still too late, he already destroyed the parts of him that were good for anything and he can't get them back. 

"Do you want me to ask the other Leareth in?"

–aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa he doesn't know. 

She waits.

What did she want the other Leareth to do. 

"...to ask what your goals would have been before. Or reconstruct it if it'd be relatively recent."

He's scared, though it's muted behind the calm. It takes some effort to unpack why. 

...Is he afraid the other Leareth is going to - be disappointed in him? No, it's deeper than that. Refuse to recognize him as the same person? (Even now, some voice in his hindbrain is babbling about how the other Leareth is probably going to kill him, though it'd be pretty surprising if he'd held off until now and changed his mind.)

But he's not sure how he would have felt, before, about another version of himself who had lost this much of his internal fabric. He's - not a very safe person. Most of the ways you could change a Leareth at random result in a monster. And it doesn't feel obvious that he could have the other Leareth explain it; if that worked, he could've kept it in his written notes, and then why would he have been so protective of his core memories in the first place? 

( - a shattered tower - )

"...I might be able to fix that? I'm not sure."

Oh.

...How? Her power can do a lot, that’s evident, but this is a different thing from making him unable to recognize faces.

"I don't know that I can but there is the other you around to copy from, if he's all right with that."

Deep breath. He’s still scared, but - 

- realistically he’s probably scared because he’s in a situation he doesn’t control, without magic, without resources, mostly not even oriented to what’s happening, and two thousand years of hard-earned paranoia are screaming at him that when this happens he usually dies. Which is true, but surely it ought to make some difference that there’s another Leareth, right there, who is in control. (A Leareth he knows well, the person he was around 792, plus or minus some minor different experiences thanks to Bella existing.) And if he can’t trust his alt then things are kind of hopeless anyway. 

He steels himself. “We should ask him about that.”

She nudges the local Leareth (and acquires permission to relay to him again).

He comes in. “Yes?”

(It seems stupid to be sitting on the floor in a corner, he’s not even sure how he got there, so Angband Leareth picks himself up and drags himself back to his bed.)

"We were wondering whether it would be possible to use you as a template to copy from for reconstructing some damaged parts of your alt's mind."

He starts to answer instantly, then pauses, thinks about it for longer. 

”Yes. Of course. His core memories, or something else?”