:Leareth. Can I get you some water or something?: 

:No: He's busy. He's trying to think. It's very very hard, but it's also very very very very important, so he has to. 

:Leareth, I'm going to look at you with Mindhealing Sight because I'm worried about you and I want to know how I can help: 

:All right: 

His mind is - well, he's definitely doing something with it. The sketchily rewoven bits of scaffolding that he's slowly and effortfully rewoven over the past eighteen months have some new sections, that look recent. But still fragile, and he's putting a lot of weight on it now, and there - isn't, really, enough there to hold together. Leareth has clearly been flinging around attempts at reinforcement, but it's messy and not really reducing the strain.

More than anything else, it looks the way that Melody, having seen his mind after the incident where Maitimo was too upset to speak to him for days, can extrapolate that it might have looked during. 

Leareth is very effortfully trying to piece together words. 

:Can you help me figure out how to do things if they are important. I can do things if they are not important so I, I do not understand why it is not working–: 

:In the long run, of course. In the short run - no, I think you need to stop trying to do that: 

:I have to: 

:No. You don't have to. You never have to do something that isn't going to work, and it - just look: She bounces her Sight to him. :You're - hurting yourself, by trying to do it in this order: 

Frustration in Leareth's mindvoice. :What are you expecting me to do instead? Only do things which are not important?: 

:No! I want you to recover and be okay and I think that's very important. I think that - trying to skip ahead to the part where you're already recovered enough to go personally win a war is not only not going to work, it's - probably going to make things worse and make it even harder. Can you please just trust me on that?: 

Leareth feels like he's run out of ways to try to say in different words that it doesn't matter, he has to find a way where it works. It's incredibly frustrating. He feels like crying again but he's too tired. 

This conversation is going nowhere and Melody should know what to say, to break out of this stupid impasse, but she doesn't. Mostly because it's hard to think about anything related to the war head-on, thanks to the blocks she put on herself, but if she undoes that it's not going to make things better because she will instead be crying. And, in hindsight, she...probably should have prioritized doing her own processing of the situation before this happened. There were times when Leareth was asleep. She should have asked Dree for respite care sooner so that she could get a handle on her own feelings before Leareth desperately needed her to be sane and reasonable and to know what to do to help. 

(All of this sort of feels like an observation that some disembodied presence which isn't exactly Melody is making.) 

:Leareth. I think I should put some temporary blocks on you, so you can calm down and feel less overwhelmed, and then we can talk about what makes sense. All right?: 

:No: It's NOT all right and Leareth is looking at Melody with betrayal in his eyes, and something too resigned to be fear. :I– no. Please: If she does that then he won't be able to care about the important thing and he has to has to find a way to care enough that he can remember how to put together the part of him that's broken. 

Gods. 

She can't think, but she doesn't need to have any original thoughts to notice exactly how bad it would be for Leareth's ability to trust her if she ignored that. 

Melody takes a deep breath, and lifts both hands, palms out. :Then I won't. Leareth, I'm never going to do Mindhealing to you that you don't agree to. I'm...going to go think about what I can do instead to help. Unless you don't want to be alone in which case I can stay: 

Trying to hold a conversation is exhausting and it's not even productive. :You can go: 

She probably shouldn't be leaving him alone right now, but at least he has his dog who will hopefully come alert them in some way if Leareth tries to do something stupid, and Melody REALLY CAN'T do this right now. 

She goes downstairs and starts making herself tea. Her hands are shaking for some reason, which is odd because she doesn't feel stressed. She doesn't feel anything in particular. 

"- Melody, I'm worried you're going to spill, do you want me to make the tea for you -" says Dree.

:Thank you: Melody steps away from the kettle. She...should probably try to explain to Dree but it's still very hard to even think about what's wrong and needs explaining, so she just picks up her squishy ball fidget toy from the kitchen table and squishes it while she paces back and forth across the kitchen. 

Dree makes her tea and gives her a not very full cup of it.

Melody thanks her again and sits down and sips the tea. It makes her feel slightly less like everything is very far away. 

:- Sorry, I should - explain. Leareth is - I don't know. Not listening to me. That hasn't come up before. I think he's - too upset to take in what I'm saying, but he doesn't want me to do anything that would help with that, so I'm sort of low on options here. - Separately I think I'm failing to think of obvious things because I blocked my emotions about the thing he's really upset about, but if I undo that I'm going to be sad about how most of my friends are probably dead and I do not see that being a useful addition to the situation. - Normally if I were this personally affected by something my patient needed I would call in another Mindhealer, I think I can't actually be professional, but in this case it's not like I can just leave: 

"I mean, you can leave. You're not the one with nightmare telepathy," says Dree. "I don't know that we'll do as good a job with him as you, we don't have context or anything, but you shouldn't have to be on call twenty-four hours a day six days a week."

:...Honestly I should probably try to give at least one person more of the context but I was worried before that it would just result in people being angry and then Leareth would be really scared: 

Melody is also not sure if that was a good idea to say, and it's probably incredibly confusing. 

"- angry? With who?"

:With Leareth. He - I - this is directly related to how he was someone who could end up in another world by accident and immediately notice they were about to have a war with an evil god and then play an instrumental role in winning it, but - he was planning a very ruthless operation in Velgarth and he's done a lot of things that most people would find morally objectionable: 

There she is just going to wait and see how Dree responds to that before digging herself any deeper into a hole, if hole-digging turns out to be the thing that's happening. 

"- well, I could try to get someone with prison experience, I guess?"

That sounds like they're not especially at risk of being KICKED OUT OF THEIR HOUSE over it? Probably? Melody is finding it hard to gauge how Dree is reacting because, surprise, it turns out that having a lot of her emotions blocked is bad for the ability to have normal social interactions. 

:If you can find someone with prison experience and experience with - very traumatized people - I can try to explain some background to them and then I think it seems like less of a disastrous plan for me to leave until I can get my head together and be professional again. ...Also it occurred to me that I could in theory try to convince Leareth to let me re-block the projective element of his Mindspeech, that would solve the nightmare telepathy issue, but it would also take away a lot of his ability to communicate so I think it's only worth it if you can't find anyone willing to risk a one in ten chance of getting hit with nightmare telepathy - probably that's high but I'm being pessimistic -: