#and doli lin never has anything go this smoothly and he’s just like Are You Sure ??? even after the stuff about the dead temple god????

[wordsgood]

sorry i keep making posts about this but i really think halsin could fix doli lin. doli lin always feels so desperately old even though he’s mostly not and he’s going to live a lot longer, and then he meets halsin who immediately calls him ‘child.’ not in an infantilizing way, not in a distancing way, but in a tone of care, something doli lin has pretty much never gotten even when he was an actual child. and then he watches halsin care for thaniel, sees halsin doing everything he can to protect a centuries-old child, and he’s like……… ah! intellectually i knew people could have cared about me like this. but i never actually saw it. so i never even expected it. my child self never got this care but maybe now—

and he can talk to halsin about loreleaf and jatatyla! he can honestly express his fears that he will end up treating these kids he loves so so so much the same way that the adults in doli lin’s life treated him, mess them up in the same way he was messed up. you’re the guardian to another boy with the forest in his eyes, he can say. how do you handle the fear of ruining him?

maybe halsin has an answer, maybe he doesn’t, even hundreds of years in. maybe it’s better if he doesn’t. maybe the best they can do is share their fears and know that they’re not alone in them. and, in the mean time, doli lin has a lot of being treated tenderly to catch up on, so when he’s not,, you know, trying to survive the tadpole and the fighting and the shapeshifters and the endless camp romances, you can usually find him curled up against halsin’s side, reading aloud while halsin whittles, or doing some other boring old man hobbies together. just………enjoying the sensation of being cared for instead of always doing the caring, or insisting that he doesn’t need care because other people need it more