it's 5am and my head hurts and I should be sleeping but I can't stop thinking about Azune using Mending on Bolaire. "I would show you," Bolaire says, fissures in his voice, in his composure, because it is so important that these people believe him. I can show you my body, my seams, my secrets, the most flawed and vulnerable parts of me. And then Azune, gentle as can be, says: "No, it's okay. That's not what I'm looking for. Bolaire, that's not what I'm looking for."
And he has been looking. While Hal asks his questions and Murray stares in half-wonder and half-glee. He is the one looking. He touched Bolaire's "face" before: "Does this feel like flesh?" searching for something living and person-like. And earlier: "Are you alive?" asking for sentience, intelligence, compassion. But Bolaire can't give him either. "How would I know?" and "It depends on your definition of alive." But still, even then, Azune casts Mending.
(And if you think about it, I feel like this is the same as Cure Wounds. This is the same as laying on hands and attempting to heal someone. Bolaire can't be stitched back together the way a flesh and blood body can, but his shape, his form, it can remember that it once was whole and return to that wholeness.)
Azune, hearing that Bolaire cannot confirm their personhood, does not draw back, does not reject or judge, he heals Bolaire, or the closest possible thing he can do for a person that is also an object. And it feels like such a monumental acknowledgement of Bolaire as more than a thing, with such a simple gesture. Azune could have easily sided with Thjazi's perspective on Bolaire, any of them could have, but instead he offers them a kindness, an intimacy, a reassurance. He says: you are person enough for me to put back together again if you were harmed, and this is how I would do it.
And most heart wrenching of all is the response to this gesture, "Oh, interesting," Talesin says, "I don't know [how it would affect me]. I hadn't even thought about that." How else would they heal you, Bolaire? If not with this? But of course you wouldn't consider that, because who would heal a thing?
Azune Nayar would. Azune Nayar who prays the names of the dead and trusts his loved ones implicitly and cares so deeply he stomachs unimaginable pain instead of ever forgetting. He would imagine a way to tell you that you are safe, and accepted, and that you are a person to him, all in one fell swoop. And I hope to the gods they don't forget he did cast that before they were interrupted, because I want to know what a healing spell that is a remembering spell does to an object this ancient and I want to know how that object/person feels about being healed, or even the gesture of it
