"Sure. Um--I'm sorry about getting pissy with you at dinner. Sorry-ish. Homosexual marriage--isn't a universal human thing." She glances at Lady Hareth. "A long time ago it was pretty much verboten for people of the same gender to be together, although you could often get away with it if you were discreet but not always. So anyway a few centuries ago people who were attracted to the same gender got fed up with this and started working for the right to not be reviled for falling in love with the wrong person and now we have what we have. And I'm attracted to both women and men" soft curves in her arms and softer lips under hers; a high, girlish giggle "so I suppose it's more immediate to me than to a lot of people, but an outsider swoopin in to try to change things--doesn't historically do anything good. If gay elves wanted my help I would give it, but--you were right, it's not really my place to try to intervene.

He feels his expression getting tense again. That's not going to be useful. Lady Hareth is watching him with curious amusement and that's not going to be useful either. And right now when they're trying to get the whole continent behind an alliance for an offensive is a spectacularly bad time to fan the flames of old damaging dangerous (and true, but..) rumors...

Maitimo'd know exactly what to say, would in fact find the conundrum delighful rather than discomfiting, and also wouldn't already be giving away too much with his facial expressions, because Maitimo'd had to relearn facial expressions and his expression never changed without conscious deliberation -

- I can't throw her at Maitimo. She might be able to resurrect people and I know exactly what he'll do first. 

"No," he says, "it's not. Suggesting to someone that they'd be helped by a campaign to let men marry men, and women marry women, is a grievous insult. I understand that you didn't intend it as one, but people will rightly take it as such. If your god permits that sort of thing then we can safely conclude he's not the same one as ours. I think you should focus on other avenues of being helpful. I don't care how you conduct yourself."

"Marriage isn't the first step, not from this kind of starting point--but I take your meaning." She's not really happy with it, but she's also not the kind of person who will stick to their guns even to the detriment of the people they're trying to help. "And I...suspect I would have been less...sensitive...absent the conversation with Lady Hareth before dinner. Is it true that some of you think humans are better off dying of old age, or was that another misunderstanding?"

"There are people who think that. By some of 'you' do you mean some of my subjects, some of my household, some of my species? Are there no people in your realm who think that?"

"Okay, I take your point. Are there enough of them to be a problem, would be a better question. It seems worth asking, considering."

"You can open by explaining that you think men should be allowed to marry each other, and then when you merely want to make everyone immortal the most conservative of my acquaintances will be relieved. No one in a Noldorin realm would have leave to interfere with the teaching of magic on those grounds, and my father would provide support to you if any of them did."

"Okay, fair enough," she giggles. "What's up with those faces you were making earlier, though, you looked like a gay person killed your favorite cat."

Just my family, and it wasn't actually his fault.

"I was shocked there are communities where that kind of conduct is acceptable."

"Mhm." She doesn't believe him. That face was not just a shocked face. He knows she doesn't believe him, he can read her mind, but she's not going to force him to acknowledge it by saying it out loud.

He's tempted to ask for more intermediate Effort exercises, because this actually does not matter and that does, but they tried changing the subject at dinner and now she's raised it again, and is apparently still dissatisfied. And if she keeps raising it with people eventually it'll come up in a way that lets someone make a certain inference and fracture the current alliance.

"Have I failed to make it clear," he says, "that persistent interest in discussing this topic with someone is almost impossible to interpret other than as a serious insult? I like you, and I need to be able to work with you independent of liking you, but it's frustrating to be in the presence of someone who is not only constantly making implications that people'd ordinarily comes to blows over but also thinks that doing so is open-minded."

"I'm sorry," and she means it "I won't bring it up again" and she means that too. "Is there any way of shielding my thoughts?" because while she understands that logistically it would be best to drop the subject like a hot potato she probably wouldn't be able to change her actual opinion even if she wanted to and it would be best not to be broadcasting it every time the subject came up.

"Yes, certainly. It's a series of exercises, and from the way you meditate I expect you'd learn them reasonably quickly -" and he describes how one develops the habit of delineating private from public thoughts.

"Oh, that sounds easy!" And, hm, what to use, none of them speak any of her languages from home except the one she's been speaking to them, she could pick one of those, but she's presumably going to teach them at some point...why didn't she and Odette invent any private ciphers as children, that would make this easier...she settles for putting her private thoughts in a basket--a cornucopia, actually, let's go with that--and withdrawing and tossing out anything meant to be public. Then she meditates on that for a while.

Lady Hareth gets tired of practicing magic before Illia is done meditating on osanwë privacy. "By your leave, my lord," she says, and Fingon bids her a good night, and then is glared at when he doesn't also leave the room because this will leave Illia unchaperoned.

Men.

"Lady Hareth, I genuinely appreciate your concern, but at least for the next seven years if any elf tries to do anything to me I don't like I expect to be able to crack their head open."

She outright smiles at that. "Good night, Illia. It really has been a pleasure. Good night, m'lord." And leaves.

Fingon looks amused. "And you can teach everyone else how to do that, too, and then this problem is obviated entirely. You must have been wondering why it was a priority of mine that you meet her right away, given that she dislikes us more than anyone known to me anywhere on the continent."

"Having not met very many other people on this continent, the fact that her opinion wasn't typical of humans in general was not obvious to me. I'm glad it's not. I'm also glad I didn't end up having to give her the 'not my culture' explanation, that could have gone badly."

"I expect she'd actually have been fine with that, the Haladin are very against Elven mores in any form. Her opinions are not at all typical - we're met with parades when we visit, we've never had to conscript anyone because they're delighted at the chance to sign up for Elven training, there was briefly a seriously-held opinion that we're unusually humble gods - but her stance is, I think, important for you to know about if you're going to be working in Dor Lómin, and for the most part grounded in grievances that are felt more widely. And I'd like your opinion of us not to be mainly a consequence of limited exposure to other ones."

"I appreciate that. And I appreciate that you appreciated that I checked on the orcs before killing them. No, but what I actually meant by the 'not my culture' explanation was that while it may well be relevant that I am the same species as her and hers instead of you and yours, I have no more reason to think of them as my people than I do the Nihon-jin or the Haudenosaunee back home, and I have no less reason to think of you as my people than that. If I end up spending considerably more time and effort helping them than you it'll be because they need it more, not because they're more entitled to it."

"Most people find their sympathies extend more readily to their own species."

"I'd probably be more likely to feel that way if I had grown up thinking of my species as 'my species, as opposed to anyone else's' and not just just 'people.'"

"Are there no non-Men where you're from?"

"None that are people. We still have, like, animals."

"That seems like it'd remove many destablizing power dynamics."

"Sure sounds like it," she says wryly.