"I see. That's too bad. Couldn't happen to us, at least, we're not Elves. We die eventually."

"So far, anyway."

"Yeah, don't fix any of the Enemy's prisoners of their mortality if you're not going to rescue them. Not that I was too worried."

"Well, fixing mortality is an ongoing thing, you have to keep de-aging yourself, it's not just one exercise of magic and then you're as undying as an elf. So there's that."

"Yay. We don't usually get people taken prisoner, usually the orcs just kill them. Slowly, but still."

"Morgoth seems like the kind of guy who would buy into the whole 'Elves are more important than Men' thing, so that doesn't really surprise me."

This earns her another smile. "I don't think torturing us is a particularly satisfying outcome because we can't end up bound to him."

"...Point in favor of lacking the soul thing being worth mortality. Assuming that's how that works."

"Yeah, I'm very happy we cannot make unbreakable oaths, the Elves would probably demand fealty and then you're really stuck."

"The more I hear about this whole oaths thing the more creeped out I get by it."

"And I get the sense we haven't even heard the half of it."

"To be honest I suspect I'll end up hearing a lot more than you would, if only because my sister tells me everything and can probably raise their dead."

"...well. Yes, I expect that'd inspire honesty on some topics. Or a lot of dishonesty if they think they can pull it off."

"It helps that the factions disagree somewhat on who, exactly, should be brought back. So you hear things from one side that you don't from the other."

She smiles. "Oh, do they. Yes, that'd help."

"There's not a lot of dissent, but some."

"Around us they're so - 

The cousins will come for a visit, in full Elf regalia, and greet each other very formally and say everything with their eyes and you can tell sometimes that they're in the middle of a raging argument or that they hate each others guts or that they're clearly secretly sleeping together but in terms of what they say to us, absolutely nothing."

"...They're clearly what?" Beat. "Um, if there's no such thing as privacy in an elven fortress--should you be saying that?" She checks that there aren't any elves spying on them, pulls up her sleeve, and writes on her forearm in melanin so Lady Hareth can see, I was told that people who wanted to make trouble between the factions were spreading rumors about something like that. I'm not saying it isn't true, or that I'm not curious, but it seems like it would do no one any good to encourage that kind of thing. I can make writing implements and a reasonable surface if you want to talk about it without causing that kind of friction. 

"I go around saying unkind things about Elves all the time. If they can hear me I think they've tuned me out. But sure, we could do that."

The issue isn't unkind, the issue is giving people who were already doing something unfortunate more ammunition to do it with, she writes, picks up a twig, blackens the end to charcoal and smooths it to make it easier to write with, and getting a piece of tree bark into something roughly like a thick, stiff paper, at least on one side.

He's enlisted you to defend his reputation? I mean, not that one should spread rumors, but if you're very attentive to Elf power dynamics and attention and nonverbal cues, and I am because I have to be, some things are hard to miss.

No. But the people who are trying to tarnish it are trying to drive a wedge between the two factions, and--for various reasons--I don't want that.

I can stick to facts. By any reasonable definition the House of Fëanor not loyal to the King. They get military orders from the King and ignore them. This doesn't happen more only because the King's decided having the illusion of power is more convenient for everyone involved. People say Fingon lets his cousin fuck him both because it's probably true and because they're aware of the political situation and it's expressive of how they feel about it. People'd stop saying it if the King could actually command the east in any meaningful sense. What's your interest in maintaining the polite fiction of a unified rule?

Well, I like Fingon and his cousin, um, is the person who thinks he's hallucinating and still captive and therefor needs more good things in his life because that's awful, or at least I'm assuming I'm right about which cousin, and also I really don't like the attitude against same gender relationships and dislike enabling having one used against its members, and if they abandon the polite fiction they might feel obliged to spend more of their resources posturing at each other and fewer at fighting Morgoth, and these guys might decide to go back to pressuring my sister not to bring Fëanor back, which would distress her considerably.

Those are decent reasons. Fair enough. I don't mind the activities, I mind the hypocrisy. Elves.