S'pose not. Trades off against kissing, though. Macalaure once said to me that he thinks we're all only half people on our own but we can make up for each other. I think he might kind of be right about that. Nelyo forgets that he counts, too, as an end in the ends he is juggling, and because he uses himself so unrelentingly, he ends up using everyone more than he means to. When we're around we can demand him - his love, his time, not his work on our behalf - and that snaps him out of it. You shouldn't feel like you have to do it, I've never seen anyone who wasn't family do it successfully - Father does it oddly, and with inconsistent results, by pretending to be unimpressed with everything Nelyo does until Nelyo admits to himself that he's proud of himself and in fact pretty fucking impressive. Fingon does it just by openly and aggressively caring a lot about Nelyo's wellbeing until if Nelyo cares about him at all he has to care about himself. 

The piece Macalaure is missing is that he forgets other people exist. Or - he knows they exist, he cares a lot what they think of him, he wants to impress and entertain and perform for them, but he forgets that most people are not performing all the time and that they keep existing when they leave whatever stage he's encountering them on. It is not good for him to be alone for too long. He was King when Nelyo was in Angband and he was good at it but only in a day to day way, there was nothing he intended to achieve with it, and I had to point out to him when people had emotional needs for reassurance and affection from him. 

Both of the two of them live life at too many removes. That's a new thing. Before the war these failings were much slighter, and harder to notice.

Well. They're not going to have to live with the war any more. Maybe they'll get better.

It works out fine when we're all around to help each other. 

Caranthir dislikes people as much as me but he likes Dwarves, they're more reasonable in his opinion. He forms opinions of people very rapidly and is a good judge of character but - people find it annoying to be sized up and immediately evaluated as worthless and uninteresting, and he doesn't find many people so but when he does he's not shy about saying so and the sort of people he finds worthless and uninteresting are disproportionately represented among politicians. So even worse than me at politics. He likes economics, sociology, history, people in the abstract rather than the particular. He's generous. He's easy to embarrass. He's ridiculously good with money and is the only reason we have any, Elves in general don't really understand it. 

I don't think I could pull of worthless if I tried but I'll do my best to avoid uninteresting.

He'll like you. It's a specific politician type - not having any principles beyond 'coming out of this looking like I did nothing wrong'.

Ecch. Can't blame him. ...Slightly jealous, actually.

That he can get away with aggressive disdain for a lot of important people?

Important people who deserve it. But yes.

They do deserve it, but we still do not take Moryo to parties. Curufin you've met and I think you know everything important about him except that he constantly has minor injuries inflicted at the workbench and before my father died I do not think he ever accidentally injured himself. And he doesn't smile anymore. There's no one left who he'll believe when reassured that he's brilliant, our father was the only person whose opinion he ever took seriously on that.

So I can solve most of his problems by resurrecting your father, which I was going to do anyway. Convenient.

And most of Pityo's problems you can solve by reembodying Telvo. The two of them complement each other very well and together you can just kind of set them a project and expect it'll happen in some ridiculous and surprising way. Alone they - don't do much. He's a great help on any task you set him to but he hasn't taken the initiative on any.

Yeah if someone's twin is gone by default getting them back seems like the best possible way to help them.

Yup.

Yeah, that got predictably depressing. Let's think about something else. Like kissing. Hm. If all elf hair is sensitive, will she get any particular reaction from kissing his eyebrows or would that just be silly?

Silly, but not, like, in an objectionable way. Kissing experiments that are a little absurd are still quite all right.

Well, it's not really the same kind of hair, so that makes sense. She'll just have to tug on his regular hair some more.

Well if she finds getting reactions from him to be that satisfying they can do it all day.

She finds lots of things about the kind of thing that results from playing with his hair satisfying but getting reactions is definitely up there.

And none of this even rightly qualifies as a waste of time that is owed to their people!

It really doesn't! Milliways is so convenient like that.

It'll probably be a few more days of guiltless experimentation before they are inclined to seriously get to work on magic.

Mm, experimentation.

But. Eventually!

"I wonder if Bar minds if I remodel the backyard."

"Let's go ask her."

"Mmhm," she says, stretching and sliding out of bed to tug her dress back on.

He heroically avoids getting distracted by this and dragging her back into bed.