"Aren't they pretty? She took a job in our timeline with Vaire, the Vala of fate, weaving its threads. Then she got to unweave them all, it was lovely."

Bella giggles.

"Thank you for saving her, by the way."

"You're welcome."

"And for keeping my father out of trouble, and caring about him, and protecting him the right amount."

"You're welcome."

"You should ask the grownup version if you want more cool things like eidetic memory that might be hard to do with wizardry, he's going to spend the next five hundred years toying with Silmaril capabilities if no one stops him now that we can finally use them all properly."

"I'm generally very wary of mind-affecting wizardry," she says. "And it's hard to test safely, so adding the option of doing science to it didn't help as much as it did with other branches."

"Yes, Loki too. Of course. Wouldn't even listen to mood songs."

"Well, of course not, what if they worked."

"They do, I'd be insane without them. I understand the aversion, though."

"Yeah, there's some therapeutic use for mood alteration, but it's just - not something that sits right with my approach to my own thoughts."

"I do not plan to ever again be in a situation where it's needed either."

"Good plan."

"Shall I show you to the pretty guest rooms? Or to the library?"

"It's coming up on bedtime for me, actually, not that I'm not enormously tempted by the library."

As he stands up there's a pop, and another Elf is standing there. He has long black hair with gold wire elaborately braided in. "Careful," Maitimo says, "there are two of my father running around."

"He...invented cloning?"

"Thankfully no. Some other dimensions have other Ardas, apparently. And other Lokis - Bella, this is Findekano. Findekano, Bella."

"Hello," he says. "Welcome to this dimension, war's over, lovely to meet you."

"Hi! Nice to meet you too. I will prrrrobably be able to steer mine away from cloning himself especially since he can apparently find duplicates on other planes; no guarantees whatsoever on your copy."

"Might not be a bad thing, perhaps they'd keep each other busy. Your father caused rather little drama - in hindsight, astonishingly little drama - while he was raising the lot of you."

"That should perhaps be credited to my mother," Maitimo says. "... Bella's a therapist and has done couples counseling and perhaps I should ask her to have a go at it."

"You're a therapist? Can you work with Maitimo," he says earnestly. "He is pathologically incapable of acknowledging his own happiness as a valuable end but I have medical authority for him now and I say he needs a therapist."

"Um," says Bella, "the subject has been raised, but for you to commit him to therapy without his say-so would in my standard of therapeutic ethics require more criteria than just being married."

"On this he will listen to me," Findekáno says firmly, "because he appreciates the usefulness of delegation. Right?"

"This is not the time," Maitimo murmurs.

"You are not going to do better than a therapist instance of Loki."

"It's normally actually recommended to see somebody you don't have any preexisting relationship with, for a value of 'preexisting relationship' that should probably cover 'friends with alternate instance', although I can appreciate that people whose cultures are not steeped in the concept of therapy may find that unsettling..."

"Want to recommend a qualified friend, then?"

"Unfortunately all the colleagues I could recommend are still in Materia."

"And going there is a bad idea, apparently," Maitimo heads off the next question. 

"For Feanorians or for anyone?"

"For anyone who reacts to learning it's a bad idea by trying to think how to do it anyway, I think."

"Maitimo makes friends with everyone, he's not going to find a therapist he's not friends with even if they're a colossal ass."