Mmhmmm.

Hey Maitimo?

Yes?

I'm flopped on Findekáno at the moment and if you want either of our senses on the theory that this is pretty easy to abruptly stop doing help yourself.

....okay.

He tenses up and scoots against the wall, but he listens.

It's cozy and warm and Kib's doing that thing where he's got his face pressed into Findekáno's shoulder, breathing slow, feeling heavy, eyes mostly closed.

He stops, after a little while, because actually it does not seem it'll be much help to have memories of things he cannot have. He doesn't tell them this. He curls up in the corner and tries to straighten out his head.

Kib doesn't demand a status update.

He stays put for about twenty-five minutes and then he gives Findekáno a kiss and goes back to programming.

The dinosaur cavalry's fully grown now. They ride it around Beleriand making sure the orcs were properly cleared out the first time and making it known that there's food and shelter and safety to be found in the new kingdom. They hand out shines. They use automata on rails to mine more effectively. 

Maitimo starts idly plotting how he'd end up back in charge of his country, if he wanted. It seems a dangerous thing to think about, but he's so terribly lonely and useless and bored.

Yep. Kib's worried about him. If this were not obvious from looking there's the half-batches of notes every day, brainstorming about things he could do. There are margin notes disclaiming actual intentions to follow through on anything more elaborate than "here is a harmless useful pastime" without more thought and Maitimo's cooperation and so on but there's all kinds of musing about the cunning use of oaths (time-limited oaths not to reveal anything to the Enemy so if he winds up caught in a contradiction it's temporary?) and seeking help farther afield (is there, like, any established ex-Utumno-prisoner protocol he could adapt if he sailed back to Valinor? Which would not get him yet more mind control for his trouble?).

Couple centuries in Lorien is the protocol! It seems to be pretty effective, in that when the centuries have passed the person who comes out of Lorien is pretty functional and happy. Maitimo's not very tempted.

What Maitimo wants to do is stage his takeover and trust his boyfriends to have anticipated this and have something he doesn't know about in the works to stop him if it turns out seizing power is the trigger for something bad. But if he knows they're doing this he'll stop them, and he doesn't think they can outmaneuver him reliably enough.

He has a pretty good plan to take power. He files it away in his mind, idly, and enjoys Kib worrying.

If the notebooks are anything to go by, and they should be, Kib does not particularly expect Maitimo to stage a not-technically-coup, on the grounds that this would be exploitative of political weaknesses in the host that Maitimo should instead point out to somebody so they can stop having them. Kib is not dwelling overmuch on the possibility.

He does write about the question of what purpose the state they got Maitimo in might serve and the conclusion that it's probably something complicated, interrupted (unless the Enemy is just pointlessly sadistic, that's also a possibility) but there's no way to be sure.

Thauron offers explanations sometimes at night. He doesn't share them; if Thauron wants people to hear it then Maitimo doesn't.

Of this, of course, Kib is ignorant in its entirety.

Sometimes someone else escapes Angband. Usually they ask the first people they find to kill them. The Noldor oblige.

Which sends Kib into a little spiral every time about Maitimo's will to live. The edges of that but only the edges make it into the half of the notes Maitimo gets.

Maitimo is unsure if pointing out 'if I kill myself the hallucination ends and the next one won't be as pleasant' helps here. Eventually he says it anyway.

"Oh, is that how it works.

- then why does everybody else ask to die?"

"The ones who want to live probably wouldn't come to an established settlement. Most of them either kill people or keep them chained, which is worse, but there's not much you can do about that, not when we all might serve the Enemy.

...for the record, even if there weren't a golem on me, if an oath to hurt you came into force at this minute I could just not do it. It's unimaginably painful but I'm used to that."

"Not sure 'just' is the word, there."

"I wouldn't do it."

"Okay. But the golem being there means it wouldn't even be unimaginably painful, right?"

"Yep. I'm not trying to convince you to remove it, that'd be - worrying."

"A bit, yes."

"I've been idly figuring out what I'd do if I worked for the Enemy, but only out of boredom. There aren't any disasters here, the chance this is real and I'm untampered with doesn't weigh very heavily when the difference between the current situation and one where I was helping are so small."