"Who would know who the baby's father is? Would the Alteri be able to answer that?"

"Maybe. I don't know. I don't know how closely they even keep track. I suppose they must keep track. I don't know if I've ever even met whoever it is."

Squeeze. "Elves need to be with their husband while they are expecting a baby, in order for them and the baby to be safe. I don't know anything about humans..."

"You can get by without someone else during pregnancy if you have to. My sister did when she was carrying my niece. But - you don't want to raise a child all by yourself, not a baby, that's so much to do on your own, you need someone to help."

"If the father is alive it ought to be him, it's a terrible thing to have a child of your own in the world and no idea, and to miss their childhood..."

"I suppose," she says. "The different houses do it differently, some of them do forced marriages and some of them do artificial insemination and let you pick who you raise the child with. I thought - I thought they'd tell me when I had to find someone. I don't know why they wouldn't tell me."

"I am so very sorry. What an appallingly evil and cruel thing to do."

She nods. It doesn't change the situation, but it's not something she would have heard back in Earth space. It is difficult, it is painful, yes. But it means a lot to hear someone say that it's wrong, too.

She doesn't have anything to add to that, so she hugs him again. Hugs are good for making things marginally less awful.

"What do humans need to safely carry a baby -"

"I haven't done it before. Um, I think - good nutrition, that's important. You're supposed to have access to prenatal care, but I don't know what that means. You need - I don't know, when I was with my sister it wasn't her first time and there were other women there to help. The dangerous part is giving birth. If you don't have access to proper healthcare and there's too much blood loss or an infection, then you can die."

" - probably the people who deal with the humans on Endorë have experience with this and we should just accelerate getting cleared to go there."

She nods, then frowns. "What do you need to do before you can go back?"

"I don't think we need to do anything in particular, it's just that the schedules aren't up to us."

"Oh. Of course, yeah, that makes sense, you'd need to coordinate things." She wipes her eyes. "I feel like I should be doing something."

"Resting? Eating well?"

"I was thinking something more ambitious, but that's probably a good start," she admits. "I couldn't sleep. I should try sleeping. Sorry for waking you."

"It's not a problem. Resting and eating well are really important, even when someone has done something awful to you and all you want is to go dismantle their civilization entirely."

She laughs. It is straightforwardly true and probably not intended as a joke, but her emotions are fragile and unstable right now and it sounds almost like something that Mathrael might say. 

"OK. That sounds like a good plan. I'm gonna sleep, but let's come back to that second thing when I wake up."

"All right. Good night."

She sleeps until the middle of the day this time, partly because she's really tired and partly because she can. Eventually she wakes up, cleans herself off, and stares at the ceiling for a while trying to summon something in the neighborhood of resolution.

The Noldor stopped listening to the aliens that had been telling them what to do. She has no idea whether the same thing is possible for the Liars, but if it isn't, she doesn't want it to be because they were too scared to try when the opportunity presented itself.

Eventually she sighs and leaves her room again.

The Elf ship is still making its slow way around the planet. It doesn't seem to be close to landing. There are Elves playing musical instruments in the courtyard.

She had better start getting to work on making friends with some of the non-Ettelië Elves. She should probably have gotten to work on this sooner, given that she's really pretty lonely and Elves currently make up one hundred percent of her social circle, but now she has a motivation that's obviously way more important than her social incompetence. She's pretty sure that most of her potential civilization-dismantling resources are dependent on being friends with Elves. 

She greets them and does her best to compliment the music in Quenya.

"Awwww, thank you," someone says, and then corrects her pronunciation. "Do you play?"

She shakes her head and tries to formulate a reply in Quenya, but decides she's probably better off speaking a language she actually knows. It would probably be pretty hard to get to know her if her vocabulary were limited to a couple hundred words.

"No, I've never had the chance to learn," she says apologetically.

"Would you like to?"