"Yes, of course. Even Fëanor would have, after he asked for the boats and was denied. He asked for aid in building them, or for knowledge about how - it wouldn't have taken us very long, if we'd known what we were doing and had expert guidance-"

"I'd thought you were in too much of a hurry to build boats. I could have gotten you as far as canoes or something myself, transporting horses would be harder but..."

"We know how to build canoes, you can't cross an ocean in those. You need ocean-going boats, and we didn't have enough time to independently relearn all of the principles that make a boat oceangoing, that took centuries for the Teleri to accomplish."

"You can cross an ocean in a canoe if you really want to but it's admittedly not ideal. But you only needed to go one way and only, what was it, a hundred fifty miles? You don't need a very high standard of construction to hold up that long, I've been sailing, I could have gone and stared at the boats and brought back illusions - boat-related information. All this for the lack of how to build a ship."

Loki sighs.

"How quickly could you have built a fleet?"

"I'm not sure. I've made a raft before but not an actual ship. My information there is as spotty as anything else. The first thing I tried would probably have been offering the boat-hoarders information they might want in exchange for what I remembered. Curufinwë thinks he'll have a lightbulb in three days, though, based on the most pathetic disparagement of my tutors' ability to get information to stick that I could possibly have produced without complete silence, and boats are generally invented first out of more familiar materials."

He shakes his head. "I expect Olwë would have relented on refusing to permit any of his people to aid us in building our ships, or teaching us how, if I'd asked Findaráto to talk to him. By the time we arrived the fighting had already started."

Nod.

"If I had what you'd consider a healthy relationship with Maitimo, what would I have done differently?"

"It's not so easy to articulate, and I'm not drawing from personal experience except the kind that veers heavily in the other direction."

"Oh?"

"Well, until very shortly before I came here I couldn't tell anyone about what I was doing with most of my spare time. Except Sigyn, after he was injured with no witnesses and kept his silence when I saved his life; and I explained that my arrangement with him is not romantic in nature. So I don't have a history of particularly intimate relationships and I doubt you would have felt suited to an arrangement like the one Sigyn and I have."

"If that was what Maitimo wanted - that's the thing that bothers you?"

"It's certainly an example. I mean, I think Sigyn would probably romance me if I wanted him to; but he wouldn't stop sleeping with anything that moves even if I really really wanted him to. He requires one of these things to be properly Sigyn in a way he does not require the other."

"I wouldn't stop working on the interests of my people, any more than Maitimo'd stop obeying his father no matter how much I begged him, and I did beg him. Maybe it's just that our intractable things are more duties than desires."

"Maitimo is very good about getting people to feel however he wants them to feel. If he wanted that he would ensure I felt good about it."

"I'm really not sure. Am I bitter? It's one of the things I always admired about him, that he was so good at bringing people around to his point of view and making allies out of them."

"The way you put it made it sound really manipulative. It's a skill, but it's... dubious at best applied to relationship parameters like that."

"So, putting aside the 'left us to die' complication - if two people in your world want to be involved, and one of them wants a specific kind of relationship, and the other person wouldn't innately feel good about that but can be persuaded - not just persuaded to agree, persuaded to feel genuinely happy - you shouldn't do that?"

"You shouldn't - covertly do that," Loki says at length. "It should not happen without being acknowledged. Because if it does then at some point someone is going from not being in and not wanting such a relationship to being in one without having actually been... awake, for all the transition steps."