"We've discussed how I feel about that word."

"He swore an oath to kill my family."

"And for this act of idiocy now he is chained to a wall when he came unarmed to turn himself over to your custody and you were all set to accept his teleporting nephew who'd sworn no such thing instead. I suppose I can at least be confident you won't kill him, because he's kin."

"Executing criminals is permitted," she says, but very quietly. "This isn't how I wanted to do this. But he's a Noldo and probably a smart one and Galadriel thinks that his real mission here is almost certainly to kill my father and that is in fact also what he's sworn to do so it's not particularly unbelievable and I don't see how to do right by everyone here but at least the mess can mostly fall on the shoulders of the people who created it."

"Oh, even being kin is not absolute protection, I didn't realize how many layers of hypocrisy were at work in that fucking word - your lack of confidence in your guards is perplexing, anyway, you've been sparing them to watch him even though he is chained to a wall."

"In ten years they invented weapons that reduced Angband to rubble! I have absolutely no idea how paranoid I need to be."

"I gave them extradimensional information telling them how to do it! I dropped the bomb so they wouldn't have to figure out a deployment mechanism! They didn't wake up one morning thinking I suppose it might be useful to split the atom!"

"They did wake up one morning thinking 'I suppose it might be useful to forge swords and take them down to Alqualondë-"

"So don't give him a forge."

"I'm sorry."

"I feel like I should have tried you on a houseplant first before giving you anything more complicated and imagining you'd look after him but it would be hard to find a houseplant you were predisposed to mistreat."

"I have been looking after him. I come several times a day. He said he doesn't mind the guards, he likes company. Houseplants definitely won't kill my father and if one of them had sworn to I'd be pretty wary of it, too."

"So you'd water it," says Loki, "and keep it in the dark, and compensate with songs."

"That works. Good crop songs compensate for growing a plant without light, I mean. And he's fine, he's singing, he tells stories -"

"- he's chained to a wall."

"Is this a particular Asgardian taboo?"

"State of the art is nicely furnished prison cells with force fields between them and the corridor. But no, not in particular, I don't think Asgard is particularly precious about any form of prisoner maltreatment."

"If we had force fields I'd do that."

"You have guards."

"I'll talk with my father about it."

"Thank you."

"Why didn't you warn us that the oath was to kill anyone who claimed a Silmaril?"

"I didn't know the full wording of it and absolutely nothing about sending Maedhros here alone and unarmed to supposedly babysit the thing - which you are not even keeping in the same room as him, although I take less issue with that than the chain, honestly - screams 'assassination attempt, beware', and it still doesn't."

"We were worried he might be able to weaponize it. And - okay, you know him better than me, if you're sure that's not what he'd be here for I trust you, but Galadriel knows him better than either of us and she thought it was likely and he was capable of it."

"Galadriel hates him personally. Maedhros is not one of the family engineers, I do not think he can weaponize the Silmaril unless it comes already weaponized in some way I don't know about."