It's an interesting balance you strike.

I really wish we'd met before Angband. I struck it much more stably, and not in a way that left people feeling used.

I haven't tended to feel used, or at least not in a way that doesn't dovetail perfectly neatly with my desire to be useful.

I really have not tried to manipulate you. We share goals, and when it looked as if we didn't it was still obviously best to defer to yours.

So you just think you'd have come off better by way of how you handled other people, if we'd met earlier.

And I'd be better at aforementioned shared goals. I really do feel like I have less than half of me in place.

Missing memories, or - elsewise?

Missing - intuitions that would make more sense of the memories I have, and things I can still fake but do not think I used to need to fake at all.

If you didn't use to need to fake them it's impressive you scrounged up the ability to do it.

Perhaps I should thank my father for the horribly unpleasant last decade of our time in Aman, for giving me at least a little bit of practice at concealing my reactions.

I assume that's sarcasm. On at least some level. I usually don't notice you've been faking smiles until I get a real one - and I suppose I don't know how many layers deep you go.

Our departure from Aman was - we should have left a hundred years sooner, it was like that stage in some relationships where both parties are unwilling to end it so instead they try to make it so miserable that they'll have a real excuse, instead of noticing that the fact you have that inclination is itself sufficient excuse.

Eugh.

The Enemy was astonishingly competent at pulling everyone's strings, and my father has so damnably many strings.

It's sort of hard for me to think of Morgoth as anything other than a malevolent force of nature. Thauron got personal; Morgoth just gets disastery. Is this a change in strategy or just my not having been around long?

This is more typical of his strategy, actually. In the war with the Valar he mostly took monstrous forms, or was a volcano or something like that.... I think the reason the Valar weren't looking for evidence he was planting lies and rumors was that it wasn't how they were accustomed to seeing him operate. Thauron understood incarnates better. If he'd been in Valinor at that point it would have gone even worse. But Morgoth's not - above personally torturing prisoners, or anything like that.

Wouldn't expect him to be.

And he knew my father well enough to know which losses would drive him either to suicide or something costlier, and to arrange for it to happen at the worst possible time.

Nod.

I assume he hasn't tried getting personal at this point because it didn't work. You either were unmoved or successfully left the impression.

Unmoved would be the wrong word. Moved in an undesirable direction. Someone remarked that it was in some respects good that Sigyn didn't come along because then there would have been someone close to me to target. I'm not sure if Sigyn is literally too kinky to torture or not but I'd probably be able to operate under the assumption that he was long enough to get my job done.

So no more personal games, just large rocks dropping on our heads occasionally and an effort to leverage Thingol's idiocy against everyone which I really think is not going to work.

I am glad to have this prognosis on his idiocy and its effects.

Several years away from home playing 'thing Thingol can project his complicated feelings about Valinor, Finwë, the death of his brother's people at our hands, and the war onto' is annoying mostly because of all the interesting things I could be doing instead. From here forward I don't expect it to be terrible in its own right.

Maybe in another visit or two they'll be giving you permission to have visitors.