He closes the door. And Maitimo slides gracefully out of his chair and across the room and is kissing him before he's even processing how they - how do they possibly move like that - and then he kisses him back, hungrily, the person he didn't know he was waiting for all his life -

(And much later - Elves can go forever, Elves did not know humans couldn't do this, and he'd be embarrassed if Maitimo weren't staring at him like all his dreams had come true in front of him, if Maitimo hadn't expressed again, and again, and again, that he was delighted to have a human one, delighted to be stronger than him, delighted at how easily he can leave little bruises -

"when you said 'yes'," he asks, eventually, fearing the answer, "was that 'yes I'll fuck you', or -"

"yes I would like you to be mine forever," Maitimo says promptly.

"I'm twenty-three."

"We fixed mortality!"

"I mean, more, I can't make commitments like 'forever'."

"Every day we have together, you can say 'I want another one'." His eyes are shining.

"Yeah. I can do that. All right.")

And a day later one of the space Fëanors takes a break, sees the notes, and pops over to the new world.

The teleport landing site is in a pleasant outdoor courtyard area; Boots is sitting in it working on the interdimensional message protocol. "Oh, hi! I'm Boots. Which one are you?"

"Space. We don't actually distinguish internally, we're forking for the force-multiplier rather than differentiating. NIce to meet you. It sounds like you did a very nice job."

"On what?"

"Your Arda! It's lovely, did you hear how badly ours went?"

"Yeah, actually I wanted to ask you how to present that story to your alt here."

"Are there reasons he'll react worse than the rest of us other than 'he's twelve' -"

"That and our Valar gave me out of context prophecies about Alqualondë about which I told him and was freaked out about..."

"And with an alt of you you have the expectation he had a really good reason, and could maybe even have pieced together what must have been the circumstances given only the information he fed a planet into a black hole, but you don't have that confidence in other people, understandably..."

"Yeah. I knew, I emphasized even, that I had very little context and didn't know why and that anyway it had no reason to happen as described when why would he need a boat he could just learn to fly, but."

"I am very unrepentant about Alqualondë - thirty thousand dead and all backed up, more than that dying every single hour on Endorë and not all backed up. But if you'd told me a hundred years before it happened that we'd kill thirty thousand people I'd have been appalled too."

"He asked me if I'd still love him if it happened anyway and I said I didn't know."

"It's stressful having alts, because I think every one of us had built our sanity on the assumption that if we were just the most brilliant person in the world than some people - not many of them, but some of them, somewhere - would love us no matter how badly we screwed up everything else. Being redundant, having equals, is something I think we were all very deeply afraid of. But on the other hand - now we do have people who'll forgive us everything, who'll understand everything, who'll love us no matter what - we have each other. He has us too."

"Yeah, I think Cam's leaning hard on that the same way."

"You could describe the situation to him, ask him what he'd do."

"- to Epic, you mean? Hm, could do."

"I think he'll take it okay. I actually expect he'll have a harder time when the decisions the rest of us made which the Bells disapprove of come up."

"He was clinging to me kind of hard when the oath and the boat burning things came up."

"Boat burning was a mistake in flat Ardas only because they stupidly crossed anyway, their presence just meant more people were in the Enemy's reach and if my dear father's grandchildren by his second wife hadn't told Thingol about Alqualondë, we could have had the war won in a century and then sent back for them. Leaving people in Valinor is a horrible wrong but I hope it'd be understood by now that some horrible wrongs which end with Melkor dead sooner are worth it.

Oath - oath looks like it'll be a mistake in some settings, in mine I think that would have been worth it too."

"I only skimmed the Luster files but it's not obvious that your alt there would've survived if they hadn't crossed the Ice, and absent him it's not obvious how they'd have won the war in a century even with a more consolidated population even if you assume that's an unalloyed benefit. Shine didn't have Alqualondë and Doriath remained mostly a nonentity in the offensive..."

"I mean, yes, the conclusion Luster points to is that we should have stayed home. I just - can't regret not doing that, and once I don't regret trying I also don't regret making plans that depended on me living longer than three weeks."

"Fair enough.

He also hasn't heard about Evil Arda."

He nods. "What about it are you planning to explain?"

"Undecided."