Annie laughs.

"Anyway, you can do whatever you'd like with your hair, but Elves won't even blink if you start going around naked, they've mostly been wearing clothes for your benefit. Except me - it helps with being touched -"

"...my benefit is kind of also not a factor here, I can't see. And my weird sense goes through stuff. I can tell the difference between the presence and absence of clothes but it's not serving the usual purpose."

"I can point that out to people. It's just habit to be careful of it around mortals."

"Makes sense." Annie shrugs out of her shirt.

"...I'm still not very good at facial expressions, are you distracted?"

"Maybe a tiny bit more than always. Not in a bad way, though."

"I love you."

"I love you!"

"Come here and lie still so I can kiss you?"

Annie goes there and lies still to be kissed.

Annie is kissed! She doesn't even have a panic attack! Thauron laughs in her head but she doesn't listen and she knows that given the premise of this hallucination she now has mental opacity and it's not real.

Eeeeee.

Yeah. 

Celebrendes and the Dwarves collaborate on more applications of electricity. They can't get anywhere with computers but they think they know the materials they'd need. She goes out and looks at the Silmaril and feels no impulse to snatch it out of the sky. She swears unimportant things and checks that it doesn't feel like anything. It doesn't.

She catalogues her brain. She can't do it on paper or out loud, the Enemy might be listening; she sings, sometimes, when Annie is behind a few stone walls, or listens to Lírnith sing which she can do even while holding Annie because Elf hearing is better than human. She tries to follow what the engineers are doing, tries to establish for herself whether Annie really does have to be from a different world. She can't. Electricity could too easily be made up, the results to their experiments could too easily be made up, it would require the Enemy have a creative mind but, well, she does.

She catalogues her brain thoroughly enough that if everything goes exactly as she is expecting it to she won't have a panic attack. She won't enjoy it, it'll be an odd sort of pantomime with the steps falling into place in the grooves in her brain she prepared for them, but she won't have a panic attack. She bounces up to Annie and says she had a breakthrough at coping with things and wants to kiss her more, and she does, and she doesn't cry or have a panic attack and Annie looks happy, which is the most important thing in the world.

Annie loooooves her. And is trying to take her at face value and when she is being very kissed that's not hard to do at all.

Annie is very kissed. She can't quite bring herself to let down her hair but she will delightedly play with Annie's. She tries digging the grooves in her head to go farther than that, but it's slow going. The girls turn nine and Elian follows various Dwarves around with fascination and Eliel wants to know everything that happened in Rirosseth's life, wants to write it down so it's not lost, and she painstakingly does that. They both sing when Annie's out of earshot. 

Annie wants to know everything that happened in Rirosseth's life too.

She can tell both of them. She can start when she's four, and flesh it out in vivid detail, except for the parts where she says "and most of my memories of the decade after that were taken, I'm not sure why" and things like that, or when she struggles for a name - "the Enemy took them all, Lírnith told me as many as she could remember but it's not all of them -"

"I wish the opacity worked retroactively," Annie murmurs.

"It...did some things? I think it broke most of the outright tampering. But what's gone is just gone."

Nod. Sigh.

There are still thousands of years of memories to tell.

They are fascinating.