- how long does he have to live? he asks his father, looking at the human King.

I don't know! Probably we should not delay very much in getting him to Lórien. Are we taking Leareth too?

- I think no. I think Leareth might benefit from a couple more weeks. The King, uh, won't.

Then once the reunions are over with they can get him on a boat. Is Vanyel going with him?

Vanyel is incredibly torn! He feels he sort of has a Heraldic duty to go with his King and be around in case anything awful happens, but when it comes to what he wants, he absolutely wants to stick around where Leareth is.

Are they going to be within osanwë range? It's unclear how much that helps because it's not like he can instantly Gate to Lórien anyway – though honestly he'd appreciate if Fëanáro could get on politely asking the Valar about it now rather than later, in case they end up preferring to Gate Leareth there rather than take a boat in whatever number of weeks. 

Yes, Nerdanel's gone to petition them.  I don't think you'll be in osanwë range the whole way, unless you know Maitimo much better than I noticed. But we could let you know about anything really important by relaying through a few people along the way.

Sigh. Duty comes ahead of feelings, and it's not like Leareth has been interacting with him in any way and that doesn't seem very likely to change soon. :I'll go with you to Lórien: On the bright side it'll give him a chance to catch up with Randi and Shavri, who are after all two of his best friends. 

Shavri is looking happier than he's seen her in years. She can't stop glancing around at everything, alight with curiosity. 

The Quendi are delighted to show off their world! It was prettier when there was light, but here is the port of Alqualondë, and here is the first road in all of Valinor. They don't carry much food, but just accept meals from farmhouses as they go. 

Vanyel catches them up on the war, and tries to enjoy their obvious enjoyment of the scenery and the Quendi's friendliness to their guests. He talks a little about Leareth. They try to understand it, he thinks. Shavri tries especially hard. But they don't have a decade and a half of background, they can't possibly get how viscerally upsetting it is to see Leareth like this. 

Several weeks pass. 

Leareth's problem, right now, is that he's bored. It is a bizarre problem to be having. He isn't really keeping track of days, but it's been a long time and he continues to not be tortured. He's occasionally uncomfortable but even that is in boring ways, such as lying in bed for several hours while he increasingly badly needs to piss. 

All of this would be fine - it's a set of moments all in a row where he isn't being tortured - except for the fact that boredom makes it harder not to finish thoughts, and finishing thoughts isn't safe but his mind keeps veering toward adding up all the confusing pieces, which is dangerously close to drawing inferences about whether any of this is real. 

...He wonders, publicly, where (possibly-fake) Maitimo is. 

He comes in a couple of minutes later. 

Hey. Vanyel is not here; he is taking his King to Lórien. He has some kind of human sickness we're not familiar with but we expect Lórien to be able to help.

That both makes sense (Leareth was aware of King Randale's illness and this is a very reasonable use of Arda's resources to repay a favour to Valdemar and to Vanyel), and is confusing (Melkor has not previously shown that much of a tendency to fill the fake rescue scenarios with side plots that are tangential to Leareth's existence and mostly don't affect him.)

He wonders what the story is for how they're supposed to have defeated Melkor, which seems rather implausible even for Vanyel to do in a way that didn't result in Leareth also dead in a Final Strike fireball. Leareth lets that thought drift up publicly. If this is Melkor trying to bait him into engaging, well, it seems like he's taking that bait, that's the thing that's happening now. 

I vetoed approaches that seemed likely to kill both of you since then we'd have no way off this world. As a last resort, sure, but Melkor clearly couldn't use you reliably yet. In his own world Vanyel had been to Urtho's tower. He'd had some assistance from a god. He'd found some ancient weapons. Most of them were unstable or we didn't know enough about what they'd do, but there was one that ate magic. 

...What. 

This wouldn't be conclusive proof that the scenario is real even if reasoning from evidence were safe, but - what. The fact that Urtho might have built other weapons and that they might even have survived the Mage Wars is technically something Leareth remembered, therefore something Melkor knows, but it's not like it's been salient to him before now. And...if Vanyel did get into Urtho's Tower then Leareth is pretty sure he would have some kind of feeling about that. He can't, though, because his mind is untrustworthy and he cannot in fact tell whether this is real–

–but for a moment he finds himself urgently wishing he could distinguish if this were reality, and that thought is public. 

I don't know how confident you'd have to be for it to be worth engaging with further. We're using Valdemaren magic, and I don't know of a way to fake it with Arda magic. In particular if Melkor could do compulsions he would just have you sitting somewhere making him Gates and magic weapons, none of this elaborate memory-alteration. - I think if Melkor could do compulsions it'd have been over within a week, really. 

That's a reasonable point. If drawing inferences and updating on evidence were safe then it would be a significant though not fully conclusive update. Even if Melkor did have Vanyel (hard to imagine), and in fact it was over in a week and now he's going to torture all of them forever, tricking Vanyel into using compulsions on Leareth for this weirdly slow-paced scenario in which Vanyel mostly hasn't even showed up would mean letting him have magic. Melkor is too paranoid for that. 

With a sort of mental shrug, Leareth lets all of that reasoning be public. 

Does not-safe mean that you think your ability to add up two and two and reliably get four is broken or that you think having a better world-model probably makes you worse for your goals or that you think the scenario gets worse as soon as you start thinking about it?

Leareth doesn't know how to answer that question. He doesn't remember how or why that part is broken, just - he's compromised, he knows there are gaping cracks in his ability to look at the world and form an understanding of it and then act on it based on his goals – and that means it's not safe to try, it's not safe to want things or have goals or care what the world is like, because all of those things can be exploited, and being exploited by Melkor into taking actions is definitely worse for...whatever it is that he cared about, once.  

- a flicker of a crumbled tower, a bloodstained sky - 

So he can't. And the surest way to avoid taking actions is to avoid having any beliefs about what is true, but he's not doing a very good job of that right now.

(All of those thoughts are public.) 

- Leareth's thought-sensing is blocked so taking off the amulet won't do anything. He's tempted to anyway. He could try the same thing, just by letting Leareth in behind the distinction he makes for osanwë. It'll do the same thing but maybe it won't have the same impact, maybe it'll work better if Leareth can feel it with his own senses. 

He could try it anyway, though.

He's so angry. He wants to kill Melkor again, except that won't help. He wants to go back in time and kill Melkor at the beginning of history, except - it's never really been good for him to dwell too much on what he'd do if he could go back in time and do it again. (He did it a lot when he was younger, replaying conversations in his head until he got them perfect. His eventual coping mechanism was to just get them perfect the first time, which took the edge off the urge.) He wants - 

So it's true that Leareth is plausibly compromised to the degree where most concrete things he does in the world will make it worse. That is the entire thing Melkor tries to do and he would've tried very hard and he had a lot of time (we couldn't have gone any faster) and it is after all why Maitimo wanted Leareth stripped of his magic, taken prisoner - but that's enough, right, that's sufficient, he saw Melody's impression of the tapestry. That's not what it looks like for Melkor to have woven himself so thoroughly through a person that the person will pursue Melkor's aims at one remove. That's hacking and slashing and rethreading to try to hold together a single thread of experience that's cooperative. It'll take a lot of repair but it's not clean enough to hold together better with more information - the opposite of that, it's so fragile, Melkor must've been threading such a fine needle - 

Leareth is confused. 

Confusion is dangerous, it's too close to curiosity and curiosity is too close to trying to understand anything and he can't, but – Melkor couldn't ever fake Maitimo's thoughts. The times he tried were incredibly unconvincing even when he could get the speech and osanwë and mannerisms sort of right. 

–So, either way, if he could update on evidence then he would believe it, that this is Maitimo. Which doesn't necessarily mean the rescue is real, maybe Melkor did discover compulsions and handily won the war and now they're both prisoners and Melkor is trying a more creative storyline–

–only, he doesn't actually think it would work, Maitimo is smart and paranoid and it's definitely been subjective weeks and Leareth can't imagine Maitimo being this thoroughly fooled even for subjective hours. Also it would be a shocking increase to Melkor's self-control to hold back from torturing Maitimo a bit first, and Leareth is pretty sure there'd be hints of that even after the memory of it was erased, and there aren't. 

(And he can usually tell, when an experience is something that Melkor's iterated on hundreds of times to get it convincing, there are slight echoes and feelings-of-wrongness and he doesn't have any of that now.)

It's not literally impossible that this is still a hallucination, but - it would certainly hold up in the strictest court in the world, a sane person would make the leap and believe it. 

Leareth is not currently very sane, he knows that, and so he just hovers near it, and lets all of his thoughts be public because, damn it, even if this is all fake it's still the real Maitimo in here and Leareth trusts him. 

- he's sure he's not in Angband, if that's important to Leareth's decisionmaking here, he coordinated ten thousand soldiers to comb through Angband when it fell and he coordinated setup afterwards and picking the diplomatic party and talking to the other rescued prisoners and their next of kin and handling logistics for the return to Tol Eressëa and the start on the new cities in Beleriand and it's not impossible that with all the resources of Angband and the opportunity to retry repeatedly and access to all of Maitimo's memories you could put together thousands of convincing conversations but it'd be the work of Years, and a stupid work of Years if you've already won. 

- Melkor would be bad at him, they never spoke, and now in hindsight that's obviously because Melkor wasn't even sure he could lie to him face-to-face, he'd feel satisfied about this if only it had actually fucking helped -

- Leareth might not remember what it was that he was supposed to protect, but Maitimo does, it was everyone, all the people in all the worlds. And they're going to get to that, eventually, once they've had the chance to rest a bit first, and it's all right, if Leareth needs a break, needs a very long break even, but - but he's one of the people in one of the worlds, so someday, somehow, they'll have to fix this.

All right, fine, it seems like it is probably just true that Leareth is not in Angband anymore. 

–He's not sure what to do with that. He's compromised, still, it's not safe for him to act, Maitimo knows that, it's why his magic is blocked (because Maitimo is not stupid), and - it may or may not be safe to reason about things...

Maybe it's safe to have an emotion? 

Maitimo was very firmly advised to definitely never touch him unless very unambiguously invited so he is not going to offer a hug he is going to sit here on the other side of the room. He is pretty sure that it is safe for Leareth to do anything it is possible for him to do and really it ought to be the responsibility of the not-tortured people here to make sure anything he should not do is impossible, not on Leareth to handicap himself further.

Then...it seems like it's not going to damage anything that (a previous not-yet-broken version of himself) cares about, if Leareth tries slightly less hard to take zero actions including mental ones. He - hasn't really bothered to have real emotions, in a long time, he's pretty good at cutting off the place where they come from, there were a lot of moments that were bad and mostly consisted of suffering but that isn't the same thing. 

–It turns out the feeling he's going to have, if he lets it happen, is scaredscaredscared and helpless and his heart trying to pound its way out of his chest, and it's hard to breathe, which doesn't exactly help with the scared part because it feels like maybe he's dying and, no matter what else is happening, no matter how irreparably damaged everything about him is, he doesn't want to die.