Well, our gods don't do very much outside of Valinor, if people your gods don't get along with want to come live here. 

Melody bobs her head, smiles. :I'll keep that in mind. Do you have questions or anything? If not I'll head back to the other side of the island now: 

I don't think so. We're so grateful. Please do let us know if you need anything.

:Of course: Melody starts to turn, then pauses. :Hey, listen - I can tell that you care about Leareth a lot. Even if you're sort of not letting it on to him fully. I'm...really glad of that? And, I imagine it must make it hard for you, right now: 

That's true but - things were so much worse before he came.

:That makes sense. It - seems like we actually got pretty lucky, here, in terms of how things worked out? It wasn't great but it could have gone so, so much worse: 

Yeah. I just wish - he hadn't paid so much for it.

:I know: Melody bows her head for a moment longer, then heads out. 

He goes and climbs a tree and sings until Leareth seems to be waking.

Leareth wakes up a few hours later. Starts out fairly calm, until he gets out his memory-notes and realizes he didn't add to them before going to sleep, at which point he start thinking frantic public thoughts at Maitimo. 

You woke up and asked me whether this was distracting from other priorities and we talked about that. We talked about getting your hair untangled. You said you wanted to start making some progress at recovery, we talked about going to Lórien or Melody. We called Melody over. You went outside for a bit. I told you that at some point you made Melkor some gates. Then you had Melody over. She tried the associations-smoothing thing. You were very tired, and you went to sleep.

"Thank you." That's enough to retrieve most of it in more detail. Except the end part is foggy. Maybe it's just because he was tired. "...Did we decide to go to Lórien? I - think it would be necessary, at some point. It does not seem as though there is a better option. I...would probably be less wary of it if I knew more of Lórien's goals, in general." 

We were leaning toward going to Lórien but after you fell asleep I talked to Melody and realized that I need to check whether the Valar have any restrictions on your movement or activities in Valinor in light of the orcs thing. I've asked someone to go petition them about that. 

Lórien is - pretty good at healing. He can do psychological or emotional things, as well as physical ones. He mostly helps people with - grief they can't move on from, or a lack of energy for life, or unhealthy sexuality, or brain injuries that they are having trouble healing themselves.

Leareth tries to speak, to put the thing he's afraid of in words, and gives up, he's just going to think at it publicly instead. The problem is that Lórien is a god. Who can change how his mind is. Obviously the way his mind is right now is terrible and it really needs to be changed, but - Lórien might have different opinions about how it should end up than Leareth would. A god might well not think that Leareth ought to be the sort of person who tries to fight gods, and - make sure that whatever he heals towards, it isn't that. 

Yeah. 

He has never known Lórien to do that but he doesn't know things that make him confident that as a matter of principle Lórien never would. 

And he has never spoken to Lórien, at all, ever, because - unhealthy sexuality.

Right. 

This is not particularly reassuring information, but - it is kind of reassuring in the sense that Maitimo is just being honest with him, laying out the considerations. 

"Could I ask him to swear an oath not to change anything except the memories Melkor altered?" he says. "...Is it even true that oaths bind the Valar as well? I am not sure if that is something I only heard in Angband." 

It's true. I don't know if he'd agree but I think it'd be reasonable to ask.

Leareth nods. 

"...Would you know?" he says finally. "If I - wasn't the same as before. Would you be able to tell me, help me...find a way to fix it...?" 

"I think I'd know. And I'd tell Vanyel to get us to some corner of the world where we can research how to find other dimensions, and look until we found one whose gods didn't need killing, and we'd fix you."

It's not that Leareth doesn't believe Maitimo, it's that he...doesn't know how to put weight on that kind of assurance, and he's not sure he understands why Maitimo is making it – even though he asked for it – and, it feels like he can't figure out the bounds of it until he understands what Maitimo wants, here, what the thing is that he's trying to attain.

Because - it doesn't seem clear, from this vantage point, that 'fixing Leareth' is the obvious first step towards even fixing Arda, let alone the rest of the multiverse, it seems like maybe Maitimo would be better off just...going onward with Vanyel. 

And Leareth isn't sure why his feeling on the matter is that he desperately doesn't want that to happen. 

Huh. 

- so, one answer is that there are more people who are willing to risk their life - more than life, you have lots of those - to save my world from an evil god if they can expect that if they are injured in the process then they'll have the best available care? And probably out there there are some people so altruistic that they will do it even if I plan to totally abandon them afterwards and I do keep running into those but there's certainly going to be less of them, right, and I'll have less allies if that's how I treat them. 

- and another answer is that...you seem to be able to care about people without caring about any particular people? Or at least to have done that for a long while, before you decided Vanyel was promising, before you came here. That is not how I work at all. I care about people by caring about people. I am at all capable of math and extrapolation and noticing that I would care about faraway people if I met them even though I haven't, but - I can't care about people by leaving a trail of discarded shells behind me whenever they get mildly inconvenient to carry. I have no desire to train the habit or find out who it would make me into. The reason that I want to do things about Velgarth or the rest of the worlds at all is because they will have people like you in them, and people very unlike you, who ought to be okay, and the important project is getting them to be okay, and to do that I have to live the kind of life where I do that. Not - not off a cliff, I didn't mount a rescue during the war because it would've been stupid, if the best approaches to Melkor had killed everyone in Angband we would've gone with them, but - but that would've been awful, the kind of price you can maybe afford to pay once every few thousand years, not the sensible approach to routine prioritization!

- and another answer is that I - well, I like everybody, but I like you more than that, and if you didn't know various things I didn't tell you on purpose and the words accordingly meant something different I would be tempted to tell you that I love you, and so you have to be okay or I'll be very sad.

...It makes no sense whatsoever to be crying about this so why is he crying again. 

- hug?

Leareth has to think about that for a bit, but - there isn't a good reason to be scared of it and there is a good reason to expect it'll help. So, sure, hug. 

Hug. Very carefully in case this causes panic attacks or something.