"Yeah, we've got lots of time. There were a couple things I wanted to talk with you about, if it's a good time?"

Echo of memory: I think it gets easier with time, and we have time... No, nonono, that was not real, he kind of even knew it at the time, that wasn't Maitimo and Leareth is going to shove it away in a corner where he can maybe think about later or possibly never. (He probably has to think about it eventually, it's not going to go away, but not now.)

"All right," he says. 

"Vanyel asked me whether Melody had done an emotional block on you, after he talked to you. I told him, because I expected if I had asked you when you were in a having-opinions-about-things mood you'd have been fine with it, but it occurred to me that I should ask you if there are any cases where I should actually ask you first or where my expectations might be wrong."

"I am not bothered that you told him." Leareth has to think harder if there are any cases where it would bother him. "...It is probably not going to be helpful to - hide from him how damaged I am, in general. Is it?" 

"I don't think so. - mind, it's absolutely what I'd do, in your position, if I could. But I think it will be a waste of energy you could instead spend on actually recovering. He'll have some feelings about you being a person with vulnerabilities and emotions, and he'll get over it. And he had useful suggestions about the emotions block because Melody's done them for him, too."

Leareth nods. "So - I think the only circumstances where I would not wish to share something with him, if it were my decision, are – ones where it would be disproportionately upsetting to him given his own experiences, relative to how much it helped me for him to know. However, I...imagine there will be other times in the future where I am not able to meaningfully decide that and would need to trust your judgement on the matter. Do you think you know Vanyel well enough to guess when something would be particularly painful for him to hear?" 

"Hmmm. I get the sense that I'm missing a fair bit of specific history?"

"...I think it is not actually my story to tell." Vanyel is someone who probably cares quite a lot about his privacy here. "The specifics are - quite different from what happened to me, and so it seems unlikely to come up."

(Vanyel probably had feelings about the situation with Finwë and Miriel, if that ever came up. Leareth keeps that thought private.) 

"Were there other things?" 

" - yeah. I - don't know how to approach this one, it's not very urgent but it's frustratingly hard to talk about. ...Melody commented on my holding you and it made me aware that I was afraid that.... I'm making a lot of medical decisions on your behalf, and also you're -" handwave - "formally our prisoner, right now, and also I'm - washing your hair, and bathing you and holding you at night and doing other things that among my people are characteristic of a - close personal relationship - and I do not mind any of this, I'm fine with all of this, I haven't actually noticed any of these features of the situation getting in the way of any of the other ones, but Melody commented and I thought - oh, if she knew, she'd be very worried, and it seemed like maybe there was something worth talking about there."

Oh. 

Leareth starts trying to say something and then gives up and just leaves his thoughts public again. He hadn't thought about it! None of the individual things bother him either! Aside from the fact that he is now noticing there's kind of a pattern here and - maybe he's asking a lot of Maitimo actually, that is a lot of support things for one person to be doing, it seems maybe even unfair but - it's not like there are that many other people he could ask for this kind of help. Maybe he could ask Nayoki to come across from Velgarth, but she's very competently running a research team in his absence and he's loathe to grab any of his best people from the organization when he's not there and won't be for the foreseeable future, and also this would be an even weirder shifting-of-roles for her than it is for Vanyel, probably.

The part where he's formally their prisoner doesn't seem that interesting, Leareth is sure that Maitimo distrusts him exactly the amount he distrusts himself, and that is correct, it's actively helpful at this point that he can offload some of the paranoia about whether and how Melkor compromised him so that he can - focus on doing things at all. 

He remembers a fragment that he's pretty sure is real, Maitimo walking in while he lay in the rubble of Angband, looking at him, gesturing for someone to knock him unconscious. It was clearly the correct thing to do. If anything he feels safer, knowing that happened. 

...He's worried that Maitimo wouldn't be able to notice if this were an unfair position to put him in, because the entire person he is, is so shaped around being what other people need.

That is a lot of not very coherent thoughts! About a subject he had not considered until now and has no idea how to think about either! Mostly Leareth is grateful that Maitimo is around and willing to spend kind of an absurd amount of time helping him even though he has a lot of other important responsibilities. 

" - okay. I ...think that as long as you are comfortable with everything then that's actually the only important thing here? Please don't grab people out of your organization in Velgarth on my account, I didn't mean to be asking you to do that. I'm fine. I have not done this specific sort of thing before but I did run the war effort and I added a sewer system to Tirion and I can notice if I am overtaxing myself or not delegating enough or anything. I guess it would be specifically nice if someone else were available to do your hair but if you don't particularly feel I need to go to Lórien about it I can manage that too and I think it'd be worse to ask Vanyel."

"Hopefully I can manage my own hair now that I am less - impaired. I am sorry it bothered you?" Probably it would have bothered him just as much to ignore it and let it get ratty again. The Quendi hair thing is so confusing. 

" - it made a lot of sense for me to do it but the culture gap or species gap or whatever is quite notable?"

"Yes. I was trying to remember that before all of this happened, but I suppose for the last month I have mostly not been able to track that." 

"And I don't know enough about humans to try to come up with any good analogies for you."

Leareth considers saying 'you could ask Vanyel', and then decides that would probably be an unbearably awkward conversation for both of them, so he leaves the thought public but doesn't say anything out loud.

"Thank you for asking about the bigger pattern," he says. "You caused me to notice it properly. This is...mostly not a way that I have been close with people, before?" Probably he has ever, but if so it's not a fact about his past lives that he took particular effort to memorize. "I am not used to...to needing this, and it is very strange." He could claim he doesn't need it, it's just helpful, but – no, he kind of does, for some reason, it's very confusing. 

" - of course." It seems like it must have been very hard to do all the things he was trying to do without any close allies whatsoever. It is - hard to imagine the pain of having every person you trusted repeatedly murdered for it.

He's had allies. There are a lot of people at his current organization who are competent and who know what his plan is and agree with it and are helping get all the parts of it lined up. He just doesn't - have the kind of emotions about them that would make it hurt, really hurt, if something happened to that person in particular this time around. Vanyel is probably one of the people in Velgarth he felt most - attached to, that way, before the accidental Gate out. And he would have killed Vanyel if he judged it was necessary. He would have hated it, but - he's done that kind of thing before. 

- it's terrifying, actually, how much it feels like something happening to either Maitimo or Vanyel right now would rip apart everything he's slowly starting to rebuild. 

Well, not much can happen to Maitimo - not nothing, but not much, compared to how people in Velgarth die - and he will take good care of Vanyel too. 

The memory was real. From when we found you. I checked with Vanyel about whether he could do the compulsions yet and he was too tired, so. People can resist the sleep songs.

"I think it was appropriately cautious and paranoid on your part." His lips tug in a bitter half-smile. "Melkor had trouble getting that part of you right, I think? That you can care, and be - coldly ruthless, at the same time. The fakes were generally missing one of those." 

"There is a saying that evil cannot comprehend good. I don't have any good guesses about whether it's true, and if so whether it's true specifically here where evil supposedly comes from Melkor or everywhere. But it seems true that - doing the right thing is harder than the thing Melkor does, and more complicated, and has more parts, and is in more tension with itself."

Leareth nods. "That sounds right, I think." He frowns. "What else happened in the first few weeks after I was rescued, before I decided this was real and started keeping records? It is more in order but it is all very vague." Shrug. "Also I failed to keep any notes during the last week when I had the emotions-block, but I doubt that anything very interesting happened." 

"Last week at Vanyel's suggestion we read you a lot of books and sang you a lot of songs. The first few weeks you ate, if we reminded you, and drank, if we reminded you. The recommendation was to be very diligent about not doing anything that suggested things were about to start happening. I talked to you a little bit every few days. I told you where you were and who was on duty feeding you and so forth, and that I'd hear your thoughts if you sent them to me."

When they'd been planning what to do with him Vanyel had mentioned he could use the compulsion to suppress Leareth's thought-shielding. It'd give them a bit of warning if Leareth was planning anything but it sounded like the worst thing imaginable to have happen while you believed you were a prisoner of Melkor, and anyway many other things would've had to go wrong for Leareth to be planning anything more sophisticated than a sympathetic story about what'd happened. Maitimo is - grateful for his thought-protecting amulet, it ended up being very useful, and doesn't know what Leareth was thinking when first rescued, and is glad of it.

Oh no why is he crying again–

Leareth is aware that at some point he needs to start forming an actual model about his emotions instead of being righteously confused at them. He's - very grateful that Maitimo was both willing to be ruthlessly cautious and also to take into account which things would have been awful and terrifying for him, and to weight that as well. He agrees they were taking a lot of precautions already, it wasn't stupid of them not to - if they'd had fewer other options then maybe they should have done it, but it was reasonable not to in this case, and he's relieved it came out that way. And that it wasn't by luck, it's because there were other people trying to do the right thing and being clever about it when he couldn't.  

(Leareth was not planning a sympathetic story about what happened because he had no idea what happened, and still doesn't, the memory's got to be in there but he hasn't wandered his way to it by accident yet.) 

(Yeah, Maitimo was being mindful of situations where Leareth had switched sides out of self-interest, maybe stalled some, and was now going to switch back for the same reason but he considered it unlikely even at the time and it now seems very flagrantly inapplicable.)

Hug?