Hug. 

(He's so glad that's not what happened.)

So is he. Leareth would have said that couldn't have happened, not with him being who he is, but - he doesn't know that, actually, and he doesn't know whether he can still meaningfully be the same person now that he was before. There's a lot of...information, necessary to what Leareth was, that he kept together across thousands of years and then destroyed on purpose. So that it couldn't be used against – not him, he must not have thought he would ever make it out of Angband at that point, but against his allies and their goals, the part that he was actually fighting for. 

He can put something back together again. Probably. It's going to have to rely a lot on what Maitimo and Vanyel and other people who he knew before think a Leareth is. 

Actually the plan is to go find other worlds with better magic and find something that can get him all of his memories from all of his lives back, if it can't be done with Arda magic, which his father is murmuring about, and then he will have two thousand years of being Leareth to work off and he'll do just fine. Maitimo feels very strongly about this and - complicated thing swept back out of shared thoughts - about getting any say over how Leareth should be shaped.

That does seem a lot better, if it's an option. He hadn't known they were thinking about it. 

His father is pretty sure he could do it for a local soul; he is less sure how to do it for a soul from another world but not entirely sure he can't - "which usually means he can, eventually." 

Leareth can't help but smile. Fëanáro is brilliant and very good at what he does and it - means a lot, that he's still willing to aim that at something for helping Leareth in particular. It'd be easier to understand for Vanyel, who helped them actually win the war. 

- you keep having errors in the same direction, on that -

On what? Leareth is not sure he follows. 

On being surprised by the amount our people care about you and are invested in you being okay. - I'm not upset. 

Huh. That...does seem like a pattern, another one where he's failed to properly fit together the pieces of it because thinking on timescales longer than five minutes is still hard. 

Hug. You saved us. You got Vanyel. Plenty of credit to go around.

"A great many people had to work very hard and be very clever and brave for the war to be won." He knows that. From the outside it's clear that he played a very significant role in the early war. So why is it so hard to feel like he was one of those people, instead of...just someone useless who needed rescuing. 

Presumably some of his feelings that are inappropriate to the situation are Enemy action and some are just general intense reactivity but this one he would guess would be that most of Leareth's plans don't work if he isn't making them work so he hasn't trained a lot of warm feelings about being a small part of a greater whole?

No. Honestly, many of his plans on Velgarth don't work even if he is putting all he can into making them. Lots of kinds of plans can work, just - big ones, the kind that shift the arc of history, almost never do, and if Leareth gets taken out of the picture then generally all of that momentum trails off into something random instead. 

–Maybe not anymore. The momentum imparted by contact with Arda seems likely to be decidedly non-random. 

Good. Maitimo likes for his effects on things to be decidedly non-random. 

If there are records back in Velgarth that can be used for checking whether a Leareth has reformulated himself correctly, that seems important. 

There are! Well, he isn't sure if there are written records of the - part he destroyed, so much, because that wasn't exactly a memory, it was more a...deep feeling of what was important? He thinks it was linked to some memories but of course he doesn't know what they were.

The records he can actually get are of the events that happened and the actions he took, which is still better than nothing – right now it feels like the formless mass of five years of Angband memories is about ninety percent of everything, and that is very not true, and maybe it would help it feel less true if he could actually make a timeline of the years before it.

Leareth doesn't remember exact instructions on how to get his records, but there must be someone who knows or can figure it out – he can ask Nayoki, well, Maitimo can ask Vanyel to pass a message to someone who can ask Nayoki and probably eventually that will get him some crates of records that can be Gated back here. 

I will do that.

"Thank you." Leareth is quiet for a while. Not thinking very many thoughts, just - trying to absorb whatever feeling it is he's having about Fëanáro working to get his memories back. 

"Did you end up visiting Beleriand?" he says eventually. He remembers that being a plan and could easily have missed it during the week of being incapable of doing things. 

"Not yet. While you were so out of it seemed like a bad time."

"I would not have minded you going." 

"Sure, you wouldn't have minded anything, which means - extra responsibility to be looking out for you and not vacationing. My work in Beleriand isn't urgent, in any event, I'd rather do it when I don't think anything here is affected by my absence."

"I suppose that is fair enough." 

There's a thought that's trying to drift up, it's mostly not in words yet but it feels important to drag up into the light so that he can convey it. 

"...I am glad I came to Arda?" he says finally. "Even with - everything that happened - I am glad that my Gate landed me here, and that - I could nudge your history onto a different and better path. I am not sure what would have happened otherwise but I think it would have been very bad."

He closes his eyes. "And...I am glad that we met. There is a great deal of future ahead," even if he can't really think about it yet, "and - that is worth what Melkor did to me." 

"I am glad you came too. We will make it worth it."

"I know." 

He's quiet again for a while. 

"I think I will go for a walk," he says finally. "And then perhaps see if Vanyel is awake." He needs some things to do with himself in between whatever stretches of time he can handle looking at the memories - doing nothing will mean he gets bored and then ends up drifting into memories anyway.