- oh, that's well done. He can think of only the barest places where he'd tweak it.

(It feels very vivid and very real and Leareth is sort of, barely, aware that it isn't and that he's somewhere else, somewhere safe, but – mostly he's back in the stone room, and is feeling everything he did at the time, the desperate confusion and helplessness and his mind racing ahead for any remaining path to victory.) 

I noticed you; I noticed you'd come from another world; I decided the second thing was easily a hundred times more important and went off to check out all the worlds that I could find. I didn't return to Valinor until I saw the gate and realized you were leaving it. There are easily ten thousand people dead who wouldn't be if I'd spoken with you first, and perhaps more importantly I think it's going to be far more difficult for us to trust each other. But, I have to try. 

(A variant on the speech about Eru) 

And I - I'm skipping ahead here, but this is important - I want you to help me kill the other gods, of my world and of yours. You are not of any use to me without all of your magic, and without the ability to go wherever you please and talk to anyone you like. You will not have to act on any of this until you have the freedom to verify all of it. I'm telling you more than I can prove, right now, but once we can trust each other we will figure out how I can prove it.

- hold very still. 

It was suddenly less mysterious how he'd driven the Noldor to the brink of war.

Leareth remembers thinking that if Melkor had found other worlds they had as good as lost already. 

He remembers thinking that everything in the entire conversation could be a lie. 

He remembers noticing that Melkor was acknowledging this, and - offering to try to address it. Thinking that he has almost no bargaining power, here, but - maybe he has some - and maybe the path of good faith is at least worth trying, that would be better, right, if he could manage it...? 

They talk about oaths. 

They negotiate terms. 

...

"Leareth, I swear to you that I will not harm, or arrange for my servants to harm, your friends Vanyel and Yfandes, or the Prince Nelyafinwë of the Noldor, for as long as you have not returned to open war against me, or otherwise unambiguously acted to repudiate this attempted alliance."

- that is funny but surely not actually the concession that gets Leareth to agree to this -

It is totally the concession that gets Leareth to agree to exactly one Gate with exactly eighty orcs going through to Valinor!

Their orders are to settle peacefully there unless provoked and Leareth confirms this with some mindreading. He thinks that this is not going to turn the entire war and it's a pretty fair-sized ask in exchange for the oath, and Melkor agrees that afterward he'll swear that he'll leave Fëanáro alone as well, and - and at that point even if Leareth is wrong that Melkor is the kind of being who can be cooperated with, which Leareth isn't sure he isn't because he didn't do nearly enough of his own research and fact-checking before this happened - but even then, that team of people can maybe still win the war even if Melkor has a Leareth. And if Melkor can be reasoned and cooperated with then maybe there's an option here that isn't total war. 

–and he knows that this is all a gamble and he could be missing something huge but he's taken gambles like that before, over and over and over, and "eighty orcs" isn't a big one, and–

–and he does it, and then Melkor swears not to harm Fëanáro either, and then there's a discontinuity and he's back in the room with Maitimo, gasping, sobbing, completely and utterly certain that Maitimo is going to be furious about this. 

- still being careful not to move. He's not - sure what to say, actually, they usually don't talk through memories while Leareth is having a panic attack about it but -

"We can nail that one down to a date, then," he says calmly. "It'd been three months, outside. Two years for Melkor, if the time compression was consistent -"

Maitimo is calm about it and that gives Leareth some impetus to focus on here-and-now, and taking slow deep breaths until he feels calmer as well. He has panic attacks frequently and they're very inconvenient and so he's practiced getting them to go away a lot.

Talking is still too hard so he thinks half-coherently at Maitimo. He obviously made a mistake but it seems like the shape of the mistake was 'believing he could trust any of his reasoning while in Angband' and that - seems hard to have averted, except by having done whatever it is he did to himself right away, and realistically there is no possible world where that happened. He still isn't sure what could have convinced him to do it at all. It was so important to him, before, being - who he used to be - and maintaining that across the centuries, and - something he made a vow to do - and if he'd been a person who could have set that aside easily, well, he wouldn't have ever come to Arda at all because he would have died eighteen hundred years ago.  

So maybe it is just the entirety of what a Leareth is that was the problem, here. 

(Also, if he'd done it right away it would have meant two entire extra years of being tortured, and even if that would have been correct and better he is still cringing away from the thought of it.) 

"Leareth, are you all right? I think we should take a break now and possibly be done for the day." :Maitimo, is he talking to you? I'm not reading him with Thoughtsensing so I can't really tell anything from here except that he's very upset and feeling terrible about himself: 

He's talking to me. I think we might want to talk this one through for the rest of the day, yeah. 

And to Leareth: maybe if we'd told you more about Angband - but no, he could've erased that.

I'm not sure anyone could have reasonably done better.

:All right. I'm going to grab some food and I'll stay nearby for the next hour or so and then check in with you before I head back to my room: She's staying in the middle of the island, equidistant between where Leareth is and where the other rescued prisoners are staying. 

Vanyel and I were in Lórien, when you sent them. But a force of that size couldn't possibly have threatened us. We thought - maybe some kind of complicated Gate trap that'd hit Vanyel if he tried to take it down - 

Leareth doesn't remember having cast any kind of trap like that, and probably he would've needed to? He supposes it's possible that Melkor could have interfered with his Gate in some way and then altered his senses so he didn't notice. Also he doesn't trust his memory very far even now that Lórien has supposedly put everything back. 

He isn't sure what Melkor's strategic objectives were either. 

I don't know. Denying us transit in and out of Valinor, maybe. But too late, if that was his aim - we'd already reached Lórien. If we hadn't - it might've been decisive, given Vanyel's injuries.

I think this couldn't possibly have been much of what he wanted.

He might have been thinking the same thing Leareth was at the time - that this was just an initial step, that they would build further from here. 

...It seems like he should have been able to do it, though. Leareth isn't sure what happened to stop that. It doesn't seem very in character for Melkor to have made a mistake. 

Hug. Very in character to make a mistake, really, but not in character to let you remember it. 'm wondering now how many people in Tirion are wandering around with holes they don't realize are there...

That's a good and frightening point. 

...Leareth is having a lot of feelings and most of them are ones he can't name. He's confused, as well - the oath that Melkor gave him (which must have been faked, there have to be ways he could've done that even if the magic part alone weren't possible to imitate, he could've taken an oath for something trivial or just added 'for the next hour' to the end of the sentence and blocked Leareth from hearing it). Anyway, it does seem like it'd be a strong offer of good faith if it weren't a lie, but it's confusing that it's what convinced him, after presumably repeated failed attempts with slight iterations, instead of some other strategic concession. 

Certainly now he feels like if he lost Maitimo or Vanyel then everything else would crumble - a flicker of noticing that maybe this is bad, maybe that's an unfair thing to ask of them - but he can't see why that would have been his highest priority then. 

I wondered that too. I’m touched, but - 

...Does Maitimo think it was a mistake he was making, there? Leareth doesn't have his head around what kind of mistake it would be but that doesn't mean there wasn't one. 

I don’t know? If you could be sure of the oath I suppose I’d expect you to ask he swear - that he didn’t believe that with full information you would consider it a bad deal? That he’d help you with Velgarth? I’m not sure. I guess if you’d delayed him from going after Van that’s have been good.

It's hard to remember exactly what he was thinking at the time even now that he has the memory back, but... Maybe that Melkor swearing an oath to help with Velgarth seems too big in exchange for one Gate, it seems plausibly like something that would make him more suspicious rather than less. He won't know until he's finished sorting through four hundred speeches one by one, but - Melkor was the one setting the terms, he suggested the oath, it seems plausible he tried a lot of other things and this was the one that resulted in the least suspicion. 

...Also Leareth remembers feeling very helpless and very tired even in that conversation, despite his subjective sense that it had been only hours since his capture. It's possible that after two years of actually being in Angband, he was - not thinking at his best. 

That would make a lot of sense.

Presumably Leareth is already aware of this, but - I’m not angry. We knew it happened, if not how exactly.

There's aware and then there's being able to really believe it, and even though Leareth knows better it keeps feeling like surely Maitimo is secretly angry, actually. He feels apologetic about this because it seems sort of rude to refuse to believe Maitimo on what he's outright saying. 

Seems possible you have a lot of fake memories in which I am angry. And I don’t think you should train the habit of being embarrassed to disagree with me or disbelieve me? Even if short-term I’m pretty likely to be right.

He's not trying to train that habit but – sure, fine, it seems like it could happen by accident. It's just that it's so hard and terrifying to trust himself on anything, even small things.

Also he clearly needs to have a dig into all the fake memories that aren't attempts to convince him, at some point, if they're determining so many of his emotions right now. That sounds miserable but probably it's important.