Leareth yawns, smiles wearily at him. "Please." 

So he'll sing him to sleep.

Vanyel drifts out to go finish unpacking. 

And hopefully in a familiar place with some magic senses Leareth can recover. Eventually. He was worried at first they'd set him all the way back to square one but he actually seems to be recovering faster than that. 

(Because he's very smart and very careful.)

Leareth does seem shakier than before for the next few days, leaves him room less and calls Maitimo more, but he’s sleeping better - even when nightmares wake him, he can instantly check the wards to reassure himself.

”I wanted to ask you for advice about something,” he says at one point about a week later. 

"Sure, what's up?"

"I want to be more comfortable around Vanyel. This is the first chance we have had to - trust one another, in this way - and it is unfair to him and I think must hurt his feelings that I am more comfortable with you. I suppose I ought to bring it up with Melody, but - I am concerned that Vanyel has been her patient as well and this will cause her to feel horrifyingly awkward if I wish her to help me sort through memories of Melkor making a fake Vanyel torture me and...various other things." 

"That makes sense. Do you want to try to find a different Mindhealer somewhere?"

"Maybe. I had also wondered if there was anybody in your world who – they would obviously not be Mindhealing-Gifted, but was there anyone who spoke with the survivors of Utumno and helped them with this kind of thing?"

Leareth sighs. Looks down. "Or perhaps it would be worth asking Lórien. I remember hearing that he can smooth that sort of association; I am not sure if it would work with everything related to a particular person, but...for this I suppose I would consider asking." 

"There were people who spoke with the survivors from Utumno. I think some of them are here; I can talk to them and try to recommend one. And if that doesn't help as much as you'd like we can see Lórien."

"I would appreciate that, thank you. I - want to ask Vanyel for help with something that I do not have enough magic for – to check that my immortality setup is working and Melkor in fact did not find a way of damaging it – but that is a longer conversation and it would help if I could be in the same room as him for longer than ten minutes without feeling pointlessly stressed about it." 

" - that makes sense, and I wasn't aware that Melkor might have damaged it. I'll start looking for someone right away.

If anything happens, assuming the immortality is in place, how many years before we'll be able to find you again? Two, three?"

Leareth gives him a blank look. "Unless anything went badly wrong, I ought to be able to contact you via either Valdemar or the north once I succeeded in finding a supply cache with my records. Probably months?" 

" - you know, this whole time I have been assuming you start over as a baby. No?"

"What? No, that would not work very well, although I - did a few times consider it - as less costly than the current version." It's suddenly occurring to Leareth that this isn't something he ever told Maitimo, because he hadn't ever told Vanyel, and Vanyel is plausibly going to be upset by it and– he curls up tighter.

Get it over with. "The spell is linked to the bloodline of my original body. This was two thousands years ago so I do not have a shortage of descendants now. I - take a young man's body - usually a little younger than Stef. The trigger would be the first time they use a fire spell. For a time, once I had the control to do so, I tried sharing instead of taking over entirely, but it - seemed to be shifting who I was, and that was concerning, so I stopped. I do not like it, exactly, but one life taken every one or two centuries is a lower cost than many of the others I pay." 

"Oh," he says quietly. He doesn't look upset, but then, he wouldn't. "The blood - the first time, it was your children?"

"Yes. ...Grandchildren, perhaps? I am not sure how long it took after the Cataclysm before magic had settled enough that I could reincarnate. I arranged so that there would be many of them just in case, even though I - desperately had hoped - that one of the other methods I set up would work. This was the only one that succeeded." 

" - wouldn't you know whether you were your child or grandchild? - you did mention you lost a lot of memories, but -"

Leareth is starting to expect that Maitimo is pretty upset, a lot more than his face is letting on. But there's no point in hiding any of it now. 

"Not necessarily. I think I had several hundred biological children from my first body, and I - continued to make an effort - for several centuries until I was sure. Mostly I made the offer to women who wished to have children, especially Gifted children, and I made sure they were well set up and had a comfortable income."

He closes his eyes. "...After the Cataclysm, when I was worried about sabotage as well as poor luck, I - used more subterfuge. In perhaps a hundred total cases I made use of compulsions or illusion-magic or other subterfuge, to bed married women with children already, who did not know my identity, so that I would have descendants in families where no mortals or gods could find them."

Maitimo is going to have feelings about this, isn't he. 

Well, not where Leareth can see them. 




He'd said it to himself, at one point, that Leareth had probably done just about every awful thing you could think of, and possibly some that he hadn't thought of. If you had asked him 'has Leareth killed children' he would have said certainly yes, and if you'd asked 'has Leareth had children he never saw because they were part of an elaborate scheme that didn't require them to have a father' he would've said quite plausibly and if you'd asked 'has Leareth killed his own children' he would have said that it seemed entirely possible, and if you had asked him 'has Leareth forced people to bear him children with mind control' he would - actually, he would have guessed no, on that one, he didn't know you could do that -

- not enough imagination, that keeps happening - 

- and it's easy to say "he has probably done just about every awful thing you can think of, but I'm still on his side" if you can think of awful things, but apparently he is significantly impaired in this because he could've listed awful things for Years and Years and Years and not thought of that one, because it doesn't even give him a pointer to what other awful things he isn't thinking of -

"I -" am going to go deal with some important prince business, but that's a transparent lie and even if he could pull it off he owes Leareth better than that - "I want to go sing."

Leareth nods, because he doesn't think he can manage to speak. That went...about the worst it could've gone, actually, why didn't he see this coming -

- why did he forget that one of the reasons he can't have friends is that someday they'll find out the kinds of things he's done, that was an option he sacrificed knowingly and willingly along with all the other benefits of being a traditionally good person, and he knew that but he didn't expect something would ever happen where it would hurt this much. 

He manages to keep his expression controlled until Maitimo is out of the room and, according to his newly reopened Thoughtsensing, a good distance away, and then he wraps his mental shields as tightly around himself as he can, and curls up on his bed and cries. 

As promised he goes and sings. For women dead two thousand years ago - do people know if they're under compulsions, would they be wondering who did that to me or why did I do that - for things that he doesn't have enough detail to put a face on like that, just like an hour ago he couldn't have imagined a person pregnant when she did not want to be - for Leareth, taking the shape he thought would let him survive, except right now it doesn't feel like there's anything beautiful about that -

He is an Elf so if no one interrupts him he'll just - do that, for a couple of days. Manage logistics in the background once the lack of interaction with other people starts to itch, have Larya bring Vanyel and Leareth meals.

Leareth does not leave his room or talk to anyone - he barely bothers to get out of bed - when Vanyel comes by he pushes him off with 'not now, leave me alone please' - when Vanyel drags Melody over, damn him, he tells her to please leave him alone too, and she leaves. He eats but only because Larya will tell Maitimo if he doesn't and it'll only upset him more and that doesn't seem fair at all right now. 

Maybe if he tries hard enough he can somehow wrap the pieces of himself back together into a shape that can survive the way he did before, for two thousand years. Maybe. But he doesn't really believe it.

Sleeping is very bad without Maitimo there, but as promised there are shields on the room against his projecting in his sleep, so it's fine, it's fine.

He could sing for a lot longer but he thinks he is at least hitting diminishing returns from singing, after two days. 

He sleeps. He swims in the ocean. 

He wants Findekáno. 

"Van - I know this is very unfair of me - would you be up for another Gate?"

"Yes, of course." Vanyel considers asking any of the large number of questions he has, starting with 'what happened', but - decides to leave it alone. He can just park himself outside Leareth's door the entire time Maitimo is gone, Leareth will know he's there because of Thoughtsensing but it doesn't technically count as infringing on his space.