Me? I don't have any magic, I haven't fought any gods, I merely bring people snacks. I cannot steal anyone who does not want to be stolen. I cannot distract anyone who does not want to be distracted. Kiss, this time on the lips. 

Aaaaaa okay that is pretty overwhelming – it's a nice overwhelming but that doesn't change his instinctive freeze-orient response, apparently. :Sorry: 

Don't be. He'll hold very still, now, a few inches away, and wait for him. 

Leareth relaxes; it only takes about a second of orienting to get that the situation is still safe and fine and actually very good, just...confusing. So confusing. It seems kind of ridiculous that he's two thousand years old and is prepared for anything up to and including landing in a new world on the brink of war with an evil god, and apparently kissing someone is the thing that makes him feel like he's lost without a map. Which is not obviously a problem, it seems...kind of unlikely this will go terribly wrong if he's insufficiently paranoid, but it's still new and strange. 

- the first thought that crosses his mind is actually 'wait are you telling me that when you did all that you never kissed them' but he is absolutely not in a million years sharing it, that'd be an awful thing to do, and it actually feels disturbingly plausible now that Leareth did not experience a single surprising positive emotion at any point about the whole thing - 

- do you think you want more time to think, before anything happens?

:Maybe. I want you to keep holding me though: 

Leareth is thinking that he possibly, even likely, has ever had something that counted as a relationship with someone, which he was maybe even happy about. It's just - not the kind of memory that can get easily compressed into written records, and apparently it doesn't come across a dozen reincarnations as implicit procedural memory either. And for the last thousand years in particular, after it fully sunk in that his war was against the gods, and the lengths they would go to in blocking his plans up to and including murdering everyone in the same city as him, he hasn't really had the luxury of - needing a particular person in his life in order to be okay. And that kind of limits the depth to which it's safe to care, and once he's already made that tradeoff, it makes sense that trying to have romantic relationships anyway while not caring much would seem kind of pointless.

Obviously that's different, now, because he has, in fact, already cared very deeply about Maitimo for a long time. Which is a happy thought, but in a confusing way that makes tears come to his eyes. 

Going to kill everyone who did that to you. And eventually bring them back, I guess, once they can't possibly hurt us or anyone else.

:Damn it–: now he's laughing and sort of crying at the same time, he pulls back enough to look Maitimo in the eye, then leans in and kisses his cheek and lets his forehead rest against Maitimo's – and then freezes again, because even though Maitimo has literally not moved at all, he's managed to whack himself with a disorienting wave of emotions. 

Patpatpat. 

It was Findekáno who said that to me. I was - moping, about how stupid it turned out to be to parole Melkor, and he said, well, we did it too early, we should've waited until he was as small next to us as we are next to the gods, but we weren't wrong to realize that eventually, you know, we'd have to, to have really won. 

:Huh. That is true, and...very wise: He thinks quietly for a minute, or mostly drifts between thoughts, rather. Then finds himself smiling again. :Has Findekáno known how you felt about me the entire time?: 

Most of it. Uh, my plan to stop doing immoral things until we knew more about the rest of the universe and how they'd take them wasn't standing up very well to - being close to you and not distracted - and so I went and apologized to him for unilaterally deciding to try to stop doing immoral things until we knew more, and then to talk through - a lot of stuff related to that - and then once we'd figured out all of that he asked what it was I liked about you, and I explained. He's - very, very good. ...possibly you should talk to him about this in case he has any useful advice.

:Well, he must be very good, for somebody like you to love him. And, I expect that would be helpful, yes, if he were willing: It seems likely that everything he's feeling is pretty normal for humans - for people more generally, really - and it's just out-of-the-ordinary for him. 

I think so, yeah. And with most Quendi relationships both people are both new at everything so no one feels like they're - the one having a lot of feelings -

:That would be a very different experience, yes: 

...He's so happy. Kind of bewildered as well, and - he can feel parts of himself still trying to pull away from it, it feels dangerous to hold nothing back, to want something this much – and really this isn't surprising at all, given his entire life history.

There are very few things that can happen to Maitimo, though, especially here. And...if something does happen then he will search every world in the multiverse until he can fix it.

:I want to know what you are feeling: he sends. 

The amulet is dangling right there. He does not take it off but he reaches for the clasp and presses it into Leareth's hands. 

Leareth thinks about it for a while.

:If you need me to stop then tell me and I will shield my Gifts until you put it back: he sends, and then he undoes the clasp, slips the chain free of Maitimo's neck and returns it to Maitimo's hand. 

It was not until after they retrieved Leareth that Maitimo was sure he didn't have a way around his amulet; earlier he would've guessed not but it wouldn't have been a very confident guess. 

He's aroused. Leareth is right here and happy and they're not pretending anymore and he still should not touch and it is taking a lot of restraint, not in the sense where he might fail at it but in the sense that it's where all of his attention is, in arms he is holding still and legs he is holding still and breathing he is holding steady. He is delighted, and pleasantly surprised - he'd thought it might take a lot longer, even if it was something Leareth wanted - humans are so very fast about everything they want - and he'd been half-expecting that Leareth would want to dictate terms more than he seems to - that's a carryover from the first desire for Leareth he ever had, which was of course shaped like 'he can do whatever he wants' because that was the first thing it was important to internalize about Leareth -

:Is it really?: Leareth sends, thoughtful. :The first desire you had for me, I mean. I suppose it is not false that I have sufficient power to do whatever I want, technically, now that you trust me with that again, but 'dictating terms' would require having considerably more idea what I am doing than I actually do: 

He sort of wishes he could tell Maitimo to stop having restraint, just to see what would happen, but - that is almost certainly a bad idea, actually, right now. They'll get there eventually. 

They should get there slowly in a fashion that lets Leareth feel safe and happy and loved. It is fun to imagine other things but it would actually just be bad, right now, to go ahead with them. 

And yes. It's not - the thing he wants, the thing that feels like a good place from which to build other things, the thing that can be described with nice words like 'romance' and 'love', it isn't the thing he is steering towards now - but the first thought he had about Leareth that was definitely not a thought Maitimo-who-went-to-Lorien-and-got-married-decades-ago would've had was that Leareth could do whatever he wanted and that was really hot -

Leareth isn't sure he understands why that has him smiling but it does.

...Maybe it's related to the same undercurrent he's sensed before, that Maitimo wants him to be at his strongest, even if there must have been times where a more powerful Leareth would feel meaningfully less safe. 

Then probably Leareth should know what practicing compulsions was like. 

Maitimo is a very good liar and part of being a very good liar is knowing when not to lean on your ability to lie and 'a day spent practicing mind-control, together, alone, while you've been concealing five years of wanting him' is in hindsight an awful lot to lie about, though he could hardly have ordered someone else to practice with Leareth, and it really shouldn't have been Vanyel.

There was this impossible tension through the whole thing, right, where Leareth was the one practicing his ability to turn people into his helpless puppets but Maitimo was the one who had context, who had more than half the picture, and it was thrilling and distracting in almost exactly the way this is distracting, holding Leareth in bed, except the thing he'd been trying to do was not betray any signs that he was enjoying himself, and it'd be such a terrible time for it to come up, when Leareth understood Maitimo to have been angry with him for, judgmental about - (the children, not the sex, but what a thing to clarify out of nowhere, so he hasn't) - 

- it's easy to tell which thoughts are definitely his because they are ALL THE THOUGHTS ABOUT LEARETH, which Leareth is too innocent to have dreamed of planting -

- and his sentences all came out sounding flirtatious to his own ears, but probably that was just his imagination because they landed exactly as they were meant to, reasonable and supportive and gentle, and it felt like he was on fire, but in a nice way, but not entirely in a nice way, and he should've been thinking about how to graciously bow out if Leareth needed a week of practice but that would require the ability to think -

...That is really not what Leareth had been expecting but he isn't actually sure why not or what he was expecting instead. He had, in fact, not noticed anything, and looking back on it, imagining Maitimo as he'd appeared then jusxtaposed with the thoughts he's sensing now, is prompting a very interesting set of emotions... He makes all of those thoughts public because that symmetry feels more appropriate, right now, and also it's half of how he communicates with Maitimo anyway. 

He's trying to figure out if this counts as Maitimo expressing that he would enjoy doing the compulsion thing again at some point, but apparently this is exactly the category of thing he has no idea how to ask about. 

:You must be the first person in five hundred years to describe me as 'innocent': is the first actual sentence his mind comes up with. :I know what you mean, but...:

Patpatpat. If you wanted to murder me I'm sure you could be very creative about it.

:Not as creative as the gods– Sorry: That was completely not where he was intending that to go. 

Well if they're going to be sharing thoughts they're going to be bumping into awful things all the time, that's one of the costs of sharing thoughts. And now he's curious, though he shouldn't be because probably those experiences were traumatic.