:I think the song is cheating. And so is the fact that you are very good at snuggling: Long pause. :...However, it is also an effective strategy. I will trade my objectively superior skylight for snuggles: 

Rather than walk over, though, he takes down his barrier and then shuts the door and locks it, and Gates across, it's absurdly short-range and the shielding is thorough enough that it won't be detectable by any nearby Herald-Mages outside. 

What, don't you trust me?

:...Actually I was just worried I would get distracted and forget to lock it so servants will not go in, since I know you are very distracting. Perhaps if you change your mind and decide it is objectively superior after all, with sufficient ingenuity you can arrange to get into it: 

Hmmm. And he pulls Leareth into his arms.

Mmm, that's nice. :All my powerful magic and it turns out I am still bribe-able with cuddles: 

Some things even powerful magic can't get. - though actually, cuddles are not one of those things.

...True, but Leareth wasn't about to use a compulsion to make Maitimo come over and cuddle him, that's - something he wants to check Maitimo is okay with each time. Also it's actually pretty hard to get right if he's more than a few feet away, he could've done it before but he's out of practice. 

Kiss. Maitimo had not been necessarily assuming that Leareth wouldn't do that but he is perfectly delighted about this outcome.

Huh. Leareth is used to Maitimo having basically perfect predictions about how he'll act in various situations. 

It's not quite that detailed, usually, and less so for decisions that are more novel or less constrained. And - there's maybe a slight mismatch in their intuitions about how much the compulsions are something to be careful about, which he's correcting for now. Leareth is being very careful not to use magic in some way Maitimo wouldn't like, and it is very sweet of him. Maitimo is mostly ...not thinking of that carefulness as one of the interesting tools to get things he wants and not things he doesn't want. It's too - 

- oh, here's a concept that feels relevant. When you are new at getting things you want, you have to ask for them, and that's often taken as rude. And then you get better at asking for them, and manage to ask in a way that's mostly graceful. And then eventually you get good at engineering the situation so you never even ask. And for everything that is very very important to Maitimo, he does that, has for a long time. It would be terrifying to be in a position where you had to ask for food, even if you were sure to be granted it, because you'd be imposing, even if just a little bit, you'd be spending social capital, and anything you actually need you ought to be in a position to get without spending social capital -

- there are exceptions here, he's gesturing at a general principle but obviously emergencies happen and wars happen and you should often have higher priorities than not asking for things, and you'd better be fluent in asking so that when you do need to you spend only very little - 

- but it fundamentally did not occur to him to rely in any sense on asking Leareth for things, or on Leareth asking him for things, except in the context of clarifications about factual confusions or something. Obviously the thing he would do - is doing - is arranging circumstances where all of the things Leareth might do, given who Leareth is as a person, are fine. This sounds like a lot of work but it's not; picking Leareth to fall in love with instead of some other person did most of it. 

Huh. 

That makes a lot of sense - it's not the direction Leareth himself went in, it's not the angle on power and control that made the most sense to reach for, but it makes sense.

...Leareth still feels like he ought to be careful, here. Maybe part of it is that - this is fundamentally a different kind of thing he wants and is trying to get, he's not trying to win a war. It's not even that the rules are different, just that the actual best strategy is different. Because he loves Maitimo and so he doesn't want to hurt him or upset him or even just ruin the moment, those are constraints and they're new ones for him. He doesn't have a good model of it yet, so of course he's being careful.

Of course Leareth's thing is different, Leareth mostly - couldn't use personal loyalty and couldn't use familial loyalty and had limited reason to trade favors instead of trading more concrete things. And Leareth had concrete power - not just the magic, Maitimo also gets the sense that rulers in Velgarth generally have some amount of ability to order the use of force? 

Almost always, yes. Many countries have standing armies. Most countries have internal guards who are authorized to use force against those breaking the law, as humans who grew up not in paradise have a tendency to do. It varies, how much a single ruler can directly command all of that, but - usually to some extent. And when there are limits, it's often not much more than a piece of paper in their way.

And, no, Leareth doesn't think familial loyalty was ever something he could lean on, even in his barely-remembered first incarnation. (It's possible he would have felt differently about the children thing if that had been different.) 

He doesn't want to think about that - (Leareth's children would've been like him, at least some of them, except born into the Cataclysm with no way to live forever) - no not thinking about that - 

Quendi don't really have lawbreaking and never needed an army except the once and the only kind of power in paradise was Maitimo's kind - or his father's, and it was obvious from early childhood he shouldn't do that, why specialize in something you'll always be second-best at -

Snuggle. Waft of apology for mentioning the thing that Leareth also doesn't want to think about, actually. :Your family does the specialization thing very strongly, I noticed it: 

It's useful. I don't know if it was my father's plan all along or if it sort of happened naturally when I was - me - and Macalaurë was obviously going to be the greatest musician of our generation and Tyelcormo couldn't learn to read. Maybe initially he planned to field an army of Curufinwes. Probably, actually.

:Tyelcormo cannot read? I did not know that: 

There's something wrong with his brain. If the letters are very spaced, and in a different alphabet my father designed so the letters aren't other letters when flipped along any axis, then he can, but slowly. It's not his eyes because reading through other peoples' eyes doesn't fix it and it's not that he's stupid at everything, he can mostly keep up if there's no reading involved.

:Ah. That happens in my world also, sometimes. We do not fully understand it either but it is possible for a Mindhealer to fix it, at least partially:

Huh! We should try that, then. 

:Mmm. I hope Velgarth’s magic can help. He has clearly managed all right but it seems inconvenient:

I think it is. It was a good thing Oromë was there, when he was younger.

:Yes: Leareth shifts a little so he can trail his fingers along Maitimo’s shoulder, down his arm. Reminded, with a little shiver, that Maitimo is just physically stronger than him, could straightforwardly win any fight between them if not for Leareth’s magic. 

He’s not sure what he wants right now, still feels off-balance from the conversation about compulsions.

He holds him. It's interesting, how humans are so fragile and so powerful. It feels like it might have almost as much to do with human social dynamics as the lack of paradise. Quendi mostly can't kill each other without putting a fairly extraordinary amount of planning and effort into it. Humans are both easier to hurt and much, much better at hurting each other. Probably someday when they are friends with all the gods they can put an age limit on DEATH BY GIGANTIC FIREBALL and make all the humans much less fragile. And make oaths harder to make. And make Leareth's hair more sensitive, at least sometimes. Sometimes it's kind of fun to have to work for it. 

:Sometimes fun to work for it, huh?: