"Even with whatever you've done to my head, and I haven't catalogued it all because it's a lot, it's obviously dangerous to be here without any idea what I'm thinking. I don't think I'm actually at risk of anything more than distracting you but that's basically a coincidence of the oaths I happen to be under right now and I don't think you can possibly have felt all that out yet. So if you didn't have Thoughtsensing I'd expect you to have something else set up, and the thing that's simplest is just making me send them. Not because you're going for information today, I have noticed that you are not, just because you aren't sure enough yet of what I'm doing. I guess having someone else do it works too, it's just not the first thing I thought of, so when I noticed I wasn't obliged to share them I thought that probably you had it natively."

Mindhealing Sight can see oaths, directly, it took Jisa and Melody a while of putting their heads together to figure out how to interpret it, but they had a while, when they were in k'Treva and Telumë was with Nayoki getting this place set up because no one thought to warn him he was going to need an underground bunker pretty enough to keep a Quendi alive in.

"A reasonable line of thinking," he says. "I definitely would not be here if no one was watching your thoughts. ...I suppose if you would prefer a compulsion to make all of them public, over a third listener, I might take that into consideration." Honestly it's better having a Mindhealer there anyway, they can see more of the gestalt, but - he might ask them to just use receptive Empathy and Mindhealing-Sight, and get the content of thoughts by osanwë himself. 

Stressedscared no that's stupid, he can't steer here, fear is only useful when you can use it -

"I don't especially have a preference," he says tiredly. "You won, you get the having-preferences, that's kind of how it works."

:He's scared: Jisa informs Telumë. 

Telumë did not exactly miss this fact. 

"I know," he says, with equal weariness. "I - do actually wish to make this less awful for you, to the extent I can - maybe Sauron likes to hurt people after he wins just because he can but I am not Sauron and you know that. Still, that is limited by the fundamental fact that you are my prisoner and we are on opposite sides of a war." 

- and that's a tangled mess of emotions, because that's Leareth and so characteristic of him and it feels so - safe - and also it's not safe at all and also he apparently just experiences spikes of fear whenever the conversation turns to how to modify his brain to make it acceptable to his captors, why, was he experiencing that every time with Sauron too and just mostly not noticing - oh, no, he was noticing and just channeling it as - adrenaline, excitement, not panic, panic would be boring, he couldn't afford to be boring - and that line of thought probably also explains why the other thing he is alongside 'scared' is 'turned on' -

- and having emotions is bad, it'll scare Telumë away, it is maybe slightly safer here than in Haven but only barely and arguably not at all, Sauron was willing to torture him but utterly unwilling to dispose of him, and Leareth will, if there's a tantalizing enough dream of getting the thing he wants back -

"No one whose prisoner I'd rather be," he says lightly. " - no, that's not true, I'd rather be the prisoner of someone very stupid."

Telumë chuckles, keeps his voice light as well. "That does seem correct. I think someone very stupid would not have succeeded at taking you prisoner in the first place, though. You did not make it easy." There's pride in his voice. 

"You have some way of doing compulsions that an observer can't detect and that do let me pause the action and consider whether I really want to. Did you have that all along and hold it in reserve just in case or did you come up with it recently - oh, no, it's Jisa, isn't it, there's a way of doing them with Mindhealing and it's just different enough."

"Yes. I was - completely unaware of the plan until it had succeeded, actually. I provided them a wagon ride into Valdemar with one of my agents, but I did not know it was them. I would not have expected Vanyel and Treven to be willing to risk them, even if they did have a rapid way out." 

"I also made that assumption! Foolishly, it turns out. Didn't have anyone looking for them particularly. Did have someone looking for all mages but they also found a way around that."

"Jisa can conceal her Gifts. Apparently being a Mindhealer and also very creative allows many things. Stef could not but I suppose your people were not stopping all Bards, and - hmm, you might not have thought of the hair colour change as a disguise, he would have been more distinctive otherwise." 

"They'd both done horrible things to their hair. I should've just had a policy of arresting people for bad hair, that would've saved me."

And this is safer territory but he's actually starting to think that maybe it's stupid to just try to keep everything in safe territory all the time - and he has to assume whenever he does anything that he's doing it for a lot of instances of him - instead of trying to fix the problems with him that seem likeliest to bother Telumë. Scared easily. He knows from Angband how people deal with that, visit it patiently under safe conditions, hear it out, reassure it - this feels like not ideal circumstances but he can't expect to ever get more than a few hours and any line of thought he has to rederive can't be long -

- listen to the fear. It says that he is helpless and in the hands of his enemies and will be utterly destroyed unless he pleases them and will anger them if he is observed to try. Wow, that doesn't feel like it made anything better. 

"Or at least you would've had to come yourself, your hair is lovely." Even more lightly; obviously Telumë can take it as flirtatious if he wants to but he wants the tone to be uncomplicatedly innocent.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaa this is very upsetting now she can see why Melody didn't want her watching the interrogation part. :He's trying to figure out how he can be less scared because he thinks it'll upset you and then you - he can't possible actually think that you'll get angry and hurt him but - I'm confused about a lot of what he's thinking and feeling. But he's scared of you trying to modify his mind: 

Which is very reasonable! Probably she's going to do it a lot more! The oath is even worse and she has to look at it for eight hours at a stretch, it's terrible. 

Telumë will think about that later when it's all right if he looks visibly upset. "Thank you! I was a bit sad about having to start all over again with it short, that was ten years worth of growing my hair before, but it'll get there eventually." 

"Does this body do face-hair? Or is it too young? - you look really young. I can relate to Vanyel now."

Reassure the fear - yeah, that does sound pretty bad! It makes sense that his mind would want to activate all its defenses! It won't work, it won't protect him at all, but it makes sense! It's like a little child picking up a stick to menace a line of advancing gryphons (and he can call to mind lots of examples of that). It won't work but it's not contemptible, just tragic. 

He doesn't feel reassured, maybe that was the wrong mental move.

(With a different bit of his attention he smiles fondly at Telumë, acts like he is visibly suppressing an impulse to reach out and feel how soft his hair is.)

"I think it is probably too young and will do face-hair eventually. And, yes, I think that physically I am possibly even younger than Stef was." 

"Well. I told Vanyel he should do whatever made him happy." Visibly suppressing the impulse to reach out and touch his hair didn't go over badly, and Telumë does want him, so this time he does reach out - slowly, carefully - pets his hair. "I think it's softer."

...Telumë is clearly an idiot, because he gamed out so many contingency plans for various far less likely situations that could occur or things Maitimo could try at him, and he did not plan at all what to do if this happened because - for some reason he literally did not consider that it might. Probably he should stop him? But that might just make him sadder? It's not obvious to him that it's bad even though apparently it's outside-view dubious to have sex with someone who is your prisoner–

–the thing he actually does is freeze and stare wide-eyed at Maitimo. 

:–aaaaa Melody help what do I do: 

Melody comes running, she isn't far. :What? ...Oh. I see:

What's Maitimo thinking and feeling right now? 

He raises an eyebrow. "- has this not come up before." It obviously hasn't but maybe Telumë will explain himself. Shocked and confused is okay, it's more space to think with the other part of his attention -

(Are the things he's scared of true? It is true that if Telumë can think of a way to get his boyfriend back he will, and while obviously Maitimo does not want to die he can hardly object to this as a general policy, and it's not really the thing that scares him. The thing that scares him is that Telumë will try and fail and get some useless broken thing that he can't love and that doesn't matter at all -)

"It has not. I was very stupid and - did not think about it in advance either." 

...What would he have decided? He wants to do what's best for Maitimo, here. Or least bad, anyway. Possibly what's least bad for him ought to be a consideration but - no, he just cares about that less, actually, plausibly he will take some emotional damage from - this kind of intimacy, with his boyfriend-who-is-currently-evil, who both is and isn't the Maitimo he loves. But he's still a person, he's suffering and he matters and - Telumë can handle a bit of extra distress about this later, if it's hard then, well, he has three Mindhealers he can talk to about it and all of them will hug him too if he wants. The difficulty is that he doesn't know and he's really really hoping Jisa has an idea and will tell it to him soon. 

 The object-level conversation has all his attention now. "I will very patiently await you having some time to think about it, then."

:...It's not clear to me, actually: Melody tells Jisa. :I mean, on priors it's a terrible idea, but this is Leareth we're talking about. And it might be mostly a bad idea for him. Mainly I'm getting a sense that Maitimo is feeling very helpless and out of control: which hurts, especially remembering the years of Leareth feeling that way constantly, :and - maybe we shouldn't make this decision for them too: 

:Ummm, it doesn't seem bad to talk to him about it?: Jisa tells Telumë. :And then do what you want after that: