"I feel like at this point there's a big pile of counterevidence." Tiredly. "I never get to see him again, do I."

"No, I don't think that. It'll be safer once we know about the, er, new abilities you got out of this. And not in the same block as the one where you keep your memories, so, I suppose that might in fact count as this particular you never seeing him again. But he wants to and does not currently think it's going to be too much to risk. Given how little avenue we're giving you for influencing anything outside of here." 

"Okay. Thank you."

"You're welcome. I'm going to go run this by - other people - but probably I'll come back in ten minutes or so and fix the memory thing. Please have something to eat, there's food right out there." She points. 

"Of course."

He sits down and serves himself a plate of food and interacts with it in various ways that don't involve eating it and waits.

Melody comes back. "All right. This is Kalira." A dark-haired human girl of about sixteen bobs her head, smiling nervously. "She does not know anything about anything important and she will shut up if I tell her to but she can tell you about topics of interest to her, like birds, and she'll listen to whatever you want to talk about, although if it disturbs her too much she may leave." :Eat and drink: she adds, almost absentmindedly. "Memory part will take about two minutes to fix and then I'll head out." 

He eats and drinks and waits for that to be done.

Melody finishes and leaves. 

Then he can strike up a conversation with Kalira about birds and sketch some when necessary to illustrate since he can't use osanwë and he can think.

What does he want. To go back to Valinor, but this is mostly because they won't be anywhere near this careful - they don't know how - and Telumë is not going to fall for that. What does he want assuming he can't advance any of his goals. He wants to - repair things with his husband, he guesses, and that's an astoundingly messy knot of emotions there but - he loves him (and also he would not like to go the rest of his life without ever having sex which sure seems like the default trajectory here) so he shouldn't leave things where they stand right now. 

He wants to grieve, because he lost something, something he didn't even know he could possibly have until he lost it, something he wouldn't have chosen here and now. Though it could be worse. (It could be Sauron.) And also he lost the chance to spend time with Quendi and he's actually really upset about that, it was really important, humans aren't the same, you can't sing with them, you're doing careful cultural translation all the time, and he's not their Prince Nelyafinwë he's a random confusing prisoner, and they don't understand how awful this is - any Quendi here would understand instantly and instinctively that he is being tortured and he - really needs that, actually, to see that in someone's eyes, he doesn't need them to think it's a mistake - it isn't - his people must have helped with the arrangements - but he needs to interact with someone who doesn't think this is a kind of distasteful variant of the ordinary course of their world -

When Kalira seems to have sat about as long as he can interest her without much effort he tells her that she can go and he sings, a mourning song and then some wedding party songs, and he cries a lot, and he contemplates suicide abstractly enough that he hopes they won't come squish his head for it, and eventually he falls asleep.

Telumë focuses on his work. 

It's hard. He very badly wants to be with Maitimo. (It won't help, right now, he knows that). Also there's a lot to do, even if he's deliberately keeping himself out of some of the more sensitive preparations because that leaves more option value for interacting with Maitimo and, it turns out, he actually just wants that and is willing to trade some conveniences for it. Nothing important, nothing irreplaceable, but he has a lot of very competent people who have somehow kept this organization running for seven years in his absence and they can handle it.

He's glad that he already got the most important message from Vanyel and doesn't immediately have to interact with him again, before he has his head together about what just happened.

He made a huge mistake, somewhere, that's sort of apparent in hindsight - the obvious version is that this is what conventional ethics is for, there is a clear bright line that says 'do not sleep with your prisoners' and so it doesn't matter if your judgement on that matter is extremely compromised. He still isn't sure, though, if it was actually wrong in expectation, but clearly it was risky in expectation in a way he didn't foresee and that is, in fact, on him.

Maitimo sleeps. Wakes up. Does not eat or drink. Sings to himself, again. The feelings he is projecting at Telumë are a little bit calmer. Wistful. Lonely. Tired. 

He has a few more things he wants to process.

The thought that he pushed away the first night - that he'd woken up with the powerful sense that he'd miscalculated, and a few hours later they had miscalculated, in a very important way. Had he set himself up to make this mistake, in the hope it'd give him more leverage in the long run? If so he is really impressed with himself but also they'll probably respond by being even more cautious and he's already suffocating. But there's still something about the thought that makes him not want to throw it away. Probably it's just that if he did choose this, then it wouldn't be yet another awful thing that happened outside his control, it'd be an awful thing that he did deliberately for a reason. It makes a weirdly big difference. 

- and related to that he should probably face up, internally, to the fact that this is not sustainable, that he's pretty sure he's less stable than he was the first time, and maybe actually these are too many constraints for him to exist under if he wants to have any of his usual traits and not just wobble constantly between emotional extremes other people will control for him with hostile mind control. Maybe he should ask for days off once a week, or something. It means that the entire continuity of his life will feature meaningless conversations with strangers and being forced to eat by people who still don't seem to want to talk about whether at some point he's allowed to call a halt to this experiment. But there'll be a continuity of his life. Maybe he could build on that. (Maybe Telumë could feature if they didn't talk.)

Telumë reinforces his shields, not that it does anything, and finishes the planning meeting he's in and then goes to his Work Room to practice the next few items on his list of magic he needs to get down solidly again. 

And he doesn't move, he's good at that, but as soon as Telumë starts practicing he'll get a flash of - shock - amusement - despair - fear, but only the littlest pinch of it -

"So, uh, if anyone was in doubt about whether Eru and also all the gods here hate us personally," he says out loud, "one of my new blessings is that I can tell when and where Telumë is practicing magic."

Telumë has given up on stopping what he's doing and asking whoever's on shift every time he gets emotions like that. (They're rotating in some of the Thoughtsensers who aren't Mindhealers, now that it seems like the various blocks are solid and Maitimo isn't going to dislodge one, and one of they stays nearby enough to be pulled in if necessary.) He's trying to practice the mental motion of not being distracted by it, it seems like it'll be important. 

When he's done he goes to check with the person on duty. Asks for Melody. "Can he tell what sort of magic I am doing or simply that I am practicing it at all?" 

"I don't know." She Mindspeaks him rather than go in. :Maitimo, how much information were you getting?: 

"Uh, same spell over and over, some kind of barrier. Then he switched to some kind of trap spell over and over, and then to a different kind, and then to something I'm not familiar with."

Telumë laughs. It's not actually funny but he can't help himself. "I think the gods do in fact hate us. Not that this is a surprise. We ought to test it at various ranges and with various types of shield, and how precisely he can sense my location just based on this, and until we have done that I will only do very boring magic. You can pass that on." 

Melody passes this along. 

Sigh. "Makes sense."

They test it. 

None of the several dozen types of shielding they try do much, even though all of them ought to be totally impermeable to Velgarth magic, including the sense-sharing aspect of lifebonds - but this isn't Velgarth magic. They do make the resolution on what kind of magic Telumë is doing, and the exact direction and distance to him, somewhat fuzzier. Telumë Gating several hundred miles away makes a bigger difference; Maitimo can still sense that he's doing magic at all, but much less of the details. Which means that if Telumë is going to be personally doing any magic that is particularly important or sensitive, which he ought to avoid in general now, he needs to do it from the opposite end of the northern territory he controls.

Once Maitimo is asleep again, Telumë sits down and gets out paper to write, and thinks. 

And several hours later, they meet and regroup. 

"The way things are right now is not acceptable," Jisa says. "I don't even mean strategic considerations, although that part isn't great, I mean - just because his ultimate goal here is maximal torture in the universe doesn't mean I'm all right torturing him, and...we kind of are, right? I don't think there's realistically any way we can keep him here without it doing him a lot of harm, even if we're trying really really hard, even if it'd be possible for a human, and - and I was fine with that, when there was actually a good reason, but we have all the information we need at this point and this is so bad for him and I'm - not willing to just sit here and watch that happen."

"We could consider being less careful," Melody says. "The memory block was more important when we were interrogating him. But I don't think we can both give him actually liveable conditions and also have it be safe for him to interact with you, Telumë. Especially not now. I'm not blaming you, just..." 

"I know." He feels very tired, mostly. "It was stupid of me." Maybe it was unethical too, but the part where it was stupid is a lot more salient to him right now. 

"If this hadn't happened, it would make a lot of sense to consider sending him back to Arda now. And, well, doing that now would also address the distance thing. It might be the best damage control strategy for the, er, security hole this creates. Except for the part where doing that is inevitably going to cause an enormous diplomatic incident and we are kind of relying on the Noldor right now for rather a lot of resources." 

Telumë doesn't speak for a long time. 

"I am worried about the strategic consequences of keeping this secret," he says slowly. "It is relevant and - keeping relevant facts secret from one's allies who one is relying on is not something I would prefer. Also, it occurs to me that denying him Quendi visitors at this point is going to be suspicious, and refusing to ever send him to Lórien is going to be suspicious, and..." Deep breath. "And we are not going to be able to keep it from them forever. I do not want to. Which means that even if it successfully remains a secret for the rest of the war, it will come out at some point that we kept it from them, and that would also be very messy. Also it might not successfully remain a secret anyway, even if we try, given that - I do not exactly expect luck and coincidences to be on my side."