"All our options are terrible. I guess maybe one of them is less terrible than the others but it's not clear which." 

Having all of his available options be terrible is not exactly a new experience for Telumë, but - somehow this time is worse. Mostly because he no longer trusts any of his reasoning on the subject of Maitimo. It's not really surprising that he can't be objective, as Melody pointed out, probably nobody could in his situation. But he failed to - it's not that he didn't notice, he was aware of it, but he failed to take any precautions against it. He can't think of any possible way he could have predicted the marriage aspect, but if he had been thinking at all he could have recognized that sleeping with Maitimo while he was a mind-controlled prisoner would cause an enormous diplomatic incident if known, and that this was a very good consideration against it, actually, separate from the thorny and confusing and still-unsettled-in-his-mind question of how he could try to do right by Maitimo.

...Making Maitimo pay most of the costs of his error here is definitely not doing right by him, and that is clearly what's happening right now. 

"I think it matters a great deal what kind of diplomatic incident," he says, wearily. "If they want Maitimo back in Arda that is probably a good thing. If they think I am an awful person, that is - fine." It'll hurt a lot but it's something he can handle. "The important part is whether they deny us the resources to win the war over it, or - I am not sure, try to put someone else in charge of it, or something." 

"I have no idea. Every once in a while I start to think I understand Quendi culture and then something else catches me by surprise, so I'm not very confident in my predictions here." 

"It definitely seems like the more - cooperative - we are about admitting to this, the better it'll go," Jisa says. "If we tell Fëanáro now and cooperate with whatever he wants, that's going to be a lot better than having it leak by bad luck at some point later and also in the latter scenario Maitimo is still being basically tortured in the meantime and honestly if you keep doing that I'm going to refuse to be in the rotation for watching him because I can't deal with this." 

"But if even the best case scenario involves us becoming enemies with the Noldor, then we might have to gamble anyway on keeping it secret long enough to win this." Which he really desperately doesn't want to do, and - that's a sign as much as anything that he can't be objective here, and the fact that he can't means that he really ought not be interacting with Maitimo anyway. 

Nobody says anything for a long time. 

Nayoki hasn't spoken much so far. She knows the least about Quendi out of all of them, and also she's been mostly out of the rotation because she is, after all, leading an entire research arm as well and dragging her away from that is pretty costly. 

"It occurs to me that he would be the person who knows," she says. 

"Perfect. He is going to be so incredibly uncooperative about telling me if I ask, and navigating that was already exhausting and stressful before he could blast me with all of his emotions, but - you are probably right. We should do that once he is awake." 

He wakes up. 

He's alone in a pretty cage whose walls he can't see and he's married and he tried to get to a place, emotionally, that'd let him pull together pretty quickly from there, since this is going to be the start of every day from here forward, but it still takes him a couple of minutes to stop being miserablescaredhelpless and get up and get dressed. He sings to himself. His emotions fade into lonelylonelylonely.

Someone from outside the room set-commands him to eat some food and drink water, since he literally never does that otherwise. If Melody is unhappy about it it doesn't show. 

(Melody is very unhappy about it, actually!) 

A couple of minutes after that, Telumë comes in. Herald Dara is with him. Telumë's expression is kind of guarded, right now, but not cold. Mostly he looks very, very tired. 

He gets one of the chairs, sits down a few feet away. "Need to talk." 

He doesn't remember any previous interrogations, he doesn't know what to expect Telumë to look like for them, but he knows what Dara's presence means. Scaredscaredscaredscaredscared.

"I have to say, this is the worst honeymoon."

Telumë laughs. Bitterly. "I know. Trust me, I am not any happier about it than you are. Dara?" He waits a beat. "Maitimo, you are not going to remember this so I am just going to tell you our considerations here. One. I really, very badly do not want to hurt you. I will say that under Truth Spell as well if you want, even. Two. This is kind of a security nightmare. I would be very unhappy about never seeing you again - I do, actually, love you, even though you are currently evil and loving you is not very adaptive for my goals. Three. It is realistically going to be very difficult to keep secret in the longer term, which means there will be a diplomatic incident over it eventually. Four. I am hurting you a great deal, right now, no matter what I want. Making you pay the price of a stupid choice I made, by never seeing your people again and spending the rest of the war as your husband's prisoner with your memory erased every day, is - not very fair." 

He steeples his hands together under his chin. "We are considering whether to just tell your father about this now, have the diplomat incident occur now in a time and place of our choosing, deal with the repercussions, and probably send you back to Arda. I am aware you will use this to cause problems but we can take precautions against those being problems for me. I would miss you very badly but that is not actually a reason not to do it. I wish you to tell me how your father is likely to respond, best and worst case scenarios, so that we can judge the consequences on our alliance with the Noldor. I am aware you are not going to be helpful here," a sigh, flicker of exhaustion, "but also, you should be aware that I know you quite well and have generally been able to find out the answers I need anyway. So?" 

" - I hate thinking for you," he says after a second. "It's different than telling you things I already thought about, it's... tearing up my head trying to get to the most important pieces of it faster than you will. Can you - take the spell off - and we can talk about this and you can do it this way if we can't come up with anything -"

"...We could do first stage only?" Telumë offers. "That will alert me if anything you say is a lie but it will not force you to answer, or to think." 

"Please."

Dara nods and does this. 

Telumë looks levelly at him. Waits. 

"Can you repeat what you asked, I was trying not to remember it."

Telumë repeats all of it. 

"- for a useful answer I would want to try to derive what all the Quendi are doing right now, what they perceive themselves as able to demand if they want to. I can try to guess that but if I guess wrong then my answer will be less useful and you might just want to tell me. It's not like I'll remember. I think that if I were working with you on there not being a diplomatic incident then I could make sure there was a very small one that didn't touch the war effort. I - obviously shouldn't want to work with you on that. I might be willing to in exchange for - in exchange for you undoing all this mind control and not doing more and sending me home, I guess. I'll miss you a lot but it does seem like the most reasonable thing to be aiming for."

Nod. "The Quendi are - providing us with several resources that would be difficult or impossible to get elsewhere, and are necessary or at least very preferable to have for the only currently-available plan that has any chance of working. I think they would see themselves as having significant leverage." Small sigh. "If we do send you back, I would probably want you to swear a temporary, releasable oath of non-interference with the war effort. We could workshop it to make sure it did not contradict your current one. With that, we would be willing to undo all of the other mind-effects, I think." 

Headshake. "Might contradict something I'm already under, and if that happens it tears up your head. You can put me under guard, you can put me on a different continent, you can require me to show up every day at the poetry courts of the Vanyar with something good enough to read out loud, I would like my head to be mine and to be ordered towards my goals even if everything not in my head is very determined to get in the way of them."

Nod. "I might come back to that later, but. If you were not trying to help make the diplomatic incident a smaller one, but if on our end we were immediately cooperative in anything your father wanted that did not risk losing the war, what would happen? Best and worst case scenarios." 

"Best case is probably my father is disgusted and mad at me and decides he doesn't want anyone in Arda to know about this and doesn't ask for me to be returned and Vanyel is the only person who is upset on anything resembling the right level and works with you on figuring out the ideal security situation, with no Quendi informed at any point."

Blink. "...Right, I suppose that might well be the best case from my end. It certainly does not seem like the best case for you. Worst case from my perspective, then?"