"I have no idea what to consider it! It is not the same thing humans call marriage, but... I love him very much. I did before and I still do. This happening does not influence that one way or another. I want him to be happy and I do not want to hurt him any more than I already have. I - need him very badly - but I think actually my mistake here was...that. I think it is predictably going to make you insane if - if the person you need most in the world is sworn to serve Sauron - and spends months trying to kill you - and then you get him out and he is still evil and you sort of try to have a relationship anyway just because you both still love each other. I think - everything about this is awful and intolerable and I want reality to not be this way - but I think that the choices I made were predictably bad and I ought to have..." What? "I probably ought to have figured out how to go back to not needing people. So that I could interrogate him professionally and send him back to his people and win the stupid goddamned war and then worry about trying to fix anything with him." 

And then he starts crying, which is really just humiliating on top of everything else. He didn't mean to say any of that, it just...wasn't a question he'd been expecting or preparing himself for, and those are the words that came out. 

"If it were me it would probably help to have internally had any middle ground between relying on the evil boyfriend and learning how to not need people. What it is you need to not need people for."

"I - just..." And he can't describe it so he just does the mental motion to make that part of his thoughts public, holds it out for Findekáno to see, the stars through Maitimo's eyes - fixing all of the worlds together... "I wake up in a new body with - maybe thirty memories, the most salient events of my last life, and that is everything until I find my records, and...this time at least a third of them were him. And that is what I have to - to build the core of myself on, so I remember what I am fighting for long enough to - finish becoming me again."

He lifts his hand, helpless, lets it fall. "I had to rebuild everything after Angband - I destroyed my core memories so that I would stop doing things. I was not done. And then I had to start over. And then this happened. I am not sure how to go back to not needing that because I have never had this problem before." 

"Do you, uh, think that you are the person who should be running the war effort right now. I know that it's really important. I know that a lot of it is using plans you laid. But -"

"Maybe not. It is the last thing I want to be doing. I have been delegating absolutely everything I can. I really, truly wish I did not have to, but - I think I am still a fairly key piece at the centre of this. Probably it would be fine if I took a week to - get my head together - but I think that if I stopped working on this entirely then things would go worse, possibly disastrously so. I asked Nayoki - she is one of my trusted advisors - I asked her after this happened, and she said she wished she could give me a year or two to rest, but..." 

"Okay.

- I want to go talk to Maitimo now. I am trying to help you do the right thing here and get him home safely where we can work on getting you what you need for your war effort. If you are concealing any significant part of this mess then I am going to have to spend almost all of my time and resources on that. If actually it was more times or if actually there were more compulsions or if actually he's been deterred from having an honest conversation with me here and now, I would like to know that. I don't want to hurt you. If you are the best person for this war effort then I want you to have whatever you need to succeed at it. If you are not in my opinion the best person for it then I will try to convince your advisors of this and we will figure out who is right. But I need to know now if there are more pieces of this I'm going to keep stepping on or if I already have them."

"...I think you have all of them?" He skims over recent events in his mind. "We gave him several days of remembering everything so he could do some processing, during which I did not talk to him. And then we - had a sort of negotiation, trying to find shared ground in navigating this situation. The kind of alliance one builds between enemy factors, not - with a lover - but since we are opposed to each other's goals... He does not remember that conversation, since it involved my revealing a lot of information of relevance to the war, but he wrote a letter to himself about it. Approximately, we agreed that he could go home without any mind control in place, even though I recognize this is very risky, because - I had gotten myself into a position where most of the options were terrible, and this one seemed to be the least terrible across both of us."

Telumë rubs his eyes. "Also he is about the amount of traumatized one would expect from having been Sauron's prisoner, just because Sauron found him very useful does not mean he did not have some fun torturing him. Probably you could have guessed that. If I am forgetting to tell you about any aspects, it is not deliberate and is probably because I am - not exactly a paragon of good reasoning and careful planning, right now. I will repeat anything in particular that you wish me to under Truth Spell, later." 

"Thank you. 

You can't have him right now. But - you know where he got it, right? He got it from his people. He - watches people and pokes them and makes them stronger and then carries a copy around, for whenever he needs it. Maitimo is the crown prince of the Noldor - though actually we should probably get the King to change that, come to think of it - and you have the Noldor. I don't know if you can use that. But you could come to Vinyamar, sometime, and try. He's going to fix all the worlds with us, some day."

Telumë nods. He's kind of shaking right now, but he feels better. Lighter. "I - would like that, I think. I miss Arda. I miss..." It takes a while to piece it into words, and even then it won't quite come together, so he leaves it as a half-formed public thought instead. It's something shaped vaguely like...being in the presence of people who trust one another, because they grew up together in a world where that was safe.

And Velgarth right now isn't that, Velgarth is in existential danger, he has to be paranoid and he's good at it and has, in fact, been quietly good at it in all the various meetings and planning sessions he managed to fit in, somehow, around all of this. But even so, it feels important and right to remember what he's steering it toward. 

"Thank you," he says, and steps back so Findekáno can go have his promised private conversation with Maitimo. He has to trust that Maitimo will hold to the terms and conditions of their agreement, because it's his interests as well, that's the entire point. Shared ground.

He goes into the room. 

It's pretty. It's not all that small. They were clearly doing their best, at least on that front. 

Maitimo is sitting on his bed staring blankly at the wall.

- he has his head back and he has his osanwë back and he has his creeping awareness that he's trapped in this space back and he can kill himself if he wants to and now he is trying to revisit everything, figure out if he did it right, double-check his reasoning on whether to betray Telumë here -

(The advantage is that it'd upset him immensely, and he's already pretty fragile, it's probably mostly a matter of landing the right couple of hits here. The disadvantage is that - deliberately, by the terms of their agreement - he has at this point made it much more difficult to pull off, and it's not too late for Telumë to go back on his end of it. There's not a good way to land a blow that actually hurts without Telumë retaliating by making sure he doesn't have osanwë in Valinor or something, and he needs to be in one piece to steer in Valinor. This the answer he expected but it's exhilarating to check, in the moment when he could actually do something about it.)

"Maitimo."

He turns around. Moves to give him a hug, ends up sort of collapsing in his arms. Findekáno. I didn't want - anything to happen like this -

I know. 

Vanyel thinks that we should plan for you to remain here another couple days, until your parents come to pick you up. He agreed that if you wanted to leave now with me you could, though.

Where would we go if I wanted that?

Aiwenor, and I'd tell everyone that if they want to leave any time in the next year they have to do it right then. We will probably have better plans than that in two days but that's what I'd do now.

Both my parents are coming, Vanyel said?

Yeah. I thought your mother was near Tirion but I guess not. 

I hadn't expected her to be near enough to get involved. It's probably bad, more reasonable people around means things work out better for Telumë probably, but he feels sort of warm anyway. I think I can wait two days if I'm not alone. 

I can stay until - a couple minutes before they get here, probably. Unless you want to get into that, now, too.

I don't know. Probably better not to. He might be able to use it to splinter the Noldor again later. Nolofinwë probably hasn't been kept in the loop about the god plan and might be positioned to stop it. 

Okay. Then I can stay until I get a warning that they're ready to come over. 

I have a couple of questions, when you are ready to talk about the situation.

I don't mind talking about it.

Were there any plans to tell anyone anything until it became impossible to hide.

I don't know but I really doubt it.