When they get back to Vinyamar he says to Dara, do you have a minute?

:Yes, of course: There's some trepidation in her expression but mostly relief. She feels like she can breathe again. :I - think I owe you an apology. For failing to step and be a grownup about this: 

I think a lot of people failed at that. I just wanted to get your perspective on, uh, what happened.

:We kept him captive and questioned him in a way that was predictable awful for him and also extremely necessary, with very tight precautions that - may well have all been justified, actually, because he's terrifying right now. And then Telumë made the extremely questionable choice of - also still trying to relate to him as a lover. And...they tried to have a negotiation about whether it was safe to see each other, which was a fraught idea to begin with and made me extremely uncomfortable. I think Maitimo remembers it but I could bounce you my memory of the part with Truth Spell too?:

Shrug. :I get why Telumë did it - it was really, really clear that Maitimo missed him a lot, Sauron thought it would be more fun to have him still love Leareth, and he couldn't stand to see Maitimo being lonely and sad. It was very stupid though. Anyway, I - mostly tried to stay out of it because - well, because Maitimo scares me, though I guess Telumë was also scaring me a bit, some of the times. But mostly Telumë was making me sad: 

That makes sense. Did you have communications with Arda -

:During this or earlier? I mean, both, we have the communications artifact here and I could use it on my own if Vanyel were on the other side. I couldn't initiate communications myself since I'm not a mage, but Jisa could and I'd be comfortable asking. I didn't feel like Telumë was cutting that off, if that's what you're asking?: 

Yeah, I was just trying to get a sense of - whether everyone there had the ability to ask for help if they noticed they needed it.

:I could have, I think. I guess I didn't feel like I had a lot of - people I could call on, in Arda? With the Noldor, I mean. Obviously that was wrong - I'm so, so glad you came - and I'm not sure why I thought it, actually:  

It was a bit of an unprecedented situation. Sigh. I have someone on the way to get you situated in a guest room here in Vinyamar, though you can absolutely head somewhere else if that ends up making more sense. Do you need anything from me?

:No. Not right now. Thank you:

So he heads off to talk to his father.

Telumë spends a couple of days meeting with all his people, updating them on the meeting with Findekáno and what's currently going on with the war effort in Arda, trying to re-orient himself to - everything - to the circumstances he's managed to stumble his way into during several weeks of, in hindsight, mostly not looking ahead of the next several hours.

He's so tired. The fact that Quendi need less sleep and Maitimo is sending random emotions at him a lot while he should be sleeping doesn't help, but it's mostly not about that.

He spends about four hours straight talking to Melody, who has elected to stay here. Because he's here, she says, and he clearly needs something he isn't getting, and she was after all his Mindhealer for five years, in another world and another lifetime. She knew Leareth very well and she can help him put together the pieces in the right order. She apologizes for not offering right away; the fact that she Gated up from k'Treva at the same time as Maitimo's arrival meant she was pretty distracted, and Telumë looked a lot more fine from the outside then he, in fact, is. 

He wants none of this to be happening. He wants to be back in his room in Tol Eréssea with Maitimo beside him, he wants a world that isn't on the brink of destruction... 

Reality, unfortunately, does not listen to wishes. Only actions. He needs to be actually himself, actually functional, as soon as possible, because they need him for the war - but, at the same time, it's not only on him. He's made a lot of mistakes. One of them was shaped like not taking enough responsibility, not personally checking that Fëanáro and Vanyel back in Arda were doing sensible things, but...the bigger piece, he thinks, was shaped like not realizing he could ask for help. Feeling more alone than he, in fact, is. Findekáno might be personally furious with him, justifiably so, but he's still their ally. And he needs to make more effective use of the resources he has. 

...Talking to Maitimo is going to make him fall apart for days afterward, he thinks, but he owes it to him. Partly for strategic reasons - violating the terms of their agreement before Maitimo even leaves for Arda, before he sees his parents, is not going to help at all. But also because, like it or not (and he would like it, he thinks, if the circumstances were less of a mess) Maitimo is his husband. 

He goes to Nayoki. Asks her to do what he should have done before Maitimo even arrived, which is to put some skillful and carefully done compulsions on him. No touching. No flirting. Maitimo is going to want it, probably, and be very good at making Telumë want it too but it's a terrible idea. It's not quite as feasible to compulsion himself against saying anything sensitive, that's not a natural category in the same way, but with cleverness and care on Nayoki's part he can at least make it a lot harder for his future, inevitably much stupider self. 

(He's capable of being very stupid. This is an important thing to know about himself and he wants to be calibrated, there.) 

An hour before Fëanáro and Nerdanel's Gate, he goes in. "Maitimo?" 

" - hey. Figured you'd decided to back out." Wantsadhopeful.

Telumë sits down. A good distance away. Exchanges a glance with the member of Maitimo's staff currently in the room. It's a wise idea to have chaperones, he thinks, even if he feels pretty awkward about it. 

"It was part of our agreement," he says, neutrally. "I do not actually intend to back out on any of the terms I agreed to, there, at least not while you are still following it." An implicit reminder that the verifiable-to-Telumë part of what Maitimo agreed to isn't done, yet, since he's still here. 

"I've been very good. I could've told Findekáno I wanted him to take me home and then he would have, but I told him I'd wait for my parents, so there wouldn't be any more inconvenient revelations for any of you. And now he has decided you don't have enough adults in the room and I am not going to see him until the war is over. 

I really should have considered the downsides when I surrounded myself with people who wanted more than anything to make the world a better place."

"I know." Maitimo was cooperating and it did cost him something huge and Telumë, in fact, feels very bad about that. Which is in itself a lever Maitimo can use, but... "I am sorry. Would you have considered it a downside, though, before?" 

"I think I didn't really know very much about how people can hurt each other and so all my reasoning was very black and white. I'd have told you to do this and not feel bad about it, obviously, and - I mean, if you ever manage to undo it all I will probably still say that because it's not like it will help at that point for you to feel bad about it, but - I think I was actually missing something, something important. - I think you knew it, actually, and as a result you had decided to never be close to anyone because the gods would use it against you, and I decided that now that had changed and you could afford to be close to people and I was going to seduce you into it. I'm sorry about that."

There is a pretty interesting conversation hook there, which is a bad idea to follow right now even if it's not object-level about sensitive strategic information. Are you really sorry, he wants to ask, it seems convenient for Sauron's aims now. Also he's thinking that he isn't sure he had a choice - he came out of Angband in a thousand pieces, that he couldn't have reassembled on his own anyway, and maybe there was a path to that which didn't run through Maitimo but it isn't clear at all. 

"Maybe," he says instead, noncommittally.

"Did I at some point give you all the memories. Not of - not of after Angband, that seems like it'd mostly make us closer and I can't imagine you want that, but of before that, when I met you, the time before the war and the first couple of months of it."

"You offered." It might be a good idea to take him up on the pre-Angband part, actually, some of his mistakes here are due to having lost so much of the context he had before on Arda. "How does the memory-sharing work?" 

"It's over osanwë. It'll be fuzzier than sharing sense-impressions because my memory's not perfect but, uh, you stood out, I bet it'll come through reasonably clear. I could probably fudge it, especially if I'd spent the last couple of days planning how, but you can ask me under a truth spell if I did."

Nod. "I stood out, did I?" That is awfully close to flirtatious but, in the neutral tone he says it in, it doesn't quite trip the compulsion against that. 

"It was like nothing I'd ever encountered before. I had bounds, right, on how people could be - how goal-oriented, how careful, how paranoid, how dangerous, and suddenly they were all clearly inapplicable and it was terrifying and I was fascinated and you were reading my mind and I was pretty worried that you'd be furious, if half of my mind was -"

- wantwantwantwant -

"And I realized before you did, how much damage you could do if you wanted to, and it should've been upsetting but it was mostly just so oddly clarifying, like finally I'd been presented with something that mattered - finally everything I'd been doing for centuries mattered -"

That is very distracting and it's a good thing that Telumë's mind is blocked from the directions it wants to go - don'tmovecloser - he can't actually compulsion himself against wanting Maitimo but at least he can't take any actions about it right now. 

He doesn't smile. It's a very effortful notsmile. "Are the emotions you were feeling at the time going to be in the memories also?" 

"I can filter them out if you want but only by kind of - stripping away context."