"Right." Telumë hadn't even thought about that, actually, he had just assumed... "Maybe Mandos decided that there was no need to fix things that are not broken. Honestly I thought you had resumed your relationship - that this was part of why you were so happy - and I was...a little disappointed when Findekáno immediately apologized and said you had not. I do not see what he would have to apologize for, you were together for a thousand years." 

"The - circumstances of our marriage were very difficult - but that doesn't, actually, entitle me to ignore it? Especially since there's a chance it would happen again, and who your husband is married to is absolutely something you are entitled to a say in."

"Well, if I am entitled to a say, then my say is that I would be fine with you also being married to him if that did happen again? It seems very fair. Also he is great." 

- DELIGHT. 

"Well. Okay. If you say so. 

I don't think I care about who you're sleeping with? If you had children I would care a lot about that."

...Huh. "I have not actually had particular interest in sleeping with anyone else. I missed you in particular a great deal, but..." Having children now - not because he has to, Foundation thinks they can just solve the problem of getting him a body that didn't used to belong to someone else before it comes up again, since Mandos taught the gods how to put adult dead people back into adult bodies again... It's a weird thought. Not necessarily a bad weird but...weird. 

"Well, you know where to find me - do you know where to find me? Findekáno managed it and he doesn't have any magic."

"I do not, actually!" He somewhat deliberately made no attempt at all to keep track of Maitimo's movements. "Findekáno said that you have a beautiful cottage in the woods, but not where. I am guessing you have much greater osanwë range with him, and also nearly everything is very far from the north. What country?" 

"Rethwellan."

Nod. "If I travel there I ought to have range to find you, I think. I may not be able to come immediately since I am currently running a country, but...soon, if that is all right with you." 

"It is."

- hug?

Telumë has a lot of habits, at this point, around - not touching Maitimo, not needing things from Maitimo, being...someone who can hold himself together solidly with or without Maitimo nearby - so he has to set all of that aside and think about it for a moment, but - yes, hug? 

"I'm worried about - trying forever to have back something that - we probably can't. But I think probably there's a thing we can have that'd be - good."

Telumë nods. He's thought about this a lot, and–

"I am not completely un-worried about that, but..." He's thought about this so many times and it's still hard to put into words. Honestly the fact that he spends a lot of his time wandering through avenues of Foresight really hasn't helped his ability to talk about nebulous things by making words with his mouth. "I think we are both rather different people, now, and - starting from a different angle - and I think that if we go from here, where we actually are, and try to find - build - something good, it will... I am not sure if it will work but I hope that at least we can avoid becoming stuck trying to backtrack to a place that existed in the past and no longer does." 

"I hope so. I think I would like to build something."

"I am glad. I think I would like that too." 

He wakes up feeling scared, which is annoying, he thought he'd got past that. 

What is he scared of -

- that he can't do this, or won't want to once it's actually right there -

- that he has to do this, because this is the only way to ever get to do anything -

He goes outside. Sings. 

Probably if he wanted he could find some other interesting person who would protect him and help him accomplish interesting things. Probably if he wanted he could figure out how to do artifact magic and figure out how to protect himself against mind control and then he could do interesting things on his own without a protector - actually that seems like it'd be good for him even if he's with Telumë -

So he doesn't have to do this.

Does he want to?

He wants to move forward, he wants to stop holding himself in place, and it feels like he absolutely has to talk to Telumë to do that, there's too much of their history that's only in Telumë's memory, right now. It will be scary and it will probably hurt but he wants - to pull everything out and see it all clearly and then figure out what he wants to do with it. And probably what he'll want to do with it is fix it nicely for Telumë and then kiss him, since that's usually what happens when he is around Telumë, but it doesn't have to. The thing he's asking of himself right now is that they talk. 

And he wants that.

Okay. 

He heads into the village and tells children stories.

Telumë wakes up crying. 

This is inconvenient; he thought he'd processed all of those emotions, and - on reflection he still thinks so, it's taken a lot of work and hard conversations and times he's gone off alone to think and the end result is that he can separate out and name everything he's feeling, he's not lost in it or confused by it, he has clarity. It's just that a final step of actually moving on involves bringing that into the open with Maitimo, and he's been able to set that aside for years because it wasn't an option yet, but now it is an option and so it's hurting again.

And he's pretty nervous about the upcoming conversation. Nervous that they're inevitably going to hurt each other a lot; that as soon as he lets himself be vulnerable with Maitimo he'll fall back into the horrible configuration from before, needing something that doesn't actually exist and then flailing around about it. 

But they'll never be able to build something together if they don't sort out the foundation first. And he wants to build something with Maitimo, if Maitimo ends up deciding he wants that too. 

So he'll go to Rethwellan. 

As usual - more so than usual, probably - Telumë has set up the leadership structure around him so that it's not too hard to disappear for weeks if he has a day or two of lead time, and that even disappearing with no warning will cause a minimum of chaos. He has warning, though, so he spends a day properly handing everything over. He passes a message to Vanyel. He talks to his god. And then he Gates to Petras, which he's visited a number of times during the last decade. 

Maitimo? Is he in range? 

Hey.

Inconveniently, osanwë isn't directional. All right, where are you? 

He can send an image of his little cottage. 

Give me a moment. 

Rethwellan is the territory of the Shadowgod, which as usual means that in practice several much tinier deities have various bits of it, also there's some overlap with the Earth-Father and Sky-Mother duo that have territory in Hardorn, but in any case, it has one of the new magical storage structures, not exactly a Heartstone but still based on something that the Star-Eyed Goddess shared. He draws on it for energy. It's vastly easier than pulling on nodes. 

He Gates to just outside the cottage. 

" - hi."

Telumë doesn't answer for a moment, because somehow, even though he's imagined this hundreds of times and he sees Maitimo semi-regularly in their shared dream, actually being face to face with him is resulting in a lot of emotions. Which isn't that surprising, he reminds himself. He's done a lot of refactoring the shape of person he is, but Maitimo is still his most important person by far. 

"This is very beautiful," he manages. "You built all of it?"