"I have a knife I purchased, metalworking is really annoying without magic."

"I can imagine." And then Telumë falls silent and just looks at him, because suddenly he has no idea where they could possibly start. 

"Did you ever get Foundation to stop letting me hurt you?"

"We never figured out how to block it entirely but Foundation did find a way to make it very attenuated, and to see a few seconds before you were going to start doing it, so - it was basically not a problem." 

"I'm glad. 

I don't remember - almost anything of what we probably need to talk about. I'd smuggle myself a little bit of information, sometimes, if I thought I could get away with it. Whether you seemed happy. Whether it seemed like it'd be better to refuse to see you. But -"

"I - gods - I am very sorry about that. I wish I had not felt it was necessary." He smiles crookedly, very briefly. "Although that is rather close to wishing you were less good at everything you are good at, and - I do not actually wish that at all. I never did. Even when you were evil and I probably should have." 

Something Vanyel pointed out to him, which surprised him a lot at the time but has started to seem true since then, is that most people wouldn't continue to be just as deeply in love with their partner if said partner were immutably acting as an agent of Sauron. Even Leareth would have been surprised to learn that his future self still loved evil Maitimo pretty much exactly the same amount as he had loved the Maitimo who was on his side. It seems like - not a very smart or adaptive way to have been set up, but it's the way he was set up, the reality he has to work with. 

...It's been a very long time since he did this, but Telumë shrugs and makes that thought public.

He's also not sure that the parts that hurt most were the times he was with Maitimo, although he does need to share those memories, if only so that Maitimo can have that chunk of his life back. For him, though, it's all the times when Maitimo wasn't there that still ache the most even now.

"You don't need to apologize. I - it was necessary. I wish I'd been able to burn fewer bridges, not more of them. I do want it back, now, but - the ruthlessness almost never hurt? Some other things hurt, a lot, but not that. I have not at any point had trouble coming to grips with the fact you will hurt me to save the world."

Nod. "I think the ruthlessness, there, was - the part of me that was the most Leareth? And...I am not sure but I think it might have been better overall, for both of us, if I had been more Leareth, and not," okay it's actually very hard to talk about this, "and not a traumatized child trying to hold together some of the pieces of him. I do not think it actually makes sense to apologize to you for - that - but I can nonetheless wish it had been different." 

"I think it would have been better. It would also have been better if other people had been capable of doing more, or if you'd had a way to break oaths, or if Sauron had never existed, but -" Shrug. "You worked with what you had.

And Leareth might've just killed me and I am glad you did not."

Telumë glances around for a place to sit down. Sits. 

"This is not the only way I have looked at it," he says, "and I am not sure it is the most useful way, but - one of the things that I did, afterward when there was time, was to use Foundation's Foresight, feeding in more human-level information I had, to - look at what would have happened in the various different paths. Where I made choices differently - where others could have done something else... I think all of the paths where you died were, while arguably much better for the war effort, also far worse for you." 

"This doesn't surprise me. Especially -

- the marriage is the reason Mandos decided he doesn't need to fix all the gay people -

- and I think there's a problem I'd have had, trying to become less evil in Mandos - I really, really needed to be somewhere where no one was reading my mind -

- but it would, uh, be understandable if you wish you had not tried to put all of that on yourself while you also had a war to win -"

Telumë closes his eyes. After a moment, lets his head fall into his hands. 

"–I do not wish that, actually. I think - I think it was quite bad in expectation, that some of my you-related choices led to lower chances of us winning, but we still did win - it was salvageable - and... I ought to tell you some context, actually." 

This is the part he still struggles to say out loud. I came back, he sends instead, it's so nice having someone he can use osanwë with. I came back in a child's body a long way from anyone who could help me, and I - needed to put myself together enough to reach a records cache and then return to my organization - and the memories I had carried with me were so heavily of you. So I put you there. I - built the place where I keep my values out of you. And then... It would have been bad enough if you were dead. Instead of that, you were still alive but evil. Looking back, I am rather surprised that I managed to hold myself together as well as I did. 

Oh. 

A pause. He is not sharing thoughts at all right now. He can't avoid sharing emotions but they're mostly that he is - very focused. 

That is not a complication I anticipated of seducing you! I would not have done it if I anticipated that! I'm very sorry!

"...I am not sure if it was even primarily you seducing me. A number of the memories were from before that. I also rebuilt substantially off Vanyel but that was fine since he was eventually in contact with us." Just furious with Telumë for a while. "I think it was - bad timing, mostly, in terms of recovering from Angband. I was leaning on you very heavily for five years, and then I was - finally mostly doing well - but I think it was still fragile and still very reliant on you in particular and so it is not surprising that is most of what survived my death and reincarnation." 

Nod. "So that's why it was so hard to say - you know, this is worse than nothing - even when it was in fact quite bad for both of us -"

"I think so. And - why even now it is very hard to wish I had not put the burden on myself of - of trying to care for you in particular despite the circumstances being terrible for it even leaving aside that I was supposed to be fighting a war. And I think that was not the correct attitude to have in expectation then, given the downside risk if we had not won the war, but..."

What's he even trying to say, here? He switches to osanwë again. But it is the shape of person I was, for - upstream reasons that all make sense, that almost make it overdetermined what would happen... And afterward I could have decided to try to be - not that. To be someone who was aligned only on the mission of building a beautiful and flourishing future, and not also have the core of myself pointed at you in particular. But...

It still hurts so much. He lets the tears come. But we had won, perhaps not entirely, certainly not all of the worlds, still, enough that - it was not clear if it even made sense to point Leareth's ruthlessness at the shape I chose to be going forward. And it still...feels...that I could not have brought myself to kill you. Not in almost any scenario. And I am not sure what I am even trying to say, here, just... Just that I love you and care about you, I suppose, and I did not at any point actually want to change that. And I think I am allowed to say that I think loving you is good. I think a number of the actions I took as a result were stupid, but - but I am not going to say that, in itself, loving you was the wrong strategic move. 

"Okay. I ....think I understand. And - hmm. 

The main thing that I have been feeling, lately, is an acute lack of resources. I can't do anything at a significant scale in Velgarth without people looking out for me, because I don't have any magic or any meaningful defenses against it. I can't go home, not for a very long time. I am not entirely sure whether people ought to trust me enough to let me do things at large scales unsupervised anyway. So I keep - circling around you - as a resource I have here, as a way I can be safe enough to get things done, and confidently expect you not to get in my way - and so it's very reassuring to be loved and wanted and trusted but also that feels very unbalanced, I guess, if most of my feelings are about - safety and the ability to get stuff done - and most of yours are about me being at the very core of who you are - 

- I am not at all saying that I don't love you, just that I think I am thinking of my love for you as a resource, right now, and - and specifically tried very hard to build the core of my new motivation system without any reference to you because otherwise it was too easy to just let it be 'whatever you want' -"

"That makes sense." It hurts to hear but it also fits. "I - am not saying this is still true, actually. I would not have felt comfortable coming to see you, now, if it were still the degree of true that it was then. You are still one of the things there, but - one among many. I am not quite sure what shape I will eventually be now that we exist in a world where I have already built my god instead of one where I am laying a millennium-long plan to do so. But I could become a shape that did not include you, that needed to be thinkable. I thought it would be very bad if I came to you desperately needing anything, that is - too close to the pattern we had ended up in and I do not want to nudge you at all toward letting your motivation system be 'whatever I want.' I would be okay if you - ended up deciding that it did not make sense after all for us to build something together. I would be very sad and I would not stop loving you but I would be okay. Probably that is still unbalanced..." 

"I don't know. I think there's a way it fits together but I am admittedly not immediately thinking of it. I wanted - I still do want - to help you, with figuring out who you want to be in a world where you don't have to be so tightly and painfully Leareth-shaped just to survive. To show you directions you could grow in. To make lots of those directions point towards me because it is wonderful, having you love me, having you discover what love is in my arms. But - but there's a whole class of things there that felt wonderful before we'd really actually hurt each other, and now feel really scary - 

- I can practically sort everything, really, either it's a feeling that's too impersonal like "I want to come home to Telumë because he built a beautiful city and I want to live in a beautiful city" or it's a feeling that would be a really bad idea to indulge like, like, wanting to play the games that we used to - do you even remember, I didn't offer you those back during the war -"

"I remember a little. Enough that I - noticed, during the war, when I was keeping you prisoner, that it was...not something I wanted at all anymore. I - during the last six months of the war I was trying to walk a tightrope of giving you a space to exist where you could alive and as yourself as possible, which was - not very much - and also not keeping setting everything nearby on fire, and that meant - being in control, being the one who wanted things of you, so you could be that shape. And, I hated that, actually? It was very upsetting every time I noticed it enough to think about it. I want to never ever do that again. From what I remember of the games that we used to play, they were not that at all, but - enough resemblance on the surface - it just feels kind of awful now. I think the actual real memories of it might not be awful..." 

Nod. "We used to both enjoy that you could hurt me, and obviously wouldn't, and that I could - tease you and confuse you and have everything go how I wanted even though you had all the cards - and now both of those facts about the world seem horrible and not cute or funny at all, and I'm kind of upset about it. Not in a way where I think we could possibly have it back, or should try, but - that is one of the things that I am grieving, here. That even if I let myself think about wanting you, I'm so scared of being manipulative - 

- I think I am having a hard time mapping a middle ground between being - manipulative, and unilateral, deciding what I want and steering you towards it, which I still feel like I know how to do, deriving my comfort and security from my confidence in my own ability to not let things happen that I won't like, expecting that you will let me do this because you are overcorrecting for the godawful mess that things were before -

- and, uh, trying to be honest and open and emotionally healthy by showing you enough of my head that my head stops containing plans that could come across as manipulative, which is what it apparently does when you have enough of a view of it -

- to be clear I am not planning to do either of those things! They seem bad! But when I try to imagine 'okay, how do we go back to dating', those are the plans I come up with, 'I engineer this and it's lovely and Telumë is happy and I feel safe because I decided what would happen and this is kind of fucked up but I don't have to care' or 'I try to be honest and emotionally vulnerable and then the parts of me that are interested in self-defense go away'. And once I reject both of those for being stupid and because I'm not interested in having a bad relationship anymore, I want to only have a good one, I end up - sort of floundering?

Uh, anyway, I was going to show you -"

And he sends some memories. He's so painfully happy in them, he's so delighted by Leareth, he's so delighted by confusing Leareth, by making him realize new things about himself, by making him discover what he wants - he's so delighted in his own invulnerability, in the emotional safety he can offer just by enjoying himself, he wants that back, even if the form it has to take is wildly different - 

Telumë remembers it and doesn't at the same time. There are a couple of moments that are very clear; the night Haven was attacked, when they were in the mountains watching the stars, is one of the brightest; but a lot of it is just a sort of smeared blur of wonderfulgoodhappy. It feels right, to have at least something more of that month back, and it also hurts a lot, and - suddenly he's crying. He wants to go back to what Maitimo said about trying to find a middle ground, but he can't, yet, something still feels very stuck...

I think that is one of the things I - could not quite move past on my own, he admits. Grieving it. I am - this is sort of hard to explain, but it is not you who I am angry with, or feel hurt and betrayed by. That would be very pointless. It was just - the world - you did exactly what made sense given your goals - but we had something that was so good and then reality destroyed it and we cannot get it back. Even if we can build something that is a different kind of good, someday. I want...

He takes a shuddering breath. I tried not to come here needing anything in particular from you. But - I think maybe I have spent the last decade waiting for the time we could - both look at it together - and grieve the thing that was destroyed - and I think, I hope, it might be easier to want to build something else after...

That - sounds good. Can I hold you?

He thinks about it. Tries to sit with the parts of him that are desperate for that, and the habits that pull away from it, and the part of him that's scared that needing anything from Maitimo will tear apart the fragile new foundation they're trying to lay down. 

Yes, he says finally. 

Then he'll hold him, and he'll sing, a song he sang for Leareth but that Telumë probably doesn't remember.