All right. And he doesn't rush, though he does reschedule a few non-urgent plans he had, where rescheduling won't inconvenience anyone else. He lets Maitimo know when he's done everything for the day and headed home. 

And Maitimo comes over to hug him. 

I should invite them over and apologize, he says. It won't be very difficult, I know what my father needs to hear, and then he'll forgive me and everything will be fine. (Frustration, resentment.)

Telumë hugs him back. Speaking with them seems good. But something is troubling you. A note of apology; he knows it bothers Maitimo when he involuntarily leaks emotions through the empathy-bond. Do you want to talk about that? I like to understand what you are feeling and why. 

I don't really know why it's bothering me. I've apologized to everybody else. 

I got along with my father well before everything happened, it's Melkor's work that we don't trust each other, I should want to undo it. But it feels - hard. It wouldn't actually be hard. You have to - overshoot my father's expectations and then he feels gratified and calms right down of his own accord, he's not a very complicated person when it comes to this sort of thing, I will kneel at his feet and tearfully apologize and then he'll tell me there was nothing at all to apologize for and I should stop that at once, and - come home, except I can't go home - and - I don't know what's bothering me, actually.

I would definitely have some feelings about it, in your place! He said some very cruel things to you, even if it was - very provoked - and, I am not sure, if it were me in that position, it would bother me that I needed to - manage him, even manipulate him, into forgiveness, rather than simply being open. Though we are very different people so I am not sure if it is like that for you. 

He didn't say anything to me. I didn't learn he'd disowned me until you mentioned it, though it wasn't a surprise. 

Oh, I had thought - I suppose Vanyel was not quite clear about what happened where or in what order, and I was not even there. Did he try to hit you? 

Yes. And then the Valar asked Eru for advice, and then I was - sent to you - and when I woke up you mentioned, that he'd said it was no concern of his. It hadn't been a surprise and it hadn't mattered very much, the only things Telumë was restrained from by fears of diplomatic interference were things that Maitimo could've refused anyway and didn't want to, but - 

I think it makes sense to feel wronged by that? And - I suspect it would be difficult to get an apology for it from your father, and instead you are not even trying for that?

It is impossible to get an apology for anything from my father and trying would mean - making him double down on it, and also question why I still feel enough affinity with evil Maitimo to want apologies on his behalf.

Yes, I agree that trying to obtain an apology from your father is not going to work. But - well, I felt it was appropriate to apologize to you on evil Maitimo's behalf, right? And - the fact that your father is not going to actually apologize does not need to mean it would not be meaningful and good if he did. Sigh. It does not really work for me to apologize for him, but - well, you hurt him very badly, and it makes sense to apologize to him for it, but he hurt you as well, in his anger, and my sense is that you do have enough - continuity - with the person you were then to still remember that hurt? 

(Telumë feels like there's something important here that he's trying to convey, and also he has no idea if he's hitting any of the right words.) 

It feels like it was me. I was wrong about some stuff and I was in a very bad corner but it was me being wrong and in a corner. And -

- and he was trying, right, he did come as close as he ever does to an apology when he found out about the marriage, he said he wished he'd left Valinor sooner so I didn't have to grow up - believing the Valar - and I heard that and thought 'he feels guilty, I can use that', and did, to get his Silmarils taken away, and it's just kind of stupid to be upset that in so doing I lost...the possibility of having a relationship that had that in it, that sense he would have fought the gods for me.

I do not think it is stupid? You - used a lever you had access to, to achieve a goal, and it had a price, and - well, if it were stupid for you to be sad about that, it would have to be stupid for me to be sad that I killed millions of people for Foundation to exist, and...I am sad about that and I do not think it is stupid. I know it is somewhat more complicated because your goals have - shifted, over time - but I do not think that makes it stupider to grieve that you lost something. 

I want - 

- I don't know what I want. I don't want to make you relive - all of that - but I can't stop poking it - the moment when I stopped having lots of people love me and want me to live and ended up in the world where I had exactly one -

I do not mind talking about it. It still aches, but there's relief there as well. I think it is not quite true that you had only one such person. Nerdanel still loved you and wished you to live. She asked after you. And Findekáno - I mean, I think he thought it was a risk and one that was hard to justify strategically, keeping you alive, but he wanted it. 

Can you hold me?

Yes, of course. Hug. I love you. 

I love you. Scaredsadwant - I don't want to ask too much. 

I am not sure it is possible for you to ask too much. Some sort of distant echo, there; he thinks maybe Maitimo said something similar to him, when he was Leareth. I suppose you might ask things that were - very hard for me, that might take a long time, if I needed to grow first to be able to give you that - but it would not be because it was too much, if that makes sense? You need the things you need. And I wish you to have everything you need, eventually, because I love you. 

Lean. I appreciate that. And yet I am scared that if I try to figure out what I want, here, now, it'll end up being something that it is much better for you not to worry you'll ever be expected to give me.

That makes sense. He holds Maitimo in silence for a bit, just thinking.

I think we ought to talk about it anyway, he goes on, eventually. And if we figure out what you want, but it does not make sense for you to want it from me, then - that is all right, and we can figure it out together as well. Sigh. I know I cannot give you back a past where those events did not happen. 

I don't even really wish for that, now. Just -

Lean. 

He'd been sitting quite still at the seat of the Valar, wondering whether they would kill him. They ought to, obviously, but maybe they were the wrong kinds of entity to do it. But then, they'd done it to orcs, and what difference is there now between orcs and Maitimo. Orcs never come back, so if they do kill him, this is probably it. It feels unfair, somehow, which is ridiculous; he'd been offered so many more chances than any orc. He'd just wished he could have long enough to learn whether the rest of his desperately-strewn plans bore any fruit.  

And then the Valar had asked about the Silmarils. He'd been delighted, delighted and horrified, because this was an important victory and also ones whose costs he hadn't already paid, whose costs he would pay right here and now and - in a fashion that fractured the alliance, ideally - his father had asked him, did you do this, and he'd responded by taunting him, and his father had thrown a punch and the Valar had cancelled magic and he'd stood up, clearheaded, thinking that the thing to do now was to go for Vanyel - and once that proved impossible, to watch his mother try to calm his father down - his mother, his father, relationships he'd pushed to their breaking point, relationships that were not really supposed to have a breaking point - but he can see it in Fëanáro's eyes, that he's reached one - 

- and then he is Telumë's, trying to catch the complicated feelings off Telumë's stern blank face - "Your father - did not wish to express any preferences about your treatment." - had his father known how that would come across, of course not, he was a Quendi, and a particularly imaginative one only along a few dimensions - 

He was sort of saying that he did not care if I - raped you, or mistreated you in other ways, is that it? I think he was not considering how that would come across, no - I think he was mostly communicating that he would not cause a diplomatic fuss if we killed you - but I was not there when he said that and so I am not sure. 

He was angry, he wasn't phrasing things carefully, I don't want to - infer anything about what he wanted from what he said. I think he had to - he had to stop thinking of me as his son, in order to stop obstructing measures that were at that point very obviously necessary. The diplomatic complications were making things worse. So - stop living in the world where they're real. I guess some people find it easier to hurt people they love and some find it easier to stop loving people they need to hurt - I am not sure if I'm making any sense - 

- the thing he apparently wants is for Telumë to hurt him but this is a stupid want and they definitely should not do it, he has no idea where it even came from -

(Telumë is also confused by that want, but he's not going to acknowledge it right now, if they're going to talk about it it seems better for that to happen later, maybe much later.) 

Do you wish your father had done it the other way? Gone on thinking of you as his son, and - accepted the pain it caused him, knowing that it was strategically necessary to imprison or kill you? It's a mental move he's not sure Fëanáro could have made; the man is brilliant, but - unsophisticated, in some ways, there's a way that he thinks in absolutes, and family was one of those...