He starts to shake his head. Pauses. “...I mean, probably, but there are a very large number of memories, which are all horrible, and I have not gone digging for that in particular.”

"Do... you want me to look?"

“Oh, you can do that too? Yes, I think so.”

"Usually people are better at sorting through their own memories than I am but if you're having trouble I can try."

Sift sift.

Leareth is bad at sorting through his memories because they're one, overwhelming with a lot of content he would prefer not to look at, and two, not at all organized on a larger scale by place or season or anything useful like that, and are full of choppy discontinuities between torture and hallucinations (some of which are also torture), so while the order is technically distinguishable, it still kind of feels like a jumble. 

If Bella goes through, though, there'll be a pretty apparent shift in overall tone and feel, between memories of Melkor carefully iterating on various convincing scripts - leading up to the Gate - and everything after that, which is much more typical Utumno-type content. 

"Found it. I can try to poke it into salience for you -?"

"...All right." He says it with some trepidation. 

Nudge nudge.

And there it is. 

He remembers noticing the diffuse wrongness - thinking that he'd sensed it before - but this time, when he finally had a moment of uninterrupted thought while resting after the Gate, successfully chasing it down. 

Finding the discrepancies. Subtle, yet glaringly obvious as soon as he thought to look, checks that didn't add up anymore, the parts of his mind he needs to trust instead scrambled and trampled over. 

Realizing that he's already lost. That it was over the instant Melkor brought him into Angband, and he was foolish to miss it for so long. (And the horror, not knowing how much damage he had already done to his own cause - had he killed Vanyel, killed Maitimo...) 

He remembers opening a metaphorical door in his mind; the core of him, the place where his values live, driven deep into the fabric of each new body. 

A tower. The stars. A promise to the world, to the future, not to give up–

Do you want me to try copying those over? Not today, maybe, but soon?

He takes a minute to consider it. 

"I think so." It's terrifying, but so is literally everything so that's not really useful for deciding between things. 

I can come back tomorrow, to give you some time to process the idea?

That seems like a good idea. He's not sure he has any stamina at all left for making decisions today.

Maybe she could help him nap again, he doesn't want to be alone with his thoughts, it's hard enough dealing with all the pointless loud emotions when he's not exhausted. 

"Whenever you're ready."

He starts to get settled, before remembering that he'd meant to reply to Maitimo's message, except that sounds so, so hard right now, he would have to pick words in the right order... He's guessing that Bella needs his permission to tell people things about how he's doing, he can't remember if she explained that or not but it seems right. Anyway she has his permission, since writing a lot of messages to people sounds impossible but he also wants people to...know things... 

"Is there anyone I shouldn't talk to or anything you'd prefer to keep back?"

He doesn't want her to tell anyone about his immortality method, but also she can ask the other Leareth about that too and right now the non-tortured Leareth is clearly in a better position to make thoughtful choices about infosec. 

Probably she shouldn't talk to Fëanáro directly, Leareth has a sense that things go better when he learns information via Maitimo, and also he's not convinced Fëanáro wants or needs to know that many details about the inside of his head right now. But the older Vanyel in Arda, and Maitimo, are both - well, people he wants to have accurate information about him, to the extent it's relevant, because he sort of entrusted them with all of his plans.

(He continues to think she should not even consider it a confidentiality thing to talk to the other Leareth, they're the same person, even if he's occasionally weirdly scared that his alt is going to murder him.) 

"Okay. I can update your Vanyel and Maitimo."

"Thank you." He's ready to sleep now. 

Sleep. Sigh.

Local Leareth is still sitting, watching. :Is everything all right?:

I think so. It's just a lot. Also Maitimo's very suspicious of me so that'll be fun.

:Right. You could just talk to the other Vanyel and have him pass it on, maybe?: 

I will at least do that first but it might be irresponsible to do it exclusively.

Leareth stands up, trying not to make any noise. :You know I would not ask you to spend more time here, helping him, than is sustainable for you, right? If you would prefer not to be taking so much of this on then we would figure something out. Although I do very much appreciate everything you are willing to do, here: