"In a perfect world where we did everything right, we would have asked you," Vanyel says. "Beforehand, even, when you were here the first time, if I'd been thinking ahead I could've guessed we'd run into this exact issue. That being said, I think it's the sort of mistake in prioritization and allocating personnel that's almost inevitable in any large military operation under time pressure, especially one where we had extremely good reasons to maintain really tight information security, because Melkor is - was - goddamned terrifying. And I also think you ought to be angry with me, not Leareth, since I'm in fact the one who started the questioning without thinking to ask you and then briefed him on what I'd been doing so far, and assumed that healing people would take your full attention, since Healers in our world absolutely can't be interrupted while working." 

"I should have thought to ask you at the point where I was considering whether to wake Vanyel to apply another Truth Spell or closely imitate it with a compulsion," Leareth agrees. "I am not sure why I did not; likely part of it was the sense of time pressure, and part was not being sure how much healing-spell time an interruption would in fact cost you. I did ask Maitimo if there were any rules of engagement I ought to know, and expect he would have informed me if compulsions were harmful here." 

"Rules of - is this or is this not the first war this entire civilization of Quendi has ever fought."

"It is. I would definitely have told him - before I asked for him to come here and do this for us - if there were a risk some magic would behave differently on orcs than it did in Velgarth. We do not have any norms about conduct out-of-bounds even in wartime for the sake of accomplishing important military objectives, and I think the King's inclined right now against establishing any, but I eventually picked up enough about how humans fight wars that the question made sense."

"We talked about the concept some, in the past," Vanyel says, his voice controlled. (He is not going to snap at Bella in frustration, that is not going to help right now at all.) "Honestly, though, it's not clear to me if anything that happened here would be against the Heralds' general rules of conduct in wartime, and ours are actually tighter than a lot of neighbouring countries, Karse used blood-magic and demon-summoning constantly during the war with them. I've cast at a distance for battles where I didn't know the full strategy involved, because of information security or just because of time pressure, and sometimes my friends died. We use Truth Spell in legal proceedings even in peacetime. I've read sentries' minds in order to learn things I needed on the battlefield. I - think I would've been a lot more likely to grasp for other options if any of this had felt to me like it crossed any lines." 

"I don't actually know that it's productive to hash this out right now. I apologize for - overextending myself in directions I perhaps shouldn't have instead of asking for what I needed to know sooner so we'd all be on the same page about what I was doing given how much basis to do it."

Vanyel ducks his head. "I'm sorry for...being frustrated and prickly about this, I guess. It's been a long war. I do think we could have told you more at the point when you were transporting me to Haven. Anyway, I think we're all absurdly grateful for your help. A lot more people might have died - hellfires, we might not have won at all - in the version where I had to use an inter-world Gate that Melkor could have detected and interfered with." 

She nods slightly.

"It was an enormous relief, having a way to get the weapon that didn't seem to run some chance of leading Melkor right to it. We're grateful, and if there's anything we can do to fix the rest now that it's peacetime we will. Probably most additional discussion can wait until everyone has had some downtime. It sounds like the things that shouldn't sit for another month are getting Randi and Elspeth here for medical care and Vanyel and Leareth getting started on a way of finding new humans.

And - if there's anything our Leareth needs - now that the war's over -"

"I can mention next time I talk to him. Or I suppose this Leareth can."

"Thank you. All of you. Really. I keep suspecting that we'll learn, someday, what happens in an Arda if no one intervenes - and I suspect it's really, really ugly."

"It is."

And they can go back to setting up their city.

He doesn't ask for more updates on his Leareth at all because it's not, actually, his Leareth, they knew each other for six months, if Leareth wants him to know anything he can tell his magic therapist that has him improving several hundred times faster than any Utumno survivor in history or his alternate universe version or his friend of twenty years or something. 

He does bring the sexuality question up with his father and his father can in fact be angled into responding with 'the Valar are stupid' (it helps that this is little Fëanáro's opinion about absolutely everything including dozens of topics that have nothing to do with the Valar).

Bella steps out of the meeting with Rúmil and leans on him tiredly.

Hug. Do you want to talk more about it or should we just take our apologies and go home?

I should tote this Leareth back where he belongs at some point and look in on the other one.

I hate how - ugh. I hate being wedged by my own desire to be a good person by people who don't even know they're doing it. At least if they knew they were doing it there could be some sort of adversarial satisfaction in trying to outsmart them anyway, but what do I do with it when there's nothing there to even outsmart, just people underestimating me and then sitting on enough stuff that I have to keep showing up anyway?

I haven't met any of them before so I might be misreading them, but I think you probably have more leverage than just 'you could refuse to do them favors but there's a universe full of evil gods so you wouldn't refuse to do them favors no matter how poorly they repay them.' You could demand they agree to some rules about what they will and won't do, for example, I think probably they'd agree to that. 

Maybe. The trouble is it'd be much better if it didn't have to be that rigid! I'm not myself that rigid! I would have agreed to interrogating the orcs that way and I would have agreed that it was Olórin's prerogative to undertake a suicide mission! But they didn't know that and they didn't think not - using me - was important compared to getting spells from me and -

Hmm. If they'd done all that to win some human war that was killing tens of thousands of people I'd be very angry with them, because it'd be obviously a horrendous miscalculation, thinking that getting one spell was more important than whatever delays and complications it might add to actually have your help. I think fighting Melkor is pretty different from that.

But it's hard to tell whether they in fact would have done the same thing either way, whether they were aware they were giving up something unfathomably important for something even more unfathomably important or whether they just didn't notice they were giving up something unfathomably important in the first place. 

It has seemed like they didn't notice and are mostly trying to smooth over - superficial social hurt just because I've demonstrated I'm upset. Leareth was like 'you can yell at me' like he was planning on paying a yelling-denominated fine as the cost of doing business, he - I'm probably reading too much into this honestly and don't remember his exact words but it sounded at the time like he was practically daring me to stop teleporting him places over it -

Hug. 

It must be very annoying how they don't seem to be able to predict your objections in any detail at all!

I didn't think it was that complicated!

Well I wouldn't have had any trouble but in their partial defense I think there are a lot of reasons why it's bad to mind-control people and some of them are inapplicable here and many of them are still applicable but overridden by other considerations and many of them are - applicable for reasons of precedents set which makes their applicability sort of smuggled in with the question of whether we're mad at them -

- and that's the sort of thing most people aren't accustomed to distinguishing carefully at all, even if they could pass a test with a hundred questions about whether mind control is okay in this situation yes or no.

Yeah, that's a good way to - disentangle it. She sighs. It really didn't help that I was going in hoping to just uncomplicatedly trust them because I know the other Van and I know our Fëanáro and would like to believe everyone they could grow up into and every child they could raise would be, not just great but also well-positioned to trust me in turn even though that's presumably very path dependent actually.

I should hope it's not path-dependent, actually? You're smart and you're trustworthy and you're intellectually careful and you care about this - grand project that I guess we've all stepped into, of combining all the magic systems to fight all the gods and fix everything. But I think it's - going to be slow. I'll be much more annoyed with them if I don't think they're even progressing in that direction but I don't actually begrudge them taking a long time.

Melkor -

- I should've talked more about Melkor, then maybe people would've understood -