"Why would he be giving you a hard time? ...Is this the chaperones thing all over again."

"So his brother fell for a mortal girl. And it was a disaster for all parties and he has strong opinions on the topic."

"I don't suppose it will help matters if I explain that we're not dating and I'm not going to die in a handful of decades?"

"I mean, he'd know the first thing and probably disapprove of the second, he'd just give me constant running commentary anyway. It'd be a million times worse if he thought he had a basis, but he hardly needs one."

"I think it might not be worth the benefit to bringing you to have to constantly suppress scathing comments about how you went out of your way to avoid doing the thing to me that he was apparently perfectly happy to do to random pretty people."

"...if you say to his face that he slept with the men he liked seducing into being his protégé's and personal assistants then we will have a really big political problem on our hands. So if me being absent makes it easier to avoid saying that, I am staying home.

Also, 'went out of your way' is kind of strong language for 'didn't forcibly marry someone', I admit I didn't kill Eol but I assure you that I would have if I'd known -"

"...I meant the vassal thing? I wasn't thinking about sex at all, I was thinking about the fact that you respect me as a person with my own agency and my own name."

"You have a great name. Finrod is involved with his vassals and it is at least half the issue I take with him and I thought you might have pieced it together but you really really cannot say it."

"I suspected but if he doesn't think we're sleeping together then I wouldn't be even slightly tempted to include it in any scathing commentary I was suppressing."

"I don't think he'd jump to that. Warn me off it, sure, but not very sincerely. I am really prejudicing you against someone you've never met, this is a bad idea."

"Does it help if I say you did that by accident the first time you told me he literally renamed someone vassal? I am, um. Possibly more sensitive to that particular thing than most people would be, I have some really good reasons to be attached to my name in particular and it sort of gets generalized even when other people aren't as specifically attached. And if someone is in the habit of enchanting humans into vassaldom I do appreciate being warned. And if I found out any of this by surprise while I was talking to him I probably wouldn't be as good at diplomatically not bringing it up. See also: my sister bringing up gay marriage in the middle of dinner."

"Those are good points. Alright, I'll continue venting with a clear conscience. Finrod was I think more invested in the girl his brother got involved with than his brother himself was, he kept visiting her over the decades to talk about the necessary differences between Elves and Men. Long after Aegnor himself had cut and run."

"Is he likely to be more sensitive about it since Aegnor just died?"

"Possibly. Probably. I'm sure he's grieving and in a lot of pain. You can bring people back, that'll help."

"It should help me be patient with him, anyway."

"Aegnor was a good man. We're weaker for having lost him."

"I was there. For part of it. I wonder if I could have gotten him out, if I had known to."

"You can get him back, right?"

"Yes."

"I wonder how Andreth'll feel about it. If she's still alive."

"She might be? How long ago was this, exactly? Would she be with the refugees I resettled if she is?"

"Oh, this was super recently, she'd be in her eighties or nineties now. Men don't always live that long but sometimes they do. And yes, she lived in Ladros."

"De-aging one human out of all the hundreds of humans I'm de-aging sounds like a super safe substitute for yelling at him."

"Seems like it might, yeah. Pop over to them sometimes soon? They must be in fairly desperate straits, we were not prepared for that many refugees because under ordinary circumstances there's no way we could have gotten them out."

"Healing and de-aging and teaching and increasing the food supply and apologizing for being scary. Sounds like a plan. I thiiiink I'll do one more stint of orc-killing and then do that because theoretically any given military action is more valuable than any given non-military action and my stops to help people more personally are supposed to be mental health breaks."