"Ugh, don't I know it. If your brother does die I might well be able to bring him back sooner than anyone else; he said he wouldn't go to Mandos and since reaching there is my current sticking point..."

"If you want to stay here for a few days - we do lose people in the war, the next time one dies you could try to bring them back -"

"It didn't sound safe to wander around long-term on this continent; Mandos is probably a bettor captor than Morgoth. If you want to tell people to stick around when and only when they're certain I'm immediately available...I could try."

"The problem is that if you're immediately available you'll usually also have a few minutes to just heal them, very little is instantly lethal in war, and I can't ask you to wait under those conditions."

"Immediately as defined as 'a timespan over which Morgoth is not going to get them'. I am strongly opposed to gambling someone's freedom-from-Morgoth."

"Trust me, me too."

"Not even a little bit surprised. If there's an interval over which someone wouldn't have time to be healed but isn't going to get grabbed I'd be perfectly willing to make the experiment."

"Thank you. I'll keep that in mind." Dessert is served. Maedhros eats it as he ate dinner, levelly, without looking at the food, in small bites that he chews exactly twice.

It's not really surprising.

If he thinks it's worth it for her to stick around for a few days to perform the experiment she will; otherwise she'll head to the general vicinity of Doriath even if she's not going to be doing diplomacy to replace the glass dome with tinkte so she can start building her sister's city.

He thinks she should go ahead and do that. May your travels be more dangerous to your enemies than to you, and so forth.

Yeah.

She stops by Celegorm and Curufin's place again on the way over to the spiders. "So your brother was expressing positive emotions and I honestly couldn't tell if they were genuine or if he was pretending."

"Pretending. Why?"

"Because I don't appreciate it. I don't like it when people try to pretend to me that the world is a better place than it actually is. If your brother prefers for his own reasons that I believe him to be more okay than he is, well, he's had more than enough of his preferences not being respected for the rest of eternity and I can put up with it, but I will not be more productive if he smiles at me and I don't like the idea that I will forever have to second-guess how okay or not-okay he is because I can't ever trust that his expressions of positive emotions are genuine."

"Odette -

Most people's expressions of positive emotions are communicative. 'I'd be happy to have you' doesn't mean 'I'd experience happiness', not really. 'I was so glad to hear from you' means 'hearing from you was a positive thing' much more than 'I experienced gladness'. I sort of doubt you go around wondering whether most peoples' pleasantries are deeply felt and sincere. But Maedhros is broken, so his pleasantries are broken things, and count as lies, though they're no more dishonest than anyone else's..."

"...Okay. If he wasn't trying to manipulate me--I mean. If he wasn't doing that to manipulate me. I don't, in principle, object to your brother manipulating me. If it wasn't specifically for my benefit that he was pretending, I'm not going to object to it."

"I do not think that my brother uses emotional expressions any differently in terms of social purposes than anyone else uses them."

"I gotta say, when the time comes your brother is going to improve my focus so much for killing Sauron and later Morgoth."

"There's a lot to hate the Enemy for. Maedhros is fine."

"Yep."

"And doesn't owe us sadness any more than he owes the rest of the world happiness."

"I--don't want to seem like I think he ought to feel anything in particular. If he had been doing a thing for my benefit that did not in fact benefit me then she should instead not do that. Since he was not doing that I have no reason to object to his behavior or anything."

"When are you heading out?"

"In the morning. It's going to take a while to replace the dome."

"I bet. Does it take longer to generate new materials than ones that come from the surrounding area?"

"If you mean is generating matter easier when I'm expanding a thing that already exists the answer is yes. If you mean is moving stuff around easier than generating matter the answer is also yes."