I think he is actually in fact trying to get more self-loathing so I'll perk him up. It's astonishing the man manages to effectively rule so much as his horse. 

How charming. Findekáno should be advised that if he goes along with this plan whatever she gets can and will escape her head fairly indiscriminately as casual answer to relevant questioning, conversation piece, weapon, summary to her family if they ever find her, etcetera, it would be entirely reasonable not to share, most people who are alive and have memories of theirs in her payload would not have chosen this, etcetera.

Well, yes, that's the point. I want people to know. Not - not anything explicit, but who he is, definitely - 

When they come for Findekáno he's been sleeping, in light armor, and he rolls out of bed and draws his sword. Yes, he is badly outnumbered, but he is better than anyone Maitimo would have sent and there remains the chance that Maitimo would have asked his men to take Findekáno alive.

"Your parents are dead," says the woman in the lead. "I swear it. It's over. Put down the sword."

He does not put down the sword. He does not resist when they pull it out of his hands, though, or when they bind him and search him for weapons, or when they start dragging him towards the center of camp.

Dead.

People are staring. Right, Maitimo would have arranged for him to be taken the long way around, arranged for as much of the host as possible to witness this. Maitimo will get as much leverage as possible from the murders he arranged. Maitimo probably choreographed the aftermath as carefully as he choreographed the deaths themselves. 

He is thrown to the ground at Maitimo's feet and kneels, expressionless, eyes fixed on the ground, his heart pounding too loudly to hear Maitimo speaking. They're dead.

And then Maitimo takes hold of his hair near the scalp - the crowd gasps - and drags his face upwards so they make eye contact. I need an oath of fealty or a public execution, which do you want it to be?

That depends on the wording you want, Findekáno manages after a moment. 

Be convincing enough to end this war. 

Let go of my hair.

He does.

And Findekáno swallows and says "I do not desire that more blood be shed to settle the rule of the Noldor. I pledge myself and those who follow me to the pursuit of our common goal under Nelyafinwe, King of the Noldor. This senseless violence served our foe. I swear not to aid anyone in letting internal divisions drive us again to war. I swear to protect you with my life. I swear never to raise a hand to you or permit anyone under my command to do so." Glance at Maitimo. He doesn't look satisfied. "I swear to obey you in every just order you give." That doesn't help; he really wasn't expecting it to. He can't think of anything he's willing to add. He remains there, motionless.

And then he's dragged to his feet, again, and out of the square - not a public execution, then - and to Maitimo's tent, which he almost does not recognize because his vision is swimming. They chain his arms and legs and leave and he has just enough mobility to curl into a ball on the floor and shudder violently. Requests are pouring in over osanwe. Don't fight, he says over and over. Don't fight. What's the wording of the oath Maitimo's asking for from other people?

Standard fealty oath, to obey as far as honor permits and resign when it does not.

Don't fight, he says to everyone who asks.

He's not tracking time very well but after perhaps a day or two some people come in to clean him up. Wash his hands and face. Change his clothes. Wash his hair -

"What the Halls," he growls when they try that. 

"King's orders."

"Are you sworn to obey righteous orders from him, or any."

This earns him an amused smile. "I have a choice. If you were deciding whether to kick and scream on that basis."

He doesn't kick and scream. "What exactly did he say."

"'I want my pretty defiant cousin in my bed when I'm done here.'"

"As far as you can tell, is he under the influence of any oaths, any mind-altering magic -"

"What are you going to do about it if he is?"

"Forgive him."

"As far as I can tell he's of wholly sound mind. What're you going to do now?"

He closes his eyes. After a few minutes he starts singing. 

They wash his hair, awkwardly, hurriedly, and leave him there.

When Maitimo comes Findekáno is entirely calm. "Your grace," he says expressionlessly.

"Findekáno." He still manages to infuse the word with enchanted adoration.

"I'd hoped you'd pick a different name, so that one could keep its pleasant associations."

Maitimo blinks. "Alright," he says. "What do you want me to call you?"

He finds himself actually speechless. 

Maitimo unchains him - right, Findekáno is sworn not to harm him, it's not just that it'd be suicide but that it's literally impossible now - and waits.

"If you are doing this because killing people gets you hard and I'm conveniently right here," he says after a minute, "go ahead. But if you were hoping for an emotionally interesting reaction from me you should probably wait a week. I am grieving. I do not think I'll even be able to muster hurt and betrayal."

And Maitimo stares at him searchingly for a moment, and then turns, and leaves...

Try not to hate him debilitatingly much, I have to puppet him into running the country.

How much is debilitating? Yea much? She's not sure how exactly to try to hate someone less, her mama can do things like that but never taught Elspeth because it would have required different basic mental architecture - is he just deliberately courting it so he'll be inured, or something -

At a guess, somewhere between that and a conviction that if you're going to dislike him and thereby cause him considerable distress - no one dislikes him - it's somehow metaphorically appropriate for it to be for the things he regrets most - and he's flippant about it but he does regret that one, now -

Why doesn't anyone dislike him? He's so dislikeable.

I can only speak for myself on that.

He's probably an enlightening case study even if he's not an exhaustive explanation.

I know him too well to hate him. He has a tendency, under pressure, to see only one solution he can live with and reach for it and cling to it unrepentantly, and objectively that means he is frequently evil, but - not out of enjoyment of other peoples' suffering, just out of awful options and an excessively-firm commitment not to let self-doubt and self-loathing cripple him.

He is good at harm reduction about being evil.

Before the war I would have called him a good person and I think there's a chance that after the war he'll be one again - the war rather demands that one not value goodness too much, at least not the kinds of goodness we were all taught to value, in Valinor...

...he's a monster. But when he doesn't have anything else to offer me I'll walk away and that will hurt him very badly and I have no desire to hurt him worse. 

He doesn't have to be deliberately sadistic about it to be unlikeable amounts of evil.

Maybe part of the difference is that Elspeth knows lots of people really, really well, many as though from the inside, in full-color detail, and some of them she liked for real until her feelings were stolen and some of them she liked by force until she learned bit by painful bit to stop and she doesn't trust her fuzzy impulses automatically anymore, not when she has information -

- but she's pretty sure a lot of the people she knows would not like Maitimo either and they don't all have that background so that's probably not the whole story.

Maybe in your world there's a much stronger taboo on mind-controlled sex slaves?

Not exactly. There's a much narrower, much less voluntary "mind controlled sex slave" genre of thing. And the power imbalance is sort of different even if you factor out the Golden Empire. If a vampire meets a human and goes all gooey-feelings about them, to quote Addy who has never had a gooey feeling in her life, it's the vampire and not the human who is mind controlled; this was traditionally rectified immediately but the motive was almost always more panic about human mortality than anything else. And the vampires are dealing with ridiculous forces of need that Literally Only Grandpa Carlisle Ever In History has managed to set aside. (Not that this worked out very well for Esme before he found her again.) The mind control is more exogenous to and contagious from the people you could identify as perpetrators than the thing Maitimo was doing. Werewolves, the mind control part isn't even contagious. (Poor Jake. Maybe they have found a way to keep him in a coma or something.)

So you were used to a - horrible force of nature, not something being harnessed deliberately and asymmetrically for personal convenience -

Yes. (Not that it was not rather terrifying being five watching a total stranger gaze at her with indelible adoration - but she knew even then it was not his fault.)

That does sound terrifying, I'm sorry. I'm used to Maitimo, and his wants are complicated, and not magically enforced. To me this seems preferable.

She doesn't have one of those really awkward imprintings. They worked it out. All the mind control was third-party, the Volturi wanted Jake because they were keeping werewolf packs as enforcers and wanted the third alpha and to keep him they had to keep her because they couldn't make him capable of doing without her. And now she has her wolf, absolutely reliable and committed, and it is much more true that he is hers than that she is his.

I'm glad to hear it. 

Some of the imprints have really awkward relationships with their wolves without Chelsea babysitting them all the time. They try to be kind of careful about who the unimprinted male werewolves have a chance to see, but Alice can't see them so they can't just do protective matchmaking with people who'd like having wolves. It's unfortunate. Also that mess with Brady when it turned out imprintings and turnings were not on speaking terms, that was objectively horrible even if Elspeth still can't really care about it because that would have inconvenienced Chelsea and Elspeth can only combat additions not subtractions.

...yikes.

Yeah her world has horrible shit too.

(Other things she cannot care about: the infant puppy who died when the Volturi caught Jake's pack, whose own parents could not mourn her. A significant swath of human snacks that they didn't want anyone in the wolf village worrying about. The non-wolf-gened, non-imprint members of the Quileute tribe, massacred because they would have been inconvenient.)

It's just... people objected. Someone noticed, and fixed it as best it could be fixed.

Well, thank you for telling me. I would prefer to care about those things and it doesn't seem like there are barriers to me doing so.

Yeah. Chelsea never reached for him and went snip, snip. It seems reasonable that someone should care about them.

I think I'm an unusually forgiving person but that I wouldn't forgive either.

Chelsea is dead.

Mama did grant her last request, though: Chelsea first, not Afton, she got to die beloved.

And they kept her hands until they were too dead for Addy to copy from, to let her do patch jobs.

Elspeth didn't take one. Her father did, though, took the shortcut so he could love his child and not make his mate more miserable over his failure to do so.

....

Maitimo, are you listening -