I'm on my way. Trying to think through whether -

Whether it's a category error or an oddly specific thing that happened to come up? Whether I'm broadly failing to imagine what sorts of compromises are going to come up, have come up for him, I keep thinking about how I wouldn't have come up with it, no matter how much time I had, it wouldn't have been on my list of things a person could do if they were evil -

Didn't you say he was going to kill millions of people?

Yeah. 

An advantage of drawing the line before that is that I'm not sure there are a lot of places to draw it past that. 

Yeah. 

I don't think - I didn't think I believed in drawing lines. Just making trades. But - 

I'm sorry. I know you love him. 

Do I? I'm hurting him. With all this being sad. He needs - he's recovering from Angband, and I'm making things worse. Vanyel's worried. I didn't explain what was going on.

None of that strikes me as counterevidence because you've always been very bad at loving people.

Vanyel's return Gate goes up. He sticks his head through. :Maitimo, please don't dawdle on this: 

They step right through. 

"I'm sorry," he says immediately. "Is everything all right here -"

They're in the hall just outside Leareth's room, using a nearby doorway for the Gate. "I believe so, yes." :He hasn't moved. I don't think anything seems worse than, er, whatever the last few days...: He's giving Findekáno a blank look, trying to remember if they've been introduced. 

" - my cousin, Prince Findekáno. Findekáno, Herald Vanyel. - I should explain what's going on. I'm so sorry." He activates the privacy barrier on his amulet. 

"Leareth and I were discussing his past. He explained the, uh, lengths that he went to in order to have sufficient, and sufficient untraceable to him, descendents for his immortality spell in the early years. Has he told you about this -"

"...Not details. I gathered he takes over people's bodies, because his body dies and – when you go through the historical record it's pretty clear he pops up as a young man. It's his descendants specifically, though?" He shivers. "I guess that wouldn't bother him any more than the body-snatching part in general." 

"I guess not. He didn't know them. He'd make arrangements with women who wanted Gifted children. And - when he was worried that someone might realize that was how he was doing it, stamp out all his known offspring - he's good at compulsions, he'd - find strangers, and -"

"...Right. I - can see why that'd bother you a lot. Bother Quendi more in general. Is it even possible for women here to have children out of wedlock, or - unintentional pregnancy from rape - or, er, to sleep with someone who isn't their husband at all...?" 

" - no. I hadn't - thought of any of those things as things that were possible. - I realize that's on me."

"I mean, it really should've been on me to realize that needed explaining, right? And...I didn't. I suppose because I don't like some of the less savoury parts of my world. Leareth's not the only person in my world who does that. ...Honestly probably he picked the least harmful way possible? Skillful compulsions, maybe he could even hide the memory from them - I bet he didn't leave women with years of nightmares and trauma from it happening to them, he'd - definitely rape women if he thought it were necessary, that wouldn't be any more sacred than murder to him, but he wouldn't make it any worse than it absolutely had to be to accomplish his aims." 

"I think," he says, "I am running into a problem where you can have qualified trust in Leareth knowing he'll have done terrible things when he considered it necessary because you and he have approximately the same picture of what terrible things there are that one can get up to if they try, and I would like to have the same sort of thing but could've thought about it for years and not thought of this. And I don't know how many things like this there are. And that makes it hard to have qualified trust and not expect on some level that tomorrow I will learn, I don't know, that Leareth can extract magical power from making people swear contradictory oaths and has a factory of that, up north, or ...that his resurrection method restricts his diet to ....the eyeballs of babies, or -"

"...Probably there's a faster way of getting that than coming to live in Velgarth for five years, where you might literally die of the ugliness," Vanyel says tiredly. "I don't know. I can go through all the things I know of that Leareth's done. I could - ask him what he hasn't told you, if you're worried about reacting badly to his face and need some time away to absorb it." 

"I don't know what I need. I worry that will - stress him out further. All of this has already been really bad for him. I - the thing I want to do is to be sad for a couple of months and then pick up where we left off but I can't do that, this is damaging him.

I don't like the thing where he thinks of the worst things he's done as his defining traits as a - friend, as an ally,  in other peoples' eyes - and I don't want to contribute to it. And I don't want to - gods. 

I feel like when he talks about killing people his regret is shaped just like my sadness. And that helps. And I don't think that's true here, and it shouldn't need to be, but -"

"I'm sorry." 

Shrug. "Anyway. That's what's going on. I am going to try to get things figured out soon so he isn't stuck. I appreciate the Gate."

“I’m glad I could help.” And Vanyel is just going to keep sitting here in the hall until Leareth, who must have heard Maitimo getting back, either asks for him or tells him to go away. 

He goes to his room with Findekáno. Cries on him for a couple of hours without talking much. 

I'm trying to think what I did here that was stupid.