I don't know. Maybe. I don't feel better equipped to reason about any of this but I feel more emotionally inured to - learning about it - and the reasoning probably doesn't have to happen right now and might go better when it's shaped by actually trying to solve real problems. 

Do you think it's ridiculous for me to trust Leareth? And to love him?

No. 

I think you should be really careful about what you help him do, until we've had time to think about this. But you're not helping him conquer planets, you're helping him recover from Angband. You should obviously be doing that. - or delegating that, if you don't think you can do it.

I think I can do it. 

Thank you. 

Do you want to go back now -

There's nothing that can't wait a day. 

Okay. 

I'm going to go talk to Leareth.

Vanyel is still sitting with his back to Leareth's closed door. He lifts his head, eyes widening. :Maitimo–:

- is he okay -

:I assume not but I don't think he's less okay than he was yesterday. He's not speaking to me: 

I'm so sorry. I think - if he'll talk to me I think we can straighten it out, maybe.

Leareth, may I come in?

:I cannot exactly stop you: 

- I am not going to come in right now if you would like to be alone. 

An entire minute passes in silence. 

:...I suppose if you wish to speak now, then I would prefer to get it over with: Leareth sends finally, his mindvoice very flat and neutral. 

- he opens the door. 

Leareth is sitting against the headboard of the bed with his arms wrapped tightly around his knees, a plate of uneaten food sitting on the bedside table. There are bags under his eyes. He's staring resolutely at the wall. 

Well.

He sits down against the wall. 

I'm sorry. I know it was a very bad time for me to need some time and not communicate more. 

:I assumed you were coming here to tell me that we are not friends anymore because it turns out you did not think through all the ramifications of my...willingness to do terrible things: 

Leareth tried to communicate it. He really did try. It feels unfair, that this is happening anyway – and happening now, when he's already gotten used to - this. To Maitimo being someone he can count on. 

...no? Well, it is true that I did not think through - uh, mostly my list of terrible things it was possible to do was just too short. But I'm not mad, not really, and it seems really unlikely that it'd improve anything if I decided to be, and - even if I had decided it was wrong to care about you, which I did not, it would not change that I do care about you. 

Leareth puts his head down on his knees. 

...Probably the right thing to do here is to say it's all right, that he understands, and make things up with Maitimo, because - well, all of his other options here are terrible. He's spent the last several days trying to sift through what he can do, to - be all right again without Maitimo's help. He thought about just going back to Velgarth, but one, he can't even do that on his own, he'd have to ask Vanyel, and Vanyel would probably refuse because this is clearly a stupid plan. There isn't anyone in his organization who can realistically help him in the way he needs right now, because it's not something he's ever needed before. Also the gods of Velgarth will keep trying to murder him and he's in no shape right now to prevent that. 

...He thought about letting that happen. Or just asking Vanyel to check his immortality setup and then killing himself in his current body, hoping that starting over elsewhere will at least let him lose most of the torture-memories. Except it won't fix his - core sense of self - and he does remember the first day of starting out in this body, it was so very important that he knew exactly who and what he was. Because if you take a Leareth and you - change any of the parts at random - most of the directions that can happen gets you a monster.

(Because he's already a monster. He's just - holding as firmly as he can to the part where that's pointed in the direction of someday fixing everything. And now everything is quicksand and he isn't sure if that was ever true or if...he was just wrong, just hurting people for no reason.) 

Leareth considered admitting that he's just lost, that there isn't a way of coming back from where he is now. It wasn't clear what he ought to actually do in that scenario, though, so he didn't do anything.

It's sort of unbelievable how much he's been hurting, in the last few days. Leareth isn't used to this being a way he can hurt. And - as a result, the hope that maybe he hasn't lost Maitimo as a friend after all is terrifying. 

- he takes off the amulet Leareth made him. 

There were probably two ways out of this; one was to not have emotions where Leareth could notice them in the first place, and in hindsight he should probably have done that, he had reasons for thinking it'd be better if they talked things out but Angband should have just overridden those reasons, actually, Angband isn't like other things. (it was incredibly irresponsible to let it leak through onto the recovering torture victim with no one else to turn to, how intensely unfair, Leareth is right to be angry about it -)

But anyway he didn't do that, he did the thing that would've been the obvious thing to do if this had come up before Angband, and he's sorry about that but now it seems like the best way forward is probably just to actually communicate.

A bunch of feelings are blurred together and he should try pulling them apart so Leareth can see them - 

Leareth is in a lot of pain right now and it is clearly Maitimo's fault, and he wants to figure out the pieces of that failure.

It was a stupid and obvious mistake in hindsight, having Leareth have no other options. He'd been aware of that, sort of. He tried bringing it up with Leareth but it didn't work, because he was only sharing some of the pieces, because there wasn't an obvious better solution - he'd been thinking that he wasn't going to get tired of helping, not in the next fifty years at least, that 'Maitimo gets tired of helping' was not really a priority to solve when he knew he wouldn't - and he hasn't - when he knew he was willing to prioritize Leareth over all the political things that might come up -

- but it's obviously quite bad for Leareth to have no paths to fixing things that don't go through Maitimo. Not because Maitimo won't be there. This was - about the worst thing he could've learned in about the worst possible way and it didn't for a second shake his commitment to being here. But because - because it's not good for people to have very few options. It is not good for Leareth to feel like tactically he needs to mend bridges right now because his alternative is suicide, and maybe reawakening as someone else. 

(Did he make this mistake because he wanted Leareth - he doesn't think so. He was trying very hard to avoid that. Maybe he was in fact trying so hard to avoid that that he failed to think about ways the situation could hurt Leareth that didn't involve Maitimo asking for things he had no right to -)

Leareth is in a lot of pain right now and this reflects both the mistake and also some kind of misunderstanding, some way in which the two of them are not seeing this the same way, and that seems like the most fixable part of this. Maitimo can take some stabs at what the misunderstanding might be. Leareth probably did not realize that he was referencing things Maitimo didn't so much think-of-as-off-limits as things he'd never thought of. The problem was  - the part that'd taken a couple of days was - adjusting his model of the world for the fact he was apparently so bad at guessing how people could hurt each other. 

Maitimo is not in any doubt about whether Leareth is a monster. Leareth is good and saved a world because of the sort of person that he was and they have to get him back. 

:I am not angry: Leareth sends, immediately, that feels important to clarify. 

...It's different, reading Maitimo's thoughts with his Gifts instead of getting it via Maitimo letting him in through the osanwë barrier. It means he's getting everything and he knows he's getting everything, they both know it, and - the emotions are coming through a lot stronger - Leareth has to back off after thirty seconds because it's too overwhelming.

He takes a few deep breaths, focuses on not crying, and then starts thinking, out where Maitimo can see it. Because it seems very important that they be on the same page, here. He is very tentatively drifting toward concluding that Maitimo does still want to be his friend, but...that requires having everything in the open, and he thought he'd achieved that before but clearly not. 

In hindsight it makes a lot of sense that - the ways that humans hurt each other constantly, all the time, the - kinds of tradeoffs that any military commander is taking when they hire soldiers without vetting their entire lives, for example - that those don't come up in paradise. 

(Leareth knows for a fact that it has ever happened for Valdemaran soldiers to rape Karsite civilians, because sometimes they were caught and went to trial for it, and presumably sometimes they weren't caught, and...he isn't really sure where he's going with that, actually. There is clearly any kind of moral distinction between King Randale personally raping a Karsite refugee versus indirectly giving coin and weapons and legitimacy to a soldier who ends up doing so, but also the harm is still out there in the world either way.)

He's thinking about - unwanted children, abused children, and how this must just not ever happen here. And how hard he tried to make sure none of his biological children were unwanted in that way, because - it just doesn't make tactical sense, right? He wanted them to reach adulthood, healthy and prosperous, and be in a good position to have lots of children of their own. He certainly didn't want their mothers to know they'd been raped, that would be stupid and unhelpful toward any of his goals. He's aware this doesn't make it much less monstrous. 

(He is directly responsible for children being taken from their parents, in his attempts to pre-emptively strip Valdemar of mages and instead get them on his side, so the invasion he planned would be over as quickly and bloodlessly as possible. He was, a few times, indirectly responsible for their being mistreated a lot more than necessary in the process, even though that doesn't make any tactical sense and just resulted in a lot more time wasted on helping them recover from it later – because it turns out that when you're trying to hire kidnappers, even if you do your best to vet them, they are kind of being filtered to be terrible people. Leareth has supplied a lot of terrible people who've done a vast amount of harm and that's - on him, just as much as what he's done with his own hands.) 

He's pretty sure that he's not going to do this again, because that was a priority, changing the way he was thinking about this so there weren't any more hidden tripwires Leareth could stumble across. He spent a while with Findekáno brainstorming evil things that people could potentially - 

- actually, he just should let Leareth review that conversation. It seems important. Here's Maitimo, crying on Findekáno's chest - (I'm trying to think what I did here that was stupid...he's a person who wants things to be good...you'd use a compulsion to get the right ten people to swear....you can eat people...it probably beats using a compulsion to prevent them from committing suicide and then, like, tackling them? ...)

- probably Leareth can improve on the list but he didn't want to make Leareth go through a list of every horrible thing he's ever done - 

:I hurt you. I am sorry: 

Leareth drags in a breath between his teeth, lets it out. It doesn't matter that he had no way of avoiding it because the thing that caused Maitimo so much anguish was...the entire person he is and has been for millennia. And it wouldn't have been better if it had never come up, that wouldn't be fair to Maitimo and - and Leareth wouldn't be doing himself any favours, either, when he's in the process of trying to put himself back together. 

Is that particular decision worse than all the others? He would have thought that murdering people - that intending to murder ten million people - is obviously a lot more monstrous than sending some women home with a child they wanted and cherished and assumed was their husband's, or maybe carefully-didn't-think about that one ill-advised night of out-of-character temptation. Vanyel might not be capable of this but Leareth is more than capable of compulsions that a person can't distinguish from their own urges, lots of people do ill-advised contradictory things all the time anyway. Leareth thinks that about half of his secret children weren't the result of compulsions at all, just women who were in fact very willing to accept drinks from an attractive (illusioned) stranger and then go home with him. 

(He didn't like doing it. Some part of him found it a lot more distressing than killing someone with his own hands. But he hasn't let the fact that something is distasteful stop him, generally, that's - sort of a fundamental part of how he thinks about the world and his actions in it.)

:I have not eaten people: he sends eventually. :I - do not think I have ever personally tortured someone? It is possible I did and lost the memory, but generally I would not need to for an interrogation, which is the only purpose where I would endorse it as strategically useful. I have been upstream of kingdoms having policies that included torture, but that is not exactly rare in my world: Because his world is terrible. :I considered using compulsions with the Noldor and I would have done it if the alternative were thousands of deaths. I did not understand oaths well enough at the time to incorporate that in the plan; I would have hesitated more at it, since I cannot reverse an oath later, but knowing myself, I would not have entirely ruled it out:

He's kind of confused about the compulsion-against-suicide part, probably that's running into some cultural difference between humans and Quendi that he doesn't understand yet? 

- you didn't hurt me. You hurt a lot of people but not me. 

Uh, he has never tried, for a lot of reasons, but he expects that if he tried to ...tackle a woman, and that that works, biologically speaking, which he's not clear on, but assuming that it does, then probably she would decide that this demonstrated his unsuitability as a person to be married to and stop her heart rather than have anything irrevocable happen. Probably the difference is just that humans are less inclined to do that given that they don't come back? But on the other hand they can explode, which would seem to incline one more towards suicide since it can function as vengeance too.

Oh. Right. There are so many layers of misunderstanding here, aren't there. 

:Humans do not become married when they - participate in or are subjected to sex acts: Leareth reminds Maitimo. :It is certainly a very traumatic thing for a person to experience, that will affect them for a long time, but it does not result in any kind of bond to the rapist. Also most humans cannot explode, that is only mages. Healers can stop their own hearts if they have the right training for it, I think, but most humans are also not Healers. I am sure it has ever happened that a mage called Final Strike on their rapist rather than let it continue, but - I think most people would not prefer to die even in that situation. If pregnancy results from rape - this has the same probability as from a woman bedding a man willingly, unless the woman is a Healer in which case they have more but not perfect control of it - many women will take measures to end it rather than bear their rapist's child. I am guessing that is also not something Quendi do: 

- no, it's not, what would that fix? The baby didn't do anything - also, you can't get them back if you kill them before they're old enough to survive with support in Lórien, which is about thirty weeks into a pregnancy. No one has done it on purpose but pregnant people were killed beside Cuivienen, a few times. Lórien's working on it. 

This is only sort of relevant. 

Do you mean to say that humans do not decide when they become pregnant, it just happens some of the time when they have sex?