That makes no sense and is also kind of distressing for some reason. It's in tension, some part of him is pretty sure it has to be true that Maitimo deserves and needs his people and his home, and it's his fault that he lost them - not in temporary death but in permanent relationships and loyalty, he knows how much that matters to Maitimo, and he did something very stupid which is causally upstream of destroying that, and... (He doesn't know what his mind wants here, actually.) 

The limited Foresight angle on on his past decisions does make it look like they're on one of the better paths, right now, when it comes to Maitimo's eventual wellbeing. Not the best, but most are drastically worse.

Also it does still look like the path he actually ended up following starting from the point at which it was already too late not to get accidentally married, was one of the best ones - there are random variations there but not really due to his decisions - even though this feels very surprising given the level of messed up it ended up being. He had one lever left and he used it but it was a horrible lever, really, somehow holding Maitimo in a state where he couldn't break anything else for six months by, what, playing along with this awful dynamic where Maitimo's only goal was pleasing him, bribing him into behaving himself via their relationship, the one handle on Maitimo's motivations that didn't belong to Sauron...

He's starting to think that was pretty bad for him, actually, which feels like its own kind of awful thing to think given that Maitimo was the one actually being harmed by it.

The last year was very damaging for you. At some point you are going to need to think about that, also, and not just how damaging it was for Maitimo. 

He wants to fling back that he can worry about that after he knows Maitimo is okay, but - probably he can't, actually, and also in a way that's putting his own pressure on Maitimo to be okay sooner, which surely won't help. I know. He really isn't sure how. How to exist in a world where he's won, where he finished the thing his past self was trying to do all these centuries - it was too abrupt, too fast, he can't actually absorb yet that it's over - and also he broke something that he had never expected to have at all, maybe permanently - and also it seems like his entire core self of self is still built on Maitimo. And in some sense specifically on Maitimo loving him. Which makes it unsurprising how it feels like the entire world is falling to piece around him. It's not the world at all, it's himself. 

You had to rebuild yourself under very bad circumstances, and in the process you came to value your relationship with him intrinsically, I think, alongside the eventual flourishing of all people everywhere.

...Huh. 

It's not a lens he had on it before but it fits, actually. Telumë, waking up, didn't have enough of himself to remember what to point himself at, so he tried to point himself at everything Maitimo had stood in for, and in the process he also aimed himself at specifically the goal of loving Maitimo and being together with him. That...feels right, it makes the world seem clearer. 

And then, of course, he tried to pursue that goal with his usual ruthlessness, except that his strategies of doing things were never intended for romantic relationships, and also he wasn't thinking clearly at all, and he was failing to notice that he had two intrinsic values here instead of one, and...

Well, the biggest mistake, probably, is that he lost the ability to take a step back and notice the pattern of decision-making he was in, which on reflection probably happens a lot when he's very young in a new body, but of course he picked the worst possible week for it. And there was the horrific unknown unknown of Quendi marriage not working like anyone had thought, but it would still have been a mistake in expectation even if that weren't true, he thinks. Probably. It still feels like an intolerable way for the universe to be, to rescue Maitimo from Sauron and see him and know that they both still loved each other and not - let either of them have that even if everything else was broken around them - but probably that's the kind of insane reasoning that happens when you accidentally make 'having a relationship with this specific person' into one of your terminal values. 

And he needs to change how he's relating to it, somehow, because otherwise whether or not he can be okay depends too much on Maitimo and that's - still putting a kind of cage around him - and he's past the point where he's ever going to do that again. 

Thank you. Telumë doesn't feel better, really, but he thinks he feels less confused. 

You are welcome.

He moves on to a new village after a while, because the process of building relationships is more compelling than the process of maintaining them, right now, because he wants to try a different variant on the story of the war, because maybe one of these villages will have someone who can sing. On every other night he leaves and wanders off alone and tries to think.

He does not seem able to get anywhere by contemplating philosophy. Or - that's not true, he doesn't get nowhere, he's pulled a couple of things out into the open by doing it. He has a clearer picture of the overlap between Sauron's worldview and the worldview that could possibly be acceptable to everyone else. Sauron likes ambition, likes conquest, likes building things and doing things, likes inventing things. Hates death, and hates the pointless mundane troubles of the world. Melkor might've embraced them, said they were still suffering - Melkor gave all orcs intense ongoing pain mostly just because then things would be worse instead of better - but that's not really Sauron's style.

So that's something.

The thing Maitimo is increasingly tempted to do is go play around in Leareth's terrifying former empire. This is a stupid thing to do that will probably get him hurt in lots of terrifying ways but it feels like it'd use his skills and let him lean into a lot of the skillset Sauron valued in him without, actually, doing anything that was evil. He could probably make things less evil, even. It seems like there's maybe some kind of balance to be had, some kind of world where he keeps - lots of the aesthetics, some of the ruthlessness, some of the enjoyment of - no, if he's honest with himself he enjoyed having power for its own sake, being feared, even before, even if he wouldn't have used it readily - 

- and doesn't torture people, because he doesn't want to torture people very much, or he'd do it to himself more - 

- he does do it sometimes, usually with an apologetic bob in Telumë's vague direction first -

- and retains the aim of making all the worlds good places, and making them places where awful people can exist, and making something, someday, robust enough that Sauron can live in it. That seems like - the part that is the hardest to compromise on, from the direction of wanting people to like him and admire him and want to work with him. It's certainly the part Leareth can't compromise on, and - it feels artificial, and kind of icky, and kind of not-solid, to adopt it just on that basis, but - 

- but he knows perfectly well how he gets his values, he goes around being around people and letting them rub off on him. If he spends enough time with people who are good, then he'll slide in their direction, inevitably, by being called to take a stance on a hundred things he hasn't thought about before - he cares about bird death, now, something Sauron never contemplated in either direction - he doesn't have to change now, he just has to decide to place himself at the top of that hill, and give himself a nudge, and then gravity will take care of the rest of it. 

He moves on to yet another village and he doesn't do it. Two things are holding him back. One is that he's not sure he wants to. He has reasoned it out and it seems like the path to being able to do things again, to having a people again, to having resources again, and he wants all of those things, but he doesn't actually want it, and - maybe that ends up mattering. 

And the second is - who? He could go to Haven, promise some things under Truth Spell that aren't true yet but could be, help Treven and Jisa. It's almost certainly what he'd be doing if he weren't evil. But he doesn't know that they'll actually - rub off in the right direction. They're not shaped the way he is contemplating trying to be shaped. They're fine. They're just - not that. 

Telumë is. But he has no idea how to exist around Telumë right now at all. 

Vanyel?

Vanyel is probably pretty busy, and not with the kind of tasks that need Maitimo, and it'd be - painful to ride along being useless. He cannot stand the thought of asking for any favors, at any point in this - he needs to be earning his keep at every step of it or it feels like it will all come crashing down. 

Telumë spends a couple of weeks in his mostly-empty underground facility in the north, which slowly fills up again as people make their way back from various frantic last-minute staging points.

He thinks a lot about his conversation with Foundation and the couple of followups to it, poking more at the different choices a past him could have made, and eventually that doesn't seem like the interesting thread here anymore. He can see the mistakes he made from a dozen different angles, it's starting to feel like he has enough distance to look at the shape he was in, where his decisions in the moment were just water flowing downhill over a pattern that was already there, and he can spend a while jumping to being upset about the pattern and not the object-level mistakes but, again, after a while that feels like less the point. 

He goes and finds Vanyel. 

Vanyel is still up north with Stef mostly because Telumë is, though also because he asked Jisa if they needed him and she told him to please take at least a month of actually resting, the war wasn't easy for all of them but the frantic final hours were mostly hard on him, she and Trev and Dara were all left safely behind at the staging-area.

Stef is getting pretty stir-crazy and has wandered off to do something else, so when Telumë traipses over to his room, looking about the same level of miserable he does all the time lately - he was kind of miserable the entire war but the weeks since they won have been much worse - it's just the two of them.

Vanyel offers him a hug. "What's on your mind?" 

"...I am trying to figure out what shape of person I need to be." Telumë feels weirdly shapeless, in the core of himself, the stars are still there but it's becoming a lot more obvious that he's holding onto a memory that existed in the past and doesn't now; that he's trying to point himself at something not actually there to be pointed at. 

"Need to? Or want to? Because, I don't know, the first one makes me kind of nervous for you and the second one less so." 

"I have no idea how to figure out what shape I want to be," Telumë admits. Maybe he never has. It didn't feel like a deliberate choice, really, becoming the shape Leareth was before he ever met Maitimo, not the way a sculpture or a painting is a choice. It felt like - trying to build the only pattern that would work, he couldn't afford to be anything else because even pointing all of himself in the same direction might still not be enough. If you try to make the most beautiful glass it won't hold water, he remembers Maitimo describing it. 

"I guess I'm running into the same thing," Vanyel admits. "Stef isn't, he's fine, but I am. So much of my life has been about being someone who was really good at setting things on fire. And, gods, hopefully we're never going to need that again? But - I'm really bad at asking myself what I want, it turns out. And I can see that being hard for you too." 

"I would not have described it that way before; I would have said I wanted very straightforward things, and one of them was for everybody in the world to get to be all right, and - it did not seem that would ever be true unless I did something - and 'everyone forever' was a very big number so it outweighed the rest. But...I stop now and ask myself what I want and mostly I want things that would involve changing the past, which even my god cannot do." 

"I know." Vanyel is silent for a while, but when Telumë doesn't speak he goes on. "I want Savil back. I don't know if we can get her back. She died a long time before any of the conversations between the gods. I don't know if there's enough of her left to get. And - maybe we can make the future good, at least have everything that happens from this moment forward be good enough, but we can't rewrite what's already happened. We can only go forward."

Telumë nods. "I suppose I am trying to figure out what person I need - want - to be, for that part." Sigh. "I always hoped we would get to where we are - I thought it would be a better problem to have, this one, than the problems we had before. I think that is true? And...I always knew it would cost something unimaginable. And suspected that it would hurt, afterward." 

Vanyel pats his shoulder. "I know. I think it's fine, if it takes us a very long time? And we have time, now, that's - one of the things you bought us. We kind of have to take our time, actually, right? Foundation and all the other gods ran very low on resources, in that fight, it's going to be years before there's much oomph there to go fix the rest of Velgarth. It'll happen, though. Even if neither of us ever does anything." 

"Never doing anything really does not sound very appealing." 

Vanyel laughs. "I know! It really doesn't. And - I don't know, Maitimo said what a Quendi in my position would need was to go wander around and sing for a thousand years, which leaving aside the fact that I'd get so bored, doesn't actually feel like it'd - be the sort of nourishment I'm looking for? I don't know what would be. Stef wants to talk to everyone he can in Valdemar and write songs. Jisa and Treven have a kingdom to rebuild. I guess they could use my help, probably both of our help, but it doesn't feel like that has to be the thing I'm for? I sort of want to go back to Vinyamar for a while, where everything is beautiful, but I'm not sure that's what I want either and it'd be really sad, right, nearly everyone whose name I knew there is dead now and who knows when they'll be back." 

Telumë shakes his head. "I want to - build things. Only I am not sure what, yet. I want to build the kinds of things that made no sense to build, before we had won." 

"Extravagant luxuries, that kind of thing? Make somewhere around here just as ridiculous as Tirion?" 

Telumë remembers a thousand glimpses of a shining city. "Not that exactly, but...something. And then I suppose we will have to move on and find all of the other worlds that need fixing and fix them too, but I was asking Foundation about that and they said it would really be a lot better if I spent at least a decade here. Also...things are not really good, yet? Things are going to be all right but perhaps they will get there faster if I am one of the people being clever about it." 

"I'm very sure of it. If you need to rest I think you should rest, but I know what you mean, that doing nothing isn't actually very restful." Vanyel smiles slightly. "Want to come with me to Haven? It got very rudely flattened and there's a lot of rebuilding to be done." 

"I will think about it. But - maybe." 

He wakes up - no, not 'wakes up', he is dreaming - in Tirion.

He starts crying, and does not move.