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starsprayRating: T
Characters: Sons of Feanor, Elrond, Feanor, Daeron, various others
Warnings: n/a
Summary: After years in Lórien, Maglor and Maedhros are ready to return to their family and to make something new with their lives--but to move forward, all of Fëanor's sons must decide how, or if, they can ever reconcile with their father.
Note: This fic is a direct sequel to High in the Clean Blue Air.
Prologue / Previous Chapter
Maedhros was never surprised when someone came looking for him out by the willows, but he was surprised to look up and see Curufin rather than Celegorm or Caranthir. Curufin seemed to have his hands too full these days to worry too much about Maedhros—which was how Maedhros liked it—but he looked worried about something, now. “What’s wrong?” Maedhros asked, flipping his sketchbook shut. He had been sketching his hand with its pattern of scars, having started to draw without really thinking about it, and was fairly certain that would count as brooding, whichever brother saw it.
“Maglor told me what Míriel wants him to do with this song.” Curufin sat down next to Maedhros and leaned against him. “Why would she ask such a thing of him? It seems cruel.”
“Desperation, maybe. It seems they’ve tried everything else. I don’t think either Míriel or Indis meant to be cruel.”
“But he doesn’t—I don’t believe that Lórien cured him of all his fears, not the way he wants everyone to think. He was shaking after he sang before the court in Tirion.”
“But he did sing,” Maedhros said.
“After hardly eating anything beforehand, and snapping at Amrod over dinner.”
Maedhros sighed, and wrapped his arm around Curufin, resting his cheek against his hair. “Don’t try to talk him out of it, Curvo. It won’t work and you’ll just make him feel worse than he does.”
“No, I won’t. But he doesn’t even believe it will work.”
“He doesn’t, but I think Elrond does. I think Daeron does.” There had been something about the way Daeron had paused after Maglor had first told the two of them of Míriel’s request, something about the way he had seemed to be listening for something, or in the light that had glinted in his eyes for a moment. It was as though he could hear the Music itself—and not just hear it, but understand what it meant. It had been the first time Maedhros had looked at Daeron and seen someone truly powerful, in the same way Galadriel was, or perhaps one of the Vanyar who lived close to the Valar upon Taniquetil. He’d known it already, but had never had any occasion to see it, and it had been as unsettling as it was reassuring.
“Does that mean you do too?” Curufin asked.
“I don’t know, but I know better than to ignore someone like Elrond. And Maglor would not be so set on completing this song if he didn’t also feel it was important, whatever happens. He could have said no, when Míriel asked him. He could still change his mind, but I don’t think he will.”
Curufin was silent for a little while. Down the river Huan barked, and Maedhros heard splashing. Across the river in the wide fields a flock of birds erupted out of the grass in a cacophony of cries and fluttering wings. Nearer at hand a blackbird sang somewhere in another nearby willow tree. Finally, Curufin said, “He doesn’t want Atar to know—but it won’t be possible to keep it a secret after he actually performs before the Valar.”
“Why doesn’t he want Atar to know?”
“He’s afraid of what will happen if Atar gets his hopes up, only for the Valar to refuse again.”
Maedhros’ mind went immediately to the way Fëanor had fallen apart at the doors of Formenos, to the way Maedhros had been so afraid that he would die of grief then and there—only he hadn’t. He had just hardened, and that had been so much worse. “What does he think will happen?”
“Nothing like what you’re thinking. Just—more heartbreak.”
“If you don’t want to keep it secret—”
“No, I agree with him. It’s the fact that it cannot stay secret forever that worries me.”
“I’m sorry you’re still caught in the middle, Curvo,” Maedhros said quietly.
“I don’t mind. It was only really hard when Tyelko was angry with me over it. I’m worried for him, too—I just wish he’d tell me why he’s still so upset.”
“I think it runs deeper than just what happened at the end,” Maedhros said after a moment, remembering how Celegorm had avoided Míriel the year before when she’d first come to Imloth Ningloron, and the way he just looked hurt whenever Fëanor’s name was mentioned, instead of angry like he used to. Maedhros hadn’t tried to ask him about it, but now he thought maybe he should.
“Is it something like that holding you back too?” Curufin asked.
“No. It’s just—some things can’t be taken back after they’re spoken aloud, and I don’t know how to let it go.”
“You mean what he said at Losgar? He asked me about it before he left Tirion.”
“Yes.” Curufin hadn’t been there when Fëanor had spewed his rage at Maedhros after the ships were set aflame. Maglor had been nearby, but no one else knew just what was said, and Maedhros did not want to share. Their guesses would be close enough, though perhaps not on the mark; they all knew how angry Fëanor had been then, as though he’d forgotten it was possible to be anything else.
“I think he regrets that more than anything,” Curufin said after a few moments. “Burning the ships.”
“He told me he doesn’t even remember it clearly.”
“That’s not the same as not remembering it at all. He’ll have looked for it in the palantír too. I think if we hadn’t given it to him he would’ve had the idea himself eventually—he wants to know everything that happened, I think especially the parts he was there for but can’t really remember. We haven’t spoken much of what he’s seen, yet. I’m hoping he’ll open up more to Ambarussa.” Curufin paused, and then said, “You and Atya are still a lot alike, you know.” Maedhros flinched. “Sorry. I just mean that he’s unhappy in the same way you were unhappy for so long. He’s just better at hiding it in front of other people. I’m not sure even Fingolfin knows how unhappy he is.”
“Are they so close that Atar would let him see?”
“I think you would be surprised.” Curufin sat up, crossing his legs and facing Maedhros. He was frowning; there was something pinched and worried in the expression, tense around his eyes. “I just—I don’t know what to do.”
“I don’t think there’s anything more you have to do,” said Maedhros. “There’s nothing broken that’s your responsibility to fix.”
“I’m good at fixing things, though—or I used to be.”
Maedhros sighed. This was all so much more complicated than the broken clasp of a necklace or a gem that needed a new setting. “That doesn’t make it your responsibility to fix everything. Are you just worried about Calissë, that everything else suddenly seems bigger than it is?”
“Of course I’m worried about Calissë. I’m always worried about all my children, and she’s never been so far from us before, let alone for so long a time. But if she’s not safe with Cáno, she isn’t safe with anyone. I’m more worried about you, and that’s not new. It feels like there should be something I can—”
“Curvo.” Maedhros leaned forward to put his hand on the back of Curufin’s head, and to press their foreheads together. “I’m fine,” he said. “I don’t need you to do anything more than what you’re already doing. Just be my brother, and let me be yours. If I need something more, I promise I’ll tell you.”
Curufin reached for Maedhros’ sketchbook and flipped it open to the most recent drawing. “You’re fine, really?”
“If I wasn’t, it wouldn’t be my hand that I was drawing.” Maedhros took the book back. “If you start hovering over me like Celegorm was hovering over Maglor in Tirion, I’ll throw you into the river.”
“No you won’t.” Curufin pushed himself back and got to his feet. “You’d have to catch me first.”
It was a clear dare, and Maedhros sighed again, putting on a show of rolling his eyes. Then he lunged to his feet, only narrowly missing Curufin as he slipped out from under the willow, already laughing. Curufin was quick, but Maedhros had longer legs, and he caught Curufin up around the waist just as they came within sight of Nerdanel’s house. “Wait, wait, no I take it back—!” Curufin yelped as Maedhros swung around and sent him tumbling into the water. It was shallow, the current lazy, and Curufin sat up, spluttering, with water streaming out of his hair. Huan came charging out of the fields on the other side of the river to splash around Curufin and then to bound out of the water to drench Maedhros when he shook himself off.
“Feel better?” Maedhros asked as he waded into the water to give Curufin a hand up. If it had been Celegorm he wouldn’t have tried—Celegorm would have pulled him down into the water with him; Curufin wasn’t heavy enough to get that kind of leverage.
“I feel wet,” Curufin said. Maedhros hauled him up onto his feet. “Do you feel better?”
“I told you before, I’m fine.”
The wind picked up as they wrung out their clothes, and Curufin shivered. “You’ll have to come up with another threat; it’s too cold to be throwing everyone into the river.”
“The cold makes it even better.”
Nerdanel shook her head at them when they turned up still dripping. “Again? Aren’t you all too old for this sort of thing?” she asked.
“He started it,” Maedhros and Curufin chorused, each pointing at the other.
“Oh, just go get changed, and stop dripping all over my kitchen—and I’d better not see either of you tomorrow with different colored hair!”
“We aren’t fighting!” Curufin said as he headed upstairs.
“No one ever believes me when I say I’ll throw them in the river,” Maedhros added, stopping to kiss Nerdanel’s cheek. “So I have to sometimes follow through.”
“If you say so,” Nerdanel said, lips twitching as she tried very hard to pretend to be stern. “Go on, then. And Tyelkormo tells me that hedgehogs hibernate over the winter, so he’s in your room preparing a little den for Aechen.”
Celegorm glanced up from the hedgehog den he was constructing in the corner of Maedhros’ room, near the hearth, and raised an eyebrow. “Isn’t it a little cold for wading around in the river?”
“No,” Maedhros said as he stripped off his shirt. “Too cold will be when there’s ice.”
“That body has never lived at Himring.”
“Neither had my other one when I first went there. Where’s Aechen?”
“Outside somewhere with Náriel, I think. What were you doing in the river?”
“Fishing Curvo out after I threw him in.”
“What did he do?”
“Same thing I’m always threatening to throw the rest of you in the river for.” Once he had changed into dry clothes Maedhros sat on his bed to watch as Celegorm finished constructing Aachen’s little den. “Thanks for that.”
“He could make himself a cozy little place somewhere, but this way we’ll all know where he is and that he’s warm enough.” Celegorm sat back on his heels. “Was Curvo worrying at you?”
“Not too badly. He’s more worried about Cáno, I think. It’s just that Cáno isn’t here and I am.”
Autumn wound on. Maedhros spent many afternoons watching the yellow willow leaves drop down into the river to be carried away, and then he started a painting of it. Painting water was very hard, but he didn’t hate the result. Náriel decided that she wanted to learn to paint, so Curufin made her a small easel to set up beside Maedhros’, and Maedhros supplied her with brushes and paints. She had a wonderful time smearing color all over her canvas, bright and clashing streaks of it. Rundamírë also came out to Maedhros’ studio to investigate his shelves, making a note of the colors he used most. Her particular talent lay in paints and inks and pigments, and she’d been the one to supply almost all of his paints when the studio had first been set up. “I didn’t make this, though,” she remarked, pulling one of the jars of ithildin out from where Maedhros had pushed it into a back corner. “Did Telperinquar give you this? It looks like his work.”
“Yes.” Maedhros glanced at it. “He and my father made it.”
“Ah.” Rundamírë set it back on the shelf, understanding without having to ask any other questions.
“It’s pretty!” Náriel said, darting over to stand on her toes to peer at it. “Why don’t you use it, Uncle Nelyo?”
Maedhros had to bite back the first few replies that came to his mind. “I just haven’t painted anything yet that needs to shine like that,” he said finally. “Maybe someday I will.”
“You could paint stars on your ceiling,” Náriel said. “Tyelpë did that in our bedrooms! It’s so pretty at night, and he taught us all the constellations and the stories—”
“Maybe,” Maedhros said, smiling at her. It was a nice idea, but Maedhros wasn’t sure he would ever be able to fall asleep with something his father had made hovering over his head like that, even if the painted designs were his own. Sometimes it was hard even to glance toward the horizon in the evening or at dawn, when Gil-Estel shone so brightly.
“If you want more of it, Tyelpë would be glad to make you some,” Rundamírë said.
“I know. Thank you—but I really don’t know yet what I’d use it for.”
Rundamírë ushered Náriel out of the studio, telling her to go find Curufin for help washing the paint off of her hands and arms and face. Then she turned back to Maedhros. “Did Curufinwë ever tell you what Fëanáro’s gift to him was?” she asked.
“No.” None of them had really spoken of their gifts. Maedhros knew that Caranthir had a glass ornament with a flower inside it, but not what anyone else had received. He didn’t even know what Maglor had.
“A box of gems that he’d made,” Rundamírë said, “but all the flawed ones—the mistakes he was making as he began to re-learn how to do it.”
Maedhros didn’t know what to do with that. His father did not make mistakes—not in his craft, certainly not in gemcraft, and if he did he did not share them. “Why are you telling me this?” he asked.
“He did not know how to make Tyelpë’s ithildin, either. So he asked to be taught. I don’t know about you, but hearing those things made me wonder if it was really Fëanáro that had returned from Mandos.”
“I know that he’s different now,” Maedhros said. He’d known too that Celebrimbor and Fëanor had made the ithildin together, and that it had made Celebrimbor incredibly happy—to be his grandfather’s peer, to be a teacher too instead of only a student.
“It goes deeper than just that the fire of his rage has guttered out,” Rundamírë said. “I would be lying if I tried to tell you I did not still distrust it, but his pride has softened, and that makes me almost ready to believe absolutely anything is possible.”
Rundamírë left, and Maedhros looked back at his own painting—another try at water, flowing around the willow roots. He suddenly had no heart for it, and went to clean up his paints and brushes. Náriel’s painting he set aside, with the others she had made; he would ask his grandfather to make frames for them and then send them to Tirion sometime, to surprise her. After a moment he moved one aside a little, so he would remember that he wanted to keep it—he had plenty of room on the walls of his studio, and it was a bright splash of color, pink and yellow and blue, that wasn’t trying to be anything except a child having fun, and he liked it far better than anything he’d yet tried to make.
The problem of his father niggled at the back of his mind as he washed his brushes, watching the water turn blue then green then muddy brown. Everyone thought—not entirely incorrectly—that he was just afraid. But it wasn’t that, or it wasn’t that he really thought that Fëanor would revert suddenly to who he had been at the end. It wasn’t even that Maedhros did not believe his remorse and regret were genuine. It was just—
Fëanor never said anything he did not mean. His faults lay not in falsehood but in too much truth. Everyone said so, and Maedhros had long known it. He might not think or believe the things he had said after Losgar now, but there was a time that he had, and that meant there might come a time in the future when he would think similarly. Maedhros felt stronger now than he had in many years; he did not fear coming face to face with his father anymore—or at least, he was trying to tell himself that he didn’t, and most of the time he believed it. But he was not strong enough to risk learning what it would take to earn anything like that kind of ire again.
Fingers dug suddenly into his ribs and Maedhros yelped, dropping his brushes into the basin with a small splash. “You were wearing your brooding face,” Caranthir said as he took a step back and to the side, out of reach of any swing Maedhros might take at him. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.” This, of course, earned him a deeply skeptical look. Maedhros sighed. “Nothing I want to talk about.”
Caranthir, fortunately, was not Celegorm, and didn’t push once he had as much truth as Maedhros was willing to share. “All right,” he said. “I like that,” he added, nodding to the partly-finished painting on the easel. “Is it getting easier?”
“I think so.” Maedhros glanced at Caranthir, who had himself been quiet and withdrawn lately. “Are you all right?” he asked.
“Fine. Why wouldn’t I be?”
“Moryo.”
“It’s nothing I want to talk about.”
“All right.” Maedhros dried off his hand and hugged Caranthir close for a moment. “Tell me if there’s anything I can do.”
“I will.”
When they returned to the house they found Rundamírë with a letter. Maglor had sent a starling with a quick note to say they had arrived safely in Taur-en-Gellam, and now a longer letter had arrived with more detail. “Calissë has decided she wants to learn to play the harp,” Rundamírë was saying to Curufin and Lisgalen as Maedhros and Caranthir stepped into the kitchen. “I think Maglor is even happier about it than she is. She also did very well when introduced to Thingol and Melian.” She paused. “And Olwë and his wife, and Ingwë and his wife—goodness, I’m surprised your aunt and uncle aren’t also there, if they’re gathering all the kings and queens together.”
“Did she really do well, or is Maglor just being reassuring?” Curufin asked, reaching for the letter.
“I can only report what he actually wrote, Curufinwë,” Rundamírë laughed. “I have no trouble believing that Calissë is behaving perfectly, unless you and your brothers have been teaching her otherwise when I’m not there.”
“Cáno would’ve turned it into a funny story if anything had gone sideways,” said Caranthir, “and I don’t think we need to worry about Thingol or Olwë or Ingwë being offended by Calissë. Especially not with Maglor and Daeron there.”
It wasn’t long after that that Curufin, Rundamírë, and Náriel returned to Tirion. At the same time a letter came for Maedhros—not from Maglor, or Fingon, or even Finrod, but from Elrond. He wrote of meeting with Maeglin—awkward but less fraught than might have been expected—and of Gil-galad, and of his and Celebrían’s plans to spend the winter quietly in Avallónë. The letter ended with an invitation to visit them there, or else to come to Imloth Ningloron sometime after they had all returned home.
Maedhros had not intended to travel anywhere for some time; he was quite happy at home, settled back into his own routines and his own rooms. But at the same time he didn’t feel as though he could really turn down such an invitation. Not from Elrond, who had been so firmly kind and so determined that the two of them should come to know one another properly, now that they could both leave the past where it belonged. He found, too, that he didn’t even want to. So when he wrote his reply he said, at the end, I have not visited Eressëa since I returned from Mandos; I would be very glad to join you there for at least part of the winter.
