starspray | Add Another Stone

Fandom: Tolkien
Rating: T
Characters: Finrod, Celegorm, Curufin, Fingon, Turgon
Warnings: (past) Character Death, general Doom of the Noldor, some violence
Summary: The thing about forgiveness, he thought, was that it was so much easier when the object of it was far away—or dead. It was so much easier to let it all go when those responsible were far away and unable to do any more harm.

First Chapter / Previous Chapter

Both months and miles passed under his feet. He explored mountains and followed rivers to their sources. He sang, sometimes, simple songs he’d learned as a child just to keep time with his footsteps. His voice was rough and out of practice, but that didn’t matter. Neither the grass nor the stones cared.

Something in his meeting with Celegorm, though, seemed to have shaken something loose. It was like he really had lanced the wound festering inside him, and now that the worst of the pain had passed he could think more clearly.

The thing about forgiveness, he thought as he stood at the top of a waterfall plunging dozens of feet into a clear pool below, was that it felt easy when the object was far away. But it did not, in the end, have much to do with the other person at all. He wanted to forgive those who had wronged him because he did not want to cling to that bitter anger—he knew it for the poison it was, and he did not want to hold it inside him.

Yet here he was. Clinging. It was a poison, but letting it go felt like—

It felt like saying none of it mattered. It wasn’t true, and in fact Finrod knew it was really the opposite. But that didn’t change the feeling.

He thought about calling upon Nienna, but didn’t, in the end. He knew what she would say, and he wasn’t sure he wanted the sort of comfort that she would also offer.

Eventually his travels led him as far west as it was possible to go. On a late spring evening he crested a heather-covered hill to find the sun setting in a brilliant display of fiery colors over the smooth and dark waters of Ekkaia. He sighed. His feet hurt and he was tired. This was the most beautiful sunset he had seen in years, and he wished that he had someone to share it with.

Almost as soon as the thought entered his head, he caught a whiff of smoke, and turned to see a curl of it rising up from a small campfire less than a mile away. Sitting beside it was a figure with a head of familiar silver hair, also looking out toward the sunset.

And all of a sudden, everything was both easy and clear.

Celegorm looked up as he approached, surprise flickering across his face. He looked even more tired than Finrod felt. “Are you following me, this time?” he asked, though he couldn’t quite muster the right tone for it to be a joke.

“I wouldn’t have thought you’d come all the way out here,” Finrod said. He dropped his pack to the ground and sat down, with the fire between them.

Celegorm shrugged and looked away, back toward the waves. “They say my brother spends his days by the sea, singing his pain and regret into the waves.” His voice wavered only slightly. “I thought I’d…I don’t know. Join him, after a fashion. Since he’s—I’m not likely to ever see him again.”

“Nor I my sister,” Finrod said quietly.

“At least you know where she is.”

“That’s true.” Finrod looked from the flames to Celegorm’s face. “What of your other brothers?”

“Maedhros isn’t going to come from Mandos any time soon.”

“But your younger brothers?”

“They’re fine. They’re with our mother.”

“Why aren’t you?”

“No one wants me there, any more than anyone wanted to see me in Tirion. I did go back,” he sighed, “and said what I needed to say, and none of them believed a word of it. Then I left again, and I’m sure they all breathed a great sigh of relief as soon as my back was turned.” Maybe that was true in Tirion, but Finrod did not believe for a moment that Celegorm’s brothers or his mother did not want him at home with them. But before he could say anything Celegorm added, “You’re wanted, though. Fingon cornered me to ask if I’d found you.”

“What did you tell him?”

“My face was mostly healed by then, but up close you could still see the last of the bruising. I told him you hadn’t been any more pleased than anyone else to see me, but I didn’t know where you’d gone after we parted. I don’t know if he believed me.”

“I believe you,” Finrod said softly. Celegorm looked at him, startled. “You said—everything you said before, I do believe you. And—if I hated you then, I don’t now. I forgive you. All of it.”

“You don’t—some things, Findaráto, are unforgivable.”

“Maybe, but you did warn me beforehand—you said you didn’t want to. I knew you were as bound by your oath as I was by mine, and both of us trapped under the Doom.”

“But you were also right when you said we could have tried—”

“All of those things can be true at the same time. I’m so tired, Tyelkormo. I know I have every right to be angry, but I don’t want to be.”

“What do you want?”

“What do you want?” Finrod asked.

Celegorm shrugged, turning his face away. The firelight flickered over his hair, and his shadow up the side of the sand dune behind him danced. The sun sank below the horizon, plunging the world into soft purple twilight. The stars flared in the sky overhead, countless and more beautiful than the finest diamonds. Finrod watched them, and waited. At last, Celegorm said, “I don’t think it really matters what I want. Mostly I just want my brothers to be all right—the ones who can be all right. And they are, so…”

“They would be better, I think, if you were with them.”

“They wouldn’t,” Celegorm said, voice flat and very tired. “I was the worst of us—you know that.”

“You were all rather terrible, by the end,” Finrod said.

“I pushed for Doriath. I would have pushed for Sirion, far sooner than it actually happened, if I’d survived.”

“Let’s not play with what-ifs and might-have-beens,” said Finrod.

“But if it hadn’t been for me Curvo wouldn’t have—”

“We are not in Beleriand, anymore,” Finrod said. “That’s what I’ve been trying to remind myself, in all my wanderings. Beleriand drowned long ago, and the Doom of Mandos is no longer a threat hovering ever behind us. Your Oath, too, is no more. Those verses of the Song have been sung, and—”

“And they echo, still, in everything that we do. Aren’t the two of us proof enough of that?”

“Yes. Sometimes the echoes are very loud—loud enough to drown out everything else.” Finrod looked down at his hands, at the dirt under his fingernails, thinking of how once there had been blood there, though it had been too dark to see. “But echoes fade. Even the loudest ones. The Song is going on, still, and now we can choose what our next verses will be.”

“This is a little more like what I expected from you, when I first tracked you down,” Celegorm said, a thread of fondness winding its way through the words. He picked up a few sticks and tossed them into the fire. Finrod watched the sparks float up, like tiny stars themselves, before they went out. “Or—after you punched me, I expected something like this.”

“The echoes were very loud when you found me,” Finrod said. “Really, it was…first Curufin returned, and then not so very long afterward it was Turgon, and neither of those meetings went how I would have liked them to. I didn't want to see Curufin at all—though now I can appreciate that he came to me so quickly, if only to get it over with—and…”

“What did Turgon do?” Celegorm asked. “I know I’d come away from a conversation wanting to punch him, but you two were always friends.”

“We took very different approaches to the dreams that Ulmo sent each of us, and I suppose…I can’t really understand why he did much of what he did, and he does not understand me either. Maybe there can be a return to friendship for us, someday, but it won’t look the same. But you never answered my question. It does matter, you know. What you want.”

“I want all of my brothers back,” Celegorm said after a very long silence in which Finrod started to think he wouldn’t answer at all. “I want my father back—not who he was at the end, but who he was before. I want—”

“You want…?”

“I already told you, it doesn’t matter.”

“It matters to me.”

“It shouldn’t.”

“One thing I don’t want,” Finrod said, “is to be the thing you use to punish yourself. I allowed it before, but I won’t now.”

“How can you just—just like that, you’ve decided to let it all go?”

“No,” said Finrod. “I am going to have to decide to let it go every single day for the rest of my life. It’s not easy or simple—but that is who I want to be. I don’t want to be—to be so broken that anyone who reaches out risks getting cut.”

“If you figure it out,” Celegorm muttered, “tell me how you did it.”

“I’m telling you now. I’m choosing it—choosing to try.” Finrod watched the way Celegorm’s braids gleamed in the firelight, saw the way his eyes were too bright and the way he kept swallowing. He wondered if Celegorm carried any ghost-scars.

“Finrod—”

“It’s going to be cold tonight.” That was an exaggeration; the wind off of Ekkaia held a slight chill, but that was all. Celegorm met his gaze, and behind the weight of grief and guilt Finrod could see that old and familiar hunger. It ignited the same feeling at the base of his own spine, spreading, tingling, through all his limbs. “Can I stay?”

“Can you—you think I’m going to tell you no?”

Finrod got up and went to kneel in front of Celegorm, who had been sitting with his knees drawn up to his chest. He unfolded himself now, but stopped short of reaching for Finrod. “We can write a new song for ourselves,” Finrod said, meeting his gaze.

“I don’t want to hurt you again,” Celegorm whispered.

“I know. I’m just—just asking you to try.”

Celegorm’s hands fisted in Finrod’s shirt, pulling him in before either of them could so much as blink. There was no blood this time, and only a few stray tears—mostly there was just heat and hunger that bordered on need, that Finrod never wanted to give up. He wanted to be wanted, like this, to have all the most broken parts of him seen and known and to be wanted anyway—to be wanted because of rather than in spite of them—and to offer the same thing in return. It felt a little like coming home.

Some time later, as they lay tangled up in their blankets and each other, Finrod found himself staring up at the stars again. “What are you thinking?” Celegorm whispered. He lay on his side, head pillowed on his arm, watching Finrod’s face.

“Hm?”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you smiling like that.”

“Am I smiling?” Finrod turned from the stars to Celegorm. “I was just thinking about how small we are.”

“And that made you smile?” Celegorm huffed a quiet laugh and pressed a kiss to the corner of Finrod’s mouth, and then left a trail of them over his jaw. “Every time I think I finally understand you, you go and say something incomprehensible.”

“It’s just…” Finrod tried to think, but it was hard. “Stop, stop, let me explain—it’s—small doesn’t mean unimportant. We’re like the stars—there are so many of them, and they’re all very small but all together they make the night sky. If you catch enough raindrops, you fill the Sea. Every song is made up of notes that are pretty but meaningless on their own—it’s when you put them all together that something really beautiful is made, that means something.”

“So we’re…you and I, just notes in a song?”

“In the Song.” Finrod smoothed Celegorm’s hair back from his face. “The verses of it that played out in Beleriand…they echo still, like you said, and sometimes they echo so loudly that it’s all I can hear. Sometimes I see only the ground at my feet because I can’t bring myself to look up and see the stars—but I always manage it eventually, and I can see the world again for what it is and what it means. What happened—it hurt, and the pain of it lingers, but it’s not all there is.” He paused, and kissed Celegorm, very softly. “I think I needed to say it aloud, just now,” he whispered, “to really remind myself of it.”

“It’s a very pretty thought,” Celegorm said. He slid his own fingers into Finrod’s hair, and rested their foreheads together. “I don’t know if I can believe it.”

“We were caught, before, by our Doom,” Finrod whispered. “But that’s over.”

“I know.” Celegorm sighed. “You know this is a bad idea. It was a bad idea in Nargothrond, and there’s no reason to think it will go any differently now.”

“There’s every reason,” Finrod said. “Because we are not caught up by doom or by any oaths—what happens now happens by our own choices and nothing else.”

“I know. We can write our own song, you said. I’m willing to try, just—”

“That’s what matters,” Finrod whispered. “That’s all I want.”

They lingered for some weeks by Ekkaia, basking in the quiet and bathing in its cool waters. They traced new constellations in the sky and made up stories to go with them. They learned each other again—slowly, carefully. They were trying on gentleness, finding that they liked it—even if they both still liked each other’s rougher edges too.

Eventually, Finrod turned his thoughts toward Tirion, and realized that he had started to miss it. It was time to go home. Celegorm was more than willing to travel with him; both of them were loath to part, now that they’d finally found something worth keeping, though they would have to when they reached the city, for Celegorm was also firm in his determination not to return there.

The journey back east was long and meandering. There was no reason to hurry and plenty of reasons to take their time, exploring places neither of them had seen before, and showing one another old haunts from their youth, to see how everything had changed and yet stayed just the same. They argued, sometimes, but they laughed more.

Finally, Tirion appeared in the distance, its white towers shining in the golden slant of the late afternoon sun. “It’s still so strange,” Celegorm murmured, standing beside Finrod on a hilltop. “Seeing Tirion under the sun.”

“You’ll get used to it,” said Finrod. He turned away from Tirion and toward Celegorm. “Where will you go now?” Celegorm shrugged. “You should go to your mother.”

“I can’t—”

“Did you ask any of your brothers, before you left, whether they wanted you to stay or not?”

“No, but—”

“Don’t you think maybe you should?”

Celegorm scowled at him, but it didn’t last, and instead melted into a look of misery and loneliness that Finrod had never seen on his face before. “I don’t…I don’t know.”

“Try?” Finrod said softly.

Celegorm breathed a sigh, shoulders slumping. “Fine. I’ll try. And when they just send me away again—”

“You don’t know that. But even so, it will still have been worth it.” Finrod kissed him one more time. “Write to me, whatever happens.”

“I will.” Celegorm kissed him fiercely, tangling his fingers in Finrod’s hair, holding him close and tight as though he wanted to memorize how it all felt.

Finrod looked back only once before Celegorm disappeared from sight. Celegorm raised his hand and turned away south toward the road that would lead to Nerdanel’s house. The parting was not as hard as Finrod had feared. He felt buoyed instead by the promise of happier meetings to come, better able to face what lay before him.

In Tirion, he found his house much as he had left it. His household was glad to have him back, and he was glad to soak in a hot bath and eat a hot meal and sleep in his own bed—though he kept waking in the night reaching for someone who was not there. When he visited his parents they looked at him with keen eyes and then smiled—with a look of relief that he did not think he had seen before. When he asked his father why, Finarfin only shrugged. “You were carrying something very heavy, and you seem to have left it somewhere on your travels,” he said. “You do not have to tell me what it was—I am only glad to see you smiling so easily again.”

“Did I not, before?”

“Not as often as I would have liked.”

Finrod thought about trying to explain—he didn’t think he could, in full, but perhaps he didn’t need to, perhaps only a part of it would suffice. “Sometimes…the memory of my death—it comes back very strongly. I still feel the pain of it at times, and before I left Tirion it was harder than usual to ignore.”

“Was it because of Curufinwë?”

“I did not expect to see him, and it did not help, but I think it was building anyway. I’m sorry that I stayed away so long. I know you were worried.”

“It’s all right.” Finarfin reached across the table to squeeze Finrod’s hand. “I never doubted that you would come back.”

Fingon was equally pleased to see Finrod back and happier than when he had left; he did not ask about his encounter with Celegorm, for which Finrod was grateful, and instead spent several afternoons catching him up on all the newest and funniest gossip, reminding him of all the good things happening around them instead of dwelling upon the painful ones. Turgon was less easy. He had gone to Eressëa after Finrod had left Tirion, but after the initial joy of their reunion tensions between him and Idril and Tuor had flared, and when he had come back to Tirion, they had not followed. Finrod could see also that Turgon chafed at being relegated, again, to the status of a lesser prince—lesser even than he had been before, with Finarfin now the High King and his own father still in Mandos and so not even in the line of succession.

That frustration bubbled over into picking fights. Fingon had warned Finrod about it, but Turgon kept himself in check for an impressive three months before he and Finrod found themselves alone together for a few minutes during an engagement party for one of Eärwen’s nieces, when he finally brought up the past again. Even then, it did not feel as fraught as before. “I thought you didn’t regret inviting the Fëanorians into your city,” Turgon remarked. He leaned against the railing of a wide veranda that looked out over the gardens, where the party was spread over the lawn.

Finrod had seated himself on the railing. He took a sip of his wine before he answered, having heard in Turgon’s voice the itch for an argument and feeling able now not to rise to it. “I still don’t know what else you would have expected me to do. They had nowhere else to go. But what makes you think of them now?”

“I heard you broke Celegorm’s nose when you met—wherever it was.” Turgon gestured vaguely westward.

“Then you heard wrong.” Finrod took another sip of wine. “I bloodied it and I blackened his eye, but I did not break anything.” Turgon snorted. “I can be angry with him for what he did and still not regret my own choices. Do I wish things had gone differently? Yes, of course. But I did the best I could with what I had—that’s all any of us can say.”

“Most of us, maybe,” Turgon muttered.

“You know my father would not object if you left Tirion to build another city of your own,” said Finrod after a moment. He did not want to go over the past again, not on an afternoon that was meant to be joyous. “Just—perhaps not a hidden one, this time? You could go nearly anywhere you wanted, and there are many who would gladly follow you.”

“What stops you from doing the same?”

Finrod shrugged. Even if he was inclined to confide in Turgon, it was neither the time nor the place for the full truth. “I just don’t want to. I am my father’s heir in a place where that is again mostly meaningless, and I have no desire to be anything more. Maybe someday—but maybe not. It isn’t as though I’ll run out of time to change my mind.” He tilted his wine glass, watching the sunlight catch on the golden liquid inside. It was very sweet and light, and he could almost taste the songs sung by those who had tended the grape vines. “I’m sorry,” he said. “For what I said before. It was cruel, and—”

“And true.”

“I did not mean to diminish your grief for your father.”

“I know. And I’m—sorry.” Turgon spoke the word with a tight jaw, for it was not one he was used to uttering. “Of course you did what you thought was best—you were the best of us, and—”

“Don’t do that. It’s all well and good to speak thus of the dead, but I am not dead, and I would rather not be placed upon a pedestal, if it’s all the same to you.”

“I am trying to compliment you,” Turgon said.

“Compliment me then, by all means,” said Finrod as Fingon and Angrod came up the steps to join them, “but at least pick one of my many and real good qualities for it, rather than exaggerations straight out of an old song.” Turgon rolled his eyes, and didn’t argue further.

They were never going to get back the friendship they had shared before, Finrod thought as Fingon cajoled them both into joining the dancing, but maybe they could make something new, if they took it slowly. Maybe if Turgon really did go and build another city of his own, he would feel more settled, and it would make things easier.

A few days after the party, Finrod happened upon Curufin on the street. He was not going anywhere in particular; Curufin seemed to be coming from his wife’s home, looking tired but less dejected than before. They both stopped short before they bumped into each other. Curufin regarded Finrod warily, and Finrod had to swallow the instinctive urge to say something cutting.

It was still true that forgiveness was much harder when the object of it was standing in front of him. And it was still true that forgiveness was a choice—one that Finrod was trying—and for the most part succeeding—to make every day. He held out his hand and watched Curufin’s eyes go comically wide. “I know your apology wasn’t empty,” he said. “I wasn’t able to then, but—I do forgive you, now.”

“I never expected forgiveness,” said Curufin without reaching back. “I just—as I said then, you deserved to have me look you in the eye when I said it.”

“And I can thank you for it now,” said Finrod. He did not lower his hand. “I hope someday we can be—well, something like friends, again? None of it would have hurt as much as it did if I had not really cared for you.”

Finally, Curufin reached back. His grip was strong and firm. “I’d like that,” he said. Then, as they let go and Finrod moved to continue on his way he said, “What did you say to Tyelko to get him to come home?”

Finrod turned around, tucking his hands into his pockets as he shrugged. “I just asked him,” he said.

“That’s all?”

“That’s all.” Finrod had received a very short letter a few weeks after he’d returned to Tirion, into which Celegorm had tucked a pressed sprig of forget-me-nots, and had scrawled, Of course you were right. When you get sick of Tirion come find me at my mother’s. “I’m glad he listened.”

“Me too,” said Curufin, still appearing bewildered. “Thank you? I don’t—you are incomprehensible, Findaráto.”

“Thank you!”

“I don’t think that was a compliment—”

“But I choose to take it as one!” Finrod laughed at the look on Curufin’s face, and turned away.

It did not take long, though, for him to grow sick of the city and to slip out of Tirion again—this time with a particular destination to start with. Even if his wanderings had started in misery, they had had moments of delight and had ended in something very close to joy—and he wanted more of that. As Nerdanel’s home came into view, past wide meadow lands full of wildflowers, Finrod found Celegorm also out walking. When they met it was so easy to do so with an embrace—so different from the last time. Celegorm smiled against Finrod’s lips; he carried himself lighter now, too, and the shadows of loneliness that had clung to him had nearly all disappeared. “Where are you going this time?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Finrod said. The future lay wide open before them, and he had no idea what it held—it was thrilling. “Want to join me?”

“Always.”