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(It has never been an exact science)
The midwife lays the bundle in his arms and though it squirms with surprising strength, Feanor cannot help but think it very small.
Not it. He. He is very small.
“Small?” Nerdanel gasps, her hands still knotted in the sheets, and he realizes he has spoken aloud. “Fuck you, Feanor! He almost tore me in two!”
“Ma’am!” cries the midwife, very shocked, and Feanor once again thinks that her role an unnecessary one. He studied the same diagrams as she did, after all, and he knows his wife’s body better than anyone.
He considers that a study, too.
“Shhh,” he says now, to the scandalized woman and to the babe in his arms, who whimpers and blinks up at him from half-lidded eyes. These eyes are blue-grey and quite clear; he knows that they may change or darken over time, but for now, he is entranced by them as if they shall always remain as they are now.
His son is not only small, he is also very red, from the wrinkled blossoms of his grasping hands to the downy hair on his round head.
Feanor suddenly feels the firmness shaken from his knees. He may fall, taking his son with him—that is what such love will do. He steadies himself with one hand on the bedpost.
“Maedhros Nelyafinwe Michael,” he says, both rolling and reverent, in the same manner in which he might say his prayers.
Nerdanel sighs. “Where did that come from?”
Feanor shrugs. “No matter. It is his name.”
Overhead, the wind is jolly in the maples and the crabapples, already four years in height. Formenos is growing up around them, and Feanor regards even the air entering his lungs as a privilege, marking him as a denizen of its bounty.
“Athair?” Maedhros says, and Feanor can feel as well as hear his voice, for Maedhros lies atop his chest, his feet not quite reaching to Feanor’s knees.
They both have their arms folded behind their heads.
“Yes?”
“When the new baby comes, who will hold him?”
“I will. Or Mathair.” He keeps pointedly calling Nerdanel Mathair, in the hopes that it will catch on, but Maedhros and Maglor call her mamaí, or Mother, and he cannot punish them for what he knows to be Nerdanel’s preference.
“And if you are holding him,” Maedhros asks carefully, “Mother will hold Maglor, then?”
“Yes.” Maglor does not particularly like to be held, but he gets into mischief elsewise.
Maedhros says nothing. Feanor smiles, and the branches curve overhead, as if the breeze desires that they smile back.
“Are you worried, eldest, that no one shall hold you?”
Maedhros fidgets a little. “Mm.”
“Speak up! You are a growing boy, not a baby.”
“I’m sorry, Athair,” Maedhros says. “Yes. I like to be held.” After a moment, he amends, “Not as a baby.”
Feanor pokes him gently in the belly, and he giggles, high and sweet. “I have two arms,” Feanor points out. “And both are strong. By the time there are too many children for my arms to hold, you will be lifting your brothers and sisters yourself.”
This seems to satisfy Maedhros, for he turns over so that he can spread his arms around his father and squeeze tightly. Feanor obliges him by pretending that he cannot breathe, and then they laugh together until Nerdanel calls them in for supper.
“Your children are very affectionate,” Fingolfin observes, with that thin smile that always suggests craven disapproval.
Feanor tightens his arm around Maedhros’s shoulder. Maedhros stiffens against him; he may be only ten, but he knows to dislike his Grandfather’s second son. Feanor is already proud.
Feanor says, “They know their father loves them.”
“I think,” Nerdanel says, her face stark as paper beneath its powdering of freckles, “You’d better hold him down.”
The bone of Maedhros’s forearm is sickeningly crooked. Feanor could set it, and will set it, he is so sure he can—but then his hands tremble and he does not find that the skills of the smithy are as easily adapted to the treatment of his children’s flesh.
“No,” Maedhros begs, between his teeth. Has fourteen ever looked so young? Was he younger than this, the whole last year, when Feanor was—
You did what you had to do.
“Your mother is going to set the bone,” Feanor says. He is sure that he is calm, but even so—
“I will be still,” Maedhros pleads. “I don’t need to be held.”
“Feanor,” Nerdanel snaps. At times like this, when pain scrapes her patience raw, he can see clearly—she is still angry. Very, very angry at him, for leaving her here. Leaving her alone. The injustice of it is that she is only angry because she does not understand. “Are you going to stand there all day?”
“I shall not confine you,” Feanor says, to his oldest son. Maedhros’s eyes are so like his, and his bones are like Miriel’s bones, in a boyish cast, and everything else is like Nerdanel.
There is so much danger, as there is with all his sons, in loving a collection of flawless pieces as he does—since time, of course, may flaw them.
“But,” Feanor adds, “Grip my hand as hard as you need.”
Maedhros stretches out his good hand. The right one. His thin fingers—much more calloused than when Feanor held them last, for a year has done this too—tighten so that Feanor can feel the bones.
“Feanor, you are not seventeen. We shall be in a sorry state if you and Maedhros both cripple yourselves at once! And all for a two-hand reel!”
“Nerdanel, I have been able leap a bird as soon as I could walk.”
“A what?”
“You know that that is what it is called. Maedhros and I shall only do this once, to demonstrate, and if you insist, we shall do it on the carpet.”
“I do insist.”
He sighs. “The rest of you, gather round. I want this memorized by the next feis.”
The room seems red around him, crimson on every floor-board. Or maybe it is the heat behind his eyes, searing its way into his vision.
He does not know, still, why he did not pull the trigger. He thinks he may someday regret that he did not.
“Why do you all stand there staring?” he roars, and the red walls shake at the corners of his sight. Only his wife and sons are here now; they wait with him, shut away in a parlor at his father’s house, awaiting judgment.
Judgment! His father reasons with the cursed Manwe even now.
“Do not shout at us!” Nerdanel cries, all but baring her teeth at him. “Blast the fool day we stood beside you! A little gratitude—”
He strides across the room to face her, and Maedhros steps forward—not blocking his path, not quite, but it is enough for Feanor’s wrath. He grips his eldest by the shoulder, and takes some satisfaction in shouting, “What have you to say for yourself? Friend of his house—did you not know that he was bending your grandfather to his will?”
“Athair.” Maedhros is calm, always calm. And yet Feanor knows that there is fire in him, has known it since the moment of his birth. “Do not—” His voice chokes off, and then he speaks again. “We are all tired, I think.”
“Feanor.” Nerdanel’s voice is ice-cold. “You’re hurting him.”
He looks down. Maedhros’s hand hovers over his own, which is clenched like a vice.
Feanor releases him. “Tired,” he says, almost scoffing—though he knows that it is true. This day—the griefs of betrayal—have drawn him dry. “Very well, then. All of you leave, and take to your beds.”
His knuckles are bruised, and Feanor is used to that. He wishes only that their pattern was not stained across Maedhros’s cheek.
He thought, when he saw his son lying limp across that filthy bed, that he might have to carry him out—
—dead—
They have five fewer horses, and two fewer men. The first man was not a loss, but the second was. Feanor counts his sons before he sleeps at night, cradling the names in his mind as he used to cherish the concept of a new design for his forge. He has missed the forge, missed the hammer in his hands, almost as much as he misses Ner—
He sighs.
It is his watch tonight, but Maedhros is awake, as he often is, and sits with his arms looped around his knees. When others are watching, his son is every inch the man a father could ask for; broad-shouldered and clear-eyed, canny and fierce. Now, in the shadows of their campfire, in this mountain-cleft beneath the stars, he looks like a boy again.
A rather unhappy boy.
Feanor’s mind shudders against such a thought—such a measurement. Happiness is the stuff of his father’s wishes, and where did it bring him? Where did it bring Ner—Nerdanel, he forces the name, in her insistence on civility?
Happiness cannot be the measure of their worth.
“We shall have another long trek tomorrow,” he says at last, speaking softly.
Maedhros nods, not surprised by the detection. “I know.”
“You should get some rest. While you can.” He has tried this a few times, since a rather unfortunate conversation with Maglor many, many miles ago—has tried to remember the child under the crabapple trees as well as relying on his most trusted gun-arm.
“I shall, if you command it.” The words seem like a jest, but Maedhros is not smiling.
“I am your father. Sometimes I only hope that my sons will listen to me, and not slump in their saddles from sheer exhaustion.”
Obediently, then, Meadhros stretches out by the fireside and pillows his head on his arm. Yet, when a quarter of an hour has passed, Feanor can tell from the sound of his breathing that he does not sleep.
“Get up,” he says. “And keep me company, then.”
Maedhros is on his feet in an instant.
Twenty-three years, Feanor thinks, with just a shade of that old, mild patience at which Nerdanel was so infuriatingly expert. Twenty-three years, and I doubt if I shall ever understand him.
He frowns darkly, warring against such a mental forfeiture. He is not one to relinquish the possibility—any possibility—of understanding.
“I will finish your watch,” Maedhros offers, coming to stand beside him. He stands a step below, on the uneven ground, and so Feanor can see over the top of his head for once.
“I do not want you to finish it. I want your company.”
Even in the dark, he knows when his son is smiling.
They sit by side on a flat stone that might have been spat out by shifting plates of earth, or dropped by a giant of legend. There is a whimsical thought.
“How many more days, do you think?”
“To reach the foothills, two weeks.” Feanor breathes deeply; the air is thinner here. “And then another to reach Rumil.”
“So close,” Maedhros says, but he sounds lost.
“So close.” No one else is awake. Feanor can even forget the sound of their breathing. He forges forward in the quest for understanding, which one such as Nerdanel would leave aside. “Why can you not sleep?”
His son’s silence means that he is thinking up an answer that will suit.
Feanor sighs. “Do you think,” he amends, “That you could sleep with your head on my shoulder?”
Maedhros huffs a laugh. Feanor hopes (hopes!) there is humor in it. “Probably.”
“Do it, then.”
He counts every year in that pause. Then his shoulder sinks a little beneath a weight that is familiar, always, no matter how long it has been since last he bore it.
“Is that not better?” he asks, a moment later, and is satisfied when his son does not reply.