Chapter Text
“I wish I had talent like yours,” Maedhros tells me abruptly as he watches me begin to pack my fiddle away in its battered case. He is pleasantly drunk, and very agreeable, perching carelessly on the arm of one of Grandfather Finwe’s velvet sofas so that he might peer over my shoulder. I told him he could go upstairs ahead of me, but Maedhros, already so habitually open with his affections, is always a little clingier when he has been drinking. He once confessed to me that he hates to be alone, in this house, and so I do not insist he leave me and go to bed.
I am fifteen, which means Maedhros is seventeen, and tonight we have finally said our polite farewells to Uncle Fingolfin and his family, who were here at Grandfather Finwe’s house for a dinner party. After dinner we had enjoyed coffee and a little brandy in our grandfather’s drawing room, and as the evening grew late and polite conversation grew thin Grandfather Finwe had taken out his beautiful old gold-fretted fiddle to entertain the gathered company with a song or two. When Indis suggested that I fetch my own fiddle down from my room so that I might accompany him, I had been too weak to make my excuses.
I love few things as much as I love listening to our grandfather play, but I am always happiest when I am creating music myself.
(Uncle Fingolfin had complimented my skill, when I finished playing the new reel I had recently begun learning as part of my musical studies. Tongue-tied, I had not known whether to feel flattered by the compliment, or ashamed.)
“You are not untalented,” I reply now to Maedhros, amused by the very notion. “Did Athair never show you anything of the fiddle at all, when you were young? I thought you simply were not interested in music.”
“Hm,” is what Maedhros says, frowning thoughtfully. “He did, a little; but I was very young. You were outstripping me already when you were but three years old, you know, and I figured I had best give it up.”
I blink, surprised: “I didn’t know that.”
My brother gives me a quick look, and shrugs lightly, leaning forward to pluck the bow from where I had set it on the coffee table. He turns it loosely over in his hands, testing the weight like I have seen him test the weight of a new gun, back home in Formenos.
“I could teach you sometimes, if you like,” I offer suddenly. Maedhros looks at me in surprise, brows lifted, and begins to protest something about not having the time, but I show him with a sweep of my arm the empty drawing room about us.
“Oh come, Maitimo; we certainly have enough dull hours we don’t know what to do with, since we came to New York. You cannot tell me you are occupied with your studies and society parties every evening, because I know it isn’t true. I could ask Grandfather to allow me to borrow his fiddle, and you could learn on mine.”
Maedhros hesitates.
“I liked the reel you played tonight,” he says abruptly. “How about you teach me that?”
Now it is my turn to be surprised. “What,” I say, stupidly: “Now?”
“Certainly, why not? I do not feel as though I shall be sleepy for hours yet, and as you say, there is little else to do. Let’s have a trial of it, at the least.”
“I cannot simply teach you the Tam Lin,” I protest, aghast at the blasphemy even as his enthusiasm rises. “We will have to start at the beginning first, with scales and music reading and form—“
“But I don’t care about scales,” Maedhros informs me, very sincerely.
I gape, at a loss for words. I almost think he must be having some fun at my expense, except there is no guile in his brightened expression, and he holds his left hand out expectantly for my fiddle, the bow already in his right.
“Macalaure,” he insists charmingly, turning upon me his most pitiful eyes, and I groan, finally giving up my dearest possession to his eager hands.
“Feel it against your collarbone, like so,” I instruct, trying to help him adjust the fiddle beneath his chin. My brother’s hands are slim, long-fingered, and graceful, like mine, but he holds my instrument like a weapon, and I quickly despair of getting his fidgeting fingers correct on the frets. He tilts his head awkwardly, trying to follow my guidance, but the angle only makes his hair fall forward into his eyes, obscuring his sight.
“Here,” I say for the dozenth time, repositioning his hand yet again. “No, here—You must—your hair is too long!” I laugh, ruffling it affectionately. “You must cut it to a decent length again, if you wish to learn to play.” My brother’s hair is his one true vanity, for he grows it long on purpose, thinking it makes him look dashing. He ducks away from my meddling fingers with a yelp.
“It is scarcely longer than yours,” he protests, but he sweeps it back from his face anyway, and then repositions the fiddle beneath his chin, brow furrowed slightly in concentration as he tries to replicate the pose I had been so painstakingly helping him to achieve.
It is not correct in the slightest, and I tell him so.
“This is exactly how you showed me,” Maedhros retorts, stung, and his indignation sends me into a fit of giggles I cannot suppress, despite the hand I press to my mouth. I did not confine myself entirely to coffee, neither at dinner nor in the drawing room after, and I consider for the first time that I must be a little drunk, too.
“Go on then,” I say, when I regain my composure, and Maedhros sets bow to strings as though intent on proving a point, and forces from my poor Irish fiddle the saddest, most agonized sound I have ever heard, loud as a shriek in the late-night quiet of the house. Both of us freeze an instant, suddenly remembering our poor Grandfather retired to his bed in the room above us, and the next instant we are both of us dissolved into helpless laughter, fallen over each other on the sofa.
“You can say it, Maglor,” Maedhros manages to gasp at last, wiping tears from his eyes as he sprawls backwards on Grandfather Finwe’s sofa, scattering Idril’s decorative cushions onto the rug. “I’m hopeless.”
I open my mouth to tease him as invited
(as I suddenly remember I did tease him, when I was fifteen and he was seventeen and I thought this was what hopeless meant—)
but there are unexpected tears in my eyes, too, as I look at my brother lying with his head tipped back, all unstrung with mirth, and suddenly—I don’t want to.
(Instead, I want to seize Maedhros in an embrace, to smell the blood-and-whiskey scent of him, to hold him so tightly I cannot breathe.)
(Instead, I want to wail sorry, I am so very sorry into his scarred shoulder, to not let go of him until he wraps his arms around me, too, so that by that warmth I might know I am forgiven.)
Instead, I wake up weeping, to the sound of thunderous, frantic knocking at Rumil’s study door.