Chapter Text
The world moves in dizzying lunges, spinning in the firelight: his hands chained above his head and then—not, the bladed horror of Mairon’s making held up to his mouth and then—put aside, the fire’s heat blazing against his skin as an ever-present terror but his limbs, freed momentarily from their bonds, shivering with both the cold and with what Fingon would probably say is (shock, Fingon whispers, resting the back of his hand against Maedhros’ sweating brow long enough to look concerned, his expression drawn. He says, quietly: A person gravely injured may still succumb to shock. You must keep warm, Maitimo; you must rest.)
Morgoth draws his hand away, and steps back. The water and the alcohol are both chill upon Maedhros’ skin, crawling like icy fingers down his back and his shoulders, his arms and his neck. Liquid runs into his eyes, stinging, and he blinks but still he cannot clear his vision. Everything that is not the fire is too dark to see clearly, even Morgoth. Even Fingon.
So ends this day, Morgoth says, very calm and smiling. Through the growing fog Maedhros must suddenly strive to force down a rising rush of hysteria, because oh, God, oh Christ there will be another day. Another day, and another, and another, and that’s how life goes, isn’t it, day after day after hateful day and no end and no mercy because Maedhros has never been punished more than he deserves, and I will walk into the sea, Maglor says, as if his poet’s heart has any real notion of what it means to want death: I will walk into the sea, Maedhros, so don’t you dare—
When Morgoth’s men release him from the cuffs that held his arms taut, his knees buckle. Harsh hands catch him before he strikes the ground, but even that impact is enough to make the world convulse around him again, mindless, wordless, breathless, blind—
When he knows himself again one of the men is holding him upright while the other is finishing refastening the now familiar shackles around his wrists, around his ankles. They test the locks with brisk tugs that threaten to overbalance him again, but such caution is pointless; Maedhros knows himself again, and thus knows anew that his chances are gone: his strength and his will and his cunning and anything he might have done with any of them, all gone. Maedhros sways sickly in his guard’s hateful grasp, fighting only to remain conscious as his legs tremble, and he knows he shall never run again.
At last the men are satisfied and they shove him forward, and even though his left knee fails again to hold him, this time Maedhros manages not to fall. He is pushed past the fire, through the stooped doorway, out of Mairon’s forge. In the clean dark of the hallway outside, the air is colder—so much colder, and his shivering which had begun in the firelight wrenches through him in yet crueler spasms, his chest so tight he cannot seem to breathe. Still, Maedhros feels something pitifully close to gratitude, as the door closes behind him, shutting out both the firelight and the face somehow pale still in the firelight, watching him from beneath dark hair, with dark eyes.
(Fingon does not follow him into the hallway.)
Once the door is shut, the men guarding him try to force him down the sloping passage, one man gripping his elbow and the other pulling at the heavy chain at his wrists. But Maedhros would be a full head taller than each of them, if he stood to his full height, and those last few steps left him spent, wrung out and shaking, weak with the loss of blood and useless adrenaline both. He cannot even stand, now that the firelight and the metal and the dark eyes are gone. With his ankles chained, he struggles for one more step and staggers badly, pitching forward as his leg buckles again, this time twisting beneath him. The man at his left once again catches him as he falls, but that awful pain as the man hauls him upright again, with hands careless of the wounds on his back and shoulders, is the last piece of the world left to him before even the torchlight goes mercifully dark.
Mairon is gone, and Fingon is gone, and Maedhros is gone, too.
(This time, Morgoth is not here to bring him back.)
*
Oh, Maitimo, his mother exclaims, reaching for him piteously. Oh, your hands. You are so cold.
He wants to tell her not to worry, but his shivering is too violent to hide, nearly too violent to force words from. The sight of her tears wounds him like a knife, but for some reason he cannot bear to weep with her, forcing the tears back.
He is terrified of weeping.
Where are your gloves? Nerdanel asks him, her strong fingers closing about his wrist. He stares at her hand, at his hands. He is thirteen; his wrists are thin as a boy’s wrists still, for all that he is growing. Melted snow drips down his back.
I outgrew them, he lies. The true answer is he gave them to Celegorm, because Orome has requested Celegorm accompany him on hunts to mind his dogs, and Orome sends Celegorm home with rabbit, squirrel, quail, even venison, once—all charity their family desperately needs, all carefully given without the necessity of having to see the pity in the hunter’s eyes.
(Not that Maedhros has eaten much of the scant meat, when they get it; Curufin is still very weak after being so ill, and the twins are babies yet, and cannot understand famine, and Maglor—)
Now, the tears come. He tries to lift his hands to swipe them away, but he cannot lift his arms. His mother looks up, and her face looks not quite how he remembers it, because—because it has been so long, such a very long time, oh, God—
Help me, he whispers, the hunger settled so deep in his bones it claws like nausea, the pain waiting for him somewhere in the cold, patiently, looking in at the windows with dark eyes.
On the other side of the door.
My beautiful boy, Nerdanel says, not seeming to hear his mangled voice, the words intelligible through the slow-rising pain filling his throat—his mouth—his—
She is smiling, but he cannot remember what her smile was like.
I love you, my coppertop.
*
(He comes back.)
*
He comes back to the sensation of searing heat against his skin, red light through his eyelids and his tacky lashes: there is fire pushed close to his face, so close he flinches back. The movement jars his injuries, and he moans, faintly, as he struggles to remember where he is—not Formenos, not Mithrim, a forge, not Athair’s forge—
“He ain’t dead,” a man declares, satisfied. Maedhros does not know the voice. It is not—It is not Mairon. Not Morgoth. Not the forge, then.
He is lying on icy stone, the cold its own kind of burning, his wrists and ankles still weighed with metal that burns also, freezing against his skin. Even with the fire, the cold air is agony in his raw throat, sharp in his laboring lungs. Every shiver brings more pain, but he cannot still the desperation of his body. Morgoth said he would not die from the flogging, but maybe he will die from the cold. Maybe this is what dying feels like.
But the man holding the torch does not seem concerned, and Morgoth had said—
Maedhros flinches away from that, too.
He forces his eyes open, as the torch is withdrawn. He is back in his cell, or at least one identical to the one he had been dragged from so long ago, a lifetime ago, before—
The man with the torch straightens, but there is another voice, doubtful, from the vague direction of the door.
“He looks dead. You certain?”
“Look you,” the man grunts, and then he sets the toe of his boot lightly over Maedhros’ outstretched fingers, where his hands—still shackled—lie on the stone floor near his face.
Maedhros has not yet gathered enough of himself to feel strong enough to move, and his hands are numb; he cannot feel them. But he watches as his fingers twitch; as his hands curl weakly, trying to get away from the threat of yet more pain.
He thinks he is still frightened of pain.
“See? He moved.” The man at the door huffs, appeased, but the boot does not step back. Instead, the man contemplates him in silence for a long moment, and Maedhros stares at the steel-toed boot so near his face, and his tears have already dried in his stinging eyes. He has no strength for anything more: not self-pity, not shame, not anger. Even the fear seems far away, for a body that is not his, for a person that he does not love.
He does not beg. The movement of the firelight above him throbs through him like a heartbeat, in the silence. After a moment Maedhros can not count, an eternity of trembling at a knife’s edge, the boot does lift, leaving his fingers unbroken.
Only then, does he realize he was holding his breath.
The men leave him there, gasping. With them, goes the light.
*
The darkness is absolute, no different with his eyes open or closed. Maedhros drifts, startling back into wakefulness in fitful bursts, the only constant in the black the pain that does not ease, does not leave him. Once, he tries to move, but even trying to push himself up on his hands rips such agony from the wounds on his back—he collapses, with a sound he would shamefacedly call a scream, had he not screamed in Mairon’s forge, when the whip—
(Once, while working side by side on repairing a fence back in Mithrim, Maedhros had seen the marks on Rumil’s back, roping and ruinous across his shoulders, his spine, his ribs—)
(He had not been strong enough to look long.)
One by one, their faces impossibly clear in the pitch-dark of his cell, his brothers come to try to console him. One by one he sends them away, unable to bear Maglor’s tears, and Caranthir’s prayers, and Amrod—no, no, God, please, not Amrod, not—
Celegorm comes to sit beside Maedhros as he chokes on a stifled sob, pitying himself and hating his own pity, but when Maedhros tries to shove him away, Celegorm does not move. Instead, he just shakes his head and shrugs.
I’m not Maglor, he reminds Maedhros calmly, settling back against the stone wall. I don’t mind.
Fuck, Maedhros gasps as the agony rises in a new wave and then falls back, the curse blurring in his swollen mouth. Celegorm does not flinch. He leans forward, examining Maedhros’ back. He whistles low: That looks fucking terrible, Maitimo.
I’ve had worse, Maedhros replies, slurring, and Celegorm smiles at that because Celegorm always understands when Maedhros is joking, even when his joking is a lie, even when his joking is desperate and wrong because Maedhros hasn’t ever felt pain worse than this, never, not in all his life—
No you haven’t, Celegorm says, still grinning and raking back his long yellow hair, blinking his yellow eyes. But you will, Maitimo, you will—
*
Maedhros wakes alone, in darkness, choking on blood. On his blood, because even though it has to have been hours now since Morgoth’s study his mouth is still filling with it, the hole where his tooth was ripped from his jaw still steadily weeping. He spits weakly, and it’s all he can taste, all he can smell. When Athair was dying—he bled from the mouth, too.
(Maedhros is not dying.)
Maedhros stares into the void where Celegorm’s face had been, his heart shuddering against the cage of his ribs, shivering. He cannot feel his hands, cannot feel his feet, cannot feel his face. He would not know he even had a body, anymore, if it were not for the—the pain, the pain—
All he can think of, shying away from the horrors of Morgoth’s study and of Mairon’s forge, is how terribly beautiful the mountainside had looked beneath him, so far beneath him, and beneath the dawn. How clean the air had been, on that ragged cliff, and how gentle the early sun.
Oh, God, the sun.
He should have fallen. When given the choice, he should have fallen. He thought then of Maglor, and the broken bones they would return to break him in turn, but what shall they return now? His hair—his blood—the nail they ripped from his finger, the molar they tore from his jaw. In the darkness behind his closed eyelids, his father’s eyeless skull grins back, and Maedhros retches again, gasping, coughing his own blood up from his empty stomach and clotting lungs. His throat burns from his screaming.
Maglor would have wept over his bones, and then he would have buried them. What will he do with a tooth? Or, yet more—with an ear, with the skin flayed from Maedhros’ back, with an entire finger cut from his hand? A sudden horror grips him, of the certainty that they shall take him from himself in pieces until nothing is left. Already, he feels empty, but that emptiness is no solace because he knows it is a lie; he knows now they shall delight in taking everything from him it is possible to give.
Everything, except his life.
(No infection, Morgoth had said—)
*
(Death by infection is the cruelest death, Fingon says solemnly, holding the thin knife thoughtfully up to the thin light falling through the window. That is why Olorin says we must wash our instruments, to keep the wounds clean. It is not merely a kindness; it is a necessity, if the patient is to heal well.)
Maedhros laughs, his breath coming oddly short, as he lolls his head sideways just enough to get a better look at his cousin’s face. Fingon’s brows are furrowed in his dear, familiar look of concentration, the one that makes him look both much older than his nineteen years and very much a child. He has been explaining Olorin’s work on disinfection for the better part of the last hour, and Maedhros has been listening as intently as he can, to make up for his missing the exhibition four days previously.
(No—not missing it, but running from it heedless, fleeing from a monster only he could see, and he did not even warn Fingon about the devil stalking those halls, was not even man enough to tell his cousin why he was leaving him behind—)
Maedhros swallows and his tongue feels wrong. His teeth feel wrong. He cannot catch his breath.
“After much experimentation,” Fingon is saying, the blade sharp and slim and beautiful in his hands, in the clean sunlight, “Doctor Olorin has come to the conclusion that to sterilize both the wound and anything that may come in contact with the wound is best. An example: in an operation, one should wash the incision site clean both prior to and after surgery is performed, and the tools are also, as I have said, to be kept clean. A saltwater solution may suffice, if a satisfactory druggist is not present, but we have found carbolic acid to be even more efficient. Bandages must also be changed frequently, so that sickness cannot grow in the old blood.”
Fingon sets the surgical knife down, very carefully, and offers a hesitant smile, nervous like Maedhros knows he was not at the exhibit hall, not even in front of all those scholars and strangers and gawkers. Fingon is an excellent speaker, and his passion for what he loves is infectious. Everyone who heard him speak, that day, must have loved him. Maedhros still cannot quite breathe, but when Fingon smiles at him tentatively, looking for reassurance, Maedhros smiles back.
Maedhros loves Fingon. It is a love he feels sometimes guilty over, and sometimes like an ache, and sometimes like a comfort he does not deserve.
In this moment, as he struggles to catch his breath, it hurts. The sight of his cousin hurts. Or maybe it is not that which is hurting him, but instead—
(Death by infection is the cruelest death, Fingon said.)
What did Fingon know of kindness or of cruelty?
(Fingon had been—Wrong—)
*
Once, light returns to Maedhros’ prison, and he is hauled up from fevered confusion to sit propped by unkind hands, the faces of his enemies blurred with the agony of moving and the smoke from the lit torch. He cannot lift his arms, cannot lift his head. He is helped to drink water, ice cold and salt-sour, held to his bleeding lips in a tin cup. Swallowing requires more coordination than he remembers, and the freezing touch of water to the raw-nerved open wound in his jaw is a blinding horror. Still, he thirsts; he drinks.
He will not, however, part his teeth for the bread they try to force him to eat. They offer him a tin cup of gruel, also, but Maedhros has passed the threshold of starvation now, and the very thought of food is enough to make his throat close upon lurching nausea, a cold sweat breaking upon his brow. How long does it take, for a man to die of starvation? Of blood loss? Of thirst? Morgoth said he shall not die of infection, but Maedhros has not eaten in days now, and surely, surely he cannot survive much longer if—
(He cannot quite bear to refuse the water.)
The men grumble and threaten, and one cuffs him across the face; Maedhros can not really hear them. Can not feel the blow. His hands are gone, his legs will not move, his face does not feel like his face. The cold has crept inside him now, building a home inside his ribs, carving out a door. If he can hold on only a little while longer, the work will be done, surely. A door goes two ways; Maedhros will be glad to leave this body to the chill, and step outside to freedom, whatever that may be.
(Heaven, his mother promised him, when he was young. He does not believe in that, any longer. But even if he were to walk through death into nothing but a void, the void would not be here.)
Finally, the men drop him back to the cell floor in frustration, and he does not unclench his teeth even to scream but still the sound he makes, when his savaged shoulders strike the stone, the awful, shameful sound—
The men mutter over his head, and one feels his forehead, sounding displeased about whatever he finds there. Maedhros’ breathing breaks apart in shallow whines, in his throat; the man’s hand is sick and horrible against his crawling skin but warm, and he shudders beneath it. The men leave without addressing him further, abandoning the heel of bread on the floor but taking with them the cups, and the light, and their grating, wordless, senseless voices.
Before they go, one man covers him with a heavy shroud. Or—not a shroud, a horse blanket, thick and rough and stifling on his straining lungs but not cold, the—the only thing in this dead place, that is not cold. He shuddered beneath the warmth of a hateful hand; now, he weeps beneath the warmth that was a friend’s.
He recognized the russet pattern blocked across the grey wool, in the last receding glow of his gaoler’s torch. This blanket had been Galway’s.
*
Galway, warm arm about his shoulders in a bracing embrace, smile shaped like Morgoth’s smile or his own, what difference is there now? Jem with two eyes one eye two telling him You’re a brave one, coppertop, you’re a right devil—
It is difficult to track faces in the dark. It is difficult to understand voices amidst the pain. Maedhros sleeps, and wakes, and knows not the difference, trapped in a liminal suffocating space of memories that will not leave him, confused and nightmarish and cruel. Floating, feverish, nailed into his tortured body by the pain that will not let him go, he rasps for breath, spits out blood, sobs into a single grimy hand. This is what dying feels like, please God, this is what dying feels like. God is always just, Nerdanel often reminded him, throughout his aborted childhood. He never gives us more to bear than our strength can hold, Maitimo. Is that not a comfort?
(Maedhros cannot bear any more than this. So ends this day, Morgoth smiled, and there had been fire and metal both in Mairon’s forge, and infection is the cruelest death, Maitimo, is that not a comfort?)
His heart beats too high in his chest. In the midst of his panic, like surfacing after drowning, Celegorm comes back, wretched and grieving and not like himself at all. Maedhros is reminded of how Celegorm had wept when he shot that man, all those months and miles ago, outside the tavern. This is how Celegorm looks, when he has killed.
When something is dying.
I saved you best I could, Celegorm tells him, sniffing and dashing the back of his hand across his eyes. I know it wasn’t enough.
Hush, Maedhros whispers hoarsely. His words are hardly words, but Celegorm understands because this—this is important. Be careful, Celegorm, you can’t—can’t let them hear you.
Celegorm’s hand lowers from his eyes. He straightens, every line of him taut and poised with sudden urgency, trembling on the edge of a leap.
No, Maitimo, he says, you cannot let them hear you.
*
Maedhros wrenches awake with a gasp. His cell is filled with shivering yellow light. In the shadow of the near wall, predatory and patient, is Mairon.