Work Text:
“A chisel was one of Athair’s first gifts to me, you know.”
“How odd,” cries Maglor, who is nine and just beginning to take Feanor’s endless lessons on the science of beauty very seriously to heart. “Such a harsh thing. Didn’t he bring you flowers, mamaí?”
Nerdanel smiles. Her eyes are on Maedhros, who is bright and quiet, as people who know him well know him often to be. “He brought me flowers too, dear one. But the chisel was still my favorite, because it showed how much he trusted me. Not just as his future wife—though we were not certain of that, then—but as an artist.”
“Because a chisel is so final,” Maedhros says, nodding.
“Yes, Maitimo. If it slips wrong, the scar is there forever—whether it be a little chip or a deep gouge. My teachers did not understand my desire to sculpt. They thought I should embroider, and you know that I do.” She gestures at the cross-stitched roses at the hem of her apron, still visible beneath the stains left by the twins’ jammy hands.
“I want chisel,” Curufin pipes up. There is no hope that he does not know what a chisel is; even at three, he has memorized all the names of Feanor’s tools, and thus exhausted, has turned to Nerdanel’s. “I want the chisel, mamaí.”
“It is not for little boys to have,” Nerdanel answers. “When you are a little older, I will show you, like I showed Maitimo and Macalaure.”
Maitimo prefers the soft pencil, the delicate crayons, to anything hard and sharp.
“What happened to that cast of my face?” Feanor asks, resting his chin on her shoulder. His hands are on her hips, warm and gripping. “The one you were making of plaster.”
“I smashed it, when we quarreled last.”
He laughs merrily against her hair.
Celegorm takes most interest in her needles. Feanor used to steal them too, for reasons known best to himself.
“Can these be used on buckskin? Orome has a piece he wants to give me—”
“These are much too fine,” Nerdanel answers, a little horrified. “You need an awl. Here, I think I have one somewhere.”
Maedhros is watching her from the doorway, his too-long hair a lovely tumble around his flushed cheeks. This May has been cold and rain-drenched, and he is feverish.
“Go back to bed, my darling. Your father knows you are ill; he does not expect you to be still up and about.”
“I like to watch you work,” he says. Can he really be nineteen? It is only days or weeks or months, surely, since she held his small, tender body in the crook of one arm.
“I am hardly working.” She dusts off her hands. “I am cleaning out everything that is old and ugly, here. I turn round and round each six-month, and find my past to be dull and clumsy.”
Maedhros smiles, odd and tired. She will have to wrap his throat in flannel tonight, for all he is full-grown. “Can you not forgive them?”
“I cannot forgive my foolish self. How great I thought myself, at seventeen!”
“So—you could not love anything ugly, then?”
Nerdanel unfastens her apron, and throws it down. “Look at you,” she says. “I do not have to.”