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Fingon knows that he was a quiet child for his first few years of life. Everyone he loved best (ah, the cruel turn of the past tense!) told him so, at one time or another. He growled a little, as a babe. He watched and waited a great deal.
When he...survives, he is quiet again. He knows this. He watches his skin heal, wondering how much roughness will remain though the frost is gone. He lost the tip of one toe and a few fingernails, but that seems a small price to pay. Others in their party lost whole fingers. Ears.
He performed amputations of some himself, staving off the gangrene Olorin used to speak of.
Olorin's father, a doctor himself, had been at Valley Forge, that long-ago winter. Olorin had grown up on tales of blood and death in the snow, or starvation. He had told Fingon what he must have thought Fingon would never need to know.
When spring comes, and Fingon still keeps his thoughts in his head, what with his—his mother in the ground, his family shed their hard-won furs and turn their faces to the sun again.
Winter is behind them.
(She is not really buried, his mother. He lies to himself so that he can live.
They left her under the snow; it was the best they could do, with the whole world hard as stone, with the blood freezing in their flesh as well.
It tears him open, some nights.)
Fingon watches, quietly, as Aredhel trims Turgon’s hair to the nape of his neck and restores Father’s to a semblance of its old order. Father shaves the grey from his cheeks and chin.
“Your turn,” says his sister, twirling the borrowed razor in her clever fingers, but Fingon shakes his head.
In June, when they are climbing the clear-ridged mountains and sleeping in the thin air, he begins to tie his hair back with a leather thong. He dislikes doing this, but won’t say why, not even to himself.
He has, however, begun to talk again, in the same sort of bursts and rushes that guided him through his baby days.
At least, so he suspects.
At least, he does not babble foolishly. Not anymore.
“I could braid it for you,” Wachiwi offers one evening, when they are side-by-side near the small, shielded fire. The wind is low, but they remain cautious. The camp is almost still, otherwise, with sleep. Fingon knows exactly where all his remaining family is. That is his favorite part of keeping watch.
As for Wachiwi, she is one of Haleth’s most trusted companions (and may even be several years older than Haleth—though the leader’s grim glares and broad-brimmed hat make it difficult to tell). She often volunteers to guard the midnight hours.
Fingon likes Wachiwi. They used to herd the cattle together, in the lowlands, before Haleth turned over the whole herd to the care of a man named Beleg. Cattle are curious, gentle, excitable creatures. They took a liking to Fingon, but Wachiwi sang for them through her cupped hands, and that made them coming running. Perhaps they only liked him because he was with their beloved.
“Beloved?” Wachiwi teased him, when he said as much to her. “I thought your speakers used that word only for other people.”
“Braid it?”
“Yes,” she says, flexing her brown fingers. “You are making me itch, watching it fall in your face.”
“I could cut it,” he says, unwillingly.
“I thought you might.” She tilts her head to one side, so that her own heavy braid swings. “My—I have done it. After.”
He takes her meaning. “I suppose I chose to mourn differently.”
This—his mother touched the hair that brushes his shoulders. That matters, somehow.
Wachiwi does not tell him how to mourn. Instead, she says, “Come here, cow-boy.”
“I—I’m not!”
“You have big sad eyes, like they do.”
Fingon cannot help himself; he smiles.
Wachiwi makes him sit in front of her, back to her knees. She sorts through her pockets and utters a satisfied chuckle when she finds what she is seeking. Fingon does not know if that is something that will come back to him—laughing. The smiles returned, but some things never can.
Wachiwi parts his hair in two, laying it over his shoulders with a little pat of her hand, each time.
Then she drags the tip of her fingers along his temples, separating out her strands.
“Yellow?”
Fingon clears his throat. “What?”
“My thread is the sun-color. Do you like it? These will stay fixed for a long time.”
He blinks. Finrod wears beads his hair, both silver and bright. He unthreads them to wash his hair, and otherwise keeps them above his ears always.
Fingon wonders if he is equal to thread; equal to sun-color. “If you think it suits me.”
Wachiwi laughs again. “As for that,” she says, “For suiting you, I shall weave a particular pattern.”
They fall comfortably silent. Her hands are swift, but she is careful not to hurt him. The feeling is a pleasant one. He has not often been so close to a woman not his mother, not his sister. He is glad Wachiwi is not flirtatious. She is simply kind.
All his life, Fingon has been wrong about what kindness means. This, too, he had to learn again as a child would: that which is kind asks for nothing.
Nothing, in return.
She ties off the threads. He lifts his hands and feels how the two plaits are twisted through with narrower braids. By touch alone, he can tell that it is beautiful work.
“Thank you.” He scrambles to his feet, tempted to bow. But New York is so far away, with its polite falsities. They would have no meaning here.
“You can be someone new, you know.” Wachiwi squints up at him, and he notices again that the kerchief tied around her throat is yellow, too. “If you would like to.”
Fingon’s words are held so tightly, so coldly, so painfully within. He nods, trying to understand anyway.
The wind lifts, and with it, the scent of night—of water on the rocks, of fresh leaves and sweet bracken.
If he becomes new, it will be for other people.