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In the dark, in the gracious moments before he scratches a match to light, he can’t see himself.
He has studied himself before the glass since he was small, fascinated by the bumps and bruises of childhood. He was almost—haunted, too, by the way everyone said he ought to see Athair’s features in his own.
I am small, he would say, unwilling to admit that though every older brother towered above him. How can I—
I made you, Athair was wont to say, smiling their secret smile, and I know what lives in your bones.
In the mine, where the air is cool and heavy and even precious, Curufin breathes. He lights his match, then his lantern. He gloves his bruised hands in the leathers Nora stitched for him, intending their use to be for the smithy outdoors. Nora is a strange woman, because she gives a still-stranger gifts.
Curufin pretended not to notice her offering; he did not thank her. Still, he wore the gloves—belowground.
He has not found diamonds in the mine, yet. He knows that they are here, because Athair said they were, but Mithrim rests half-above this cavern and Curufin is no miner by birth or education. He will not blast or split foundations without cause.
In the almost-year since their arrival, he has asked the cavern for answers.
It has given some back.
Most importantly, his father is alive down here.
Curufin describes the weapons he has hammered today, the fire-concoction he will brew tomorrow. Athair listens, impatience strung through him and jiggling in his right knee. Curufin doesn’t look straight at him, because, if he does, the dark will no longer be a friend to him.
“You shouldn’t be here,” Athair reproves, and Curufin shivers under the welcome reprove.
If Athair was dead, he would not want you to leave his ghost, he tells himself, for one long, long moment.
“I need time to think,” Curufin answers. “You didn’t leave me very clever ones, Athair.”
(They never speak of Maedhros.)
He leans back on his hands, stone biting even through leather, and he shuts his eyes. The darkness does not change, much, but he loses the dancing figures of the lantern-flame. A few tears slip out, and he blinks them away.
It has been a long day in a string of long days—but only in the mine.
Up above, there is war. War without a battle, to be sure, yet Curufin is uneasy.
Fingolfin, who lost his gold, and his pride, and half his family—
He will not be satisfied without blood, without riches. Such is the way of men without brilliance.
Up above, time passes. Maglor paces and pretends that that is the same as strategy. Celegorm is fiercely dependable, but the arrival of their not-kin has shaken him.
The news has shaken him.
Maedhros has no place in the mine; he hated it, Curufin knows. Still, unbidden, his brother’s face flashes before him, before his closed eyes—
White and red, white and red, white and red.
Those are three deaths, and Curufin chose moments of certainty to sidestep each of them.
He is angry at the failure of the darkness.
“What can Fingolfin do?” Athair asks, scornfully.
Then he flickers out of sight, for the trapdoor up above is opening. Curufin tenses. Reaches for a gun—for a father—that is not there.
He smells hound, though of course Huan does not descend with Celegorm.
“Oh,” Curufin says, mingling affection with Athair’s scorn. “It’s you.”
Celegorm looks all wrong in the lantern-light. The shadows turn him old and the light colors his hair bloody. “What are you doing? Not picking rocks.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Curufin answers. He knows when this brother is troubled. Only when he has herded him aboveground, jealous even with Celegorm of Athair below, does he ask:
“What is it?”
Fingon is at the heart of the trouble again.