Work Text:
The storeroom is empty—not only of other people, but also of a good deal of its former bounty. For all Mithrim’s general frugality, they have been indulgent in the matters of brined ham and cured beef, flour and cornmeal, potatoes and apples.
It was a comparatively grand Christmas supper.
Turgon brings a candle to the storeroom, and sets it on an empty, open shelf, where it may burn to its full flame without catching anything. In his clumsiness, he drops a little hot wax upon his knuckles. He curses.
In his breast-pocket is a sheet of slightly crumpled notepaper. In his fist is an inelegant stub of pencil. But here after all, armed with these devices and guided by hard-won light, he has nothing to write.
The words are all absent; the intent fled from his mind and heart as if it were never there.
What does one say to a wife abandoned, to a daughter almost unseen?
Perhaps he only came here to weep.
Some time later, he wipes his eyes on his sleeve. Anger is bitter in his veins and in the bones of his jaw. He imagines beginning,
My dearest wife, tonight we cheered my mother’s murderer for bearing up under wounds I myself would willingly have given him. Would that I had stayed at your side rather than live this mockery.
But it was Turgon who left Elenwe, not Maedhros.
My darling daughter, Papa loves you very much and never spends an hour of the waning day without imagining your small hands and precious cheeks and bright eyes. Even, I cry a little over them.
But this is false feeling; he does not know her. He does not know her!
His weeping, this time, is not so quiet as he would wish. He cannot pretend that it is a surprise—however a shameful one—when the door opens and he is discovered.
Yet no accusing word or exclamation of shock follows. Rather, Turgon hears the familiar sound of his father’s breathing, and the next instant, his father is crouched beside him where he sits with his knees drawn up and his face in his hands.
Father’s arms enclose him, and hold him tight.
“Oh, Turgon, my dear boy…oh, how sorry I am! We should have thought of you more carefully, today. We should have…God forgive me. I have wronged you again.”
Turgon would say, You have not, but he cannot speak.
Father kisses his hair. Then he runs his fingers through it, behind Turgon’s ear, as he used to do when Turgon was small.
Too small to be a father, then; too young to be afraid. Little Idril rises to mind again, and worse, the knowledge that he can neither see nor touch nor even imagine her right. Another sob swells.
All things pass, even time. Father sits beside him, now, both their backs to the wall. Turgon rests his head on Father’s shoulder.
“I wanted to write to them,” he mutters. “I came away to write to them.”
“A tender thought,” Father says.
Mother is dead. Every second of every hour of every day, Mother is dead as well. Turgon almost cannot face the grief of that total loss, choosing instead to cling and claw at the grief of lives still being lived, away from him.
“I could not send any such letter,” Turgon says. “Though I have the paper here…though in time, I might find some paltry words. It would not be safe to send it, would it, Papa?”
“I fear not.”
Turgon coughs wetly, almost laughing. “I am a fool,” he says. “A hothead when a cool one is needed. A coward only when I want courage. A fool, always.”
“Hush. Do not speak of my son so.”
“I fathered a child and wedded a woman and—but I do not care for them. I do not even know if they live.”
Father is quiet for a moment. Then he says, his voice so low that it does not echo at all in the room, “Yet you love them?”
“In my heart—so much it tears at me—”
“We were in dire straits, Turgon. Indeed, each day I ponder, quite painstakingly, over every choice. If I had only turned back, whom might we have saved? Your brother. Your mother.” Father’s voice thickens with feeling, now. “And yet we kept on. And we lived, and we are here, and…”
There it is. He cannot even blame it on Father, who is nothing but mercy and kindness, nothing but patient strength. Yet in Turgon’s sick and miserable breast stirs such a hatred—such a hatred.
For Father and Fingon, saving Maedhros and healing the family division show that not all is lost.
“I am sorry for my part in your suffering, Turgon,” Father says, at last. “You have died a thousand little deaths, and you have given us nothing but aid and stalwart comfort, as if we—I—deserved it.”
Now it is time for Turgon to be silent, because he did not expect that, and does not know what to say.
“Let us sit here a while,” Father suggests. “I have a letter to write to your mother, which I also cannot send. Perhaps we write them like—like this, if it does not seem too a foolish exercise. Sitting side by side and hand in hand, dreaming of what we would say.”
“Yes,” Turgon answers. “Yes, please.”