Work Text:
“You should begin sending out night patrols,” Beren tells his friend, over a meal taken hastily together at an irregular time. He had followed a hunch to find Finrod dozing in the fort’s tidy garden plot, huddled against the kitchen wall, and Finrod still looks half-asleep as he sips the cup of soup Beren handed him, his golden hair disheveled under his woolen cap. It had been a pity to wake him, but Beren had marked his friend’s absence from the makeshift infirmary in the hall, and the kitchen said they had not seen Finrod in over a day.
“Two patrols each night, I would say: one into the woods, and one towards the town. My father used to send us out in groups of two, and thus our camps were never ambushed, until we were betrayed. Building your walls is all very good, but if you do not keep an eye upon what is done in the woods beyond the walls—Well. You know what can happen, now.”
Finrod, who has been chewing more diligently than enthusiastically at the bread Beren brought, glances unwillingly towards the courtyard and away again. The wooden doors still smell of smoke, and the earth still smells of blood.
We were lucky, is what Beren does not say. He knows Finrod understands.
We cannot hope for luck to save us again.
“I will go tonight,” Beren says. That brings another one of Finrod’s quick blue glances, but this time he looks at Beren, and he swallows.
“Your arm,” he begins, softly, and Beren shakes his head with a smile.
“You know more than most how I lived when I was alone,” he reminds his friend, but gently, not as a reproach. It is all too easy to distress Finrod’s noble sense of justice, to outrage the fearless kindness in him that has always, oddly enough, reminded Beren so strongly of—her.
He raises and carefully flexes his arm.
“You see? Halfway to healed already, because I had you to help me, this time. It is nothing.”
It is true that the ugly arrow-wound, stitched shut into a sharp, bitten-off frown, is not the worst injury he has ever received. If he were to make a list of his sufferings, to make a formal complaint the way the white men love to do, this latest hurt would not even be worth writing onto the paper.
First he would print: My father.
Then: My people.
Then—in beautiful cursive letters of the kind Finrod can write, in the vivid red ink Finrod showed him at the bookseller’s cart the last time they went into town together: Luthien.
Beren tightens his hand on long instinct, closing his fingers over the space where her fingers had, once upon a time, been. All he feels in her place, as always, is the scar she made.
That is not as much a comfort, these days, as it once was.
Finrod’s brow furrows as he considers, and he says: “I should go with you.”
“No, Felagund.” Beren smiles again, and opens his hand. “Not this time. You should stay with your family—with your sister, at least a few more days. She must need you.”
“Galadriel? She never needs anyone; she would be furious if she thought I wanted to coddle her.”
“Then don’t coddle her. Have her join you for the night watch, maybe.”
Barahir had used to do that when Beren was young, when his heart was troubled. How many nights had he stayed by his father’s side in the dark, staring out into the quiet, reassured by the simple comfort of being together? How much does he cherish those memories now? Barahir had never discussed the horrors they saw, nor all the losses they suffered in the slow, painful, destruction of their world. But it was enough to know they still had each other.
Beren had been even younger than Galadriel, then.
Finrod sighs, and returns to picking at his bread.
“You should take someone else, then. One of the men to watch your back.”
“I don’t need anyone to watch my back,” Beren says, fondly, as he gathers up the dishes to carry out to the pump.
“I am accustomed,” he says, “to being alone.”