Chapter Text
“Ugh,” Fingon says when he wakes up. His head feels both tender and thick, and the brilliant golden Tree-light hurts his eyes. He hasn’t felt so bad after a Gathering of the Fruits since the first time his father deemed him old enough to attend.
The miruvórë Yavanna makes with her own fair hands from the honey of the undying flowers in her Garden is only offered at the high festivals, and it’s dangerously light, clear, and sparkling. It’s as easy to get swept away by it as it is to find oneself caught in the jaws of an undertow when swimming in the Bay of Eldamar, carried beyond oneself by a sense of wellbeing and mirth as inexorably as being carried out to sea.
“Ugh,” someone agrees, and Fingon rolls over to find Maedhros in his bed, hair a red-brown tangle like seaweed on the pillow and his usually fair face decidedly pallid.
“You’re definitely old enough not to overdo it at the Gathering,” Fingon says, rather pleased that it’s not only him who’s suffering. “Yavanna must have done something rather strange with her recipe this year.”
Maedhros mumbles in agreement, then stiffens. “Fingon!” he says, and bolts upright, his eyes wild -
It takes a moment, and then Fingon understands his panic as a burst of images blooms in his head like a beautiful, poisonous flower.
“Maedhros!” he says, bursting up from the pillows himself. “Did I – did we –”
“I think so,” Maedhros says, and doom doom DOOM is ringing through his head like a bell. “But how can we be bonded? We didn’t properly lie together - I don’t understand. What we did can’t have been enough to unite our fëar. I was careful.”
Given what Fingon is remembering, careful was the last thing on his mind: there was nothing careful about the way Maedhros’s fine festival robe tore under his hands when the pins and fastenings refused to yield quickly enough, his own tunic getting pushed up under his armpits as Maedhros kissed desperately at his chest, his belly; lower –
They’re silent for a moment as memories slip back and forth between them, the shards coming together in multi-faceted detail. Fingon’s own face caressed by the silver light, handsomer than it has ever seemed to him in his mirror – Maedhros, his grey eyes brilliant as stars, his mouth crushed red from kissing – Fingon’s thighs honey-coloured against the white linen, the bloom on his skin like the sheen on a tulip – Maedhros’s throat, arching away in one smooth bare curve –
The taste of him/them in their/his mouth, the sound of their/his gasp –
“Did you, er,” Fingon says, because he has always been noted for his boldness. “When you – you had your mouth on me – did you happen to – reach completion – while…?”
“I don’t believe that would be sufficient to unite us according to the Laws and Customs on the union of marriage,” Maedhros says, which is not a no . He’s turning slowly red in a flooding wave that begins at the level of his nipples and climbs from his throat to his face to his ears, and the silent yes, the sense-memory of it, hits Fingon like a wave and makes him shudder.
Maedhros catches the rise of his helpless arousal and then the desire/embarrassment begins to flow both ways, rebounding back and forth like an infinity of mirrors, on and on and on and –
“I’m sorry!” Fingon says, trying to stop the overwhelming tide of lust and shame, and Maedhros says, wincing, “I know you are,” but doesn’t stop struggling to pull his mind free from the too-close mental embrace they’ve been sharing.
It hurts, the bond too new and tender for separation. For a moment Fingon grasps tighter: then he sees the wisdom of the plan, and starts concentrating on imagining a glassy wall between them, thicker and thicker, going frosty, opaque, solid –
And then they’re back in their own heads, separate, and it’s almost – almost – like they’re not married at all. But as soon as they leave the bedroom where those terrible, glorious things happened the night before, people are going to see their bond shining in their eyes, and know exactly the long-secret contents of Fingon’s heart.
“Well,” he says, clearing his throat, and looks away, red himself.
He can see the white and gold of Maedhros’s torn outer robes abandoned by the door, the saffron-yellow leggings cast-off halfway to the bed, his own argent and indigo cloak puddled at the bed’s foot. He’s still wearing his undertunic, bunched and rumpled around his hips, but a tug covers the embarrassing state of his groin and makes him decentish again.
Where are his leggings?
Beside him, Maedhros has begun to mutter the stipulations of the Laws and Customs, his voice taking on the particular tone it gets when he’s been working with Finwë, misery leaking away and his argumentative administration tone taking over, as though he thinks he can argue the new, shining bond between them out of existence. As though sweet reason and logic and his considerable skill at diplomacy can somehow undo an indissoluble tie meant to bind souls together for the length of the Music!
“Maedhros,” Fingon says. “We are going to have to talk about this.” He wets his mouth, considering what to say next, and then swings a bare leg out of bed.
The muttering stops.
Maedhros says, “–We should dress first.”
Fingon surveys their tangled clothing again. “I rather think you might need to borrow something.”
“I can’t go home wearing your clothes!”
“Well, we seem to be married. I don’t think sharing clothes is going to make much difference.”
“What are we going to do, Fingon?”
“Truly? I think we should move to Alqualondë and change our names.”
The strain on his cousin’s face lightens, just a little. “That certainly sounds better than donning sackcloth and climbing Taniquetil in penance.”
“I’m sure Uncle Finarfin could put us up somewhere. We could go seabathing every day and never attend another council meeting ever again.”
“It sounds wonderful,” Maedhros says wistfully. Then, “But what do you think my father is going to do? Your father? Grandfather? The Valar themselves – what will this do to Tirion?”
Politics. Maedhros is naked in his bed, and they’re bonded(!) and last night he kissed Fingon back(!!) and put his mouth on him(!!!), and they’re already talking politics.
Just once, in his life, Fingon would like it if he could do something for joy, or even for grief, and not have to consider the dense web of old suffering and grievance and fresh anger binding him, and his cousins, and his father and his uncles and his grandparents, extending past them all into every corner of the city. He would like to pretend that all of that doesn’t matter, and that what matters is that he has a serious conversation with Maedhros, now, about the fact that they’re married, and what that means to them – beyond the general horror and despair Maedhros has already made clear–
But they’re their fathers’ oldest sons, and for them, politics is inescapable, so Fingon says, “The Valar must think it is permissible, or it wouldn’t have happened.”
“There is a difference between what is and can be and what the Valar permit,” says Maedhros, and his eyes narrow. “That’s something that we might be able to use, if we have a little time to prepare the ground.”
“On the Valar?”
“On my father.”
"Hm," Fingon says. He can't imagine anything working on Fëanor. More practically - “We can’t go around refusing to make eye contact for the next – however long we’d need to prepare them. Caranthir might be able to get away with that, but we’re not Caranthir.”
Maedhros frowns.
Fingon’s parents take one look at him and laugh when he finally comes downstairs, long after Maedhros has made his escape out the window in borrowed clothes.
“Oh dear ,” Anairë says. “Did you overdo it last night? Is your head a little tender this morning?”
“Perhaps a trifle,” Fingon says with dignity, from behind the thing he and Maedhros had slipped out and put together that morning while the house was still asleep.
It’s similar to the forge-shield his uncle invented years and years ago: a glass-and-silver visor which sits on the bridge of his nose and conceals his eyes, and gives him, he fancies, a certain air of mystery.
Fingolfin looks less careworn than Fingon has seen him in years, face lit with mirth and the gentle afterglow of miruvórë. “Oh, son --”
“Shh,” Fingon says, leaning into his role, and his parents laugh harder.
“At the dinner table,” Finwë says later that week, a touch querulously, and for once it’s not Fëanor and Fingolfin bringing the pained look to his face. “Is it really appropriate to wear such contraptions inside?”
“It’s the look, Grandpa,” Aegnor says, adjusting what everyone has begun to call glasses. The fashion is spreading like wildfire throughout Tirion, as things taken up by the young royals of the House of Finwë tend to do.
Other heads around the table nod in unison, the light glinting off the many visors like Laurelin striking the golden roof of the Mindon Eldaliéva. The general effect is rather insectoid, as though a dozen chittering bugs have seated themselves in the family dining room of the Tirion palace, which is only less grand than the public one in scale, seating a mere forty to fifty Elves rather than a thousand.
Every year they celebrate the Gathering of the Fruits together, as a family and as royalty, and spend the month enmeshed in ceremonies both royal and familial. There are limits even to Fëanor’s iconoclasm; whatever his faults, he loves Finwë, so he attends. For the Gathering of the Fruits, even Fingon’s slacker uncle Finarfin and his children manage to drag themselves from their beach house at Alqualondë into the city, and briefly abandon their casual linen beachwear and hippy sandals for properly tailored, embroidered, formal Noldorin court garb.
Finrod has accessorised his court clothes with glasses decorated with cabochon emeralds and faceted diamonds; they take up at least half his face. Curufin is attempting something sleek and minimal in dark glass and black wire. Celegorm has simply stolen a pair of Fëanor’s forge-shields, the battered contraption held together with solder and sheer Fëanorian will.
“It seems like one foot in the door of moral dubiousness to me,” Indis says. “Surely the intimation is that a glasses-wearer has a private life too scandalous to reveal?”
It’s too difficult to catch Maedhros’s eyes through the glasses the way he always used to – and, sadly, family gatherings are really only bearable when he can exchange glances with Maedhros – so Fingon allows himself to send out the tiniest filament of !!!!, and is warmed with surprise when Maedhros immediately twines his own thought around it, like he's just put his hand on Fingon's knee under the table.
She’s clever, Maedhros thinks. I’ve always respected your grandmother; Father never accounts for her enough in his thinking.
Hm! Fingon thinks back. It’s easy to leak a little dubiousness of the efficacy of Fëanor’s plans in general back, and a great deal more disapproval. He’s always been relatively careful in what he says to Maedhros about his mad, splendid, terrible uncle, but he doesn’t have to choose his words carefully speaking mind to mind like this; Maedhros will know what he means.
He receives a mental sigh that lets him know that, yes, Maedhros does know what he means, and the whole thing wearies him exactly as much as it wearies Fingon, if not more. There’s also considerable feeling to it; Maedhros finds the constant strife so awful, whether it’s between Fëanor and Fingolfin, Fëanor and Indis, Fëanor and his own mother – even between his brothers, whose fighting is rarely in real earnest. He’s always seemed so removed from it all, tall calm Maedhros weaving peace around everyone he can reach, striving for sense and spreading serenity like cool water. But below the surface, there’s passion; more than even Fingon had ever sensed –
Maedhros withdraws, and the wall between their minds becomes as opaque again as the dark glass hiding their eyes.
“I think the boast is that the wearer has a nightlife too rough for the brilliant light of Laurelin,” Favourite Aunt Lalwen says, laughing, and rumples Argon’s hair. “I take some leave to doubt the claim.”
“Ai,” Argon protests, in his childish treble, and his glasses tremble.
Fingon would find it hilarious, the fact that he and Maedhros can apparently make anything fashionable, if they try – he’s already thinking of other things he might be able to get other people to adopt, and wondering how ridiculous they would have to be before it became obvious it was a joke – if it wasn’t for the reason he was wearing them, or the fact that he’s barely seen Maedhros in the past few days, once they planned their strategy out. He can’t wear glasses for the rest of his eternal life. They’re buying time, not peace.