Archive of Our Own

But Makalaure was a performer; he was practiced at manufacturing smiles. It was almost impossible not to return it, even with his lips still so badly chapped from the Ice that they cracked at the strain.

If Makalaure looked bad, then of course Maitimo was worse, but Findarato could not bring himself to look, not quite yet. It was easier to look at Makalaure; when he smiled like that he could command a room, for one thing, and for another, it was possible to look at him and yet be undecided whether he was incandescently furious or desperately concerned or just existentially afraid.

Maitimo’s state allowed for no such questions.

So Findarato smiled and waited, every inch his now permanently absent father’s perfect representative as he stood before a man he was not sure if he was supposed to angrily demand weregild from or kneel before as regent of the high king.

Then Maitimo cried out in his sleep, and Makalaure jerked toward him like a puppet pulled along on particularly cruel strings, and the whole thing fell apart.

The whole premise for his argument in being allowed here when the rest of the clamoring horde of cousins were kept away was that his branch of the family could not be left out of proceedings. It was purely politics; there was no room in it for finding himself on the other side of Maitimo’s bed, singing the counterpart to Kano’s soothing song until the lullaby had twisted through the air long enough to soothe Maitimo back to sleep.

There was no room for it, but once the shift had happened, there was equally no room to switch back, to throw back on perfect postures and perfect smiles while the echoes of soothed horror still drifted through the room.

So he slumped against the cool linens of the bed instead, slumped as thoroughly as he’d held firm before, and when he opened his exhausted eyes his cousin looked far more like the haunted shadow of himself that he’d glimpsed when he first arrived.

He’d had a whole speech planned, formed in the endless hours spent edging forward on creaking shelves of ice. Something fitting.

It didn’t fit now. It was a speech from Prince Findarato to High King Feanaro, not Findarato to his grieving cousin.

It was certainly not a speech to be said across the half broken body of a cousin who had only now been soothed back to sleep.

So the first thing he said to Makalaure this side of the sea was, “That sounded like it was derivative of Aelind’s “Nocturnes.””

“You know very well it did not,” Makalaure snapped immediately, and for a moment they were young again, sprawled on the edge of one of the treelit fountains of Tirion and light heartedly dueling with tongues and harps before a besotted audience.

But while an amused and tolerant Maitimo had been a frequent spectator and sometimes participant of such sport, he had never before been insensible and feverish between them, and the silence had never before stretched so long.

“It was Mother’s lullaby,” Makalaure said after a moment too long, and Findarato startled. “With some - minor variations.”

He had improvised his duet without analyzing; examining it now, he could almost see it, but -

“Minor?” he demanded as though it were the most important question between them.

Makalaure’s flinch was deep and bewildering and gone in an instant behind yet another mask. “The songs of the world have changed,” he said, and that was undeniable. “And our place has changed within them.”

Which was also true -

“Particularly,” his cousin said, “since Alqualonde.”

The silence that fell then was nothing like Tirion.

“The songs must change to keep their power,” said his cousin the diplomat, pushing on.

He thought, almost, for a moment, about how his own songs had changed, just slightly after that first feverish battle upon their arrival; how his sword had called forth blood, even if only orcish blood, and how that blood had called forth something - not wrong, not twisted, just urgent in his songs.

It was a small change, unlike Makalaure’s own, of course. But it was still an uncomfortable one, and he did not want it here in this moment. He wanted to take Maitimo’s hand, and not just twist the bedclothes before him. He wanted to talk of something, anything else, so he pushed forward, and he did.

“You spoke of other songs before your voyage,” he said, eliding everything else with that brief phrase and avoiding any particular emphasis on your. “Have you started chronicling our battles in your epic yet?”

“I have,” Makaluare said, a hint of genuine artistic interest breaking forth, free of anything else. “I have written for it - constantly, these past few days. It helps . . . make sense of things. Here, listen - ”

He sang a snippet of the sea voyage: the storms they’d faced, the fear, the sea sickness, the burning exhilaration, hope, guilt, terror – the tangled muddle of everything, all laid out in a pattern that could now, with the benefit of hindsight, be seen and untangled.

For a moment, he almost felt he had been there, that he could taste the salt, feel the wind. That, more importantly, he could understand.

The narrative was appealing in its order: the framing of events so one could see Vaire’s pattern, see the Music, and not just the uncertainty of walking forward step after step on creakingly fragile ground while the endless snow blinded you in a monotone of white and the tears froze to your cheeks -

“I’ll tell you of the Ice,” he said, a bit more abruptly than he’d meant to. “It should be in it.”

He could write his own songs, of course, and he would, but if Makalaure meant to write an epic of their people, then this should be in it.

“It should,” Makalaure agreed. Not uncertain, but still tentative, the moment between thought and speech just a moment too long.

“Make sense of it,” he muttered, his own thoughts suddenly too weary for anything else. “Make sense of all of it. And then we can - “ He waved a hand as if to push it all behind them.

As princes there were - demands. Negotiations. An endless list of points to argue.

But that was for later, when Maitimo had woken more fully, and it was a vague thing of needs, and ones he had no doubt would be met. It would replace butchered horses and devoured leather, but it would not fix the burned, broken, empty things between them. Not really. It wouldn’t -

“Make sense of it,” he repeated more strongly. Make sense of the darkness that had flared and preyed on their minds until they had become people who could do this to one another and people who could bear it. Makalaure could do it if anyone could, and it had to be done by someone, so that meant he could do it, that he would.

And then maybe - maybe things would be better. Fixed and forgiven and truly past. They could become once more the people who had not done those things and people who were not scarred by bearing them.

Something terrible flickered in Makaalure’s eyes then - longing and hope and -

Something unbearable to sit and watch. Something -

He couldn’t bear to let Makalaure sit there alone a moment longer, looking as if his spine would snap for brittleness; he could not bear to reach out a gentle hand when his own bones were still frozen near to breaking.

So he embraced his cousin fiercely, intentionally too hard, like he once had with his brothers as children when forced to reconcile too soon. He wanted it to bruise. He wanted it to help. He wanted -

But Makalaure hugged back just as fiercely, just as hard, and there was nothing of anger there, he thought, just an echo of that word urgency.

The songs of this world were changed, and their place in them was changed, and the old, gentle things lay trampled in the roots of Telperion and cast off into the waves alongside the Ice.

This wasn’t a replacement. Not a fitting one.

But until the world could be made sense of, it would be good enough.