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Tyelpë quietly stepped up to the window that looked out over their balcony, avoiding the floorboard near the threshold that was wont to let out a bothersome creak. Condensation clung to the window in such fine droplets that the view was hazy-gossamer, a faintly glistening softness on all edges: silver-lace leaflets on the slender pine-needles, varnish on the small tea-table, hundreds of mirrored pearls embroidering Melkor’s black coat as he sat staring into the far horizon, thoughts lingering with the bedewed twilight.
None of the many limpid droplets that shone on the sable field of Melkor’s coat winked their dreamy reflections; Melkor was sitting completely still, occupied with the meandering channels of his brooding, fist under his chin and elbow on the table, hair let loose to fall over his back in a sleek curtain of dark water frothed by strands of old moonlight. From Tyelpë’s angle, he couldn’t make out the Vala’s expression nor could see much but the tense slant of his shoulders in the quiet skyglow.
Ever since Tyelpë had set the final gem in place on the necklace Melkor designed, a golden beryl that suggested the very tip of the flame that scintillated over the wearer’s breast, Melkor seemed to remove himself from any outward presentation. Physically he had been there: giving a smile that barely met the corners of his pressed lips as Tyelpë had lifted the finished piece by the clasps. He’d been reluctant to point out, then, that Melkor’s real smiles were wolfish, or the very least mischievous, and sometimes reserved to his eyes; but in any case nothing like this sudden gloom that fancied itself a smile! Like a partly-cloudy day that assured everyone it was sunny.
Of course, Melkor wasn’t really there and remained distinctly not present for the last four-and-a-half days. He’d slipped himself deep within shadows, eyes always fixed on the infinity of a vanishing point or reaching only just barely to the surface of things. He’d assured Tyelpë that the necklace was just as he’d imagined— perfect even, though he seemed to say that word with a softer breath— but something about their collaboration clearly sent Melkor into the winding labyrinth of his moods, a flooded prison of non-euclidian melancholia.
It happened sometimes, Tyelpë had learned. Melkor struggled through an undulating landscape of highs and lows with not much warning for the drops and the climbs. Annatar had advised him that it was best to remain patient with his moods: give space but not isolation, optimism but not so saccharine, touches to remind but not enough to crowd... in short, it was always balance. Melkor’s heart was a didactic scale made off-kilter.
So Tyelpë didn’t take it personally. Or tried not to— he’d rather enjoyed working with Melkor, learning the ways in which his mind worked like and unlike his own, with its own internal logic that defied conventional equations. In the vast halls and many rooms of Melkor’s mind Tyelpë thought he found something kindred within, a thrum of resonance that had synched with his pulse much like Annatar’s had, but for a different timbre.
So he gave him space, but not so much that he was avoided: greeted him with the same cheerfulness but none of his words pressed into artificial sweets. Still brushed against his fingers when he passed him the honey for his tea but didn’t push him to recall that night which seemed to slip into the hazy nostalgia of past, no longer well-defined recency. The feeling of Melkor’s large hands holding his hips firmly down, of his teeth pressing temporary impressions onto his skin, of the ache of where Tyelpë had him... it all faded from tenderness into the oblivion of memory.
(He wanted more: wanted that fleeting, flirtatious experimentation to be etched more prominently onto the smooth flesh of his back, bruising his neck and shoulders with more concrete hypotheses, letting his ache grow into a bratty soreness that reminded him with every movement what they’d done.)
As it were, Melkor had been sitting on the balcony for hours now, watching the veil of the clouds drop their favors onto the trembling palms of the leaves. And the hours before were no better: the lethargic scratch of a pencil-on-paper, slow and noncommittal sketches that ended up being torn from their spine and crumpled with a sound between a dejected sigh and a huff of frustration. Their drawing room had been littered with dozens of parchment tumble-weeds collecting around the storm of Melkor’s darkened mood as he hunched in his desk chair, the air between them was compressed with all the things Tyelpë could say but which didn’t quite make it out of his mouth. Melkor offered no explanation. It was difficult not to be relieved when the Vala left, gruff, mumbling something about needing fresh air.
Tyelpë pulled away from the window, deciding that now was as good a time as any— and better that the tea didn’t get cooled. He pushed open the door carefully, making his way into the chilly calm of the twilight hours, a damp that didn’t quite seep to the bone but which felt like mint on the tongue, reminding him distinctly of Eregion and the autumn with its fragrance of petrichor and herbs. He used the hand towel he brought with him to wipe most of the dew from the adjacent seat after placing the tray with a purposeful clack onto the glass top.
Melkor moved at least, slow like he was being thawed from stillness at the gentle flavor of the chamomile that lent its taste to the air. Sitting up, the droplets that had collected on the obsidian of his hair and the black velvet of his cloak trembled like many twinkling stars, some of them falling from his atmosphere in pale comets that splashed onto the stone below. Heavy eyes soaked up any polish, absorbing Tyelpë sitting there, the tray he’d brought, then back to Tyelpë as if his thoughts were swimming— light that passed through a higher reflection index.
Through the film of mist in the air between them and the myriad of mirrors that returned Melkor’s every gesture back tenfold Tyelpë could glean something of the shadow in his eyes: thoughts of warping and bending, like a curved sheet of metal that one saw their image in, a man looking into himself and finding his face there in the well of his heart, a face misshapen by ripples or by an imperfect lens...
(Tyelpë caught glimpses of such things in Melkor, knew from all the years spent in Eregion whose citizens had all seen war in one way or another... he knew what it looked like when someone thought themselves tainted, marred, ruined. Too lame or damaged for the world that is farther along in it’s healing than they. It was the look of a time-traveler, the patina of one lingering or slowly limping behind the present moment.)
The Vala reached out, carefully cupping the teacup that looked so small, so barely-existent in his palms... steam curled over sepia, waving a frill of unwound gauze over the reflection of Melkor within the cup— a brief wound peeking through the turn of his lips, the low-turn of his eyes before it disappeared as he brought the cup up to breathe in the heat, perhaps, as much as the simple goodness of the petals.
(This was he who banished Morgoth to the void and left him there, someone who couldn’t quite remember the silhouette of the selfsame Melkor... lost in the sea of himself, unmoored and drifting through the waves for so long that he couldn’t even remember the name of his own vessel, let alone which way was north.)
“Let me help you,” Tyelpë said softly. And his words were like the warmth of tea through porcelain, like the ephemeral scent of chamomile in the pine-resin air.
What else could he offer? What else could he say?
But Melkor’s thoughts spun slow and agonizing like the mind-fog of an insomniac. Lamed, scarred, always in chronic pain... irritable, frail, sterile. A shadow of what he once was. He didn’t feel like much of anything else, nothing but old and tired, like he’d missed lifetimes and couldn’t ever hope to forget the weary decades of his absence. How does one forget the absence of themselves? How does one find something in a void?
Tyelpë placed a hand on his shoulder, bringing him back to Avathar, to their balcony, to the landscape of scattered stars and diamonds. The warmth of his hand was just enough to make it through the layer of his coat, the weight of it just enough to make him want to lean into it. Instead, he took a long draught of the tea, letting it fill out all the hollow corners of his chest: branch heat through his heart once more, fill the emptiness of his uneasy stomach. He’d never been good or even adequate with putting these things into words... just steeped in them like the tea, let it perfume his moods with flavors of bitterness and a yearning for a richer opium.
“Does it have anything to do with Anna’s necklace?” Tyelpë asks carefully.
(And Melkor wanted to pull away, a growl poised to purr from his throat. Hated that he was so obviously tinted with a certain fragility, his eyes sure to announce 'handle with care.' But Tyelpë didn’t approach him like a wild animal, nor was he doe-eyed with pity. Clear argent eyes met his own abyss, and they urged him to action with determination, with the desire to aid rather than to fix or to cure someone broken or diseased.)
Much like the tea-warmth that grew within the dark soil of his soul like mycelium, Melkor found he was caught by the dawny net of trust.
“I’ve... not made a single thing that I’m satisfied with,” Melkor began, trying to thumb through the dictionary of his jumbled emotions and not-quite finding his words. “Nothing that I’ve made on my own—”
And Melkor grimaced slightly, damming himself before he overflowed, thinking that the elf would take him the wrong way. He sat awkwardly, held together only by surface tension. It wasn’t that he didn’t enjoy labouring with Tyelpë, didn’t enjoy the finished piece and the way his sketch was so brilliantly realized... it was just...
He’d never have been able to make it on his own.
Maybe he’d get bored of setting the stones or measuring the components. Maybe he’d abandon the design for another and yet another until the succession of designs would clearly never yield a product. Maybe he’d focus too long on a single aspect, unable to envision any of the available stones in that particular socket, deciding in the end that none of them were worthy. It didn’t matter.
Melkor set the cup back on its saucer, prepared to shrug Tyelpë’s hand off of his shoulder.
“That is the creator’s burden, isn’t it?” Tyelpë murmured, letting his hand fall down to his upper arm and the bunching of the sleeve there. “Nothing you make will ever be entirely yours, and a work of art is never really finished, just abandoned.”
Melkor tipped his head over to Tyelpë, brow furrowed. He couldn’t help the surprise that lit his face— nothing in Tyelpë’s work had ever betrayed that he knew something of that disquiet feeling, that unrest that seemed to emanate from the very marrow of his dreams. Melkor had always felt that deep inside he was merely one large dreg of dissatisfaction, with his own self held as the supreme example.
(Something that went wrong in his very making.)
“That is the burden,” Melkor said slowly, at a loss.
Tyelpë nodded and the Vala’s hands built walls around the rim of the teacup, letting the steam puff over his skin in a transparent warmth... he felt like he’d been caught on flypaper, like he’d been plucked from where he was hidden on a vine. Like he’d been seen. Relief and reflex wrestled his nerves, one urging him to pull away while the rest of him wanted to shudder into the tide.
“If it is any comfort,” Tyelpë returned, “I may know a little of what you are going through.”
A droplet of clear water that had been shivering on the lock of hair tucked from Melkor’s temple let go, running along the sweep of it across his shoulder.
“I would have you speak of it,” Melkor said quietly.
Tyelpë removed his hand, and the cold that rushed to devour the warmth that lingered there was voracious and swift, an absence that was itself present— Melkor missed it, but his companion seemed to need a moment to sort his own words, taking a sip of his own cup of tea.
“Before Annatar told me who he’d been,” he began, “There was a lost, frantic, dreadful feeling within me that I needed to create something of my own that could atone for the misery of Grandfather’s jewels— something that would be a more notable creation for my House. It was exhausting to carry that pressure, always manic with the need to make anything that would be worthy of the name Curufinwë III...”
Tyelpë looked back up at Melkor through, eyes upturned in that sorrowful reminiscent smile so common amongst the elves.
“It took a lot of time to realize that no invention I could ever make would be a suitable bandage for the inner dissatisfaction I felt, that I created within me an impossibility. And what for? There was so much small, simple good I could do for the world. The Rings were—”
And Tyelpë laughed, a breathy, sad laugh.
“They were exquisite! A marvellous innovation of optics. But in my rush to distance myself from the past and carve myself a future I didn’t do the necessary interior search, that the philosophy of it all was half-mistaken and desperate. I sought perfection when such a thing doesn’t exist— I wanted to see how close the asymptote could get before reality blurred the lines.”
“Sorry!” Tyelpë laughed again, shaking his head as if to clear it, his hands lingering over the cup and his hair disturbing some of the drops still on the back of the chair he sat in. “I tend to ramble, as I’m sure you’ve gathered,” he said, smiling less with sadness and more with careful fondness.
“But all of this is to say— you’ve all the time in the world. You are still recovering from the War as I was in those days, still finding yourself in the quiet of peace... Genius will come to you in all its splendid imperfection, you just need reflection and time and collaboration—” and his hand came to rest back on Melkor’s, approaching somewhat hesitantly, allowing Melkor to retreat should he wish.
He didn’t. The hand was warm, soothing away the hungry cold. “There’s no easy balm to what you’re feeling, but the feeling will pass.”
And Melkor was nearly there, ready to melt into the solace of those words, ready to give what scraps of faith he still had for anything other than Mairon, ready to sacrifice his paranoia to that tempting hope. But he felt... like a rag all wrung out. More scars than unbroken flesh, like more weariness than passion. Like forgotten honey, crystallized at the bottom of a half-empty jar.
(What was a creator who didn’t create, what were they but a failure? Washed-up thing, shapeless blob that was poked at on the shore. A stranded squid with no more ink, desiccating in the brilliance.)
“What if,” Melkor whispered, as if he didn’t want to suggest it. “What if there’s...”
More crystals, scattering themselves at their feet. Dropping one-by-one.
“If there’s nothing left within you?” Tyelpë asks.
He nods, can’t really bring himself to look, pretends to inspect his cooling tea. The ever-present shame threatens to burn his cheeks, and he needed to focus to keep his fingers from twitching.
But there’s never any ridicule in Tyelpë’s presence: even in the exhale-laugh he frees:
“Then I say to that as the Khazad used: that the thought is not worth a single hair from my beard!”
Silver eyes, bright and glittering and intelligent like the dew-eyes of a bird: when Tyelpë looks at him, Melkor can almost convince himself that he existed, that he was more than just a remnant, a ghost. And he continued in that confident, lovely water’s fall of words his assurance:
“I’ve seen you knock out pages and pages of your sketchbook in a day, seen you write long into the morning hours, heard you sing to the creatures in your terrariums and watched you nurse premature hatchlings with all the care and patience in the world! I know that you’ve a wealth of ideas no one’s put together before, know that they’re just waiting within you for discovery. Only you can do that— no one else. We are all just the sum-total of our experiences, and so what? But all we’ve experienced is unique. That’s not nothing.”
And again, Melkor was surprised by this incarnate being, being of finite existence who seemed in all his earthly immortality to have a faith beyond the celestial spheres. The vehemence with which he said those words, their comforting flavor, the hope... it was infectious. It was a meal to hunger, it was sustenance for the soul.
Melkor finally found something of himself, like a fragrance in the wind: “You believe that, don’t you?”
“I know it.”
And there was perhaps nothing more in the world Melkor wanted in that moment than to seal his lips over the curve of Tyelpë’s, to revive his defunct hope with what, like honey, sweetened his voice. He would have— grabbed Tyelpë’s jaw, brought him close enough that he could claim the sounds before they escaped, swallow them and bite at the soft flesh of his lips, but—
The elf was shivering, stifled by flexed muscle but otherwise noticeable in the coat that wasn’t enough to keep the damp searching fingers of the weather from soaking through. Melkor stopped himself, leaned in only halfway to those minutely parted lips...
“You’re cold.”
Eyes wide and cheeks flushed, surely from the cold, Tyelpë was charming when he was flustered, clearly having expected
something else.
(And if Tyelpë was relieved Melkor didn’t catch it: relieved because Melkor’s teasing was surely a sign that he saw the vista of peace through the crowded and dark forest of his brooding: saw that things do get better.)
“It is rather cold out tonight,” Tyelpë admitted, tipping his head back to watch Melkor stand up from his chair, suddenly taller and darker and more luminous— like the full moon imposed on the backdrop of a deep midnight.
“Come,” Melkor offered, “I will fix the fire.”
A vision came to Melkor then as he was stoking the flame back into fervency in its hearth: another piece he could make, something he could try his hand at after the terrible mind-block he’d nearly sunk into. Another necklace, in complement and contrast to Mairon’s— a luminous fall like moonlight through a glistening sheet of water, fire and yet not fire, a refreshment to the soul, a sweet rest one wakes from... stones that cascaded down the wearer like a shower of diamond and opal.
Tyelpë’s footsteps, returning from the closet where he’d gone to retrieve a thicker shawl come nearer and Melkor is restless now with a new energy, restless not with disquiet but with contentment untamed.
“I wasn’t expecting the temperature to drop so quick—”
He kisses him like he wished, all firm pressure that couldn’t be denied a kiss— not a meager peck or caress of lips or a caste modest-thing— a proper kiss all tight-grasp and possession and, and
Thank you.
“Well,” Tyelpë gasps, breathless.
“Well? Is that all you’ve to say?” Melkor rasps, pulling him up against him.
Tyelpë rumbled with amusement, a soft and purring sound that made fuzzy their contact. Melkor’s hand had come to rest splayed along the elf’s neck, light pressure but a strong suggestion.
“You’re right,” Tyelpë sighed, “Shouldn’t have said anything at all.”
More, a deeper kiss to the shadow between lips and the taste of the tea found on each other. Melkor, tall and dark, surrounded him like a shade blotting out the liquid light from the fireplace, hand still on his neck where his pulse thrummed it’s song against his long curled fingers. His other hand found Tyelpë’s waist, pulled him closer, into the orbit of his gravity and the curtain of his still damp-hair.
Tyelpë pulled back from his demanding lips, chased their advance with a laugh and a hand— “Maybe we can...?”
Melkor smiled that wolfish, predatory grin of his, adoring the fluster of Tyelpë’s whisper that sent soft heat puffing over his lips, the pulse under his palm that sped up, the amusing way that he rambled.
“Warm you up?” Melkor finished.
Tyelpë laughed again— and maybe creation was as simple as this: as getting another person to laugh. “Oh, that’s awful,” Tyelpë chuckled, still flushed but with silver eyes that followed the Vala’s lips...
“Shouldn’t have said anything at all.” Melkor supplied, leaning in to kiss Tyelpë again, lips like honey against his own.