Work Text:
"Today you depart, then," Fingon said.
"I should not have lingered so long," Maedhros answered. He did not startle. Once Fingon's habit of appearing out of nowhere and beginning conversations in the wrong place had been amusing. Maedhros might wake in his own bower with the light of Telperion flooding the open window, and the shutters he had closed yestereve drawn back, and Fingon would be there perched on the windowsill saying, I found a cliff, in the wilds of the South, a great cliff that plummets to a cave, and at the base there is bored into the hollows of the earth a deep dark pool, with starlight reflected in the shadows.
So you decided to compose a poem? Maedhros might ask as he sat up in bed, and Fingon's pensive look would crack to laughter: yes, but first, I am going to jump off my cliff into the water, do you want to come with me?
It had seemed a madness, a dream, when Fingon in just his usual way had appeared from nowhere on the peaks of Thangorodrim and left off singing to begin the conversation in the middle: now of course you have to live, when Maedhros had not yet asked to die.
It was the last time Maedhros had let himself be surprised.
This was no bower. The House of Fëanor and their followers had taken the very stones of the first settlement with them. Only a few timber frames remained for shelter from the elements. Maedhros sat in the sturdiest of them, watching the lake that he did not mean to look on again. He had heard Fingon coming down the hill, picked out the cadence of his footfalls from memory, and decided that he was alone. Maedhros had a sword on the ground at his side. There was a sharp dagger in his sleeve, held there by a cunning device, so that if he turned his remaining hand just so the hilt would slide into it.
After a moment or two he showed these things to Fingon, the sword, the dagger. Their conversations had always gone in sideways skips. Another might have frowned at Maedhros's silence, but Fingon only nodded, not needing to hear yes, I am alone, I have sent my kin ahead, but see, I am prepared to defend myself.
"That is a nice device, but so slight a blade will not do you much good in the thick of a fight," was all he said of the dagger.
"No, but I could cut my own throat with it," said Maedhros.
Fingon tilted his head a little, acknowledging. Maedhros would miss him sorely. There was no other he could speak to without guarding his words, softening, understating, sparing them the horror. Fingon knew the horror already. He had seen the worst. And he did not throw tantrums about it. Maedhros was heartily sick of making people cry just by talking normally. He could hardly say to Celegorm while he wept frantically on Maedhros's shoulder, bad enough that it happened, must I really comfort you as well?
"Well," he said. "Time to be parted."
"I want to tell you something," said Fingon.
Maedhros waited.
"My father wants a grandson."
"I know." Maedhros saw the next skip of Fingon's thought and answered it. "He has other children."
"Because he will have none of me," Fingon agreed.
"I know."
"You know," Fingon said. "I have never loved a maid."
"You love other things," Maedhros said. "The harp-song and the war-cry. Arrows on the wing. The light of morning." Strange, that he wanted to weep. Maedhros had been quick to show feeling once, before he had fallen into Morgoth's hands. Now tears came rarely. "You love the high cliff, the swift dive into dark water. The plummet and the splash."
Fingon laughed. "Yes. No!"
"You are yourself," Maedhros said. "Do not brood on your father's wants."
"I do not. Hush. I came to tell you something, not to be advised. It was not a thing to speak of in the old days. But in Middle-earth we make our own laws. So. I have never loved a maid, and never will. But I love. Not just the harp-song, the arrows, the dark water." Fingon was looking out over the lake. Maedhros saw the half-smile on his face. "I love."
"Fingon?" Maedhros said, and then something he had never said to Fingon before: "What are you talking about?"
"There are those among the Green-elves and the Grey-elves who do it," Fingon said swiftly. He turned to Maedhros. "Maiden heart turns to maid, and man to man. And I am such a one. Did you know?"
Maedhros said, "I did not know."
"I thought you might know."
"No."
Fingon said, "Now you do."
There was a little quiet. Maedhros disliked it. "Why did you tell me?" he asked.
"Because I never had before," Fingon said. "Because."
Understanding was like standing on a stone midstream and jumping to the next one. "You have been lonely."
"In our family? No!" Fingon said, and then, "Yes."
Fingon's character was peculiar, his habits wild. He was not politic. He had no craft, no art. His poems and his songs were pretty and slight as soap bubbles. He practised nothing, held to no path, took up enthusiasms and forgot them. In Valinor he had always been reckoned among the least of the princes of the Noldor.
In Middle-earth the Noldor adored him. Fingon regarded it, when he noticed at all, with bemusement. He had not changed. He was wild and impolitic and artless and fearless. His gifts were for war, for adversity, for dauntless courage. They were not crafts perfected by long labour and cunning device. They were natural to him. It was only that there had never been any need for heroes before.
Maedhros had heard some tales of the Ice. Many had seemed to think he would want to know. There was a beast, someone might say, a great white beast that came out of the shadows, and the Prince had only his hunting knife and a seal-fat torch. Or: there was a crack in the Ice, black water full of teeth, and I fell and would have drowned, but the Prince dived in after me.
In other words, Fingon had been himself. Of course. He was always himself. Maedhros did not like to think of him cold and alone.
"Is he Green-elf or Grey-elf, then?" he asked.
Fingon said, "I do not know." And at Maedhros's look, "I have not met him yet. I only think that perhaps I shall try to, now. In Middle-earth, where we make our own laws."
"I should like to meet him," Maedhros said, and could not understand why the words tasted like a lie. "Whoever he is. Whenever he comes. Tell me what manner of man he shall be." They had never had a conversation like this one. Other friends spoke of love and of being beloved. Fingon and Maedhros even in their first youth had only ever spoken to each other and of each other; and of wild places, of stormy weather, of the plummet and the splash.
Fingon laughed. "I have not got very far. Tall. Clever. Both vital, because I am neither myself." A pause to let Maedhros laugh at that. "And he shall look at me as I look at him," Fingon went on, a little quieter. "That is the heart of it, I think. I should like that."
"You should have everything that gives you joy," Maedhros said. "You are easy to love."
Fingon cast that half-smile in his direction. "I thank you," he said. "I shall think more on it, before I go seeking for him. Really the most important thing is that he should not be my handsome cousin this time."
The next stepping-stone was not there, nor the one behind. This was not one of the easy silences that came when there was nothing else to say. There must be more to say. Maedhros could not find it.
Fingon said, "I really thought you might know."
"No."
"It was a foolish love," Fingon said. "One that could not be. The Eldar do not wed so close, even if—even if. But it mattered to me, and so I wanted to tell it."
"I have heard it," Maedhros said.
Fingon frowned. "Mistake me not. It was not for love that I came to find you on the mountain. I would have done it though I hated you." He looked thoughtful. "Indeed I did hate you, I think."
"I know," Maedhros said. "I know you did." He swallowed. "Nothing will steal the deed from you."
"No, never. Do you know, I like this Middle-earth?"
At last Maedhros could follow his thought again, could hear: for the deeds worth doing, sharpened with meaning, real as they never were before. "I know you do," he said.
"You should be gone," said Fingon.
"Days ago," said Maedhros. He could not stay here, in this country of their first failures, their losses, his own terrible weakness. "I wish you had not told me."
Fingon's glance was as one struck by a blow from friendly quarters, the same shock and sudden bitterness. Maedhros did not expect him to look scornful after that. It was as if in telling his secret he had become a stranger after all. "Then forget," he said. "You will go, and not come again. Why should I not tell you what I please?"
"I only," Maedhros said.
"No, I will not hear it."
"You are not listening."
"And I will not listen."
"Should I be glad?" Maedhros cried. "That you used to love me, and now you do not?"
Quiet. Maedhros thought again of the song of water: now the rushing stream subsiding, the snowmelt poured away. There had been no water on the mountain. The very rains of heaven had turned to foul steam about the peaks of Morgoth's slagheap.
At last as the silence lingered he managed to call up laughter. "But I speak too lightly," he said. "It is all to the good. Certainly you now have handsomer cousins." Loveliness had been as proper to him once as song was to his brother Maglor; all marred now. "I shall not forgive you if you take up with Orodreth."
Fingon's shout of appalled laughter in turn, like music. Then he said, "But no."
"Green-elf or Grey-elf, bring him to meet me," Maedhros said.
"No," Fingon said. "No, I think I shall not." A pause. Fingon crouched beside him, over the sword, his fingertips on the naked blade. Maedhros turned towards him. Fingon said swiftly, "Say nothing you do not mean, for I will not let you unsay it."
Then Maedhros learned what it was like to be kissed by a hero. It was very quick and yet very sure. Fingon kissed boldly, artlessly, and without hesitation, as if Maedhros himself were both the precipice and the dark water.
Afterwards Maedhros drew a shallow breath. "Green-elf or Grey-elf," he said. "I shall welcome him for love of you—if he gives you joy, I shall be glad of it—I mean that."
"No," Fingon said. "I shall not seek him. I do not want him."
"I cannot stay here." Here in the lands where his father had died, and where Morgoth had claimed Maedhros afterwards. Had Fëanor in Valinor walked every day in the scenes of his own worst losses? Maedhros did not know how he had borne it so long.
"I don't care."
To rob the Noldor of their hero now would undo everything Fingon had done to make peace between their peoples. "I cannot take you with me."
"I don't care."
Maedhros said desperately, "I have said already words I cannot unsay, words I would not unsay even if I could, and they were not for you."
Fingon leaned over the blade, and his hand slipped. Maedhros saw, aghast, that he had cut his flesh on the wicked edge. Fingon glanced down untroubled and then put his bloody fingers to Maedhros's face. "I don't care," he said. "Say some other words. Say you love me."
"I must not."
"This is Middle-earth. Say it anyway."
"To what end?"
"To delight me," Fingon said. "To give me joy. And I shall compose you a song, a foolish one. I know you do not like my songs."
"I love your songs," Maedhros said.
"Then you have grown sentimental. There is nothing to them. Say it."
Maedhros said it.
Fingon's eyes were dark, yet the light in them was the light of the stars. "Now of course I must kiss you again," he said.
Maedhros yielded. His heart clamoured within him. Fingon set aside the sword that lay between them, and sucked the half-forgotten blood off his own fingers without thought or meaning to it, and said also, "Give me that dagger."
"I am afraid," Maedhros said, which he would have said to no one else, and before this hour not to Fingon either. But now was the time for saying all things unspoken.
"Do not be afraid," Fingon said. "If we are taken unawares I promise I shall cut your throat myself."
"And your own after," Maedhros said, "promise me that too."
"That I will not," Fingon said, "save to avenge you. Give it to me. I am faster than you are. And I will not have you bristling with blades for this."
"Will you wed me here and now?"
"Why wait?" Fingon said, and his laugh was the same that he had laughed upon the windowsill by the light of Telperion. Surely the time is now, he had said once, surely the only time is now. Fingon had an art after all, Maedhros thought of a sudden, an art without name that shaped itself in deed and daring, an art whose proper form lay in wild Time and its merciless march of consequence. How he had been wasted in the endless bliss of Valinor!
And so they lay down together there by the water, and after a while it began to rain, but neither of them noticed.
"I do like this Middle-earth," Fingon said afterwards, soft. "I shall come to you now and again, if you let me."
"You never waited to be let before," Maedhros said.
"Perhaps I am grown wiser than I used to be."
"I know you are not," Maedhros said. "I know you well."
"I always thought you must be mine," Fingon said. "I have no gift of foresight. I have no gifts at all, truly. But how could I love you so dearly, if you were not mine?"
Maedhros said, "You have my dagger still?"
"Rest," Fingon said. "I have it."
Maedhros rested. For the first time since the mountain his dreams were untroubled, save that he dreamed a while of a great fire, and could not look away. Sometimes it seemed that the fire was his father's pyre, and sometimes that it was a great conflagration of collapsing timbers carved as swans, and sometimes it was something else. But this was a small and easy nightmare, compared to the ones that had come before. When it grew too great he called Fingon's name, and heard him as it were a song in his heart, and then the fire was gone.
Then Maedhros dreamed water instead, the sighing lake, the stones in the rushing stream, the cool rain that poured from heaven. At last he dreamed the pool at the foot of a precipice, bored down deep into the bottomless darkness of the earth. Above him someone was laughing and leaping, bold and careless. Maedhros looked up from the bowels of the earth and could only wonder at it, the fall without fear, the dive into darkness cut with starlight.