Work Text:
“I don’t think,” Maedhros says mildly, “That I can whittle with one hand.”
Amras feels foolish, even though he anticipated this answer. He has coaxed Maedhros to the greening sward below the stables, chair and all, because Estrela said that his brother wanted something to keep his hand busy. Something more than holding a pen, or fiddling with buttons.
You are so clever with your hands, Estrela encouraged him. I think he misses that cleverness.
That was true. But it wasn’t only that.
He wants to feel important, Amras thought, clinging a little proudly to better knowledge of Maitimo than Estrela, friend of Russandol, could have. We all do. It’s one of the family curses.
Here and now, though, despite Maedhros’ willingness to accompany Amras on this downhill venture, things look bleak. The lines of Maedhros’ neck are tense and strained above his calico collar. He has a furrow between his brows that Amras has come to understand means pain, and his right wrist is tucked furtively against his body, as if he is trying to hide it. No matter that Amras waited for the morning hours after the days’ riders had gone out, and midday chores were well underway in the fort. No matter that even the children are too occupied to be an audience for Maedhros’ attempts at self-improvement.
Too often, now, Maedhros wants to be wholly alone.
Can you be? Amras wonders, thinking of his own ghosts. Can you ever be alone?
For the thousandth time, Amras wishes that Amrod were here. His twin always understood better the balance of boldness and wisdom—at least, until the end.
“I thought you might like to try, at least,” Amras mumbles.
There is a little pause. The yellow-headed blackbirds that have been sporting in the rushes by the lake are singing urgently, and the May wind is rustling the treetops across the bridge.
“Are you happy here?” Maedhros asks.
Amras swallows. He did not expect such a question. The knife-handle sweats in his hand. He sets it aside, the blade winking silver among the green and fawn threads of new grass poking through old.
“No,” he answers at last, because he doesn’t like lying to anybody, even Maedhros, who sometimes needs a friendly lie. “But I don’t think I’d be happier anywhere now.”
What would it be like, to return to empty Formenos, or the grime-covered city, or to any of the places he knew when Amrod and Mother and Athair were still living? When Maedhros was—
“Hmm,” Maedhros says. “All right.”
“Do you think I should be happy?” Amras asks. Maybe the aloneness that Maedhros wants can serve its own purpose today: maybe Amras can reach him some other way than whittling. Usually, Maglor is hanging about, or Caranthir. When Amras wants freedom from the fussing women and the inquisition of Sticks and Frog (which he doesn’t half mind), or if he cares to be treated like a man instead of forgotten underfoot by the men of Mithrim, he must hunt with Celegorm.
“You shouldn’t care,” Maedhros says, “What I think.”
Amras digests this. He picks up the knife again, so that he will have something to look at that is not his brother. He understands more and more with each passing week (even the ones in which there is laughter, a bounty of food, and good weather) why Caranthir hides himself away as he does. He understands why Celegorm hunts. He understands why Maedhros…
Well. Amras cannot pretend to know what the scars on Maedhros’ body and soul have truly done to him. It would be childish folly to pretend otherwise. He and Amrod used to talk in whispers about what was done to Rumil, why his neck and back were so dreadfully scarred, and that was enough to fill them with sickened interest.
This is so much worse.
What happened to Maedhros…
“I know why we came west,” Amras says at last. With an effort to shake his cowardice, he turns his head and lifts his chin to face Maedhros. He is sitting beside the chair he brought out, on the sun-warmed earth, and so of course Maedhros is immensely taller than he is. Taller, yet more stooped. Red-golden in the sunlight, even while the threads of white in his hair mirror the lines of suffering etched by his lips and eyes.
Still, his face is—it is the first face that Amras remembers knowing.
From the long, cold winter when Athair was gone, there are a few memories trapped in Amras’ mind; a few sights and sensations. He knows that Mamaí’s milk dried up, which made for many long and tear-filled nights. Amras cried with hunger more than Amrod did, because he especially did not like to eat the hard foods his brothers did: bread and meat and vegetables. He missed the warmth, the comfort of babyhood. Of course, sometimes Mamaí would take the twins to her bed, and let them sleep there, but in the whole of that winter she did not sleep much herself. She sat by the fireside, very still, with her knitting untouched in her lap and her face in her hands.
Maedhros—Maitimo—would come for them instead. He would coax them from their cribs (growing too short and narrow) and let them tumble under the quilts belonging to him and Maglor.
Amras can almost see him coming into the nursery, tall Maitimo with his hair curling into his eyes, blinking away his own sleepiness and tenderly whispering their names.
He has not wanted to look at the memories he does not know: Maitimo whipped and branded and starved. He does not want to understand how his brother changed, but he knows he must.
This is what the rest are hiding from, even Caranthir.
“Do you?” Maedhros asks, very softly. “Do you know?”
“It doesn’t help,” Amras says. “To recall that we were going to make a ruin of everything B-Bauglir did. Of course, Athair pretended that that wasn’t all. We were going to own a great deal of land, he said at first. And we were going to be strong, and not forever fighting. But we came west to make war.”
He can say Bauglir, if he forces himself. He can say Athair.
He doesn’t say Amrod aloud without feeling like a branding iron has been set against his skin.
“We have Mithrim,” Maedhros says, and his voice is bitter. “Is that not land?”
“It isn’t ours.”
“It’s not.” Maedhros scratches his nose. “Better that it isn’t, though. Whatever we manage to build here does good for more than ourselves, and whatever we break…others may mend.”
“They’ve been mending the railroad,” Amras points out, and to his surprise, Maedhros laughs. It is a dry, husky echo of his former self, but still a laugh.
“I’m afraid I mended the railroad, bairn.”
“What?” Amras catches himself, still a little stunned by the affectionate blow of bairn. “Oh, you mean…”
Maedhros was Gothmog’s slave. They don’t speak of it often, but Amras has pieced together the story from his brothers’ murmurings, and from the stories he hears from Estrela and the children. To labor under Gothmog was to do Morgoth’s work.
And Morgoth came west to oversee the construction of the railroad. Two springs ago, only, Uncle Fingolfin rode north to say so.
Maedhros taps his fingers against his knee. His broken nails have grown in, but they are still short and misshapen. Every inch of Maedhros is an unfortunate reminder of what will never be as it was.
“Yes,” Maedhros says. “My first task was stirring the tar that men like Gwindor used to seal the ties. We had shanties to build and roofs to finish, too, but those took secondary precedence. If we carted a barrow of stones for a foundation, we carted two of stakes and nails, fresh from the forges.”
“The forges you…” Amras is not sure how much he should press, but information is information. He wants to know, he realizes. He wants to know anything Maedhros will tell him.
The fear—the desire to hide from truths that cry out like blood falling to earth—they mean something else.
“Gwindor and I only knew one forge,” Maedhros says. “And it was not for making anything as crude as a stake. But the point remains, Amras.” He is squinting in the sunlight, and smiling with one corner of his mouth. “I paid for our bold expeditions with what little I had to give.”
The smile says, we have lost so much, and Amras is relieved to be able to understand it.
“Were you—angry at us for making so much work for you?” Amras asks. “In the end?”
“Angry at myself, maybe. Never at you.” Maedhros shakes head, emphasizing the point. “But it was strange, to be burdened in that way. I suppose it taught me a good deal, or would have, if I could keep hold of a single lesson I’ve ever learned.”
“It was never going to do any good.” Amras plunges the knife into the earth, something Celegorm has told him not to do a dozen times—You’ll strike rocks. Damages the blade, you ninny—“Doing things Athair’s way.”
Another silence. The subject of Athair is still a dreadfully fraught one.
“My own way is not much better,” Maedhros says quietly. “But I will not bind anyone to what I would not bind myself.”
Amras woke Maedhros, that night long ago. Maedhros’ strong arm was around Amras’ shoulder when they faced Athair together.
They could not save Amrod.
They could not save anything.
“Sometimes,” Amras says, leaving his knife where it sticks, and tearing up a handful of new grass, “I wish Athair…” But he can’t go on. If he said, was alive, so that he could suffer the sight of you, it would only be Maedhros who was wounded. If he said, could be punished, that might hurt Maedhros too.
“I know,” Maedhros says, somehow content with the unfinished thought. “But I think we must leave him where he lies.” He stretches out his hand: the knuckles still too thick for his thin fingers, the palm scarred and calloused. “Give me the knife. I’ll see how its weight feels, at least.”
Amras wipes it clean of dirt on his trousers, and hands it over.
Maedhros holds it as carefully as one might hold a snake. He turns it slowly, slowly. “You can ask me anything you like,” he says. “Any question. I’ll answer it.”
Maedhros wouldn’t say this to Curufin. Amras considers the weight of this honor, this confidence. It is heavier than any weapon in his hands. At last, he decides.
“If…” He licks his lips. He has sometimes wanted to tell Maedhros about Amrod-in-the-water, has wanted to lead his brother to the water’s edge to see if two red heads could find a third again.
Like it used to be.
(The first face Amras knew—looked like his own—)
“If the time came, I mean, if there was good reason…would it—would it be wrong to be happy again?” Before Maedhros can so much as begin to formulate an answer, Amras hurries on, “I don’t mean that it will be happen. The folks here are nice enough, and the ones you brought back even nicer, but it doesn’t signify…it doesn’t change what happened.”
“You mean it doesn’t change who we are,” Maedhros says, his voice still soft but his eyes almost unbearably keen.
Amras nods.
“You’re blameless,” Maedhros says. The knife is clenched tightly in his left fist now. Amras will never be used to the absence of his right hand. It is so—wrong, that it should be gone forever. There is no greater injustice, even death. “The rest of us shall have to answer for what we’ve done, or what we’ve been accused of—some more than others. But you should take whatever chances you get at freedom. At happiness. Your friends are your own, made by your own merit. You don’t owe a soul anything, Amras.”
Maedhros is wrong—it is to the soul of his twin that Amrod will ever be indebted, but he is still a coward in this: he does not want to say so.
“You brought me friends,” he says. “Estrela. St—I mean, Lucy. And Amlach.” Amras tries to call the children by the right names. It is still a bit of a trick, since they change their minds from day to day about what they prefer, but he tries.
Something in Maedhros gentles, then; something Amras had not recognized as tension before.
“I can’t take credit for that.”
One of the blackbirds wings towards them, yellow-crowned and dark-eyed. A free creature, a bold creature. Amras says, “You saved their lives.”
“I was…lucky.”
Amras huffs. “Oh, come off it, Maitimo. I’m still going to think well of you. Why wouldn’t I? I’ve been here just as long as you have, and I was here when you were gone, and it was awful. It was something awful.”
To have two brothers dead—Amras knows why they all went mad.
Maedhros was not the only one to reach that winter changed.
Maedhros does not look at him. He flips the knife so that the edge of its blade faces up, and drags its blunt side along the knee of his trousers, as if tempting the thin woolen weave to tear.
“That I helped them,” Maedhros says, “To escape the havoc I had created for the greater good…is not enough. They should never have been there; they were taken from homes they were content to bide in, or born into horrors no child should suffer. Innocents, truly, and I include Estrela in that number. But I—”
“You didn’t deserve it either. God above.” He feels like Celegorm, taking the Lord’s name in vain, even though it is (in comparison to what Celegorm is wont to say) a mild curse.
Maedhros chuckles. Two laughs, in a single morning? This day is strangely lucky.
“For you, I’ll come off it, then. Sometimes it was easier to think I deserved it, that’s all.” He adds, more quietly, “Since I couldn’t escape it.”
“Was it? Easier, I mean?”
“No. But one has to think of something, when—” He checks himself. Amras winces at the scenes of pain that leap to mind, even unspoken. Maedhros says quickly, “So. Lucy and Amlach. Getting on with them like a house on fire, are you?”
“They like to tease and poke and strut about too proud for anyone, when the mood takes them,” Amras answers, gratefully accepting the change in subject. “But I show ‘em how to do all sorts of things that they like. And I’m not scared of Lucy, whatever she’s been telling you.”
“She’s not frightening, not really,” Maedhros agrees, with a sly smile that is very like the Maitimo of old—the one who would wake early on the first morning after coming in from the city, and cut capers all the day long. “Not like Aredhel. Or Galadriel—good Lord. Miss Lucy is just fierce. She’s as good a friend as I’ve ever had. Of course she likes you.”
Amras flushes, even though the compliment isn’t wholly just. Sticks—Lucy is very particular with her likes, and it would be bold of him to assume he was squarely in her favor.
“I don’t suppose it will be easy to chip at wood as you’d slice at an apple,” he says, shifting up onto his knees so that he can gesture towards the knife, and wait for Maedhros to allow his touch. At a slight nod—at the absence of a flinch—Amras slips his left hand beneath his brother’s and guides the knife into a better position. “It might be smoother to shift it with two fingers ‘stead of one—until you can depend on your wrist to move as you expect it to—”
“You can whittle left-handed?” Maedhros asks, mildly disbelieving.
Amras moves one knee an inch so that it isn’t being worried by a particularly rough pebble. “Celegorm says I’d be a fool not to.”
He hopes Maedhros doesn’t ask when Celegorm began to say this.
Thankfully, Maedhros only nods. He lets Amras move his fingers into place, holding the knife like’s it a delicate creature, not something that can kill.
“Did you bring me something to carve?” Maedhros asks at length, when he has become comfortable with the positioning, and Amras permits himself a grin at last. He digs in his trouser pocket for the small block of soft pine he brought with him, and produces it with a flourish.
One can learn, through change. One can turn the blades of life outward, even when wounded.
Amras isn’t going to lose his brother again.