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Maedhros had been an only child once. If he cast his mind back through years of blood and agony; and yet more of glimmering sunlit trees, he could recall the way the house had sounded with no feet but his own and his parents pattering across it. But he had only been around fifty when Maglor was born, and the house became far, far louder with his baby brother’s impressive cries. His mother had tapped him lightly on the nose once, when he had groused about the baby, complained that he should have been enough for them. He had been such a wonderful child, she had told him, that they just couldn’t help but want another. The compliment had burrowed into his heart and made him glow as a youth; though given that his parents had later produced Celegorm and decided to have yet four more sons, Maedhros had begun to wonder if perhaps she had not been wholly honest.
But no matter the younger sibling life threw at him, he had taken it in his stride. The eldest of a collection of seven brothers, and a further hoard of cousins, he had settled into the role of the protector, the guide and the chaperone to each of their hobbies and responsibilities. At seventy, he had begun teaching a twenty year old Maglor the advanced music pieces on the harp which he himself had been practicing for years; had carried the boy upon his shoulders to classes with private tutors. He had caught Celegorm every time he had fallen from a rickety tree branch, had braided Caranthir’s hair in the specific way he liked it because nobody else could. If he sat in the quiet and cast his mind back, he could still hear the arguments which arose when someone else touched the boy’s hair of “No! You aren’t doing it right!” Until Maedhros had swept in to take over and Caranthir had quieted down and allowed him to work. He had been the one who taught Curufin the barest hints of diplomacy, knowing he would not pick it up in the forge as he did all else from their father – had been his guardian when Feanor was busy, until Celegorm was old and, supposedly, wise enough to take his place.
He had been the one, even though by the time they were born he had been more than old enough to be thinking of a marriage and children of his own, who had ferried around the twins; when their overflowing household was too busy, too hectic underfoot. It was he who had taught them to ride, and to use the swords their elder brother and father made.
They had made Maedhros. Shaped him just as much as their parents had. He had grown his identity half around them, the eldest of seven brothers. Feanor’s heir, the responsible, handsome boy with the clever mind. He had heard the talk around court for most of his younger years.
“Thank Eru that one inherited some of his mother,” from one courtier. “At least one of them is suited to diplomacy,” from another. It had angered him, quietly and privately, all those years. Maglor was less bold than Maedhros, but he had always considered his younger brother the kinder of the two of them. His other brothers too. Celegorm had an unbreakable drive, his undying determination to join the hunt of the Valar Orome to show as proof of it. Caranthir had a single minded focus Maedhros could only have dreamed of, and Curufin had a passion for his forge craft to match any boring politicians supposed love of their work.
But he had held his tongue in polite society, and he had looked after his brothers for as long as each of them would let him. And he had lost them all anyway.
His brothers had survived the Dagor-nuin-Giliath. They made it through the Dagor Bragollach and the Nirnaeth Arnoediad, which had taken several of their cousins from them. They had survived lost fortresses, exiles, and orcs. In the post alliance haze of dogged misery, he had begun to think them untouchable. Truly immortal.
But of course, it had not been such. He had been wrong, as always. There had been one thing in all of Arda which could touch them still.
The oath.
The loss of three of their brothers in the one dreadful, evil battle in Doriath had risen Maedhros from his dirge of self-pity and pierced him with the unspeakable horror of losing a sibling. Of losing three.
Then, again. They had been so foolish, so reckless, as to try again for the silmaril stolen by Luthien from Morgoth’s crown, at the Havens of Sirion. There they had lost their remaining two brothers. The twins. Maedhros knew, logically, that they were no longer boys. They had grown into hunters, warriors, and they had ridden to their deaths as such. But all his heart could see were the two wide-eyed children he remembered staring up at him in Valinor. Before the sundering of the Noldor from their kindred.
----
It began slowly from there, once they had found the two boys. The survivors of their blood frenzy. The ones Maglor had decreed his own responsibility to raise, and whom Maedhros had not had the strength of will to deny. Once they had, the four of them – though not the same four who had set out nights before – returned to Amon Ereb, he noticed it. A tense of his fingers when Maglor strayed from his sight. The relaxation of his aching muscles at the gentle power of his brother’s voice.
It had sat just below the skin for months. Until it had grown and grown, and fear as he had never felt it drove him to the very depths of despair; tormented as he was by nightmares of losing his last little brother.
At night he could not sleep, tormented by dreams more awful than those which his tortured mind was able to conjure even in the depths of Angband. He would wake from visions of horror to find himself stood in the hallway which ran outside each of their rooms. The cold rush of the stone against his feet grounded him, brought him back to his reality. It was only marginally better than his dreams, but at least one brother still lived beneath the slowly decaying roof of their fortress.
But he had found himself more and more unable to convince himself of that very fact. Had found himself sliding open the door to Maglor’s room and standing in towering silence to watch the slow rise and fall of his brother’s chest until he could force himself to believe Mandos had not taken him.
Night after night, he would pace the hallways in a half-sleep. Groaning to full awake-ness once the chill of the floor became too great on his bare feet. He wondered, occasionally, if the twins ever saw him. He could only imagine, in the chilled light of dawn’s spent leant against the parapets, the nightmarish figure he must cut. A moaning, weeping spectre, haunting already cursed halls. A mountain of misplaced shapes and missing parts, shuffling through the pitch black like a wounded beast.
No wonder, he supposed, they so preferred the open warmth of his brother. Clung to Maglor like a pair of limpets. Like Maedhros has begun to do.
For there were only so many nights he could wake with the punch of nauseating fear that he was alone before he began to watch over his brother while he slept. There were also, it became clear, only so many nights he could do that, before it too was no longer enough. He could not say if it was his exhausted mind, or a trick of the light, or Irmo sliding horror behind his eyes as he slipped into sleep between one blink and the next; but Maedhros could have sworn he saw Maglor’s narrow chest stop moving. He had launched himself across the room with a wordless cry and collapsed to his knees beside the bed. The noise had startled his brother awake and a long fingered hand had reached out for him in the dark.
“Maedhros?” Maglor’s voice had rasped in the darkness, croaky from sleep. He had felt the touch of the hand on his hair, as his brother located him and rolled over to see him crouched on the floor as if in prayer. Maedhros had begun crying, somewhere in the moments it took for him to realise his brother yet lived.
“I’m sorry – I’m sorry,” It was all he could say as he pressed his head against his brother’s hand. Maglor had hushed him, with soft tones, until he had found snatches of dreamless sleep and woken with aching legs and tear stained cheeks. Maglor had already risen. They did not speak on it again.
It had spiralled from there. He had found himself, night and night again, crouched on the stones. His eye’s focussed on Maglor’s chest, rising and falling in sleep. He counted breaths. Inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, the only rhythm which could comfort him.
Until once more, it had not been enough to soothe the endless, frantic fear in his mind. His eyes had slipped closed for a second, half of that perhaps. It had been enough to make his entire chest heave as he had come back to the reality of the room, the dark, the body on the bed. The body, the body, his little brother’s body. Hand shaking, he had reached out, had pressed his palm into the mattress and used it to push himself up to stare down at Maglor’s shallow breathing in the darkness. With his body trembling from exhaustion, he had crawled onto the bed, hand splayed out in front of him to rest atop his brother’s sleep shirt. There, he could feel it. The rise and fall. Life. He had laid there, unmoving and not resting, with Maglor’s chest rising and falling beneath the heat of his hand for hours; until the first silver strands of dawn had broken through the window, and he had fled to the walls of the keep to stare, unblinking at the horizon.
He had known it was foolish. The chances that Maglor would simply cease in the night were next to impossible. None of their brothers had died in such a way. They had died fierce and bloody, swords in hand and in pursuit of the oath. He tracked the trees to the west, the way the sun caught their orange leaves in bursts of cold flame. He saw his brothers as he had last seen them. Blonde hair stained red. A broken arm, twisted away from the sword rammed through a chest. A freckled face stained with mud and viscera. He turned his attention south, to the seas from which the peoples of Beleriand had once hoped for salvation. He saw hands grasped tightly in the throes of death, crumpled bodies atop a cliff. In the harsh light of day, away from the terror of the dark and the silence, he could stand straighter, could clear his head and remind himself over and over again, that it seemed no natural force could take the sons of Feanor. He remained there, repeating the mantra to himself with cold wind biting at his cheeks as it had done upon Thangorodrim, until Maglor’s voice rose up from the kitchens below as he settled to eat with the twins. Maedhros slunk down to join them with hope in his heart that Maglor would not have stirred in the night, would not ask as to what he had been doing curled upon his bed.
His brother did naught but ask him if he had slept, and this was a lie Maedhros could tell with practiced ease as he settled opposite the whispering twins. One of them, Elros he was almost certain, shot him a narrow eyed stare across the bowls on the table between them. The other, Elrond by default, searched his eyes with that same unreadable expression he often wore, before he offered Maedhros a tentative smile, and he felt the constriction in his heart loosen, just a little.
----
But for those small moments, the ones in which one of the twins crawled up into his lap to play with the ends of his hair, or the other demanded he teach them the basics of swordsmanship several years later, or when Maglor sat by the fire with his harp and sang of home while the rest of them slumped into worn cushions to doze; Maedhros never truly rested.
His nights never returned to the way they had been before. In the days of hope, he had stayed awake long hours to plan the best manoeuvres against the sleepless enemy in the north. In the despair he had fallen into before Doriath, before Sirion, he had existed in a fog. Sleep and wakefulness had bled together into one inescapable haze.
Later, his nights were spent curled upon his brother’s bed, remaining hand clutched to the front of Maglor’s shirt as to feel him breathe. Sometimes, with Maglor slumped onto his side, Maedhros was able to press his face between his shoulder bones and rest for blissful moments, hand still grasping to the rise and fall of that narrow chest.
----
It was not much longer before the host of Valinor arrived upon the shores of Beleriand. Perhaps for others they had been a blessing, a way out of darkness. Maedhros could not have said if it was the result of his shattered, tired mind, or the knowledge that still the Silmarils would be kept from the broken remains of their family, but he saw naught but shadow carried with them.
Hidden behind the slowly crumbling walls of Amon Ereb, each of his nightmares had begun to twist with half-forgotten realities.
Maglor was dead. Or had it been Curufin he had seen run through with a blade upon the floor of Doriath? He woke one day in the spring and dressed to take Celegorm out for a riding lesson. He remembered, slowly in the quiet of the near empty stables, that he had not seen his brother for years.
Months blurred together into an exhausted dirge of years. The war crept closer to its conclusion. Orcs fled southwards from whatever battle Eonwe commanded in the north. Maedhros could tell his brother was as glad as he was for something to turn their attention to. But the orc’s weapons had swung close to Maglor’s flank as he had twisted and parried; and Maedhros could see, every night in the dark, his brother laid out in the dust. Coated in gore and unable to move. Another casualty of Maedhros’ failure. His frantic scrambles into his brother’s room had since begun to force Maglor into wakefulness. Hands combed through his tangled hair. He could hear his brother cry above him in the dark.
It had all gone wrong. His mind dove to memories of his brother, weeping over a scraped knee, a poor comment from a tutor, an argument with father. Each time Maedhros had scooped him into still-scrawny arms and held him close until his cries had subsided. What was he now, that he had allowed himself to become the cause of Maglor’s tears.
----
The war began to draw to its bitter end. Morgoth routed. Struck down from his high throne if talk of the matter was to be believed. The Silmarils taken from his dark possession and into the waiting hands of the herald of Manwe.
The boys were gone. Sent to Gil-Galad, where they might have a chance at safety. Maglor’s face had crumpled as they had disappeared from sight. Maedhros curled an arm around his shoulder to pull him along. The Silmarils awaited. It did not matter what it would take. Too many of their kin had died for the cursed jewels. It could not be for nothing. He would not allow it to be. If he closed his eyes, he could swear he could hear them. His brother’s, whispering in the dark, voices crawling over one another for his attention. Maglor watched him with the same sad eyes he had always had.
“If the everlasting darkness is to be our lot, whether we keep our oath or break it” his brother’s voice echoed as a curse would, “perhaps less harm would we do in the breaking.” He sounded desperate. He sounded broken and beaten and as if he were under the weight of every pathetic, vicious thing Maedhros had tried so hard to keep from his shoulders.
He recalled it all. The years of raising his siblings, of carrying them by the ankles or spinning them in high circles above his head. He could remember every bump and bruise he had kissed better or patched up. Now his little brother stood before him once more, alive and breathing and desperate. He asked one thing. To forsake the oath. He could not recall a time he had denied Maglor since the boy was about forty.
“I am reclaiming the hallowed jewels of our father.” His voice was firm, hoarse, practically foreign to his own ears. “You do not have to follow.” Please don’t leave me, please don’t leave me to do this alone. A face pressed to the front of his chest. His arms curled around shaking shoulders as a wet, hiccupped sob reached his ears.
“Do you think I wish to be left behind any more than you do?”
He glanced down to meet his younger brother’s eyes, and for the first time saw their anger turned to him.
It burned.
----
Now, even more time has passed.
Maedhros recalls his youth as the only son of Feanor. He remembers it as quiet, and lonely. He isn’t sure he could live like that again. Not now, not with a head full of the swarming ghosts of his brothers, who he has never stopped seeing as boys. He wonders what kind of a monster he is, to consider consigning Maglor to that very fate.
.
.
.
He jumps anyway.