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“Elrond has informed me that he is angry with me.”
For a moment, Maglor ignored the words. He had gotten very used to pretending he couldn’t hear his elder brother whispering of wrath in his ear.
Then the cautious softness of Maedhros’s voice struck him, so unlike his usual mad rasp, and he remembered that Maedhros was really here and really speaking to him.
It still took him a moment longer to make himself look up from his harp to see that yes, Maedhros really was hesitating at the threshold of the room, bracing himself against the wooden doorframe, one hand on each side.
Two hands. No scars.
Not even from the Silmaril.
He did not look at his own hands. They worked upon the harp with all their old skill and more besides; they did not have to look lovely doing it.
They worked through Elrond’s toil and Elrond’s skill and Elrond’s impossible grace which was why Maedhros’s words took another moment to be believed.
It was not that Elrond did not have a right to be angry; it was just so hard to imagine that something about this particular day had awoken his wrath as the past ages had so consistently failed to lastingly do.
Maedhros was still hesitating at the door. Smiling, a little; not trying to mask the worry in his eyes.
Just a hint. Nothing worse. Not now.
Still, it was that hint of a whisper of darkness in his brother’s eyes that at last allowed him to find his tongue. “A feat! Come in then and tell me what horror you have committed, and why I was not invited along.”
The smile turned wry. Maedhros crossed the threshold at last. For a moment, he thought his brother was heading toward the window seat, and he very carefully did not flinch, but no; Maedhros moved past the open window without a pause and ignored the very serviceable bench before it to sprawl back against the corner opposite Maglor’s harp.
The position was easily defensible; the pose was not.
Maglor gave up his own perfectly comfortable chair to go and sprawl beside him as if they were both still youths. Wall to his back, Maedhros to one side; perfectly defensible.
Himself between Maedhros and the window.
“I might have invited you, actually,” Maedhros said quietly, all hints of wry smiles gone. “Implicitly, at least. I - honestly, and truly, Kano, my thoughts were such a tangle then, I cannot tell you what I thought of then and what I rationalized in later when I was in Mandos’s Halls trying to untangle them.”
The realization of what they were talking about scraped across him like the screeched notes of an untuned instrument.
“Ah,” he said. “That.”
“Yes,” Maedhros agreed. “That.”
There were three ages worth of things Maglor had saved up to say about that. He had promised himself he would not say any of them.
“If you were willing to give yourself up into the hands of a Vala after all,” he said, “you might have let us surrender to Eonwe and saved us all a great deal of grief and trouble.”
(He had promised himself. Possibly he had used up too much willpower on another Oath and did not have enough to spare for the rest.)
(Possibly that was just an excuse.)
“It - felt very different at the time. I cannot defend it to you now; I could not defend it then. I can describe what it felt like if - ”
“It felt like every choice left to you was unendurable except for that one, which felt merely painful. And, more enticingly, it promised to be the end of choices.”
He recited this rather dismissively to the corner of the ceiling, which had a cobweb.
When he looked back down at his brother’s eyes, he was jolted by the horror in them.
“Forgive me,” he said hastily. “Forgive me, I beg you; I should not speak such to you. I should not - ”
Maedhros’s hand - his right hand, his lost hand - was suddenly tight around Maglor’s wrist. There was nothing casual about his pose now at all. “You should speak to me,” he said, “any way you choose. The only sense in which I have not earned it is in that I have not earned that you should speak to me at all.”
I failed you beyond bearing, he wanted to say. You cannot deny it, for you proved beyond arguing that you could not bear it.
You failed me beyond imagining, he wanted to say. You -
“My first word was to you,” he reminded Maedhros. “I cannot possibly give up the habit now.”
It was one of the pettier reasons he had given himself to keep going. His first word had been to Maedhros; his last word should be to Maedhros. And, since that was impossible, he would simply have to keep on speaking -
It was possible now, he supposed.
Maedhros’s hand grew almost bruising around his wrist. “That,” he said hoarsely. “That look right there - that was the look in your eyes. You did not have to guess how I felt then, Kano. You knew.”
Maglor looked pointedly down at Maedhros’s grip. It loosened.
Fractionally.
“Well, of course I grasped some of it,” he said, reaching desperately for the tattered cloak of composure he tried to maintain for Elrond’s sake. It was a far cry from the iron armor of it he had once maintained for Maedhros’s; despite all his best efforts, he had not yet been able to craft better. Not since - “It felt like the end of the world. Again. The continent was literally shattering under our feet; it was not hard to comprehend feeling a bit trapped. I knew I couldn’t grasp all of it, of course; I wouldn’t have presumed. I had fought beside you every battle but one, but I had - some idea what difference that one made.”
Every battle but the ambush Maedhros had ridden off to alone; the ambush they had waited in vain for him to ride back from until Fingon had gone off in shining glory to rescue him -
He had told his cellmate once that this was what came of making friends with the wrong cousin; not that it would have mattered much when almost all of his cousins were dead.
A state his cellmate was intimately acquainted with at the time of the conversation, come to think of it.
He jerked his mind away from the memory. “How could I judge?” he said, trying to smile.
“Elrond told me what year he found you,” Maedhros said.
The stone felt very cold against his back.
He had not instructed anyone not to tell Maedhros about his - experiences. He had not planned to hide it, exactly.
He had just -
“Galadriel told me what year you last checked in.”
The air vanished from his lungs.
He had thought they’d had an agreement on that. For Elrond, admittedly, but surely Maedhros’s inclusion was obvious -
“That year does not have to have significance, of course,” Maedhros said, watching with eyes that had always seen far, far too much. “You could have abandoned a longstanding annual tradition for any number of reasons.”
He protested the use of tradition; it had not been a tradition, only a chance, and then a coincidence, and then a habit. It was nothing formal, nothing acknowledged; certainly nothing official. Only a stolen evening every year when the autumn started to turn, when she would happen to be at the edge of whichever settlement she currently haunted, and he would happen to be at the edge of the bordering wilderness, and he would be a voice on the wind bringing fresh warnings or old songs, and she would be an absent minded elleth happening to forget three months of lembas wrapped in a fresh cloak in the hollow of a tree.
At no point, of course, did they ever actually look at each other’s faces.
Officially.
Or as official as anything could be in such a long train of unacknowledged coincidences.
He could have abandoned the habit for any number of reasons; fear of being found out by the Sindar she surrounded herself with; delays caused by the weather; an injury forcing him to hole up where he was and wait it out.
He had never asked Galadriel for how many years she had told herself the same list of reasons and gone to the edge of the wilderness to wait.
It could have been any number of reasons.
Could have.
Hadn’t been.
For a moment, he considered breaking another longstanding promise and lying to Maedhros.
But a promise to Maedhros was ultimately a very different thing than a promise to himself, even a promise to himself on Maedhros’s behalf.
“I assume,” he said instead, “that you did not need Caranthir to help you with the math.”
“No.”
It was not very difficult math.
Sometimes it felt like it.
“I believe you are the one now entitled to telling me that I simply cannot understand,” Maedhros said.
He tried to say something.
Tried, of course you understand - don’t you dare tell me you don’t, someone has to understand -
Tried, of course you can’t - you could beg Fingon to kill you, could finally decide just to do it yourself, and since you did, that meant I couldn’t, meant I had to hang on, no matter what, no matter how little of me was left to do it with, because I couldn’t risk sending us all tumbling into the void, couldn’t risk doing that to you, couldn’t risk killing Amil, couldn’t risk - I couldn’t even remember what I couldn’t risk, all that was left was remembering that I must not, at any cost, die -
Tried.
Gold-cleaver. Wordsmith. Bard of the ages.
He’d reduced himself to just one word.
Live. Live. Live.
He thought he’d managed to build himself back up. Not all the way, not full strength, but almost, almost -
And then the winds blew, and he always found just how many words he still had left to rediscover.
Tried, I never blamed you, but only for half a moment because he had promised to never again lie to Maedhros.
Promised in a clean, cool tent while Maedhros lay there with blazing eyes, panting from the exertion of trying to shout, wounds from Angband not yet healed enough to scar. Promised, promised, promised, and, oh, he understood that promise now.
“You can’t do it again,” finally managed to scrape its way out of his throat. “As you said earlier: it upset Elrond.”
Maedhros closed his eyes. He finally let go of Maglor’s wrist; his closer hand started twining through Maglor’s hair instead. The wrist was free for only a moment; Maedhros crossed his other hand over to capture it again.
It was too warm to feel like a manacle. It felt, instead, like the fulfillment of the phantom fantasy that he had chased for so long: that he had made it to the ledge in time, that he had thrust his hand after his brother, that Maedhros had reached up and actually taken it. That Maedhros had possessed the chance and the will to hang on.
“It hurt Elrond,” Maedhros agreed quietly and for a moment, Maglor lived in hope that it would end with that, but: “It hurt you. Far more than I took the time to imagine. Far longer than I dared to dream of. I have learned my lesson about making the same mistakes twice. And I hope - I hope you long ago learned yours about following in my mistakes after me.”
Live. Live. Live.
You cannot think there is any danger now -
But he did not lie to Maedhros.
You cannot ask me to promise -
But he did not lie to Maedhros. And Maedhros could still ask anything of him, even now. Even this.
He shifted his hand so that it grasped Maedhros’s wrist in turn.
“I let myself be separated from you before,” he said instead. “It proved a mistake. So in the spirit of learning from ours, I suppose I shall have to stay if you do.”
Maedhros’s eyes searched his for a long moment before resting his head against the wall in relief.
For a few breaths, the silence settled.
“Elrond said he was angry? Really?”
Maedhros laughed, long and loud.
“He did.” He looked at Maglor carefully out of the corner of his eyes. “I have hope he may someday forgive me.”
He held Maedhros’s hand a little tighter in his own.
“I suspect he will. You are here now. No one who loves you could remain angry forever in the face of that.”