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He was well enough to sit up by the time Artanis stumbled across his continued existence, and he was well enough to be glad about that.
It was a faint, proud, spiteful sort of gladness, but it still felt like a triumph to feel it at all. Something to tell Elrond, the next time he got too fretful, so long as he had something to promptly distract him with so that Elrond didn’t start asking for the specifics.
Assuming, of course, he survived the next few moments.
“You,” Artanis said, face pale as bone in what he could only assume was rage.
“Me,” Maglor agreed, bracing himself a little against the arms of his chair. It wouldn’t actually help if it came down to it; well enough to sit unsupervised for a few moments on the balcony was not the same as well enough to outrun his cousin - was, in fact, not even the same as well enough to stand unassisted, which was probably the only reason Elrond had dared leave him alone on the balcony at all.
“I thought you were dead,” she hissed, eyes blazing with white fire. She stepped closer, but he barely noticed that - her mind was lunging closer too, sharp and fierce as ever as she raked through his own, trying to draw blood to see if it truly was him.
He did not have many defenses left now. This, though -
This was automatic. The last thing he had done as he cowered in his chains; the last thing he could do, that he had ground into himself until it was more inherent than breath. His mind buried itself under layers of shields, burrowing down into itself to wait out the scorching fire.
The first burning touch of her mind came - and withdrew in an instant after the first moment of horrified connection.
He realized his mistake slowly; embarrassingly slowly, though he did not have much energy for shame now. His cousin was not Sauron; she did not want the same secrets from him and would not be fooled by the same tricks.
He had long given up on his cleverer tricks. He - he was not even sure if he remembered his cleverer tricks. He thought some of the memory of what he had done had been lost with so much of the rest.
But his last trick, his last desperate trick, of shoving all the memories of pain together until it was one dull blur of agony, in one last attempt to convince Sauron that he was already gone, already ground down to nothingness and there was nothing left to take from him - it was one thing to try that trick when chained to a wall and only held in a standing position by virtue of the chains, when it would flatter the ego of the one trying to break him. It was another to try that trick now on a balcony overlooking a sunny garden. It was obviously ridiculous, and any moment Artanis would laugh him to scorn and ask him if he was trying to provoke her to pity him, of all people -
He fought his way free from his own mind enough to at last be aware again of the world around him. The sun on his face. The chair underneath him.
His cousin, standing wide eyed before him, looking as if he had stabbed her in the stomach.
For a wild, horrified moment, he thought he somehow had; that strength had come back to him, and he had done the unforgivable once more, that he had lashed out as he had begun to think he had lost the capacity to do.
But there was no blood on his hands, no matter how many times he flicked his eyes down to check. There was no blood on her dress.
There were only her eyes, wide and wild.
It occurred to him - slowly, too slowly - that he might have thrust her into imagining what must have happened to Finrod.
“Artanis,” he tried to say, but the air wouldn’t come.
Silent, silent, always best to say silent, who knew what he would say, what he would reveal, what trap he would fall into if he spoke -
“Artanis,” he tried again, and the word came out this time, if only in pathetic imitation if what his voice once had been.
“You did not come,” she said, and her voice sounded like the Ice he had once abandoned her to walk across: distant and cold and like at any moment it might cease crackling and shatter. “Winter after winter you came, and then you did not come. And I did not look for you.” Her eyes went less distant then; they snapped back to him, fierce and bright and assessing, looking at the flesh still mending, the bones still too stark beneath them.
His hands still twisted, doing their best to brace against the arms of the chair.
(When he was better, Elrond had promised. When he was stronger, Elrond would rebreak the bones and sing them straighter, sing them whole. When he was better.)
(Some days he did not believe he would ever be better.)
“Elrond has had you for months,” she said, eyes always seeing far too much. “No more. And I last saw you - “
The faint sound of steps hurrying toward them broke across her.
“Elrond,” they said at the same moment, both of them knowing those steps as well as their own.
Their eyes connected across the balcony.
He could not bear to reach out, mind to mind; he could not risk Elrond hearing.
But they knew each other still; knew each other as no one left alive this side of the sea still knew them.
Knew each other as she knew, now, just how very many long years he had been left in the dark. Knew as they both knew how that knowing would ache in Elrond’s heart, however little Maglor deserved for it to.
They did not have to say the words to agree on one last secret, kept between them.
“Having to sit down and think about things before you do them suits you,” she said, all wildness swept cleanly from her eyes as Elrond hurried anxiously through the door.
“You’d know all about that, wouldn’t you?” he said pleasantly, words borrowed from the Maglor he had been long ago.
“I’m glad to see your reunion is going so well,” Elrond said in exasperation, but his shoulders were loosening, presumably in relief that Artanis did not, at least, look likely to start advocating for his patient to be thrown off the city wall.
“It might have gone better if I had been told he was here,” Artanis said sharply, but she sheathed the sharpness of her tongue almost immediately. “Have some more chairs brought out; we shall sort it out.”
Elrond turned away for a moment to arrange it; Artanis looked back at Maglor and nodded, once.
This one thing, they could keep to themselves.