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Footsteps. “You’re supposed to have left.”
“I cannot,” Fingon says. “I cannot.”
Maglor’s weight dropping onto the bed—his bed, which Fingon has stolen. His perfume of cinnamon and apple, muddied by the day: dirt and the pungent herbs the healers fed to Maedhros. His hand cupping Fingon’s shoulder.
When Fingon opens his eyes, the image of Maedhros falling gives way to Maglor’s pale and tired face. What stays with Fingon are Maedhros’s gasps, his scream when Fingon tried to help him up. “Don’t move him!” someone snapped, pushing Fingon aside, but Fingon doesn’t remember who. He remembers sitting on the ground a few feet away, blind and deaf to all but Maedhros whimpering with every breath.
“Your father will worry,” Maglor says.
“Let him,” Fingon says. “How is he?”
“Drugged. Asleep, mostly.”
So the same as when Fingon left his side to prepare his horse and instead stumbled into Maglor’s rooms. There is no telling how Maedhros will be when he wakes, if he will be able to speak for the pain, if he will even know where he is. He’s been walking! For a month he’s been walking, shuffling steps with a cane, and one morning Fingon found him outside on the bench his brothers had built so he could sit in the breeze, beaming, for he had made it there without anyone’s help. “I wish you’d waited for me,” Fingon said, and Maedhros pulled Fingon against his side and said, “Hush—and look at the sun on the lake! Isn’t it stunning?”
For Maedhros’s body, Fingon worries, but for Maedhros’s mind, if he is bedridden again—
“Hush,” Maglor says, and Fingon doesn’t know what he means—if he has said something aloud or with his mind or if Maglor just doesn’t like how he looks—but he knows that Maglor’s hand is trembling on his shoulder. Fingon lifts an arm, grabs Maglor’s sleeve, and tugs.
Maglor topples. His breath trembles, too, against Fingon’s ear as he kisses it, trembles against Fingon’s chin, against his cheek. Fingon gathers him close and strokes his hair. His fingers catch on diamonds. He does not say Maedhros will be all right.
Neither does Maglor. He says, “I’ll send a messenger across the lake to tell your folk you’re staying a little longer. I won’t have a war because you were late.”
“Warmongering brutes, you must think my people are.”
Maglor nods against Fingon’s cheek.
“When is lunch?” Fingon asks.
“In half an hour.”
Measured in the short hours of the sun, it isn’t much time at all. Just enough to lie in bed for a while, holding each other. Fingon turns his head to catch Maglor’s lips in a kiss. It is half-hearted and awkward: neither of them are in the mood. Still it is a comfort. They have each other, a wonder they have somehow wrested from the years of suspicion and separation.
“Then I’m not moving for half an hour,” Fingon says. “Stay with me?”
Maglor doesn’t answer with words. He lays an arm over Fingon and kisses him again, and then he settles his head in the crook of Fingon’s neck.