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Maitimo cannot decide which is worse: the absence or the feeling of it.
The stump where his hand was is wrapped tight—too tight, perhaps, or not tight enough—and yet the pain does not stay contained. It climbs. It blooms. It burns along nerves that end in nothing, and still his body insists there is a palm there, there are fingers there, there is the weight of iron still biting bone.
He thinks he can almost feel the shackle still wrapped around him, like a ring that has married him to his torment.
They have put him in a bed.
Maitimo finds that his body no longer understands the idea of comfort—the linens shift when he shivers and the sound makes his skin go tight. The room is warm and his teeth still chatter anyway.
Light catches on metal and his stomach flips, certain for a sick heartbeat that it is that metal, that gleam, the edge of the world up there—until someone moves and it becomes only a basin, only a healer’s hands.
He keeps waiting for relief to arrive.
That was the bargain, was it not?
That you scoop away the rotten thing—cut clean through what has been violated, cut away the part of you that remembers the metal—and what remains will be only living flesh, bright with new blood, ignorant of what was done to him. A wound without history.
But Maitimo’s body is treacherous—
The hand is gone, therefore the chain is gone. The tissue that knew the iron has been cut away. That part of him has been unmade.
New skin—smooth, young, arrogant in its innocence—will crawl over the place where he hung and where pain was a constant companion and where the long years of up there twisted into a fever-dream that dissolved when the sun rose and with it came Findecáno—
And yet the knowledge is everywhere.
It lives in his shoulder where the shackle dragged him wrong for years. It lives in his ribs, held rigid so long around pain he forgot what it meant to exhale all the way. It lives in his jaw, aching from clenching. It lives in the reflex that makes him flinch when someone shifts too quickly nearby, when a boot scuffs stone, when a shadow passes across the mouth of the hollow.
He can feel the damp through the bandage with nauseating clarity—the warm seep, the way everything clings. He can feel the end of bone. He can feel where muscle has been cut and folded and bound, and the pain is sharp enough to turn his vision white at the corners, to drag bile up his throat.
Fingers that do not exist move in his mind.
He can feel them curling. He can feel nails he no longer owns pressing into a palm that is not there. He can feel an itch between two fingers that have been cut away from him, and the knowledge of it makes him want to scream, because how can a thing that is gone still hurt?
A voice murmurs near his head—too soft to catch, too steady to trust. Another answers. Water touches his lips and he jerks away before he can stop himself, choking on air, ashamed instantly, helplessly. Someone says his name. Someone says easy—
Maitimo tries to move and the world lurches.
His stomach turns violently, the taste of bile rising, and he clamps his jaw, his throat is torn raw from screams he does not remember making, from dust and cold and the way he begged—at times—for the end of it. His body is a map of strain: muscles seized into knots, ribs aching as if he has been struck there, hips bruised by the way they dragged him, dragged him, dragged him—
His skin is too sensitive, as if the world has grown sharp edges while he was gone. The cloth beneath him scratches. The air touches him and it is too much.
He tries to breathe and the breath comes in fractured pieces.
In. Out. In—
He cannot get enough air.
The shame comes and it is almost worse than pain.
He is Nelyafinwë. He is Maitimo. He is—
A thing hauled off a cliff.
He makes a sound.
His left hand—his only hand—keeps clenching and unclenching, fingers curling as though they could close around the missing shape and pull it back from wherever it has gone. Each time he notices it, something inside him buckles.
He looks away.
He cannot look away.
He cannot stop looking—
He is a prince of the Noldor. He is Fëanor’s eldest. He has sworn an oath that burns in his mouth.
And he is reduced to this: trembling, half-sick, half-mad with the sensation of not being whole, and the terror that he will become whole again but changed by his time away—
Then a shadow folds over him.
Even through the roaring in his ears, even through the lingering phantom of Angband, his body recognizes Findecáno without looking the way a song recognizes its first note.
He cannot lift his head.
He hears Findecáno breathe.
Maitimo wants to speak first. He wants to give Findecáno something—some word of gratitude, some jest to make it lighter, some small command that says I am myself, see, I am not ruined.
But his voice will not come. When he tries, it scrapes, and the sound that leaves him is nothing like speech.
It is a sound that belongs to an animal.
Findecáno kneels.
For a heartbeat his hands hover above Maitimo’s chest, uncertain—too aware of bruises he cannot see, of pain that lives beneath skin now like a second skeleton. Where can he touch without hurting, where can he touch without reminding, where can he touch without making Maitimo flinch like a whipped thing—
He lays his palm flat over Maitimo’s sternum.
Maitimo’s body jerks, a full-body spasm of startled defense remembering a thousand hands that were not kind. His breath tears in. His eyes flood instantly with hot, stupid tears he cannot stop, and he tries to swallow it down and only succeeds in choking on it.
Findecáno does not pull away.
The weight of his hand stays—
Here, it says, without words. Here. Here. Here.
Maitimo’s ribs ache around it, a cage that suddenly cannot hold what rises in him. His heart throws itself against Findecáno’s palm like it is trying to get out. He hates it, the betrayal of his own body—how it surges toward warmth like a starving creature, how it recognizes care and lunges for it..
A second hand comes up, slow enough that Maitimo has time to tense—and then to realize, with a sick kind of wonder, that there is no blow coming.
Findecáno’s fingers curve along the hinge of his face as if his skull is something fragile. His thumb rests beneath Maitimo’s cheekbone.
Maitimo’s mouth trembles.
He bites down on it hard enough to taste blood, because he will not—he will not fall apart like this, not in front of—
Findecáno’s forehead touches his temple.
Maitimo’s eyes squeeze shut.
In the dark behind his lids he sees the cliff again: the drop beneath him, the long patient days of being kept alive on purpose, he sees the chain—he can feel it, he can feel it—biting into a wrist that is no longer there.
And then Findecáno’s breath warms his hair, and Findecáno’s hands hold him like he is not a thing to be killed by inches but a person who is loved.
The dissonance is agony.
“Maitimo,” Findecáno whispers—a rough plea, a sound torn out of someone who has been afraid for so long.
Maitimo tries to answer.
No sound comes. Speech feels like a door that has been nailed shut. He has been silent so long that he fears that he has forgotten how.
His left hand—his only hand—twitches.
He wants to reach for Findecáno. He wants to grab him, to anchor himself to something living and familiar and here.
The movement is clumsy, his arm trembles and starts to fall.
Before it can, Findecáno catches his wrist.
Findecáno brings it up, carefully, and presses Maitimo’s palm against his own chest, over his heart.
He feels the fast, frantic insistence under his hand. Findecáno’s heart is racing as if he is flying, as if he is still calling up into the dark, as if the rescue has not ended and will not end until Maitimo believes it.
He surrenders the smallest weight of his head into Findecáno’s palm, the tiniest lean, testing, asking without words: will you let me.
Findecáno makes a sound—soft, wrecked—and his arms tighten around him immediately, as if the answer has always been yes.
Maitimo turns his face, slow as a wounded animal, into the hollow of Findecáno’s throat.
The skin there is bare where the collar has shifted.
He presses his mouth to it.
Findecáno shudders hard enough that Maitimo feels it through both their bodies, and the hand at Maitimo’s back spreads wide, fingers splaying wide, and Maitimo realizes with a sudden clarity that Findecáno is starved for this too—
Maitimo’s left hand curls weakly in Findecáno’s cloak.