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The ‘holiday home’ was actually a fortress. But it overlooked Lake Mithrim and Lake Mithrim possessed that particular ability to refract light in aesthetically appealing ways, which the Noldor had learned to call home: a word that had undergone such violent translation since they crossed the Grinding Ice (or, like Fingon reminded Maedhros seventeen times on eagleback, sailed comfortably on stolen ships) that it now meant something closer to temporary shelter between catastrophes. Home had transitioned from full-stop to comma, essentially.
It was in the blue hour before dawn that the fortress was at its most beautiful. Fingon had discovered this accidentally on a midnight wander, insomnia being one of those gifts that Beleriand bestowed him. The stones themselves seemed to exhale starlight, as if they had been quarried not from mountains but from the idea of mountains. This morning, however, watching from the eastern rampart as dawn stained the water a muddy red, Fingon realized they had colonised their own metaphors.
Every sunrise now came with the weight of over-interpretation: was this the blood of kinslaying, reflecting their sins back at them? Or merely iron in the water, geology asserting its indifference to their moral weather? The mind, he had learned, was a ruthless taxonomist, categorising every sensation into the filing system of before and after, and the after-cabinet was getting distressingly full.
Maedhros stood twenty paces away, relearning the curves of his own body as it filled out from stark, skeletal angles. Six months since Thangorodrim, and still he moved as if expecting his own bones to dissolve beneath him: a phenomenon which, Fingon supposed with bitter clarity, was not entirely unreasonable given their family's talent for self-immolation.
The wind carried the smell of pine resin and tangled in Maedhros's hair, which had grown back in patches of copper and white like a map of territories contested and lost. For a moment Fingon could almost imagine they were simply two princes taking the morning air, rather than two survivors practicing the daily miracle of not dissolving into their constituent griefs.
"You're cataloguing my deficiencies again," Maedhros said without turning. His voice carried that new quality it had acquired on the mountain, a kind of careful modulation of its roughness, as if each word had to be approved by a committee of cautions before it could emerge. During those thirty years, he had had far too long to think, of course, and vet his own thoughts until they emerged pre-edited, pre-apologised for. And when there were people around to listen again, he felt the weight of their attention like a physical thing, pressing against his ribs. "You're not meant to be cataloguing my deficiencies when we're on holiday. There are probably laws against such things in more civilised regions.”
"I'm admiring your profile," Fingon corrected, though the distinction felt as fragile as everything else these days. "There's a significant difference, though I understand why someone who spent thirty years chained to a cliff might have developed trust issues with observational nuance. Do you remember when you called some poxy lake we flew across, the sea? It was there and then I realised. Well. That you didn't keep all your senses."
The memory hung between them: Maedhros squinting at the horizon during their flight from Thangorodrim, his depth perception scrambled by too many years of staring at the same patch of sky, mistaking distance for vastness, proximity for infinity. The mind, sadly, was as susceptible to malnutrition as the body, and thirty years of the same view had left his visual vocabulary somewhat impoverished.
"Thirty years, three months, two weeks and four days," Maedhros said, finally turning. The morning light did unconscionable things to his hair, which caught fire in all the wrong places, and for a moment Fingon was reminded of how suffering could carve features into something resembling art. But that was a dangerous thought, the kind that led to romanticising survival, and he pushed it away before it could take root. "Though I'll admit the last bit is speculative. Time becomes rather inconsequential when you're being slowly edited out of your own existence."
Edited, says the bastard, as if Morgoth had been some cosmic proofreader, crossing out the unnecessary bits of Maedhros's selfhood with methodical precision. First the certainties, then the comforts, then the connections to anything beyond the immediacy of pain. What remained was a kind of essential self, concentrated and distilled, but whether that was survival or simply the husk that was left when everything else burned away, was a question Fingon wasn't sure either of them was ready to answer.
The lake below them moved with the lazy indifference of water everywhere, carrying on its ancient business of being wet and necessary while the creatures on its shores worked themselves into philosophical knots about meaning and purpose. Sometimes Fingon envied its simplicity. Water was water, regardless of what reflected in it, regardless of what sins it had witnessed or what bodies it had carried downstream. It continued without commentary, without the need to justify its existence to itself.
This, unfortunately, did not apply to their new love language, a kind of weaponised intimacy that acknowledged Thangorodrim while refusing to genuflect before it. Most found it disturbing: the way they could reference torture and captivity with the casual ease of people discussing the weather. But Fingon found it the only bearable alternative to the suffocating self-pity that had descended on Maedhros like a second captivity, or like a terrible hat he couldn't quite figure out how to remove.
"Maglor's coming today in case you forgot," Fingon mentioned, affecting casualness with the dedication of someone defusing a bomb. The words fell into the morning air and immediately began to complicate it, the way Maglor's presence complicated everything, not through malice but through the sheer weight of his guilt, which he carried like an overpacked trunk wherever he went. "In fact, he's arriving very soon. An hour, perhaps. Do you wish to dye the grey bits in your hair back to red lest he starts weeping at the sight again? The fellow could barely hold it back last time, then spent another hour trying to make up for his reaction."
"I'm well aware. He's sent three letters, two unofficial ambassadors, and what I can only describe as an apologetic comb," Maedhros flexed his remaining hand, the left one, which had assumed all the responsibilities of its absent partner with the grim determination of a promoted secretary. "Even though I am, well. On bloody vacation. Tell me, do you think there's a proper etiquette for 'sorry I let our brothers convince me you were probably dead and definitely beyond rescue'? And do you think I can convey 'I've given up the crown, get the hell over it' through gesture?"
"Rumil is surprisingly quiet on the subject."
"Pity. I was hoping for note-cards."
The conversation carried the familiar rhythm of their post-rescue dynamic: Maedhros wielding sarcasm like armor, Fingon providing the steady counterpoint of practical affection. It was a kind of music they had learned to play together, improvised from the scattered notes of who they used to be, and while it wasn't beautiful exactly, it was functional, which was its own form of miracle.
Below them, cook-fires bloomed like small rebellions against the morning chill, and the fortress began its daily transformation from castle of dreams into place of actual living. Servants moved through corridors with voices that carried the complex harmonies of multiple languages—Quenya and Sindarin and that awkward, temporary tongue that had emerged during Maedhros's captivity. Unfortunately, Maedhros did not speak it well, another small amputation in the catalog of things the mountain had taken from him.
They stood in comfortable dysfunction, two princes of the voluntarily dispossessed practicing the ancient art of pretending tomorrow might be survivable. The morning stretched before them like a blank page, waiting to be filled with whatever small victories they could manage: successful meals, conversations that didn't end in screaming and tears, the act of continuing to occupy space in a world that had proved definitively that existence was optional.
"He wants to play for us," Fingon said eventually, watching a hawk circle over the lake with patient dedication, understanding full well that hunting was mostly waiting. "Something about the healing properties of music. I suspect he's been reading medical texts again."
"Ah yes, the famous 'your brother is in pieces but perhaps a nice musical fugue will help' treatment. Very cutting-edge." But there was something underneath the sarcasm: a frequency only Fingon could detect, like the shuddering of a wine glass just before it shatters. It was the sound Maedhros made when he was trying not to want something too badly, the careful modulation of hope being strangled in its crib before it could grow large enough to disappoint him.
The morning had developed an atmospheric pressure change, as if the very air was preparing itself for the weight of unspoken apologies and carefully orchestrated emotional reconciliation. Even the servants moved differently, with the heightened awareness of people preparing for a performance they hadn't auditioned for but would nonetheless be required to witness.
Fingon moved closer, careful to telegraph his approach. They had learned each other's new boundaries through trial and error, mostly error, occasionally trial by fire (literally, in one memorable instance involving a knocked-over lamp, a kitchen-fire and what Maedhros had later called "an understandable but excessive panic response"). Touch, which had once been as natural as breathing between them, now required navigation charts and diplomatic protocols. The scars on Maedhros's wrist caught the light as he gestured, creating a topography that Fingon had learned to read like a map of everything they didn't discuss in daylight. Some were clean: the marks of shackles worn with the patience of decades. Others were more complex, telling stories of escape attempts, of moments when despair had carved itself into flesh with the precision of someone who had run out of other ways to mark time's passage.
"We could say no," Fingon offered, though they both knew they wouldn't. Couldn't, really. The bonds of family (and that family in particular) were like Morgoth's chains—even after you'd cut through them, you wore the marks. Celegorm had threatened to raze the forests until Maedhros passed him the exact coordinates of their newfound holiday home, as if their peace was a kind of hoarding that required redistribution.
"And deny Maglor the opportunity to perform his sorrow via musical arrangement? That would be cruel," Maedhros leaned slightly into Fingon's side, a gesture so small it might have been the result of trapped wind, or perhaps a minor earthquake in the architecture of his carefully maintained emotional distance. "Besides, I'm curious to see what key he's chosen for metaphorical fratricide. I'm hoping for a good major progression, but with flats scattered throughout. It has the appropriate moral ambiguity."
The jest carried weight it hadn't intended, settling between them like sediment in still water. Fratricide was not, technically, metaphorical in their family. It was a lived experience with body counts and political ramifications and the kind of historical footnotes that turned up in other people's nightmares. But calling it metaphorical was a way of making it manageable, of reducing mass murder to the level of artistic choice, where it could be analysed and appreciated rather than simply endured.
A bird landed on the rampart beside them, one of those small, brown creatures that seemed to exist primarily to demonstrate that life continued its modest business regardless of the larger dramas unfolding around it. It cocked its head at them with the sort of polite curiosity that suggested it found their conversation interesting but not particularly urgent, then flew away because it had better things to do than analyse the emotional dynamics of traumatised princes.
"Do you think," Maedhros said suddenly, "that forgiveness is a skill one can learn, or is it more like perfect pitch. Maglor-style-metaphor, I know. But yes, something you're either born with or condemned to live without."
The question arrived without preamble, as his most dangerous thoughts often did these days, erupting from whatever internal process had been churning beneath the surface of their conversation. Fingon recognised this as one of those moments when the careful edifice of their daily routine cracked open to reveal the darker machinery working underneath, all gears and grinding and the occasional spray of sparks.
"I think," Fingon said carefully, "that you're asking the wrong question. Forgiveness assumes there's something to forgive, which assumes there's someone to blame, which assumes the world operates on the principle of moral accounting. What if it doesn't?"
"What if it doesn't what?"
"What if the world doesn't operate on moral accounting? What if it's just... things happening to other things, and we're the ones insisting on narrative coherence where none exists?"
Maedhros considered this with the serious attention he gave to all philosophical puzzles that might provide an alternative to feeling his emotions. "That's either very wise or very nihilistic."
"Both things can be true simultaneously."
"Yes, but which one helps us get through lunch with Maglor without anyone crying into their soup?"
"Probably the nihilistic one."
Maglor arrived at noon, looking like he'd tried to launder remorse through good grooming and achieved only a kind of rumpled anxiety. His hair, which had once been the family's second-greatest vanity after Maedhros's own, now hung in neglected waves that suggested he'd been spending more time communing with his harp than with mirrors. He embraced Fingon first (safe, acceptable, free of the specific gravity that bent all interactions with the-new-Maedhros into shapes too complex for normal social physics), and Fingon could feel the tension in his shoulders, afraid that any sudden movement might spill what he was trying so desperately to preserve like he were carrying his hearts-blood in his cupped hands.
"You look well," he told his brother, which was a lie so transparent it almost set things right between them. Lies, at least, were familiar territory. They were brothers, after all, and they knew how to navigate those particular waters, had been doing so since childhood games where the rules changed depending on which parent was watching. "The hair looks healthy enough, despite the... discolouration."
"You look like you've been composing," Maedhros returned, which was true and therefore more cutting. Truth, they had discovered, was often more brutal than lies, particularly when wielded with the surgical precision that came naturally to their family. "I can see the remnants of musical notation on your sleeve. B-flat minor?"
"G minor."
"Aha. Going for the full tragic effect, then."
Maglor's guilt and Maedhros's resentment circled each other, these dancers who had learned their steps over decades of dysfunction, each knowing exactly where to step to produce the maximum effect with minimal effort. But beneath the familiar choreography, something had shifted. Maglor's guilt carried a different weight now, less performative and more truly corroded, like metal left out in acid rain until it was pitted and stained and ever so honest in its ugliness. And Maedhros's resentment had developed nuance, layers of complexity that suggested he was resenting not just the abandonment but his own capacity to be abandoned, not just the insularity but his own surprise at desiring loneliness.
They sat in what had once been a solar and was now a room for careful conversation, and set to weighing and measuring every word before allowing them up into the air. The furniture had been specifically chosen for their inability to trigger memories: no throne-like setups, no ornate tables that might remind anyone of state dinners or family councils or any of the other formal occasions where their lives had systematically unraveled. Instead, simple wooden chairs that suggested they were just three people having a conversation, rather than the ruins of a dynasty trying to figure out how to occupy the same space without recreating their previous disasters.
Fingon poured wine. The vintage was Telerin, a detail nobody mentioned but everybody noticed, like a severed hand at a dinner party. Maedhros spent what felt like an hour, though was probably only minutes, trying to explain the oxidation of copper and how their mother had conducted several experiments of the same on sculptures in her workshop. His voice took on that insufferable quality it developed when he was talking around something rather than about it: modulated and distant, as if he were delivering a lecture to an audience of strangers rather than describing his own metamorphosis to his brother and lover.
"It's like watching a person oxidise, you see," he explained casually, as if the comparison had just occurred to him rather than being the exact metaphor he had been rehearsing in his head for months. "Green blooming where strength had lain. The tarnish always begins at the fingertips, nails, and looks like a patina rising from the skin. Like elves were always meant to oxidise. There's almost a beauty in it."
Fingon felt his chest tighten with the recognition of what Maedhros was actually describing—not copper sculptures but the slow transformation of flesh under the influence of torment, the way his skin had taken on strange colours during the worst periods of his captivity, the way his body had begun to resemble something other than the elf he was, something more like metal left too long in water.
"Is there?" Fingon asked, his voice carefully neutral. He had learned to navigate these moments when Maedhros offered pieces of his experience like gifts that might explode if handled incorrectly. "Well, I suppose it depends on who is doing the looking. And from what angle."
"Do you think it ruins copper then?" Maedhros mused, scratching his head with the absent gesture of someone whose body had learned to provide comfort to itself when comfort from others became unreliable. "The act of oxidisation, I mean."
"Is there a correct answer here?"
"I've been thinking about home," Maglor offered, then stopped, apparently realizing he'd interjected with the conversational equivalent of stepping on a rake. The word 'home' landed in the room like a dropped stone.
"Which one?" Maedhros asked pleasantly. "The one we burned or the one we abandoned?"
"The one we remember wrong," Maglor said quietly, and something in the room shifted, like a change in atmospheric pressure before a storm.
The admission settled among them, long-awaited and universally dreaded. Because this was the problem with their family: they were (mostly) too intelligent to successfully lie to themselves, too educated to maintain comfortable delusions, too gifted with perfect recall to allow time to soften the edges of their mistakes into palatability. They remembered everything in high definition: every choice, every consequence, every moment when they could have turned left instead of right and avoided the particular configuration of disasters they now inhabited.
This was the curse of the Eldar, gilded as birthright by the Noldor. Perfect, precise, unforgiving memory that allowed them to replay every failure in perpetuity, to calculate the exact trajectory of their fall from grace with slide-rule precision.
"Play your piece," Maedhros ordered suddenly, his voice cutting through their collective brooding. "The one you've been rehearsing in your head since you walked in. You keep fingering the chord progressions on your thigh. Either that or it's a case of scabies, in which case I will thank you to leave immediately before you start fucking the help. Again. I think you have all forgotten that I am, like I have expressed in my seventh letter to bloody Curufin, on vacation."
The harp Maglor produced seemed too beautiful for the world they now inhabited, its strings catching light like captured stars (which, given their family history with captured light, was perhaps not the best metaphor, but metaphors had become dangerous territory for all of them, laden with historical significance and the possibility of triggering someone's particular variety of survivor's guilt). The instrument itself was a work of art that belonged in a museum or a palace, not in this fortress of careful conversations and negotiated peace, but then again, most of what remained of their former lives were similarly displaced.
The music that emerged was not what Fingon had expected. It wasn't a lament or an apology or even, strictly speaking, a song. It was something closer to a conversation between what they had believed themselves to be and what they had discovered they were, a kind of musical anthropology of their own downfall. The melody carried fragments of older compositions, themes from victory songs and coronation marches and wedding dances, but transformed, recontextualised, like words from a dead language repurposed for current disasters. This, he realised, would one day be celebrated as the birth of the saying: history is not written by the winners, but by whatever sad fuck happens to own a harp.
There were quotes from the songs they had sung as children woven through it, but rendered in minor keys, their familiar progressions bent into new shapes. The melody of their mother's lullaby appeared, distorted through what sounded like the acoustics of a cave or a dungeon, the same notes but hollowed out, emptied of their original comfort. It was archaeology in musical form: a careful excavation of their shared past, each familiar theme unearthed and displayed in its current condition, corroded by time and circumstance but still recognisably what it had once been.
Maedhros listened with his eyes closed, his remaining hand absolutely still in his lap, but Fingon could see the micro-expressions flickering across his face like weather patterns on a map of someplace that no longer existed. There was recognition in the tightening around his eyes when Maglor quoted their father's war-song, pain in the slight pursing of his lips when the melody touched on something that had once meant celebration, acknowledgement when the music acknowledged what they had all become.
The piece did not rise towards resolution: more towards the moment when you realise that the question you'd been asking was wrong all along, that the problem wasn't finding the right answer but learning to live with the impossibility of answers altogether. It acknowledged their collective damage without offering to heal it, their shared guilt without promising absolution, their fractured love without insisting it could be made whole. Instead, it said: this is what we are now.
The final notes hung in the air like a possibility or a threat, depending on your perspective, and the silence that followed felt less like a destination any of them had chosen, but at the place they had somehow reached despite all their efforts to reach somewhere else.
"Well," Maedhros said after a silence, "that was either healing or traumatic. I'll need several years to decide which."
"It was beautiful," Fingon said, because someone had to say something normal, and he'd apparently been elected to represent the forces of conventional response in a room full of people who had moved beyond conventional everything.
"Beauty," Maglor said carefully, setting down his instrument with the tenderness of someone handling explosives, "might be beside the point. I was aiming for something more like... recognition."
"Of what?" The question came from Maedhros, but it could have come from any of them. Recognition was dangerous territory—it implied seeing things clearly, acknowledging what was actually there rather than what you hoped might be there, and clear-sight had never been their family's strong suit. They were much better at grand gestures and noble delusions.
"The fact that we're all speaking different languages now, even when we use the same words." Maglor began to put the harp away. It was almost endearing, his attention to tidiness. That, or it was the tender efficiency of someone who'd learned to pack quickly, to be ready to leave at a moment's notice. "Home, for instance. Love. Loyalty. They all mean something different after you've watched them burn."
There was a pause while everyone considered the various things they'd watched burn, a mental inventory that would have been hilarious if it weren't so comprehensively devastating. Ships, cities, bridges both literal and metaphorical, relationships, reputations, their father's sanity, their own innocence, several forests, at least one kinslaying's worth of people, and whatever possibility they'd once had of being the kind of people who told simple stories about good and evil instead of complex stories about the spaces in between.
"Do you know what I missed most?" Maedhros said suddenly, his careful voice implying that he'd been thinking about this for a while, turning it over in his mind like a stone worn smooth by repeated handling. "Not during—during was beyond missing things, beyond anything except immediate survival. But after, when Fingon was flying me away and I was trying to remember how to exist in three dimensions again. I missed the... assumption of tomorrow."
The words fell into the room like stones into still water, sending ripples through the careful equilibrium of their conversation. For this was what torture accomplished, ultimately: not just the infliction of pain, but the systematic destruction of the future tense, the careful erosion of any belief that time was something that moved forward rather than something that simply accumulated, layer upon layer, like sediment at the bottom of a lake.
"The casual arrogance of planning for next week, next year, next century," Maedhros continued, warming to his theme or perhaps simply unable to stop now that he'd started. "Now every future tense feels hypothetical."
"That's not necessarily a weakness," Fingon suggested, though he wasn't sure he believed it even as he said it. "The assumption of tomorrow was what let us follow your father across the Ice, convinced we were writing history instead of tragedy."
"Tragedy," Maglor said with a slight smile that contained multitudes of irony, "at least has the dignity of structure. Heroes, fatal flaws, inevitable downfalls, moral lessons for the audience. Very tidy. What we're doing is more like... improvisation in the key of whatever doesn't kill us today. Even if it kills another."
The metaphor was more accurate than comfortable. Tragedy required a kind of narrative coherence that their lives had systematically refused to provide: clear motivations, comprehensible consequences, so on and so forthe. Instead, they were living in something more like experimental music, where the rules changed without warning and the only goal was to keep playing, to find some way to make harmony from whatever notes they'd been given, regardless of whether those notes had been designed to work together in the first place.
That evening, after Maglor had left (backing away from an undetonated metaphor, careful not to make any sudden movements that might trigger whatever explosive potential remained in the room), Fingon found Maedhros on the balcony again, studying the stars as if they might have changed their positions while he wasn't looking. Or like they might disappear altogether.
"He meant well," Fingon offered, joining him at the railing. The stone was still warm from the day's sun, a small kindness in a world that had become stingy with such things.
"The road to kinslaying is paved with good intentions." Maedhros paused, apparently hearing his own words and recognising that they'd come out carrying more freight than he'd intended. "That came out more bitter than intended. Sorry, Finno. I'm still calibrating my new register."
It was true, if blunt. Since Thangorodrim, his emotional responses had required constant adjustment, like a musical instrument that had been stored in extreme temperatures and now needed retuning after every performance. What used to be gentle teasing came out as sarcasm sharp enough to cut. What used to be mild irritation emerged as room-clearing fury.
"Take your time," Fingon said, meaning it. "We have all of eternity, assuming we don't destroy ourselves first."
"Such optimism. This is why I love you."
The word landed between them like an incompetent fledgling, tumbling through the air before settling awkwardly on the stone between them. They'd been circling around it for months: love, that is, not the bird (which was metaphorical anyway and therefore exempt from the biological constraints that governed actual birds). Before Thangorodrim, they'd been people who assumed their bodies would always be available for the expression of affection. Now, every touch required negotiation, every quick fuck a treaty between what their hearts wanted, what their minds remembered and what their bodies could actually tolerate.
"I still—" Maedhros began, then stopped, apparently encountering some internal resistance to whatever he'd been planning to say. He started again, his voice carrying the careful precision of someone attempting surgery with inadequate tools. "The geography of my body has changed. There are places that used to mean pleasure that now mean... something else. I'm having to retranslate myself, and I don't always know what language I'm using. It feels like we're back in lessons, learning basic vocabulary. And I was never good at lessons. Not like Maglor."
Fingon turned to face him fully, movements deliberate and readable, a habit they'd developed in the months since rescue. "Then we'll learn together. We've always been good at making up things as we went. Doing impossible things, all of that."
"Rescuing me from Thangorodrim was impossible. This is..." Maedhros gestured vaguely at the space between them, which seemed to contain entire continents of complexity, unmapped territories where desire and fear intersected in ways that required new forms of navigation.
"This is Tuesday," Fingon said firmly, though he had to think for a moment to remember what day it actually was—time having become somewhat negotiable in their current arrangement. "This is Tuesday, and we're on holiday. Or whatever day it is. I've rather lost track. The point is, impossible is what we did last year. This is just... complicated. Difficult. And we're very clever people, despite all evidence to the contrary."
"Evidence like following my father to Middle-earth?"
"Well, no one's perfect."
They stood closer now, close enough that Fingon could see the new lines around Maedhros's eyes, evidence of environmental attrition. Stress-lines, worry-lines, the kind of topographic changes that occurred when a person spent too long holding their face in expressions of careful neutrality while their internal landscape was being systematically reshaped by forces beyond their control.
The scars on his throat were visible in the moonlight, silver threads that caught the light like expensive jewelry, and Fingon had to resist the urge to trace them with his fingers. He did not wish to transform this moment from conversation into something more complex, for complexity required more energy than either of them possessed at the moment.
"I'm not who I was," Maedhros said quietly, the words emerging like a confession or perhaps a warning.
"Thank god. He was exhausting. All that princely dignity and unmarred beauty. This version is much more interesting."
It was meant as reassurance, but Fingon could hear the way it landed: not quite where he'd aimed it, carrying implications he hadn't intended. Because interesting was a dangerous word, one that could be interpreted as fetishising, romanticising, finding aesthetic value in suffering. He opened his mouth to clarify, to explain what he'd actually meant, but Maedhros was already responding.
"This version is held together with shite and whatever the opposite of hope is."
"Spite?"
"I was going to say realism, but spite works too. Shite and spite."
Fingon laughed, and after a moment, Maedhros did too.
"Maglor's music," Maedhros said eventually, returning to the conversation they'd been having before it wandered into the territory of personal archaeology. "It was about translation, wasn't it? About how we're all refugees from our own selves now, trying to make meaning in the ruins of our... relative morality."
"That's very poetic for someone who claims to be running on spite."
"Spite can be poetic. Look at my father."
They winced in unison, which was another thing they'd learned to do together, like dancing or disagreeing about military strategy. The mention of Fëanor settled between them like ash from a fire that was still burning somewhere, would always be burning somewhere.
"What did you think about while you were up there?" Fingon asked, then immediately wished he hadn't. The question fell from his lips before he could catch it, one of those dangerous inquiries that emerged from genuine curiosity but landed in territory marked with warning signs and barriers meant to keep casual explorers from wandering into places they weren't equipped to handle.
But Maedhros didn't tense, didn't retreat into that careful blankness he sometimes wore like armor when conversations ventured too close to the mountain. Instead, he seemed to consider the question with the same careful attention he gave to all difficult problems, turning it over in his mind until he found an angle that made answering possible.
"At first, escape. Every waking moment was devoted to cataloging possibilities—weak points in the chains, patterns in guard rotations, whether I could survive the fall if I could somehow break free." His voice carried the distant quality of someone describing events that had happened to someone else, in some other life. "Then death. When escape proved... impractical... I focused on ways to accelerate the process. More creative applications of existing injuries, methods of provoking my captors into finishing what they'd started."
The clinical tone was more disturbing than emotion would have been, suggesting depths of despair that had moved beyond feeling into something more like mathematical calculation. Fingon felt something twist in his chest. It was not pity, which Maedhros would have found insulting, but a kind of retroactive terror at how close they'd come to a world where this conversation was impossible because one of its participants had found a successful method of "accelerating the process."
"Then... nothing," Maedhros continued, apparently unaware of the minor earthquake his words had triggered in Fingon's nervous system. "Thinking requires a future tense, and I'd run out of those. You can't plan or hope or even despair effectively when you've stopped believing that time moves forward. I just... existed. Like a rock exists, or a piece of furniture. Present but not participating."
The description was worse than the clinical recitation of suicidal ideation, somehow. This idea of Maedhros reduced to the level of an object, stripped of agency and intention and all the things that made existence more than just the mechanical process of continuing to take up space. It was a form of death that left the body intact, a kind of murder that occurred entirely within the boundaries of the self.
"Toward the end, I started composing taxonomies." The shift in tone suggested they were moving into safer territory, or at least territory that Maedhros was more comfortable sharing. "Types of pain. Variations in wind. The number of ways light could reflect off ice. It was like creating a dictionary for a language only I would ever speak."
"And now?"
"Now I'm trying to remember how to breathe without pissing someone off."
Fingon kissed him then, careful but not tentative. There was a difference, they'd discovered through months of trial and error and the occasional spectacular miscommunication. Tentative suggested uncertainty about welcome, while careful suggested awareness of complexity, recognition that intimacy between them now required navigation equipment and diplomatic protocols and sometimes a good sense of humour about the gap between intention and execution.
Maedhros responded hesitantly at first, then with growing confidence, as if his body was slowly agreeing to trust its own capacity for something other than endurance. The kiss tasted like wine and learned possibility and the particular flavour of conversations that had moved beyond words into the territory where communication happened through pressure and warmth and the careful choreography of two people learning to occupy the same space without triggering each other's accumulated defences.
When they pulled apart, the stars looked exactly the same, which was either comforting or terrifying, depending on your philosophical position on cosmic indifference. The universe, it seemed, was not particularly invested in their personal dramas, which meant their moments of connection and reconciliation were significant only to them (a thought that should have been depressing but felt awfully liberating instead).
"We should go inside," Maedhros said. "It's getting cold, and I've reached my quota of symbolic contemplation for the day."
"We could just stand here until we become very poetic statues. Future generations would make up stories about our tragic beauty."
"Future generations will have enough tragic beauty of their own without borrowing ours."
“Oh, Maedhros. What is it you want?”
"I want—" Maedhros began, then stopped, the sentence fragmenting against some internal resistance that made finishing it more difficult than starting it. He took a breath, regrouped, tried again. "I want to want things again. Not just need them or tolerate them or endure them. Want them."
The admission hung between them like an offering, precious and fragile and slightly dangerous in its honesty. Because this was what trauma accomplished, ultimately—not just the infliction of pain, but the systematic destruction of desire, the careful erosion of the capacity to imagine futures worth working toward. Want required hope, and hope required the belief that time moved forward rather than simply accumulating, and both hope and forward motion were luxuries that survival sometimes demanded you sacrifice.
"What kind of things?" Fingon asked, recognising that they had moved into territory that required careful navigation, where the wrong response could shut down the conversation or, worse, send Maedhros retreating into the careful defences he'd constructed to protect whatever remained of his capacity for vulnerability.
"Ordinary things. Breakfast. Bad poetry. You."
"I'm flattered to be listed with breakfast."
"Breakfast is very important. It suggests a future where eating continues to be relevant."
The logic was unassailable, and carried its own form of philosophical sophistication: the recognition that hope often disguised itself as mundane assumption, that the radical act of believing in tomorrow frequently took the form of planning what to eat when tomorrow arrived. It suggested that Maedhros was learning to rebuild his relationship with futurity one meal at a time, constructing the first shy scaffolding of ordinary assumption that made more complex forms of hope possible.
Fingon moved then, crossing the small space between their chairs to kneel in front of Maedhros (not submission but equation, let it be said), bringing their eyes level so that whatever passed between them would be a conversation between equals rather than a performance with an audience. "You do want things. I've seen you want things. Small things, granted—an extra hour of sleep, stronger wine, for certain members of the council to develop sudden muteness. But wanting."
"That's not—" Maedhros began, then stopped, apparently encountering the same internal resistance that had fragmented his earlier sentence.
"It's a start." Fingon took Maedhros's hand. "We're very good at starts. It's the middles where we struggle. Humps and mountains, all that sort of thing."
"And endings. Don't forget our spectacular endings."