Chapter Text
The last days of a stark, white-blue winter fade in the opening notes of the coming spring. Crisp light flecks of snow give way to heavy crystalline flakes, bunching together in formations as many-petalled flowers, or splayed out silhouettes of elves and men alike, twisted into oddly slumped figures. Then comes the spring rain, in fresh heavy drops that seem to wash the sky of clouds, the sprinkles of spring snowdrops in while spring ice, delicate as lace, the scatters of spring blooms, magnolia and cherry and apple, dogwood in bright pink and virgin white, quite as clean as the snow. Spring stars shine out of the spring sky, cheerful and fey, and Fingon Fingolfion goes to horse-races and sits sketching. Dives below ice into spring lakes while his lover shivers on the shore. Eats flat-bread with honey. Follows his lover to dog-shows, where they link arms in public, Fingon’s hand resting on the smooth, unscarred stub of Maedhros’ right arm, tracing circles around the bone of his wrist, and comes home with two wonderfully soft dachshund puppies, one a long-furred dark grey and one a mottled chestnut, little teeth sharp as needles and little velvet tongues stinking with puppy-breath.
He smokes with his brother on the white cliffs overlooking the sea, sitting shoulder to shoulder, sampling new strains of pipe-weed brought over from other lands and laughing at jokes that would not be funny sober. He rides with his sister to the edges of isle, sleeping in the hollows of trees when they grow too exhausted to continue. He draws maps with his father, plotting out the outlines of new continents, and together they entertain the modest hobby of vineyard-keeping.
He goes and worships at the temples of the air, shuts his eyes in meditation and sees himself quite contentedly as one small cog of a machine beyond his understanding. He runs his fingers over the prayer beads in his hair and breathes through them, feeling the air cycle through him, each vein humming with the greater powers of Arda.
He comes to know his new body quite as well as he had known the old, and then better. Quite well too he has come to know the body of Maedhros Feanorion, returned to him, though they endeavor to continue that exploration. He lays in his lover’s arms most nights, and lets himself be soothed by the feeling of hands undoing his braid.
It would be unfair to say all of his days are the same; indeed though sweet they are quite as different from one another as the snowflakes of the fading winter, and all the sweeter for the knowledge that he ought not expect them to end.
Of course Fingon is not untroubled. Ill dreams find him, now and then. The weather turns and he feels a different cold in his bones, or else something catches him oddly in the mirror and the ghost of fire lingers in his blood, chasing him out of his sunlight villa and into the lake. Sometimes he misses Húrin so intensely his chest begins to ache with it, and he reads again and again of the Man’s fate, more unsettled each time.
At times he worries for Maedhros, who is not precisely friendless but certainly not so well-loved as Fingon is, seeking company when the desire strikes him mostly from distant scholarly connections or Fingon’s friends. He has his hounds, of course; an endless stream of them, mostly quite small and rather useless, and when a certain mood strikes over him he goes down to work in the vineyards, to write something or other of the crossing of plants.
At times he worries that Maglor has not come; that Maglor, they feel, shall not come. No ships will bear him here, he who has not died; and he will keep living, stubborn, in that other land which is now his home.
(At times, Maedhros says, they share dreams. He wakes weeping, and longing, and sorry; but there is nothing, of course, to be done for it.)
But these troubles are scattered, and few. The morning that the Spring festival, the festival of rebirth, Fingon wakes quite content on his side of the mattress—pleasantly firm, unlike the horribly soft bedding on Maedhros’ side, because his lover likes best to be sucked into his bed’s embrace so well it is a miracle he can rise at all—and rises with a pleasant anticipation, perching in the windowsill with his silver mirror to do his makeup by the light of the sun.
Maedhros groans, perhaps dreaming, but when he wakes he cannot remember it. There is nothing in the day that would make it seem a turning-point, a beginning, an end.
It is nearly an hour’s ride to the festival, which is held in the rolling poppy-fields between the Halls of Mandos and Lorien. Maedhros frets over the puppies—how soon they might return to feed them, whether it is best to take them with them, so they do not risk missing their mid-day meal, if the festival might be too loud or too much for so small a creature, if the girls from the next house over were planning to stay, and if so could be asked to feed them— and Fingon loses one of his devotional hair-beads and turns the house inside out (it has rolled, it turns out, into the seal of the vanity), and then there is some fuss in the stables.
Still they make good time, and soon they start to come upon trees decorated in green and lilac ribbons—the colors of rebirth—of people waving silk flags and singing, children wearing masks and costumes in the symbols of coming year. In the forests elves cheer, playing the customary games. By the rivers children throw smooth tossing-rocks at basins of fish-eggs, trying to tip them to fall, as they ought, into the waters. And there— the scattered, quickly-constructed wooden booths of street-food, fried dough covered in garlic-basil oil or lavender cream.
By the time they leave their horses in the golden fields and make it to the epicenter of the procession, their fingers sticky with cream and oil, fastening cloaks of silk over their shoulders—jade, for Maedhros, and swirling magenta-and-lilac for Fingon—the ceremony is quite well-set to begin. Fingon had had vague plan to meet with Finrod and Turgon and their respective broods, but they are hard to find in the crowd; there, he thinks, may be Turgon’s youngest son with Finrod’s middle daughter, smiling, well-matched children in sparkling silver-and-blue— but either he is mistaken or they do not hear him call, and quickly enough they are lost in the crowd.
And there comes the sound of flute-song and singing, the grey-cloaked processions of the Houses of Nienna and then the green ones of Estë. “Leave it,” Maedhros bends to speak against the shell of his ear, “we will see nothing searching for them now. Certainly we can catch them by the lake after.”
So they abandon that search, and climb up on the poppy-covered hills to better watch. Maedhros’ view is better than Fingon’s, for his height sets him at an advantage, and so Fingon flits up to his mind to watch through his eyes.
There walks Nienna, surrounded by her maidens, weeping for the fates of the smallest lives in all of Arda; the butterflies curled up and dead at the coming of the frost, the mayflies sparkling into the world and gone from it again, the lightning bugs, the dragonflies, the beetles, the worms drowned in puddles of rain.
After then walk the Maiar of Yavanna, moss-skinned, vine-haired, carrying baskets, and elves around them begin to sing and to cheer, their voices rising and swooping about them, and they open up their baskets and let free hundreds of dragonflies and beetles, of lightning bugs and mayflies, caterpillars and larva and worms, all the little things whose souls were not yet quite done with living. Children cheer, reaching up to catch the flying bugs with their hands, picking the huge sparkling centipedes up from the ground. The true spectacle of it will come later, during the night, when the lightning bugs will hang in the air thick as blanket of lights, then thin out into bursts of sparkling flowers.
Then Nienna sings a lament for the fallen birds, the bats cast down from the sky, the flying fish snapped out of the air— for all the things which live to fly, whose bodies lie broken down on the hard ground. And now the maidens of Vána come, and let free doves and bats and robins and finches and nightingales and bright-red cardinals and white-gulls and airy sea-fish, until the blue sky cannot be seen behind them.
And so it goes. Next the creatures of the water; fish and dolphins and bright-gilled mermaids. Then the creatures of the trees; chipmunks and squirrels and monkeys and weasels and sloths and lemurs. The crawling things; lizards and snakes and crabs and their kin. The things which are of two things at once; turtles and sparrow-hawks and frogs and chimeras. The great hoofed beasts; elephants and deer and unicorns and mules and bison. Then the animals which howl; wolves and foxes and cougars and owls and howler monkeys— then the great cats and lesser bears, and so on and on.
Then at the very end the hounds and the horses, most beloved; and here Maedhros’ eyes light up, and he runs forward, through the crowd, to look for the dogs he’s lost over the years, and returns after some fuss with a huge-eared red-and-white toy spaniel, lost to him some eighty-four years.
He comes back with the little dog in his front pocket, grinning from ear to ear, and keeps, in his excitement, kissing the dog and then Fingon in turn. “What a day,” he says, “what a day.”
Fingon smiles at him, and reaches to pet the little spaniel. But his own mind is far away; the main event has not yet started.
The flutes sound again, then trumpets. Nienna stands shoulder-to-shoulder with Estë in the center of the crowd, and weeps a last lament; for the Quendi, the talking peoples, slain by the dark forces or cut down by their kin, fallen in terrible accidents, sickened by the ill fruits of a poisoned earth of by the grief of their hearts. They who were meant to be deathless, dead before their times.
Fingon wipes his own sympathy-tears thoughtlessly with the back of his hand and nudges Maedhros. “Your brother, do you think?”
Maedhros laughs. Shakes his head. Four of his brothers are here in the flesh, and he speaks to none them. “Curufin shan’t come,” he says, “not until father is let free.”
Fingon rises on his tip toes, watching the crowd intently. Estë lifts her white veil and sings a song of healing, of rebirth, and Fingon sees two figures stand beneath it. Both Sindar, he thinks; an old, broad-shouldered elven woman with dark eyes and a young boy with a mop of dark-blond hair. A cheer breaks out through the crowd, and quickly they are drawn to their people, wrapped in the folds of green silk appropriate to such occasions, given crowns and apples and pearls.
“Well,” Maedhros says, “quite wonderful, as usual. I am glad we came. Shall we go and find our kin, Findo?”
But Fingon, unknowing, has begun to weep. Maedhros looks startled, and draws him away, into the shade of the trees. A freshly-returned lion cub, stretched out and resting by one of the blooming rhododendron flowers, looks up at them and yawns, baring huge white teeth. Maedhros reaches down, and cups Fingon’s face with his hand, turning his chin up to face him. “Dear heart,” he says, “what is the matter?”
“The orcs,” Fingon says, and Maedhros stiffens and goes to look behind them, turning sharply on his heel, but Fingon sends him the sensation of his head shaking through mind-touch, pulling him back, “no, no. I mean—Men go to whither they will, and we return, and even spirits of our hounds return, if they wish again to live, but orcs are carved from our spirits and our bodies, more akin to us than to Men—do not look at me so, ‘Ros, you know it is true—and what comes of them?”
Maedhros’ eyebrows rise. “They fade,” he says, “or else they wander as spirits, and come not to the halls. I doubt they would again wish to live their doomed, damned lives.”
“Some must,” Fingon says, “certainly somewhere some must.”
Maedhros sighs at that, and shakes his head. He says, “don’t think about the orcs, sweetheart,” so Fingon answers, “alright, I will not,” and then he keeps thinking about the orcs.
He thinks about them as they slip away towards the feast, their arms linked. As he goes to play with his brother’s younger children, tossing them shrieking into the rushing river. As he returns, quite as soaked as they, and steals Maedhros’ cape, settling down next to Finrod on the grass to watch the stars.
Finrod lies back, his eyes half shut. He manages to show his age the least, of all of them; especially now, his features unspooled by creeping sleep, his littlest daughter curled up atop his chest, the top of her head just under his chin. He runs his fingers over her hair, white-blond and sticking out of her braids in soft baby curls. The very picture, Fingon thinks, of a young father, recently wed and carefree; a man who has seen no woe at all, to whom oaths and backstabbing and werewolves come not even in his worst dreams.
Fingon reaches over and nudges him, bumping the backs of their hands together, knuckles against knuckles. “Ingoldo.”
“Mm?” Finrod cracks open one eye, green as the first leaves of spring.
“Do you ever think about orcish souls?” Fingon asks. “The dead ones. What comes of them.”
“Oh,” Finrod says, “all the time.”
And Fingon feels a little silly, for having only just thought it. Of course Finrod has gone over it all in his mind already; of course Finrod mourns, as only Finrod can, as Finrod mourns of all the lost and damned things of Middle-Earth. And of course Fingon has been here, unthinking, unknowing, until it struck suddenly; and of course Fingon does not know, now, how to live with it.
“I am not sure I can leave it,” he says.
“No,” Finrod answers, “I am not sure we ought.” His hand traces the back of his daughter’s head. She stirs slightly in her sleep. Makes a sound a little as a cat’s mew. “Some of our philosophers say perhaps they must be taken elsewhere, if they are to be reborn. That no such marred thing could come to the Blessed Isles, as the rest of us.”
“No marred thing,” Fingon echoes. His eyes flit involuntarily over to Maedhros, who lounges by the banks of the river, playing tug-of-war lazily with the spaniel. “Do you believe it?”
Finrod breathes out something that might be a no, and turns away, to better see the stars.
He spends the year in thought. He is deliberate about these things, even—perhaps especially—when it comes to matters of certainty.
(It had taken him three years, after all, to slip away from his father’s camp in Mithrim in search of Maedhros. He is precise and careful in his madness, raised in the houses of the Noldor, where boldness in craft was ever accompanied by care.)
The weather turns inside out and reassembles itself. The grapes give fruit, huge and sweet and red on one side of the vineyard and little deep violet ones on the other. Finrod writes a chapter of his ever-unfinished book, sends it to Fingon, and argues extensively with all of his margin-notes. Angrod wins every bet they have on horse-races for three consecutive months, then enters an incredible losing-streak that nearly ends their thousands-year-old friendship. Maedhros’ puppies grow, though to no very great sizes. Turgon and Elenwë invite Fingon on a weeks-long hunting trip, in the middle of winter, and have quite a fine time freezing. The next spring comes.
“I will go to speak to the king,” Fingon says, one warm morning, as he buckles the clasps of his loose riding-cloak, “come with me, if you would.”
Maedhros leans to one side then the other, popping his back loudly. He did not sleep well, tonight; he dreams of some far city, of endless noise, of the smell of dough and colorful wrappers thrown into the sea, of rushing beasts of steel that move underground. “Whatever for? You know he little likes me.”
Fingon picks up his discarded nightgown and swats him on the ass with it. “That speaks only to his fair judgement. Come, because this matters to me.”
The afternoon finds them in the white marble of the palace in Tirion. These days most often Fingon can look his uncle in the eyes without remembering Alqualondë. Does not think of his hands bloodstained, his blue-robes soaked in seawater, the finely blade silver blade gleaming in starlight, his uncle, on the other side of the crowd, green eyes pale with horror. What have you done, Findekáno?
But now it is impossible not to.
He speaks plainly to the king before him. Lays out his thoughts and his fears and his plans, lays out the injustice eating at the very center of his soul. Maedhros watches him, one corner of his mouth quirked up as though fond, and says naught.
“… But I will not do it,” Fingon finishes, “if you forbid me. It your kingdom, and your city, and I would not bring within it a dark thing without asking.”
Finarfin watches him. His face is very carefully set, and for a moment Fingon thinks he will refuse him. But then he shuts his eyes, as though bracing himself.
“At times,” he says, “I have thought on similar matters. I imagine the Valar are wise enough not to make twice the same error. Petition them; if they grant you this then so shall I.”
“You are kind, my lord,” Fingon says. Finarfin holds his gaze a moment too long, and there is a question in it Fingon dares not answer.
“The high court only, then,” Fingon says, pulling free the pins in his hair in front of the vanity. Across from him, Maedhros has settled down into the bath, his long legs swinging over the edge of the tub. A cloud of steam rises around him, his skin pleasantly pink.
“Certainly you do not wish me to accompany you there,” Maedhros says. A single lock of barely-wavy hair falls over his eyes, weighed down at the tip with water and sticking to his cheek. Fingon reaches for him; takes his face in his hands and brushes away the hair. Kisses on habit the very tip of his nose, then the sparse freckles on his cheekbones.
“Oh,” he says, as he settles down in the tub atop Maedhros, straddling his lap, “oh, but I do.”
It is summer. The halls of the high court are grander and whiter than even the palaces of the king, gleaming in the sun as bones. Fingon sweats beneath the high collar of his formal robes, pressing his fingertips against the meat of his palms to avoid pulling at the heavy golden cords strung into the fabric on his chest. Next to him Maedhros walks stands, shoulders stiff, weighed down by the many silver coins woven into his. He jangles when he walks.
Fingon kneels before the high judge. Thinks of the whispers of the air, the eagles swooping down into the great dark places of the mountain. Breathes in deeply, feeling the wind of Aman course through him, and clears his mind, very deliberately, as he does in prayer.
Then he lays out his thoughts, one by one. His grief, his doubt, his desire for change. His pity, for all things marred and broken. Why must it be so, he asks? What of those doomed, what of those damned?
Before him Manwë is tall, many-eyes, impassive. His six hands lay palm-up, facing the heat of the sun. A great eagle perches on one of his shoulders, and seems there no very large bird. I see your thoughts, Faithful, he says, and for a long time nothing more.
Fingon does not know how long he kneels. Time around the Valar seems to warp and shift, wrapping them in the its odd song-form. His knees begin to ache; from somewhere a white marble hand offers him a kneeling-pad, moss-soft. He feels that Manwë speaks in his mind, not to him but to other distant spirits.
When Manwë answers, it is aloud, his voice as the low cracks of thunder. “You are not the first,” he says, “to pose the question; though indeed you are the first to bring it to me.”
Fingon shifts. “My loyalty is here,” he says, “and I knew pity lays in your heart, Lord, for—”
“Yes,” Manwë says, “I know. It matters not. Eight times we have been asked of the fates of the orcs and unclean spirits struck down in Middle-Earth, and eight times we have given the same answer. There is no place for them; for they were not meant to be, for no notes in the music were made for them. Once their spirits had had another intended purpose, another form; but they were mutilated, twisted to ill-purpose. Only very few come to the halls at all, or seek us, dead. Those few cannot heal without being being taken apart and remade, and even then we cannot chase the last echoes of the darkness from them.”
“No?” Fingon asks. It is an odd thing, to hear the great king speak of what he cannot do.
“No,” Manwë answers, “think of a tree, grown in bad soil with little light, watered with waste and blood, gnarled and twisted and pierced through with arrows. We may cut away the rot in the wood; may dig out the roots; may even, if naught else can be saved, take the most hale green branch and graft it, let it root, water it with clean spring-water and set it under good sun. But it will carry with it forever the sickness it had taken up from the ill soil, and the waste, and the blood, buried deep within its core, for to cut so deep to wash them clean would be to kill it entirely.”
“But still it is not what it was,” Fingon says.
“Yes,” Manwë answers, “yes, Faithful; but who would take it up, and plant it in safe gardens, knowing it bears rot? This is not only our home, but your peoples’ also, once already we have allowed darkness in it. The orcs slew you, and disfigured you, and did to your people crimes unspeakable, seeking to spread some fraction of their pain and their disease. Who of your kin would, afterwards, hold love in his heart? Who would open the doors of their home to such a thing?”
There is something he wants, Fingon can feel. He has known it before in worship; has remembered the pity that Manwë ever held even for Morgoth, the aid he had given to the damned.
“I would,” Fingon says, quietly but with no doubt in his voice, and knows himself the first of nine to have spoken so.