Work Text:
0.
Caranthir died with what might have been a love letter tucked into his belt. Edges of the parchment frayed soft into something like cloth, the letter was addressed to a mortal; the message was halfway to self-censored, with thick frustrated lines struck through vulnerable words. The parchment was old, older than any mortal could last.
Celegorm died with a smile, his bloodied face frozen with hostile laughter that steadily, over the course of hours, relaxed into defeat. By the time Maedhros departed their self-made sepulchre at the center of Melian’s broken Girdle in a fruitless search for two children, only a private joke upturned the corners of his lips.
Curufin died with his dagger drawn; his sword unsheathed; knees drawn to his chest and ready to kick while he bled out, like there was something to save. A porcupine. Maglor sang Curufin’s favorite song over his chilled body while Amrod and Amras eased his limbs into a mimicry of repose. Still in death Curufin lay arrayed in his furious armor, ineffective as any Arda-bound creature against its time.
It should not have been time.
Maedhros left Dior’s blood-imbrued halls and stood outside, appraising what light minnowed through the dense tree canopy and gulping down his delirious grief with a swig of water. Then he lifted his chin and set about undoing, delegator and laborer, the disaster his brothers had bequeathed him.
His most capable scouts, returning empty-handed after a foray through warped branch and vine, began conjecturing that Elured and Elurin had been swallowed up by a carnivorous forest. Doriath, its appetite whetted on bloodshed, had claimed its toll. No other, prosaic explanation for the children’s immaculate elusion. Their invisibility.
They related this to Maedhros as though it could be of use to him, and he grew quiet. He grew, with merely a stare, into a leviathan presence overwhelming in his own tent, a penumbra to overtake them. “You impose on my conference,” he bit out, “to announce to me that you have lost your wits.”
They quailed away as quickly as life. One of his councillors carried on explaining the futility of the search. In answer, Maedhros struck his books from his writing desk with a sharp sweep of his arm; easily kicked over the wooden heirloom so he could be closer to this news: to better hear, he said with a dangerous calm, what it seemed vital that his men would have him believe about retrieving two lost little boys.
Maglor swept into the tent in answer to the commotion, soundless as a cloud and as laden with unshed tears. His hands were stippled with gore: from the dead or from the nearly dead, he didn't know and did not allow himself to wonder. He’d left Maglor to see to headcounts, tallying the missing. Maglor would use the information as he saw fit.
And Maedhros --
“Maedhros,” hushed Maglor, entreating.
The sound jolted a surge of will into him; he abruptly turned away from his antagonism to gather Amrod and Amras, their scouts -- Ambarussa's shaken but still keen-eyed, not yet unmade by the terror. At their fore and without another word, Maedhros stalked away from their meadow campsite and into the murky verdure.
They returned three evenings later with no children.
Funeral pyres ebbed their smoke up into the sky like oblations for incurious deities: all the good birchwood rations charred to nothing now.
The healers wandered along the meadow’s idylls, bobbing boatlike through the grasses as they replenished their dwindled herb stores.
A lynx slinked amid the snowdrops; hoopoes courted one other with dips and gifts of caterpillars. Beyond them stood Maglor: an eerily mesmeric figure within the placid interruption of forest. He glared at Maedhros with a heated grief.
“I hope,” he murmured, shaking with anger, “you have not come bearing anyone else to burn, because we have used up our firewood.”
Maglor had insisted upon ennobling his dead brothers after they had debased themselves: he concluded their stories for them upon firewood redolent of incense and within flame to transfigure; until, at last, not even the bones remembered what they had done.
“The bodies could not wait on your return,” Maglor said, stricken and defiant. “I could not abide them languishing there upon the floor, ignored. You left me here with them; I needed to answer to them. You left me alone with our dead -- ”
“How are our oil stores?” Maedhros asked, counting the small fires their guardsmen were tending upon the shrug of grass. Twigs, woody bramble; he watched the flames suffocate in the interminable damp and wallow down to nothing, for all the work of their devoted hands.
Maglor was silent, ashen. His eyes mapped Maedhros’ face as if for something to salvage. Closed. “Middling,” he answered.
Then he vanished from Maedhros’ side.
Everything left that way in those days. Brisk as Sindarin on a Quenya-bred tongue; immediate as punctuation.
Fingon’s brilliant banners shearing the fog, struck through. A fortress city upon a frigid hill that promised protection, struck through; three brothers all at once, struck.
And Maedhros, unnavigable as a cliff face, marshaling forth a question of logistics in order to circumvent a story he knew Maglor needed to articulate -- because Maedhros, river water still pooled in his boots, elbows and knees caked in mud, could not abide hearing it.
How Maglor alone kept vigil beside his dead brothers. He sang to them where he sat upon Dior’s hewn stone floors, nearly feverish with misery as the stunned nightscape wandered across the high ceilings. He watched through his tears as the shadows reached out their long tendrils and shook his brothers awake.
They looked at him: nothing to ask him, nothing left to say.
And when he pitched forward to take their broken bodies into his arms, he broke the spell and they fell asleep again in the sleeping kingdom of Doriath.
Maglor walked away from Maedhros bearing his unspoken bereavement, struck through; instead had his tears with Amrod and Amras.
Maedhros threw himself into work and offered Maglor nothing but drafted missives, language dogmatic under its diplomacy, that would meet Dior’s daughter once she reached the Havens of Sirion.
Like for like: Maglor stopped framing Maedhros’ face in his hands and smiling like he loved what he saw.
Maglor’s instinctive affection -- fingers threading through his hair, arms draping upon him and chin rested on shoulder as they perused correspondences together -- fled the flood of their transgressions. In the wake, dregs stuck to Maedhros and clung to him all the way to Sirion: a tension of untouch here and want for an unspoken word there.
He would drink down, instead, Maglor touching other things and other people as though he were one of the bard’s erstwhile enthralled audiences; he wondered how to become something worthy of touch even while his voice refused him want.
Struck through.
Everything left that way in those days.
1.
Everything returned that way in those days.
The lynx slinks back into focus. A different lynx now: spry, sighted by Elrond on the wooded pathway to the beach. The hoopoes call from within the whistling reeds, unseen as they were when Maedhros and his brothers first alighted on Beleriand’s shores and called it Valariandë -- Maglor mimics them to spur Elrond and Elros into grinning and hooting their own interpretations.
Elrond and Elros had appeared just like that: on the heels of Amrod and Amras’ crumpled bodies like an ineffective anodyne.
A third time’s charm, these twins arrived quarry, barbed and fretful as caged beasts until Maglor took to charming them through the bars. A year and a half into their life together, their young hostages noticed that their cage door was now ajar and they were outside of it, and by then it was the choice they made each day to remain with Maedhros and Maglor that they knew as, and called, freedom.
In their tranquil cottage perimetered by the fragmented Fëanorian contingent, the children keep a daily schedule of studies and hunting and play under Maglor’s charge:
Tea early in the evenings: mild dandelion; strident hyssop; stringent pine needle. Dinner that they all make together.
During frigid baths in the stream curving down to the inlet, the inevitable carousel of questions: of mother and father, of Aman, of five absent brothers, of reunion. Of when shall come reunion, because the poems that Maglor reads aloud promise that everyone shall end up held in familiar arms.
Of how did this scar happen; of why Maedhros does not sleep at night.
Maglor asserts that for every night the twins occupy the drafty living space with their horseplay or chatter, a fire shall warm the hearth. When they ease down for the night at last, he asks them, “Shall I tell you or shall I sing you a story?”
They fall asleep to his voice, their eyes slipping shut and remaining so in the manner of Men.
Maedhros looks away from their sleeping faces.
Maglor picks them up like precious artifacts of an ordinary life: he places one in Maedhros’ arms, gathers up the other, and together they tuck the children into their coverlets of linen and down.
Maglor kisses their foreheads.
Sometimes Maedhros’ forehead receives a kiss, too.
2.
The firewood stores never completely rebound from the disaster in Doriath, which Maedhros calls a failure of his own management.
He will not make his shortcomings the twins’ problem.
When the week arrives that the twins’ tutor chaperones them on an expedition upland to learn the wilderness, Maedhros arranges a flight of archers to demarcate a suitable campsite, carries the twins on his shoulders up the rocky inclines to their grounds, and sends his and Maglor’s firewood rations with the travel party.
He and Maglor return together to the little cottage, alone at last. The unhurried intimacy tastes strange after so long imbibing catastrophes by the mouthful. It revives gingerly, and melts bittersweet: Maglor casting those inscrutable doe-eyed glances at Maedhros before he smiles, their idle conversation about glazing turnips with honey for dinner, their shadows leaping ahead of them in their impatience to touch.
The familiarity retreads, almost, the same shy tension that would ornament infatuations in Valinor. Shattering elegant notions of Noldorin romance -- the picturesque rendezvous and hushed exchange of praise and gifts -- the scions of Finwë would stumble, smitten and clumsy, through the insurmountable tasks of projecting calm while warring with nerves, of speaking from the heart without a stammer, without wearing the same big piteous expression Huan wore whenever he’d watch Celegorm tuck into a cut of venison.
Turgon stupefied by his own apprehensions and rehearsing with Maglor the possibilities of her “yes," her “no,” her “maybe” -- Aredhel vaulting into her dangerous stunts to win Celegorm's begrudging admiration -- Finrod practicing, with a scowling Curufin in his arms, how to carry his betrothed over the threshold in the Vanyarin tradition without knocking her feet or head against the doorframe.
Lifetime ago, a world ago.
The kind of ghosts drifting there that Maglor would sigh and sing to; the kind Maedhros would shut out if he couldn't outrun their hissing, and all the dormant needs they resurrect in him.
Maglor, his sole revenant of that world, ties up his hair, takes the dry laundry from the line, and steps over the threshold into their cottage alone.
Their shadows part without a sound.
3.
Maglor keeps his domestic schedule with the consistency of a stage production even in the absence of two central characters. The blocking flows so fluently it could be dancing: his palms open to press juice and scour cookware, fingers river-certain as they fold, with more care than the tattered coverlets warrant, the twins’ unceremonious heaps of blankets back into beds. He pays the same careful attention to Maedhros’ bedding even though he knows Maedhros: he knows Maedhros wrestles into them as one sickened by his own need for sleep, ever alert and still unrested by morning.
Voice parsed and measured out for every scene’s demand. Hair tied up -- that simple costume. Káno.
“That was kind of you, Nelyo.” Maglor pauses in wiping the grit of sea salt and soot from the windowsill to venture a smile at Maedhros. He shivers gladly as if to relish the cold collecting in their living room. “To arrange for the boys to have along some warmth from home. That was kind of you.”
“This is not their home,” Maedhros states.
The door Maglor has opened for Maedhros to enter swings shut. “Nor is it ours,” he dismisses, swerving their script toward semantics to dodge the other argument: where Maedhros declares the twins are better suited far from here, and Maglor refuses to hear, his countenance assiduously aloof against the onslaught of hard truth and his mind obstinately elsewhere.
His mind here: wandering inside this little house he keeps, this ordinary world he visits alone.
“Is building a warmth worth sharing so abject to you?” Maglor speaks to the window, perhaps already missing the young twins with growing smiles. Perhaps waiting on Maedhros in spite of himself. His hair tied up.
He shivers again; seeing this, Maedhros steals out then to scavenge for him what twigs and tree splinters he can. He sparks the flint against the hearth into a meager flame.
Despite his stumbling, smitten and clumsy, he earns a smile.
4.
Kissing used to come easily. Stolen in the midst of sparring to see the other fluster, or pressed against Maglor’s laurel-crowned head on the heels of his concerts.
Or persisting within Himring's dark stone crenelations. That dry cold that howled across the plains, that silent communion they would exchange like an argot. Mouth against mouth: heady and good, soft and asking, and then bounding toward too intense. Too much.
And yet it kept returning as it always did back then: the drawing near over wine or best-laid plans; the nonchalant smile or the stern focus; a quick peck that would cede to a clawed instinct, a give-and-take that sparked sweat between them and a songful sigh from Maglor.
-- Ending in a breath of laughter or a change of topic, dismissed as too much drink after hours of stagnant foreboding, or a playful defiance of the sinister smog off of Angband that shaded their days.
Maglor, hair tied up, leans down to pour Maedhros a cup of sour mortal-made wine. A few black strands loose after a day of work curl against the nape of his neck.
Something in the memory of kissing away the vestments of heartache sinks its teeth into Maedhros and he counts back -- cannot remember when it was last that they had allowed themselves the minor rebellion of stealing a breathless couple minutes together.
Sometime en route to Doriath: before ruination pulled and cajoled them until they were synchronized with it, a living vessel of it.
Sometime before they had approached the red-streaked jumble of silver hair and limbs and fanged grin, and he had bluntly told Maglor, That is not Tyelko.
And Maglor had only looked at him.
He had stared, vexed, over Curufin and Caranthir’s bodies, confounded by the question of how his brothers, for all their inherited sagacity, had not the imagination to consider a way out of this mess that would leave them --
intact.
Why Amrod and Amras had not swallowed their pride and sheltered like the woodsmen they were; why they refused to just hide away from annihilation like Dior’s missing twins had. Why they could not have simply let the earth cradle them back into clay, eyes shut.
Swallow grief down with the wine. Sadness is a waste of time, a waste of water.
Maglor hums to himself where he sets the table for two and sets the soup to simmer over the scanty flame. Another lock of hair loosened behind Maglor’s ear, a lure.
Keeping to the script, they huddle apart before the soot-dark hearth as they wait, swathed in their cloaks. Maglor hastens deeper into his until he is nearly swallowed up in it. Maybe it is deserved, a minute strife parsed out to the kinslayers.
But still he looks at Maglor, who is worth a hundred of him, and opens his cloak. “I’m not yet cold-blooded.”
“No?” Maglor retorts, heart on his sleeve to withstand the chipped granite of Maedhros. But still he shifts in close to vanquish the impersonal distance; cloak lifts and loosens to allow company; he bumps up against Maedhros, shoulder-elbow-thigh, and shudders with the warmth they build together.
His fingers petal out against Maedhros’ -- the succor of touch -- and then bump up against the pommel of the dagger locked to his waist.
“Shall I tell you or shall I sing you a story?” Maglor murmurs into Maedhros’ shoulder.
No twins to answer the nightly question, Maedhros replies: “Sing.”
Then, with his fool’s hope ricocheting somewhere just beyond, “A duet, then?” Maglor flicks a stray curl away from his brow and Maedhros thinks about touching him again.
Maglor only overlooks Maedhros’ grimace at the suggestion and begins singing an untroubled ode to Cuiviénen: the melody sparkling through the history of the first Eldar, who blinked away the gloss of unknowing and sat up soft as clay and as malleable. How they joyfully learned lover and beloved, learned together.
He pulls at the hilt of Maedhros’ dagger as he sings. The corner of Maedhros’ mouth lifts.
“Come now, Nelyo,” he coaxes between beats, singing instructively of leaf-lit night and the first couples joining hands: slowly enough that Maedhros almost could touch, almost could join in.
When Maedhros’ lines arrive and Maedhros only grants Maglor a snort, Maglor affects a harsh and atonal Maedhros voice to sing in his stead.
-- And sings a little louder, blithe as a busker, when Maedhros twists against him to try clapping a hand over his mouth.
“No -- “ Maglor half-laughs through a flinching evasion, hurrying on singing in a scratchy low pitch until Maedhros is shoving at him, trying to evict him from their encumbrance of cloaks.
“No! -- ” Maglor wrestles back, burrows impetuously into Maedhros’ side.
Maedhros laughs. The abrupt noise rattles the frozen living space, a mind of its own and yet unsure of what to do with itself after so long imprisoned: it might tear the little tablecloth or spoil the stone fruit in the bowl.
But Maglor’s own laughter rings in reply, gem-faceted to light the dark. His voice can persuade: so his mother foretold, so his father recognized.
And it persuades Maedhros to grapple again just to feel Maglor pulling him back. Feel the vibration of his mellifluous voice going clipped now with a giggle as he vies, hands fisted into Maedhros’ tunic, to hold Maedhros close.
Giving it to him, giving in to him, Maedhros pinions him against the dark wood floor in an effortless show of brute strength. He furnishes Maglor with an out of practice grin. “Do you yield?”
Maglor’s ankle draws up against his thigh, a slow, intent pull up his leg even as he knocks against Maedhros’ ungiving shoulders. He interrupts his interminable singing to interject, sly, “Make me -- “
Tearing at the tangle of cloaks, Maedhros takes one of Maglor’s wrists captive against his chest. Maglor’s breath hitches and he squirms up against Maedhros’ body, wanting to know that Maedhros will fight to keep him there. Pleased. A flash of another smile through song, his eyes bright as knives in the dark, he cuts pristinely through Maedhros --
No other hand to silence Maglor, Maedhros kisses him. Unvarnished, he counts Maglor the only artful feature in his heave down and his firm shove of lips: his seal to lock in the moment.
Maglor’s fingers drift and curl into the high collar of his tunic. His lips move, and for a nettling instant Maedhros wonders if this foolhardy nightingale intends to keep singing -- his prey, his --
But Maglor only shifts, fits their lips together to exegete the moment. Gentle, encouraging. What are we, if not each other’s?
Maedhros breaks the kiss to sit back. Maglor watches him, quiet now.
His scouts flicker through the foliage outside the window. He listens to their march as they close in the porous perimeter for the evening’s brief halt, which Maedhros needs to call. Needs to consult with them; needs to request they keep their attention upland.
These few Fëanorians would otherwise be susceptible, without his grounding injunctions -- eat, hold, repose -- to subsuming themselves within the senescent, corrupted cause.
A hypocrite, Maedhros recognizes this in himself, too.
An easy exit from thinking, to make of yourself an instrument. The hand to strike fear, the heart to motivate cold-running blood. Eyes to corner the next conflict and see it settled. The mouth to bark a mandate, to fill with fangs.
Maedhros silences what threatens to crack open in him with distance: disentangles himself from the blankets and his brother; strides to the door; signals further along the root-warped woodland to one of his councilors.
Maglor returns to his schedule. Abandoning the atemporality of their blankets, he ties an apron around his waist and settles for paring vegetables. He casts a final, searching smile toward the threshold of their door to Maedhros, who does not look back his way.
He wants to: a vulnerability in him.
He thinks of it, while he unfurls a map by lamplight outside with his vanguard: he thinks of striding to Maglor and taking him away from the columns of bright carrots and outspread spring onion, the honeyed turnips -- whisking in callously from the wings and interrupting his fine-tuned script. Tearing off that apron so that he can touch more of him, touch him again, again.
Touch him wherever his dark hair unspools; all the minute, smooth places Maedhros has yet to touch. Behind his ear, then down to the declivity his clavicle makes. Places that seem imperative to touch before it’s their turn for their eyes to shut.
And when he is inside the cottage again, next to Maglor and working, he thinks of it.
To touch there at the exposed nape of his neck where he can see the hairs raising -- Maglor sensing suddenly the heft of his brother's attention for him, and responding to its impact with anticipation --
Maedhros turns away to tend the sputtering hearth fire.
Maglor gazes after him. He hums softly to himself, a lone guest in his ordinary life.
0.
“Why doesn’t he sleep?” Elros would accuse Maedhros on the nights when he looked for a way out of bedtime. “If he doesn’t need to sleep, then maybe we don’t, and maybe we should try and see -- “
Needs were negotiable. He didn’t need Maglor’s oneiric finger-strokes across his cheekbone to sleep. He didn’t need Maglor’s weight listing at his hip, and to feel the assurance in each rise and fall of his breath, to sleep. Luxuries were to be cast off in lean times; under the heft of grief, he threw out the hope that Maglor would want him close again. Thought about it distantly, with a bleak want, when he’d awake sweat-drenched and paralyzed in his own blankets, and find Maglor still sleeping an arm's length away -- a world away.
Dreaming resurrected those days that struck everything through. The carnivorous forest. The search. The silence of absence. Everything unbelievable. Maedhros growing wilder with disbelief until Ambarussa’s scouts implored Maedhros for nothing but a chance to reconsider this errand -- and he had snapped at them, “Then what good are you?”
The way after wandering further and longer than two little princes could manage, he could almost see needle teeth on the tree roots, the serrated leaves bearing blood. The crepuscular forest stayed tenebrous as Valinor did, around the time everything had begun hurtling down this dim path (no sign of a path, he nearly stumbled over a liana in his distraction -- and spun on his heel to find which ghost, which Vala, might be laughing at his despair). Back in those days, when the swan ships, incandescent with viscera and crowned by his Father’s torches, lit the last glimpse he ever had of Valinor. The apogee of destruction.
But how much further they had yet to climb, he had not known.
Ambarussa and their scouts began, on the third day, to curve their tracks back the way they had come. “Halt. Hold, hold.” A bubble of hysteria rose in the timbre of Maedhros’ voice as he realized they were making a return to camp.
The way he routed them further into interminable wilds, keeping his ears and eyes honed while the thorns tore and hipbone-smooth pebbles slid underfoot.
Amrod and Amras forwent perusing the scenery to frown at Maedhros and send each other level looks, in a way that could be read mutinous -- before Maedhros caught himself and perished his catastrophizing. Unhelpful. Keep searching.
But Amrod and Amras, muttering about the absent birdsong, drifted ever further from Maedhros. No need for him, this doddering erstwhile Lord of Himring who compulsively shoved aside the vines and boughs as though anything waited for him.
Together, the twins shouldered their bows and floated beyond the pall of foliage. And abruptly they disappeared.
And everyone left that way, and not everyone returned. Maedhros waited on them, blinking intently toward the inviolate shadows, and when they didn’t return, he had nothing to say to call them back. So he kept moving.
5.
Deep into the night, divorced from touch and made strangers in the husk of brothers, they argue: about grim forecasts and the twins’ safety. About Maedhros’ forswearing of sleep and the deep smudges under his eyes. About the esoteric designs of the orcs who have waylaid their hunting routes, how close the beasts’ tread comes to this shelter, and where they ought to escape when they can no longer pretend they don’t know the orcs know.
Maglor keeps sotto voce, on-script. He clears away dishes as the vast forest of the unspoken raises between them like borders; it threatens to take Maglor from Maedhros’ sights.
“You’re too soft, Káno,” Maedhros says.
“I merely do not wish to be the deadliest creature in this forest,” Maglor replies, lofty. “It is a role that would sicken us, too often performed.”
“It is for said deadliness that you and I have survived thus far.”
“Survival alone, Nelyo: is that to be our sole object?” Maglor asks, the euphony in his voice straining through a ravel of emotion. He fixes his gaze upon the cherries on the oak table, the carafe of wine half-drunk. Artifacts of the ordinary life.
He touches at them as if apologetic that they cannot be enjoyed.
Maedhros watches him touch, hears his own roughened voice give Maglor nothing: “Till we encounter a chance at another, yes.”
Maglor's lips part; he means to enjoin or argue. See the dishes all stacked, the hearth swept. The children’s bedchambers neatly expecting their return. What he has crafted, what he has built for himself and Maedhros from scraps -- what he wonders now if he is inhabiting alone.
He takes up a broom, insinuating it before his body like an apotropaic to protect himself from Maedhros’ impassivity. He shakes his head to clear his dejection, but his chiaroscuro in the silvering lamplight reads pain. Standing disarmed in his nightgown, ready to retreat to his battlement of chores, he declaims, “I only seem too soft to one who is too brutal.”
“Am I not scarred? See me marked. Defaced,” Maedhros says, staring him down. “Soft enough.”
“I see your crucible steel beneath,” Maglor shoots back, a hypocrite. A hypocrite whose chiaroscuro, sheen of tied-up hair falling into disarray and sweep of a serene brow belying trouble, recoils from Maedhros.
“For that I am still here,” says Maedhros.
“And I?” Maglor whirls on him suddenly. His voice washes in a wave through the cottage, soaking the weathered wood through with the sound. “I too am still here.”
His perfectly polished script is gone, as good as consumed by their faltering little fire. Broom clutched in his musician’s hands for want of anything else to call his.
“I am no ghost that haunts this house. I am no memory you may refuse to visit.” Maglor’s chest rises under an unheard inhale. For all his performer’s poise, he is unable to bury the ferocity under his tone, the tears he will plan to shed in another room.
His lashes catch the lights while they blink. The silence crushing. No one to disturb them with questions of distributing food, firewood, scavenged weaponry. No bad tidings when none are left to deliver them.
This could be Doriath. The forest devouring warmth and lending only ash and soil for the bereaved to paint themselves. The sepulchre at the center of the Girdle.
“I am still here, Maitimo. I am still here with you.”
And dividing Maedhros down to bare wants: want to answer, want to touch, want to. Easy to ignore, save for now when Maglor, all his known world, is calling to him.
Maglor asks, “But are you still here with me?”
Maedhros takes the broom from Maglor -- unsure of what may fall from his lips if he were to speak, he lets the broom fall between them to fill the silence. A crack against the floor.
He leans down and presses his silent lips to Maglor’s.
Maglor tilts his head away, refusing to be quieted so again.
His hand covers the nape of Maglor’s neck, drawing him in. Maglor’s fingers pet and then paw against his tunic.
“Tell me,” Maglor manages before their lips press again.
Click of teeth, slip of tongues almost accidental before they stroke together again, chasing the accident.
Relief unfurls in him to know contact again. Some unchecked animalism in him curls up his spine.
“Tell me,” Maglor hums insistence into his mouth.
“Stay,” Maedhros growls, wanting to run away before he breaks anything else beloved. Wanting to pursue.
Maglor makes a sound and means to shake his head -- beset by a kiss hard enough to bruise, a mutual hurt that they drink deeply together.
Another note from Maglor, unsteady with overindulgence in the intimacy struck through until now -- before he musters a command in that aureate voice: “Tell me, Maitimo.”
“I’m here.” The words arrive coarse, their edges torn. Maedhros is brutal, and Maedhros is the wound that brutality has opened. Raw, needing.
Maglor fiercely throws an arm around Maedhros’ neck as his mouth finds and unspeaks, in weightless brush of lips, the traumas scoring his brother's throat, his jaw.
Tiptoes -- arm urging now around his neck, Maglor draws him down for another kiss.
“I’m here,” Maedhros sounds through it again, feeling his words move against his brother’s lips and against his tongue.
“I’m here.” Incantation ardent now.
The head says to leave it there.
And everything else in him replies, Go on without me.
Maedhros pulls back only to gather his fingers in black, bound hair. He pulls at the twine tie, that modest costume Maglor wears, until it loosens and Maglor’s hair spills over his bright nightgown like a splash of ink. Familiar curls frame his fine features, disquieting for their beauty within this ravaged landscape.
And decisively, he walks Maglor back to the window’s deep recess and presses him up into it. The demand in the push incites a gasp from Maglor. He hedges him in against the glass to make him the only thing he can see in the world.
“Stay with me here,” Maedhros says, voice creaking under desire’s duress.
Maglor flows forward to kiss him, a hand flung up to brace against the dark wood lintel as he meets Maedhros’ turbulence with his own.
They shift against each other -- Maglor hungry for the living heat of Maedhros and squirming, and nipping at Maedhros' lower lip until Maedhros is half-climbed into the recess with him, hapless in his lust for more of Maglor, more of this --
Maglor’s other hand courses down to soothe at the jut of Maedhros’ hipbone, so wiry they’ve both become under despotic flight. Up to the insinuation of his ribs, still hidden beneath the tunic but known to Maglor, who knows everything about what Maedhros needs somehow, somehow --
Maglor hikes his nightgown above his knees to let Maedhros move between his legs. Their bodies clash internecine together again and Maglor makes a sound in the back of his throat, arching in an unmistakable invitation. His free hand floats down to Maedhros’ hip again, toying with the pommel of that intrusive dagger in fitful thumbing and pulling --
Before drifting across to where Maedhros is palming himself through his trousers, already hard. He touches at Maedhros’ hand. Maedhros confounds their momentum when he breaks from their open-mouthed kiss, ready to brand himself brazen.
His head says leave it there.
Maglor’s lashes fan down against his cheek as he slides his hand underneath Maedhros’ callused palm; his fingers trail up his arousal’s outline through the straining serge fabric, and then down. And again. And again --
Need snakes itself around Maedhros and tightens into a vice.
Go on without me.
To abdicate to sensation like this -- to fist his hand in Maglor’s curls and tug Maglor's head back, hear the songful sound compelled from his lips and watch his lucent gaze darken under frenetic shared craving, to move hips against the beckon of lithe fingers, to find Maglor's waiting lips and kiss him like this -- it’s a mess, and it will take a while.
His mouth finally falls to that space behind Maglor’s ear, down to his jawline and the column of his neck; he grazes his teeth ravenously against long-awaited skin. Still so unmarred, it beggars belief.
Could be something unholy in Maglor.
Could be his curse: never pained enough, never bled enough to shrive himself.
Maglor replaces his hand against Maedhros’ cock with his own hips. He tilts his hips up, a circular little roll into Maedhros. Maedhros cants back against him. Fabric drags, grates; the friction simmers as they establish an impatient rhythm. -- good. Tortuous.
Maedhros’ hand shoves under the flimsy drape of Maglor’s nightgown to find skin, grip the curve of his rear to keep them hemmed up against one another. His grip on bare skin turns Maglor shivering and pliable; his panting cedes to a thin little moan as they rut against each other.
“Oh, I,” Maglor begins faintly into Maedhros’ neck, twisting against him like it's too much, or not enough.
“How do you want it?” A murmur, more air than voice.
“I want to slake your thirst,” Maglor says. With the assertion in his hips and his head tipping back to reveal the column of his throat, he refuses to be denied.
“Touch yourself,” answers Maedhros.
Maglor squirms and interrupts their unceremonious grinding to slide his hand under linen and stroke -- a light shifting under his clothing.
Maedhros adjusts him on the lip of the windowsill and pushes up the impediment the nightgown makes; Maglor obliges immediately, lifting the hem of his nightgown and taking it between his teeth -- exposing himself, keeping himself on display as he strokes his hard cock.
It claws Maedhros out of his own mind and topples him somewhere else. Riven with need, ready to come just getting off to the pretty picture Maglor makes pleasuring himself.
His hand buries in the tumble of curls again. "Songbird," he murmurs, guiding Maglor’s head (Maglor releasing a soft, pleased little moan around the nightgown in his mouth) so he can read their transgression scrawled upon his face, and know what it does to them both.
He could submerge himself in this filthy impulsivity that neither of them needs admit they have visited on their own: wondering, as the world grows lonelier, what it might be like to relinquish together.
But, heady with his own vulnerabilities made plain, he pushes aside Maglor’s hand and takes Maglor’s cock into his grip.
Maglor hushes an inchoate sing-song noise around the nightgown, head listing against the windowsill under the swerve of new sensation.
“‘S good?” Maedhros asks against his temple, the words nearly garbled by his preoccupation with how vital it is right now to touch and keep touching.
“Mhm,” Maglor rushes in a breath. “Mhm.” A leg hooks around Maedhros’ waist with an urgency that nearly unbalances Maedhros. Then slender fingers dip to slide across the tip of Maedhros’ leaking cock.
Maedhros releases a breath. Sucks in another as Maglor palms its weight and indulges in its heat. He drags his tongue along Maglor’s clavicle to see him color and flush under his mouth. (There.)
Maglor presses Maedhros’ cock against his inner thigh as he strokes, marking his skin with its dampness. When Maedhros thrusts against his grip, against his thigh, wanting to feel and know and remember, Maglor nearly loses his hold on the lintel.
“Mm, mm,” Maglor starts as Maedhros moves his hand quicker (harder), listing back helplessly against the glass pane with teeth fervent in their hold on his nightgown. Still Maedhros keeps him caged, leaving no room but for the furtive moment, the exchange.
He thumbs at the head of Maglor’s arousal, the way he does for himself at night, thinking of sharing touch like this.
Maglor warbles a muffled note, his head dipping under the gravity of sensation -- and squeezes at Maedhros' cock.
Maedhros thrusts into Maglor’s tight hold and the silken expanse of his thigh, letting them swing him toward gratification. The sweet friction of Maglor's fingers could vex him for how steadfast, how devoted their movement: controlled, Maedhros could almost believe, by the knowledge that he is Maedhros' focal point, and he can give Maedhros what he wants; Maedhros wants him, and he gives Maedhros what he wants --
The brief sounds from Maglor change key; his gaze on Maedhros unfocuses, somnolent. The angles of groaning wood and cold glass announce their dispassion as Maglor writhes against them, as though he means to pull away -- or fight for --
His thighs tense around Maedhros’ body. He makes a strangled noise into the fabric, bucks in staccato hitches into Maedhros' hand, and spills himself. He shivers through the crash of release.
Maedhros grinds himself against Maglor's thigh, shackled by the sight of his brother wracked with pleasure. His own climax nearly takes him by surprise -- he stutters a noise as he comes across Maglor’s skin, slicking the juncture between thigh and hip.
A final admission of vulnerability: he shoves himself up against Maglor as he wrings himself out on the sloping sensation, thrusting through it. And he slows to a still, panting and nosing against Maglor’s hair, his cheek.
A last glimpse -- Maglor trailing his fingers through the mess made on him, streaking his thigh with Maedhros’ come, staining himself -- before the nightgown falls from his mouth to shroud him again.
Before Maedhros moves off him to recover the scene back into what it should be.
Before he moves: they hold each other. The swell and crash of breathing, of heartrace, eases reluctantly. Still they hold each other.
A grace undeserved, he knows -- he hadn't known to hope for it. Everyone held in familiar arms again.
A grace that Maedhros, unfit to shut it out, allows himself to visit for just a while.
0.
Maedhros splashed into the languid mudwater. The viscosity of it startled him into queasy activity, wading shin-deep to pull at submerged roots and tangled plant litter. His last good theory, he had stolidly assessed before his men. His last push.
But no one joined him. No one understood. Or maybe everyone understood something that he didn’t. Maybe --
“Nelyo,” Amrod called from further on before shaking his head to Amras, who furrowed his brow against Maedhros’ singleminded exigencies.
“Lord Maedhros,” began one of his few faithful, standing there with idle hands at his sides.
Given up.
Maedhros raised his hand sharply and they quieted. Before the force of his gesture fractured before their eyes, he bent to grope into the oblique waters, to skim the banks for out-of-place-ordinary artifacts.
A dagger. Twine to bind hair. A cloak or the pit of a stone fruit.
They left him: the scouts, the huntsmen dispersed through the carnivorous forest, hushed before his will and the terror they had inflicted upon the land themselves. Amrod and Amras again departed him, one upstream and one down, faithless and glutted on pretending.
And when he finally knew he was alone, Maedhros sank to his knees upon the muddy bank and cried. He cried until he made more mud, and through his tear-blind eyes shaped it through his fingers like clay, like he could mold two children anew and fashion them some good out of all the ugliness he had made.
A little house, a book filled with bright illustrations, fresh blankets to curl into. Wood to build a fire. Someone to love them.
But the children sank into sediment and dissolved into the root and bone of the earth. They only watched Maedhros, wide-eyed with death or wonder.
And sometimes he dreamt of it. Sweat-drenched, paralyzed, he woke up with it and lived shackled to it.
Other times, the stars blinked themselves through the thick paint of night and ushered him out of the forest of the unspoken.
Sometimes they shone fragile and inattentive -- lost interest in Maedhros' story, waiting for the Age to end. Sometimes they burned bright as torchlight, showing Maedhros the way home. And it wasn't that he could go home. It wasn't that he could choose anything but this life anymore.
But sometimes he would visit other dreams:
Maglor stirring honey into hot tea for two; framing Maedhros' scarred face like he loved what he saw. Dark-haired twins out there in the night, coming back in the way things do. Coming back like the way Maglor has never left him.
All his known world, tying up his hair and bringing in the laundry before the rain.