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The Unexpected Kindness of the Air

Summary:

Maeglin stood, overlooked in the flakes of falling ash amid the rubble that had once been Thangorodrim. All things considered, he was making a disturbing habit out of failing to die.

Which raised the question—now what?

(In which Maeglin survives, Celebrimbor seeks a different way forward, and together they might manage better than either could alone.)

Notes:

For starlightwalking. I hope you enjoy!

Title from Mary Oliver's "The Waterfall".

Work Text:

When the dust settled and Maeglin at last had a moment to prop himself against a rock and catch his breath, it came as something of a surprise to realise he was still alive.

But then, this was not the first time he had survived what by all rights should have killed him. His father’s spearpoint, his captor’s finely-whetted mercies, a plummeting fall from the walls of the city he had betrayed… that last really ought to have done the trick, he thought with no little bitterness.

Even afterward, he had not lacked for opportunity. The pitiable slinking creature who hobbled from Gondolin’s wreckage on more broken bones than whole might have been beneath the notice of elves and orcs, but weather and wild creatures could easily have finished him. So too could the ragged band of Haladin he’d stumbled into. Instead they had brought him to their wisewoman, who ruthlessly reset some of the crooked bones and then put him to work at mortar and pestle until his hands remembered enough strength, and his mind enough sense, to make himself useful at a forge again. He had just finished his first hunting knife since Gondolin when the host of the Valar descended upon Beleriand and swept his little village of Secondborn into their muster. It had been an easy choice to join. A chance, he thought, to at least fall fighting the Enemy who had turned him to evil. With such a death he might redeem himself in some small measure, and by convenient corollary avoid any lords of Gondolin still swashbuckling about.

Yet here he stood, overlooked in the flakes of falling ash amid the rubble that had once been Thangorodrim. All things considered, he was making a disturbing habit out of failing to die.

Which raised the question—now what?

He could not see any of the Haladin he’d come with. There was a hubbub of activity off in the distance, where some glittering Maiarin personage was overseeing something involving a lot of hustle and bustle and a great clanking of metal. Maeglin squinted at it dimly. Only when a gust of fresh wind lifted the pall of ash did he understand what was happening.

They were bringing Morgoth forth, in chains.

When next he came to awareness, he was lurching dizzyingly, leg buckling under the panicked sprint in which he found himself. A quick glance backward showed the meagre contents of his stomach spattered on the ground behind him. Still a coward, then. Farther back stood the rock he had been leaning against. Looking past that would have taken courage he had already determined he lacked.

“You there! What are you—ai, your pardon, sir, I didn't mean to startle you.” The elf regarding him looked Vanyarin, to judge by the make of her armour and the hair escaping her helm in tight golden curls. By some shred of luck her expression bore no hint of recognition, only ruefulness and a faint hint of something else. Contempt, perhaps; he was hardly an inspiring sight. She peered closely at him, and when she next spoke her voice was gentler. “I mean you no harm. You can put the sword down. They’re gathering all of you over there.” She pointed. “You’ll find food and tents for now, and they are collecting a list of names to search for any family who might be looking for you.”

He laughed, and laughed, and laughed, and then the rest of her words registered. “All of us?”

She schooled the look of alarm on her face into an encouraging smile and said, kindly, “The freed thralls.”

Maeglin gaped at her. Not contempt, then, but pity. Even worse.

Still, with no better option he tottered off in the direction she had pointed. It was farther than he’d thought, or else he was moving slower, for he kept stumbling as he walked; or perhaps his mind simply went away for a bit again. But eventually he fetched up at a rough trench and parados. A muddy plank bridge led to a cutaway in the embankment. Beyond it he could see rows of tents, into which stoop-shouldered, hollow-eyed elves were being herded by their brightly-armoured counterparts. Two Vanyarin guards flanked the bridge. They did not go so far as to actually cross their swords against him as he made to enter, but the half-step they took toward each other, hands on pommels and eyes wary, was enough.

“Leave your weapon,” said the one on the right.

Maeglin looked up, startled. “Why?”

“We had one incident already with a freed thrall who turned out to be not quite so free from evil as we thought. We’ll not risk more.”

The other one added, faintly apologetic, “This shall not be forever, only until we can ascertain whether the Enemy’s influence still clings to you. If we are sure it does not, these restraints may be lifted.”

That falcon slipped its jesses long ago, he did not tell them. If only Gondolin had possessed such art.

“Name?” the brusque one asked, as Maeglin’s sword and scabbard clanked at their feet. The ground tilted vertiginously for a moment, and he looked up.

“I—Lómion. Lómion.” He held his breath. The name drew no reaction from either of them. He exhaled.

“Son of…?”

“They’re dead,” he managed. “It matters not.”

“I am grieved to hear it." The apologetic one bowed his head. "Is there no one else you wish to seek out?”

With an effort he swallowed down the laughter that threatened to bubble up again. “No one.”

“Be welcome, then, Lómion, and whatever you have suffered, may you find healing now.”

The prospect of any healing that could mend what afflicted him seemed doubtful, but there was at least soup he could force past his rising gorge, and bread that he could not, and a tent shared with people too deep in their own memories to know or care what he had done. At some point he was shepherded to a different tent by a dark-haired herbalist whose perfectly steady hands belied their tired eyes. They peeled his armour off him, hissing in dismay at the blood-soaked leggings beneath his tasset. “Why did you not say? How long have you been walking on this?”

Maeglin could only stare in dull surprise at the long grim wound on his thigh. It would explain the stumbling, he supposed. And the dizziness. The herbalist tsk-ed at him. “I have not the strength to sing it closed just now, so you will have to make do with binding it and staying off that leg until I can, understand? I wish I could do more. There are so many wounded….”

Some mad impulse brought his hand to their shoulder. “Do not fault yourself. Better to save your arts for those many, than waste them on me.”

It only seemed to incense them further. They swatted his hand away. “Enough of that! You all seem to think you’re a waste of effort, all of you who have been freed, and you’re not! I do not say that what you endured was not terrible beyond imagining, but you live, and better days await. You need not walk toward them on mangled legs when the wounds to your flesh at least may be stanched. I may be too spent for a song of healing at the moment, but I can do that much!”

Maeglin blinked. It is not so much what I have endured that should concern you, as what I have done. But the words stuck as though his airway was Gondolin’s Gate of Steel, and this time there was no traitor to show them a way past. “I did not mean to suggest your skill was worthless,” he murmured eventually. Only that I was. Nevertheless he submitted without further protest as the gash was cleaned, sewn, smeared with some astringent salve, and bound. And whenever over the following days he was tempted to walk out of the camp and run until his fëa fled his body, leg be damned, he thought of the herbalist’s exasperation, and stayed.

”This was why they sent you to me,” Celebrimbor said flatly, watching the Host of Valinor close ranks behind the last of his uncles. For a moment he was back in Nargothrond, watching another pair of Fëanor’s sons walk defiant from another hostile crowd.

Thaliel, who had been Maedhros’s seneschal since Himring was nothing but a charcoal sketch of a rampart on a rough diagram of a hilltop, gave him a wretched look. The last ragged remnants of Maedhros and Maglor’s people, no more than a dozen in all, were clustered behind her. Their faces held varying expressions of misery and disbelief where they were not numb with exhaustion. “It must be. I should not have left them, no matter what they said, no matter that they ordered us—”

“Did you know?” he interrupted, whirling on her. “Did you know what they planned to do?”

Her jaw hardened. “No. If I had, I would have tried to forestall them, and failing that I would have followed them to whatever end came.”

“Even into kinslaying?”

“I am a kinslayer many times over as it is.” She glanced toward where his uncles had disappeared into the sooty haze, mouth trembling faintly. “Why would they doubt our steadfastness now, when we’d all damned ourselves together?”

Celebrimbor sighed. He ought to have known, too, when Maedhros had come to find him. Those who live, who might yet be able to return West, should do so. And if they stay, they will be safer with you, he’d said. We should not be what denies them healing, whose chief fault was loyalty to us. It was a terrible trust his uncles had placed in him, charging him with the protection of the last of their followers. A bit like being impaled on a pike, only to be told the pike housed some precious dying creature whose best hope for survival lay in taking shelter in his gut, and now he must not only endure the painful rearrangement of his viscera but take extra care not to jostle the weapon sticking him through as he went about his business.

“I doubt it was your steadfastness that was at issue,” he said at last. “Perhaps they realised they had asked too much of you already, and drew a line at last against asking yet more. A late enough realisation, but—better late than never?”

Thaliel’s disgusted huff was about what he deserved for that attempt, he thought. It seemed his misgivings about accepting lordship of the last battered scraps of the Fëanorians were matched only by the misgivings of the scraps themselves at calling him their lord. “If you think asking us to go on without them wasn’t the heavier burden, you are a fool,” Thaliel told him. “Twice a fool if you think they didn’t know that too.” She worried at her lower lip, then added, almost too low for him to hear, “There were so many of Himring’s folk freed from Angband’s pits. I had thought… I had thought it gave them hope, to see their lord again, unbowed for all that he had endured the same torments as they. And now… what are they to do now? What are we all to do now?”

“Thaliel. I am not the liege-lord you would have wished, I know. Not much of a lord at all, really.” She looked sidelong at him.

“We’re hardly the vassals you would have wished. I am not such a hypocrite as to fault you on that count. It was no light order they gave you either, was it?”

He cleared his throat. “Be that as it may. They wanted you to survive, that much I know. Survive, and live as well as you could. I will help you all do that if I can. Do you not owe it to them, and yourselves, to try?”

She was silent for a long time, looking not at him but at the rest of stragglers who had endured when hope was high and when it fled, and who stood here now at the end of an age with naught but each other to show for it. Only after she had made eye contact with each and every one of them did she turn back to him.

Celebrimbor braced himself. She squared her shoulders. “I suppose we had best go find the rest, then. They have set up a camp for freed thralls. It is a bit south of here, I think.”

“Lead the way, then.”

She gave him a look of sardonic resignation, with an edge of resolve beneath it. He would not be surprised if she had given his eldest uncle the same look on the battlements of Himring as Morgoth’s besieging forces gathered on the plains below. “If I’m not mistaken, that is your job now.”

Maeglin had not kept clear track of the passing of days, but by the time a stir at the plank bridge drew the camp’s attention, he had graduated from bed rest to hobbling about with a makeshift cane, and could make his way unassisted between his tent, the cookfires, and the latrines. He kept well clear of the commotion by the camp entrance. It was unlikely, of course, that it was some refugee of Gondolin who had tracked him down at last, bent on completing the death Maeglin had botched last time. But unlikely was not impossible. If it was one of the lords of Gondolin, they would find him soon enough. He would face his doom when they did; no need to hasten their search.

When the gate-guards eventually let the newcomers pass through, it seemed he need not have worried. Their questions of the camp residents made clear they were in search of Fëanorian followers, not him. He retreated to the far end of the camp, where there was usually work to be done mending tent-panels or washing dishes. Necessary work, but simple, where the most dangerous implement he might be expected to wield was a scrub brush or one of the flimsier sewing needles. Someone handed him a torn blanket and some thread. He got to work, idly wondering as he picked at a loose thread whether the strengths of twined fibres might be replicated in metal. How much weight could such a cable bear, if he reinforced a bunch of wires by twisting them together? Enough to hold up a wide bridge? More?

“Maeglin?”

He froze. The voice had come from behind him. He didn’t turn.

“It is you, isn’t it? Ai Eru, I thought you had died!”

“I didn’t,” said Maeglin, inanely. His brain came to an abrupt halt after this statement of the obvious, but his mouth careened on like a rider bucked over the withers of a balking horse, “Not for lack of trying.”

“What are you doing here? Cousin—”

He did turn at that, ready to retort that he knew his cousin’s voice perfectly well, thank you very much, and this was not it, and in any case even if it was, the fact that it was speaking anything other than words of condemnation and disgust was a clear giveaway that he was hallucinating, and it was truly idiotic of his brain to think him credulous enough for such a trick—

Only the figure before him was a different cousin entirely, one he had not seen since they’d fought alongside each other at the Nirnaeth.

“Celebrimbor.”

He looked more exhausted than he had even at the battle, but as Maeglin eyed him, his face changed expression, albeit with the hesitancy of a cat stepping onto an uncertain surface. It took Maeglin a few seconds to realise Celebrimbor was trying to, of all things, smile.

At Maeglin.

What in Eru’s name was he doing? “What in Eru’s name are you doing?”

“Greeting a kinsman.” Celebrimbor’s smile solidified, and he reached an arm toward Maeglin, who flinched back. Cerebrimbor did not drop the arm, seemingly oblivious to the awkwardness, though his smile gained a tinge of wistfulness. “My family is not so large that I wish to turn away from any who are left. Listen, I came to gather any of my uncles’ followers who might be here, for I am charged with leading them now.” At Maeglin’s incredulous look, “I know, I don’t think it is what any of us would have expected, and probably would not have been anyone’s first choice, but who else is there? What I am trying to say is, come with us.”

“Are you mad?”

“Possibly. I would be more surprised if any of us weren’t, all things considered. Does it matter?”

Maeglin did grab his arm then, if only to drag him past the wash-basins where they might speak with a little more privacy. “Do you know what I have done?” he hissed. “Or whom I have wronged? Betrayed my kin, destroyed my city, and that is not even looking back more than the last five-score years—my parents—”

“You would fit right in, then,” came another voice, and an elf with a dark, fraying braid and marked epicanthal folds ghosted up behind Celebrimbor’s right shoulder. Celebrimbor pinched the bridge of his nose as Maeglin startled backward.

Thaliel.” To Maeglin, he said softly, “I know enough.”

“Then you know I cannot go back to elvendom. Certainly not to Aman in the west, unless it be as a prisoner in chains or a fëa fled to the halls of the dead. I would not be welcome anywhere, nor should I be, and you would be hunted too, for sheltering the traitor of Gondolin—”

“I am not going back to Aman.”

“What?”

“I am not going back,” Celebrimbor repeated. “I have lived more of my life in Middle-earth than I did in Aman; this land is not yet done with me. I want to see what it can be without the looming of the Shadow. I want to see what we can be.

“Have you not lived in Shadow long enough?”

“There is no punishment sufficient for what I have done. No atonement great enough. My life is no good to anyone.”

“What good would your death be?” Celebrimbor asked. Behind him, the other elf—Thaliel—had a very odd look on her face. Maeglin did not have the wherewithal to parse it. “I want to build a city of great craft, where all whose works have been twisted might turn again to workings of good. Will you not join me?” Celebrimbor's smile went crooked. “We could use another smith.”

Cables, Maeglin thought. Great metal cables lifting a magnificent sweeping bridge, connecting rather than dividing, inviting in rather than fencing out. Celebrimbor should build his city on a river.

The world, after all, did seem determined not to kill him. He might as well put its determination to use.