My Father's Son by AdmirableMonster  

The shadow of Nan Elmoth lies across Maeglin’s heart, even before he has left Doriath.  He stares out of the window of his small chamber, which opens into the center of Menegroth.  From here, he can see the glittering jeweled lights and cloth leaves and petals carefully woven between them that suggest hanging branches and flowers.  Fake, yes, but a comforting, familiar deceit.  He does not like to look out and see forest, real forest.  He left that room behind, but every year it draws him back.

A letter lies across his windowsill.  Maeglin does not need to read the words again.  It is a missive sent from his father’s human companion, a woman named Bronwel.  She grows older; his father grows more erratic, more uncontrolled.  Until Maeglin was old enough to start making his own friends among the Dwarves of the Blue Mountains and the Elves of Menegroth, he did not understand why his father sometimes lost himself to anger.  (It was me, always me, cursed child who killed his mother, who could not find the right thing to do to deflect his father’s shouts, Bronwel’s savage replies.  Why can’t I ever do anything right?)

Maeglin’s heart beats rabbit-fast.  It was not you, he tells himself.  A knock on the door jerks him out of his reverie.  “Yes?  Who is it?”

“It’s Mablung.”

“Oh.”  The tight energy drains as quickly as it built.  “Come in, please.”

Mablung enters, dark, broad-shouldered, and beautiful, carrying with him a certain quietness of heart that Maeglin never before experienced.  Maeglin does not meet his eyes.

“Ah.  You don’t look well.”

“I’m fine,” Maeglin says tightly.  “I begin my journey to Nan Elmoth tomorrow.  I hope I’ll see you when I return?”

“I wanted to talk to you about that.  I’ve spoken with Beleg and King Thingol, and I can be released from my duties for some time.  Can I come with you?”

“What?” says Maeglin.  “Why would you want to do that?”  Who in their right mind would want to travel to Nan Elmoth?

“Because I care about you?”

A shock of pain goes through Maeglin’s throat.  “You shouldn’t.  That’s stupid.  You should stay here.”  Mablung is everything Maeglin isn’t: liked, respected, competent.  Not half-broken, slave to the whims of his slowly-deteriorating father. (Your father was a thrall in Angband.  Have some respect.)

“I don’t want to stay here.  I want to be with you.”

“You can’t.  You can’t.”  

“Why not?”

“Because you’ll leave me, and I can’t bear it,” Maeglin whispers, a confession he didn’t intend, one that sounds far, far too much like his father’s wretched pleas for his mother to return for comfort.

“Don’t be silly.”

“I’m not being silly!  You’ve never been there, you have no idea—”

“I mean I’m not expecting it to be pleasant, Maeglin.  But you’re worth it.”

Blood and bone, before the summons, Maeglin might have committed murder to hear those words from his lover’s lips.  Now it’s as if he’s trapped inside the dark forest already, the roots twining about him, caging him off from all love and all tenderness.  “I’m not,” he says.  “I’m like him.”  All he wants to do is reach out and take Mablung’s hand, but he can’t, he can’t, he can’t—that’s not how the world works.  That’s not how the world works.  That’s not—

“I don’t care who you’re like,” Mablung says, and for the first time, Maeglin’s eyes shoot to his face, because that is the single most unbelievable statement he has ever heard in his life.  But Mablung—Mablung is giving him a perplexed grin.  He looks no different than he did yesterday, and suddenly Maeglin remembers how it felt, laughing together at the minstrels’ performance in the halls before they walked for a long time beneath the moon in the deep-cut high-walled ravines that open Menegroth to the sky, talking of everything and nothing.  Mablung let him ramble about  all the different ways steel could be coaxed into arranging itself and returned with poems and stories that Maeglin had never heard before.  And then he kissed him and they went to bed together and laughed the whole way through.

The cage around Maeglin’s heart does not break, but he finds a flaw, a small crack he can reach through.  “You’d do that?” he says.

“If I wouldn’t it would be rather ridiculous of me to offer, wouldn’t it?” Mablung replies with a raised eyebrow.

“Oh,” says Maeglin.  Then, his voice coming out too hoarse.  “Oromë’s blood, please—please hold me?”

“Of course.”  Strong arms wrap around him, and Maeglin presses his face into Mablung’s chest and weeps, while a tender hand strokes his hair.

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The branches of Nan Elmoth are dark against the horizon.  The dawn light seems muddy, and the air seems heavy.  Anguirel, belted at Maeglin’s side, complains loudly.  “I still do not see why we are going back.”

“Family is important,” Maeglin says.  The words sound hollow.

Mablung is still asleep on his bed of leaves, curled beneath his blanket.

“Some family is important,” Anguirel retorts.  “Besides, you never polish me properly when you’re distracted.”

“I keep you perfectly clean,” Maeglin grunts.

Ahead, the forest is still, waiting.  No rustle of the underbrush signifies the movement of an animal.  No birdsong pierces the umbral quiet.  The shadows of the trees seem a hair too long for the light behind them.

“Well, I haven’t been polished today,” grumbles his sword.

“Hush, you absurd troublemaker,” Maeglin says.  “I’m polishing, I’m polishing.”  As exhausted as he is from a night full of trouble dreams and worries, he has to admit that polishing Anguirel is soothing, the accustomed rhythmic motions easy and disconnected from what he faces (it’s just your father, you ungrateful wretch.)

Mablung stirs sleepily, his dark eyes blinking open.  “Morning already?”

“Not quite,” Maeglin says, the hairs rising on the back of his neck.  “I am sorry, I did not mean to wake you.”

“It’s fine.  I’ve woken earlier on patrol.  Let me make some coffee, and we’ll both feel better.”

“Coffee.  Yes.”

Anguirel remains silent; Maeglin has never, strictly speaking, asked him not to speak around Mablung, or anyone else in Menegroth, but he has never spoken to anyone but Maeglin since his childhood.  It occurs to him—for maybe the first time—that this is passing strange.  But he cannot think about it, not now, not with everything that looms ahead.

The shadows writhe, and lengthen.

* * *

Bronwel is aging in the manner of Men, fast and fearful.  Maeglin’s father grows gnarled and bent as an old tree—not age, for they are full-blooded Elves, both, but some kind of resonance with Bronwel.  Greetings are murmured and exchanged.  Eöl looks through his child, eyes dull, reflecting nothing but naked branches bared to the sky.

He mumbles about pain and about Aredhel.  He blinks.  “Ah, my daughter, it is good to see you.”

Mablung’s hand is steady beneath Maeglin’s elbow.  He must feel the flinch.  This is no different, of course, than it has ever been.  The screaming arguments on this point are past; Eöl simply no longer acknowledges any reality beyond the one he has decided on.  Bronwel, who has sometimes asked her[him] not to anger her[his] father, does not ask anything this time.  She is quiet, a little remote—until Eöl asks her to make dinner twice in a row, as if he has forgotten, and then she screams at him to leave her alone.

Maeglin flinches.  His jaw hurts, his legs and chest are tight.  Nan Elmoth moves with a rushing sound that might be wind or might be something else entirely.  There are no leaves on the bare trees, but the tangling undergrowth beneath them curls and uncurls.

“What’s wrong, my daughter?” Eöl asks, smiling gently.

“Nothing, Father,” Maeglin tells him, smiling sweetly in answer, mouth behaving like a puppet’s, made of wood.  “I am tired from the journey.”

When Eöl’s mood changes, the only warning is in the darkening of the light outside.  “Give me medicine,” he demands of Bronwel, and she scuttles to comply.  “The pain,” he says to Maeglin (who is tucked up tight against Mablung’s side, yet it feels as if there is no one else there.) 

“It’s the pain of his wounds from Angband,” Bronwel explains to Maeglin in a low voice.

“Of course,” Maeglin says.

The wounds from Angband are a new pain, brought on in the last few years.  Sometimes Elvish wounds are like that.  Their spirits are battered, but it takes something else to trigger the old pain.  Like an aging companion with a failing body.  Bronwel has lived with them since Maeglin’s mother died.  She was of the Haladin, once.  Now she is bent-backed and stooped, and Eöl imitates her, and the forest imitates Eöl.

“Ahhh,” groans Eöl.  “The pain, the pain.”

“You cannot have more,” objects Bronwel.  “You grow so distant.”  Her eyes, like the eyes of a hunted animal, jump to the side.  To the window.

Mablung’s hand on Maeglin’s shoulder.  But he can barely feel it.  His ears buzz, and his vision wavers distantly.

“Human bitch,” Eöl snarls.  “I cannot stand the pain.”

“There is not enough,” Bronwel insists, her voice thin and reedy, courageous but flailing, oddly scolding.  “Stop behaving like a child!  The physician must have time to make it.”

“Then it is the physician I must blame?  Ah—ah—the pain—shall I have him flayed, I wonder?”

The light flickers.  Lightning flashes.  Thunder rumbles.  The trees move at the window, their branches tap-tap-tapping against the panes.

“Stop that!” Bronwel protests again.  “Have more medicine, then, if that’s what it will take to shut you up.  Why should it matter to me if you run short?”  A cornered animal will fight as well as flee.  She bares her teeth.  Maeglin stays quiet.

“He was not always like this,” he tells Mablung later.  “He was not always like this, he was not always like this…”

(Except for when he was.)

(It is only the frequency that changes, now.)

(The frequency, and the bare stripped trees that lash and groan in time with Eöl’s soft moans.)

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