My Father's Son by AdmirableMonster  

I will follow you into the dark

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.