My Father's Son by AdmirableMonster  

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The night that covers me

further chapter warnings: transphobia, horror elements

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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.)