A Man Who Flies From His Fear May Find He Has Only Taken A Shortcut To Meet It by LadySternchen  

Water/Drowning- Turgon

How strange it is that Gondolin has so many fountains is a fact almost everyone overlooks. Really, it is only Glorfindel who really appreciates the significance of it, who understands that Turgon has designed his city in the way he did to try and overcome the crushing fear that overwhelmed him whenever he is near water.

Even taking a bath was difficult, in the first years in Beleriand, especially getting his head under water to wash his hair. Finrod was the one who was there for him then, who made sure that they had time, and that the water was ever warm, and so slowly coaxed Turgon back into something like normality.

But his friend is not with him any longer, and Turgon has deal with his demons himself. At first, the bubbling of the fountains kept him awake at night, heart racing and palms wet, then later, the sound gave him nightmares, changing in his relaxing mind to the hissing and gurgling noise the ice made, while the cold sea frothed, taking whom he loved most. Pulling him underwater himself, the cold like a million knives, piercing every inch of his body.

Whenever Turgon wakes from nightmares like that, he feels relief for the fraction of a heartbeat, relief that he can breathe. Then comes the shame, and the guilt, and the overwhelming grief that will not ease even after centuries. Curiously, as scared as he is of these nightmares now, he was not then. When he was submerged beneath the freezing floods of the Helcaraxë, when he thought Idril dead or dying, and knew Elenwë to be lost, he felt nothing but a desperate longing for death himself. He came so close, before Glorfindel pulled him from the water, to drawing breath, to have his lungs fill with icy seawater, and to this day, he is equally terrified and fascinated by the idea, and cannot keep himself from wondering how it would have felt like.