Inedibles by Dawn Felagund  

Like Him

Maglor wants Fëanor to teach him a new game so that he can fit in better with the young intellectuals of Tirion. What he learns instead will prove far more enduring. A triple drabble.

Prompt: fatherless pie

Excerpt from the song "Cat's in the Cradle" by Harry Chapin:

My son turned ten just the other day.
He said, "Thanks for the ball, Dad, come on let's play!
Can you teach me to throw?" I said, "Not today,
I got a lot to do." He said, "That's okay."
And he walked away but his smile never dimmed.
It said, "I'm gonna be like him, yeah,
You know I'm gonna be like him."

And four words from "The Fall of Gil-galad": harpers - keen - afar - none

This work is also personal. I am a workaholic, and I come by it honestly. I did not even think my dad liked me until he and I worked together at a restaurant when I was sixteen, and he realized my work ethic was like his. My dad taught me to use computers (as a girl, when this was not the way), so the SWG is partly to his credit.

Macalaurë waited for the hammerfalls to go silent before he took down the box. He'd been given it by his father for his last begetting day: a strategy game favored among the Noldorin intellectual elite. Nelyo had mastered it years before and played with a fluid ease among the daughters and sons of Tirion's scholars, swilling wine and flirting and pausing in his debates only long enough to inch a piece, seemingly without thought, toward victory.

Macalaurë attended as the harper, in the room but from afar, as though out to sea, watching the lights ashore, and indeed, he'd spend the day mastering a new song for the next gathering, playing until a harpstring snicked and lacerated his finger deep enough to bleed. So when Fëanáro's work ended, he lowered the game from the shelf and brushed the dust from it and brought it to his father, in hopes that it might welcome him past the musician's stage and into the communion of Tirion's elite.

He found Fëanáro still in the forge, wrapping a burned hand. His father's shoulders hunched around the wounded hand, his keen eyes dimmed, and Macalaurë trod silently enough to observe this before Fëanáro felt his presence and straightened.

Macalaurë offered the box, feeling stupid even as he did. "I wondered if you might teach me …"

Why did someone who composed pieces accessible to none but a few harpers that arose at Cuiviénen let his voice trail into uncertainty, mediocrity? He saw that question in his father's eyes. He straightened his shoulders. The box still dangled between them.

Fëanáro's gaze softened a bit. "Not today," he said. "I have this to finish. I will be at it until late."

Back in his room, Macalaurë reshelved the box. He bandaged his finger and returned to work.

Chapter End Notes

Macalaurë = Maglor
Nelyo = Maedhros
Fëanáro = Fëanor