The Mirror Crack'd by AdmirableMonster  

---

Under the Mistletoe

LAST TIME on The Mirror Crack'd: Himring prepared for Yule, and Limral got her say.

THIS TIME on The Mirror Crack'd: Himring has a snowball fight, which Anniavas takes too seriously, and then he accidentally wanders under some mistletoe...

Warnings for very strong language, a few moments of dark implication, and some minor injury and wound care

---

Anniavas had not really known what to expect from the midwinter celebrations, and thus far, they had seemed odd and piecemeal.  Well, he had expected the poor unperfected tea to be ranked poorly, and then he had rather unexpectedly succeeded.  Perhaps he had brewed it well—it had not been as difficult as he had expected, once he had convinced Echeleb and Dernodhos that it would not be violating Melweril’s decree for him to be the one to do so.

But beside this one competition, which he had been prepared for, the rest was nothing he would have imagined.

“There are so many different folk living in Himring,” Echeleb had said when he had gathered his courage to ask about the origins of all these different customs.  They had begun with the singing, to welcome the dawn, which seemed comparatively sensical, since Elves like both the Sun and singing.  But after sunrise and the tea ceremony, the first thing that had happened was that Maedhros put on a ridiculous hat.  It had been knitted of garishly-colored blue and yellow dyed wool, and it had a bell sewn onto its long pointed tip.  This turned out to be a modified Sindarin custom, in which the lord or lady of a place spent one day per year—either midsummer or midwinter—spent the day acting as a servitor for their folk.  The hat was somehow necessary to indicate this.

“I’m surprised someone managed to convince him,” Echeleb said mildly.  “I know Maglor has been trying for several years, but he’s never shown any signs of honoring that particular custom before.”

“I wonder,” Dernodhos signed with a sharp-toothed grin.

“You wonder what?” Anniavas asked, but the grin only widened.

After Maedhros had donned his absurd cap and persona, there had been feasting—the first of apparently several.  The breakfast feast was mostly the bread and jam and tea and other foodstuffs that had been competing with one another, but Anniavas knew there would be heartier fare later on.  Even with breakfast, there was wine, sweet and only somewhat watered.

After the first feast, they moved onto trials of strength, grace, and craftsmanship.  One of the formerly Sindarin Elves claimed these were to hold the darkness at bay, and Anniavas took a careful note of this, though he found it a peculiar idea, and Echeleb said they thought it was nothing more than an outpouring of joy at a moment of celebration.  Echeleb was like that, though—occasionally dismissive in an odd way of things that Anniavas would simply have accepted.  Perhaps another lasting impression of Angband.  It was always strange to Anniavas when he was more open to a notion than one of the other folk of Himring.

Initially, Anniavas thought he would only watch.  He had only one eye, after all, and he had never participated in any of the various sports, dances, or crafts.  He knew of many of them intellectually, of course—his mind could summarize the use of snowball fights as a manner of preparing children to learn the art of war, could parse the patterns that the dancers made beneath the sky and the ways their bodies fit together. (Incarnates sometimes used physical activity as a way to indicate their suitability as a mate, though in his experience this was more common among mortals than among Elves.) But he had learned that it was not enough to have this kind of distant knowledge, to perform well.  Knowing the perfect temperature at which to steep a particular strain of tea did not help if you could not tell when the water had reached that temperature.

It was Hemmoril who first pulled him into the snowball fight.  “We need your help,” she said firmly.  “I am not trying to fight Káno without every possible advantage.”

And that was how Anniavas found himself directing a mock but very ferocious battle, on a team composed of himself, Hemmoril, Limral, and Dernodhos.  There were a number of other teams, and the object was to build and defend a fortress.  Anniavas set Dernodhos to making snowballs while he and Hemmoril saw swiftly to the walls.  There wasn’t time to perfect their brick-making procedure, to Anniavas’s displeasure; instead, they frantically rolled up large, packed balls of snow and flung them together into a low, curved, haphazard wall.  At the last moment before battle was joined, Anniavas thought of a way to reinforce it and raced indoors to fill a bucket with water.  He barely made it back in time, but the heavy splash of water across the front would soon freeze to ice, making their little fortress much sturdier.

It was a free-for-all.  Anniavas grabbed snowballs and flung them in every direction, certain that at any moment they would be utterly overwhelmed.  Twice, Hemmoril yanked him sideways to avoid him getting a snowball directly in the face.  

“Is that a loss?” Anniavas asked her the second time, and she arched her eyebrow at him.

“No, it’s just not much fun,” she replied.  “The only loss is if the fortress is captured, though people don’t always pay attention to that either.”

While Anniavas was gaping at the notion that people would simply ignore a game loss, another snowball hit him in the mouth and nearly knocked him over.  By the time he had wiped the stinging debris out of his face and eyes, he had been quite thoroughly left behind.  The battle was now raging right across the field.  Dernodhos, still making snowballs, looked up and gave him a wicked grin, pausing to sign, “She did warn you.”

Not dignifying this with a response, he grabbed another load of snowballs and took off in pursuit of Hemmoril.  Halfway across the field, he caught sight of Maedhros, still wearing that ridiculous hat, standing sentinel on the wall-top of his own small fortress.  Just like him to assume he could hold the fort himself, Anniavas thought—a weakness that ought to be exploited.  But he did not have the superior numbers to do the obvious and overwhelm him from an unexpected direction with more warriors than expected.  Instead, perhaps—

Maedhros’s fort had been constructed in a secure location, the back fetched up against one of Himring’s sturdy walls, but there was a tree nearby that looked climbable.  Several of its limbs stretched out temptingly close to Maedhros’s head.

It was worth a try.  Anniavas slipped into the shadow of the wall and tiptoed quietly over to the shadow of the tree, lying long and dark on the snow.  No one noticed him, all of them too caught up in their own battles.  He realized only as he was reaching for the bottom branch to climb that he could have rubbed snow into his red hair to make himself harder to see, but he supposed he had been lucky.

He had been right—the tree was easy to climb, although the rough bark hurt his cold hands.  A handhold he hadn’t investigated carefully enough resulted in a sudden shock of pain—there were thorns higher on the tree that he hadn’t seen.  Grimacing in pain, he hung for an instant with his muscles twitching as if they wanted to let go.  No.  He wasn’t going to fail.  He was going to win this.

His next handhold was more carefully chosen, and he let go of the thorns with relief.  His hand was trembling, and it didn’t want to take the next move, but he got a knee up onto the main crook of the tree and paused for an instant to catch his breath, inspecting the injury.  He had punctured the palm of his hand in several places, which were bleeding sluggishly.  Minor.

The next step was to sidestep his way carefully out on the limb above Maedhros.  All he needed to do next was—

The branch broke.

Anniavas had no time to react as the breath was stripped from his lungs by the sudden fall.  One moment there was sturdy wood beneath his foot, the next, cold air all around him, then he heard the snap of the branch and someone shouting.  Then he half-hit something soft, and slowed down so rapidly that dark spots swirled in front of his eyes.

He blinked.  His hand and left side were cold, but his other side was warm, and he was in far less pain than he had expected.

“All right?” Maedhros’s voice said by his ear.

“What—happened?”

“Careful.”

As the dizziness started to fade, he realized he was crumpled sideways against the interior of Maedhros’s team’s fort, his right side cradled by Maedhros’s larger body.  Anniavas said, “Shit,” in Orcish and tried to pull away.

“Wait a minute.  Let me check you over.”

The order was barely enough to hold him still and keep from squirming in shock as Maedhros’s big hand ran very carefully over his arms and legs, an impersonal and terribly gentle touch.  Anniavas’s breath hitched slightly.

“Sorry.”  Maedhros disentangled himself and sat back on his haunches.  “You scared me,” he said, with what sounded like an attempt at laughter.

“I really fucked that up,” Anniavas said bitterly, once again in Orcish.  Then, “I’m sorry for scaring you.”

“Fuck the apologies, everyone makes mistakes,” Maedhros responded, also in Orcish.  Anniavas was so startled that he closed his injured hand and hissed in pain.  Maedhros’s eyes flickered to his hand and then his face.  Reluctantly, feeling oddly guilty, Anniavas offered his open palm.

“Thorns?” Maedhros said, after a moment.

Anniavas nodded.

“We’ll need to clean those out.”  When Anniavas opened his mouth to protest, Maedhros raised an eyebrow.  “If you treat a snowball fight like a war, you’ll have to put up with being healed like a combatant.”

This was unfairly reasonable.  Anniavas breathed out irritably, a cloud of steam in the cold winter air.  “I suppose.”

“Come on.  I predict people will be getting tired of the snowball fight pretty soon anyway.”

“You can’t leave your fort undefended.”

Maedhros’s usually immobile lips quirked slightly, an expression that was not even quite a smile crawling upwards across his cheek.  He indicated the ridiculous hat. “You forget.  Today I am no lord but only a servant.”

Anniavas swallowed.  This felt dangerous, and he had no idea why.  His mind sifted through knowledge and experiences.  Maedhros himself was a dangerous warrior, but this was a circumstance when he would be drawing on his knowledge of medicine, not war.  The injuries did need to be tended—Anniavas found a strange, splintered memory, disconnected from everything else: two large pale hands, one of them with a bleeding half-moon carved out of the knuckle where Maedhros had a small white scar.  The other wrist was bruised and bloodied, swollen and leaking yellow pus.

“It will need to be cleaned out.”

“Yes, it would certainly be a shame if I died too soon for your master.”

“It is unlikely that such a wound would kill you.  It will, however, be unpleasant.”

“Keep telling yourself that, you sanctimonious cunt.”

Anniavas gasped.  Cold clung to his back, and he found himself moving closer to Maedhros, as if he were sheltering beneath his bulk.  Maedhros moved as well, minutely, shuffling himself round.  They stayed tucked against each other like that for one long, queer heartbeat.  Then Maedhros stood up and offered his hand to Anniavas.  “Let’s go.”

Maedhros took him around the outside of the snowball fight and then into the main body of the compound where the healing wing was located.  

“I do not need bandages,” Anniavas objected as Maedhros began to gather what he considered to be far too many supplies.

“Puncture wounds can be nasty,” Maedhros said implacably.  “Of course, since I’m not the Lord of Himring right now, I cannot order you.”

Letting out an explosively irritable noise, Anniavas put out his hand.  Despite having only one hand himself, Maedhros was adroit enough with the application of the salve, first to a soft cloth and then to Anniavas’s hand.  The touch against the injuries was painful, but Anniavas did not complain—what was the point of that?  If Maedhros thought it had to be done, then—

Then he wanted to do it.  Something in Anniavas’s chest twisted painfully at the acknowledgement, because once again, he found himself in with feelings that did not make sense.  Maedhros was not his lord—indeed, refused to be his lord, so Anniavas could not owe him allegiance, fealty, or obedience.  There was no reason to do as he said, and less reason to want to.  Anniavas did not like it, but he also did not draw back his hand.

After cleaning the injuries and taking far too long to anoint them with the ointment, Maedhros wound a clean bandage around his hand.  Anniavas sighed long-sufferingly, but let Maedhros secure it.

“Well, it’s surprisingly neat,” he said archly.

“For someone without a hand?” Maedhros supplied with a tiny quirk to his mouth that Anniavas was learning meant humor.

“For a warrior,” Anniavas retorted, refusing to be predictable.

The humor ebbed away.  “Well,” said Maedhros, with a strange, faraway look in his grey eyes.  “I was not always a warrior.”

No, of course not.  Anniavas should have known better—he might not be certain of Maedhros’s history before Beleriand, but, his mind told him, the Elves of Aman did not make war, and the inference was not exactly difficult.

But Maedhros did not appear angry, and, after a moment, he threw off the momentary wistfulness.  “Come,” he said.  “Let us return to the festivities.”

When they returned to the courtyard, the snowball fight was ending.  With Maedhros and Anniavas both missing, their teams had lost, their members swallowed by the team led by one of the few servants of Celegorm, Erestor, who was now raising the flag of victory high above their fortress, to general excitement, many cheers, and much celebration.  Limral came running up to Anniavas, panting and looking very pleased with herself.  He petted and made much of her, and she washed his face all over again.

After this, they moved inside, where there was more feasting. Anniavas was unused to having so much food—of course, he couldn’t remember ever having feasted or celebrated like this before.  Every time he tried to stop, Echeleb or Eirien or Maedhros himself tried to ply him with another bite—or another swallow of wine.  Soon, Anniavas’s belly was distended and his head was spinning.  The feeling was peculiar—simultaneously uncomfortable and pleasant.

The noise, though—all that feasting and chatter, echoing against the walls of the fortress until it seemed as though they might burst from the physical waves of sound crashing against them—eventually became too much for Anniavas.  He fled to the edge of the room with some excuse of wanting to investigate the decorations more closely.  In truth, he supposed he was not uninterested—some of the plants, he was well aware of from his work in the gardens, but some he had either not seen or not paid attention to.  Some of the decorations were patterned cloth, and the patterns were rather mysterious.  Limral stayed at the table, too busy begging for food to accompany him, though she threw several glances over her shoulder, as if checking on him.

He had halted beneath a certain prickly-leafed bough covered in small white berries, which looked vaguely familiar.  Digging deep into his mind produced some notion that it was toxic and ought not to be consumed by most incarnates.  A little more focus brought to mind the notion that it might disrupt the tiny machines that created life, irretrievably breaking them and rendering the associated incarnates slowly shutting down—

“Anniavas?”

He jumped and turned, to see Maedhros regarding him with a queer expression.

“Ah—ah, I was just—it was loud.”  He had not intended to tell the truth, much less the truth in the ugly tongue of Angband.  At least it might not be understood by every person in the room.  Somehow, this did little to make him feel concealed.

“Of course, but—did—do you know—” Maedhros was perturbed.  His pale face was flushed, the lines carved into his eyes and the sides of his mouth from the torment of exposure on Thangorodrim pulling at his countenance in a way Anniavas did not understand.  “Do you know the—significance?”

“The significance?” Anniavas shifted.  “No, I’m afraid I remember little of these celebratory customs.  I would have asked, but—it didn’t seem like the time.”

“Ah.”  Maedhros cast an agonized glance over his shoulder.  “I was afraid you might not.  There is—there is an old custom, I am told it is perhaps from, from as far back as the Journey, and—perhaps you had better move.”

He was…afraid?  What could there be to be afraid of here, in the very heart of safety?  “The Elves surely did not perform sacrifices of thinking beings on their great Journey, did they?” Anniavas asked.  “Only you seem perturbed.”

A chuckle.  “No, nothing of that nature.  But there is—a rather strong taboo associated with this particular item.  No—perhaps taboo is the wrong word.  There is a custom to be followed, and it—is odd not to follow it.”  Maedhros did not babble like this—certainly not that Anniavas had ever heard.  “But if you did not know, and if you are not comfortable with it—”

“Perhaps you had better tell me what it is.”

Maedhros sighed heavily.  “A kiss.  You’re supposed to kiss someone who stands under it.”

A kiss?  Anniavas’s head was spinning again.  Some queer savage heat seemed to have bubbled up inside his chest that he understood not at all.  It propelled him forward—somehow he had a hand on Maedhros’s shoulder.  “If it is such an important custom, then I suppose it must be satisfied,” he heard himself say.  His stomach swooped, as if he were standing on a high precipice and had just decided to throw himself off, not knowing if he would fall or fly.

“Then—” Maedhros said, his voice baffled, embattled, a creature caught in a trap from which—contrary to every expectation—it did not seem to seek escape.  “With your permission?”

“You have it.”

For an instant, they both seemed to be hovering.  Anniavas would have taken the initiative, but he had no memories to rely on, and he was not the one who understood this custom.  Then Maedhros cupped his cheek gently, his large fingers threading into Anniavas’s ugly too-short curls, and turned his face upward slightly.  He towered over Anniavas, and he had to fold himself down to brush his lips over Anniavas’s mouth.  Each little touch of his fingers sent a shock of warmth through Anniavas—he felt and catalogued each sensation, including the minute movements of the disturbed hairs on his head, but the kiss—

According to Anniavas’s mind, it was very chaste, as it ought to be, from a married Elf.  But it ignited a queer hot ache in the center of his chest that he did not understand.  There was a memory somewhere, of something similar, but Anniavas didn’t want to look at it, or the lurking sense that it was associated with darkness, cold, and loss.

His fists clenched, and he was trembling.

“Anniavas, are you all right?” Maedhros’s voice said from a distance.

“Fine,” he choked out.  “I just need—I need a breath of air.”

Even as he fled, he knew that Maedhros would not attempt to follow or to stop him, and it only made the swiftly-growing pain that much worse.

The tea-garden was deserted, as he had hoped.  Everyone was celebrating in the main compound.  In here, it was quiet.  He went over to the corner stove and began to boil water.  It made things easier—whatever those things were.

It was only late afternoon, but on this shortest day of the year, the shadows were already creeping in.  Anniavas worked automatically, checking the stores of dried herbs, sniffing and delicately taste-testing as he mixed up a new flavor with a generous helping of cinnamon and dried fruit.  A herbal drink without actual tea also meant that overheating the water would be less of a concern.

He was just pouring himself a cup when he heard the click of the greenhouse door opening and tensed, but the quiet footsteps were not heavy enough for Maedhros if he was not intentionally trying to be stealthy, and Anniavas was sure he would not do so under the circumstances.  He put his cup down and stood up, to see that it was Maglor Fëanorion, not Maedhros, who had sought him out.

“What are you doing here?” Anniavas demanded before remembering that the younger brother might be less forbearing than the elder when it came to appalling rudeness.

“Looking for you,” Maglor replied lightly.  “Maedhros did not think you’d want to see him.”

“And what makes you think that you are different?” Anniavas asked stiffly.

Maglor only laughed.  “I’m ruder than Nelyo.”

Anniavas had never interacted with him like this.  He knew little of Maglor—Lord Maglor—outside of the few short conversations over Maedhros’s cursed wound, and this had not been what he was like.  But at that time he had been acting as the Lord of Himring, and now—now he was clearly not.  

“So,” Maglor said, lounging closer in a slightly unsteady way that suggested he might also have imbibed quite a bit of wine.  “You and my dearest brother seem to be having some difficulty communicating.”

“It’s not difficult to talk to Maedhros,” Anniavas said.  He did not want to meet Maglor’s gaze, so he looked determinedly at his cup of tea.

“No?” Maglor slid around the table, invading Anniavas’s space.  “Just a general inability to interact with other living beings?”

Anniavas tensed, shoulders hunching.  “What do you want?”

A laugh.  “Many things, most of which I am not going to get.  Right now, however, I am attempting to do a good deed.  Maedhros likes you very much.”

“I like him,” Anniavas said without thinking, then hurried on, trying to draw Maglor’s focus away from that bare and fearful truth.  “But he does not like me.  I have tried and tried to offer him my fealty, and he has denied me every time.  So I would prefer not—not to be an embarrassment to him.”

“Which is, of course, why you kissed him and then ran away,” agreed Maglor.  

“I did not kiss him—he kissed me,” protested Anniavas.  “According to the tradition that he informed me of.”

“Oh, did he?  Good for him.” There was a strange, avid tone in Maglor’s voice, something with too much of an edge to be called amusement.  Anniavas did not like it, but, unlike Maedhros, he did not Maglor at all.  “So you suffered through his kiss, then, and ran away afterwards because you didn’t like it?”

“That’s not what I said!” Anniavas growled.  “I said I don’t know what he wants.”

“You didn’t, actually,” Maglor pointed out.  “But you probably should have.  It would have been a more useful thing to say than anything else.  Look at me, Anniavas.”

That last was said in Maedhros’s stony tones, and Anniavas was so startled that he obeyed without question and found himself staring into a thin, heart-shaped face, with sparkling dark eyes and mobile lips.  “He doesn’t want your fealty,” Maglor said, still in Maedhros’s voice.  “He wants your friendship.  Not that he’ll ever manage to say it himself.”

“That’s nonsense,” said Anniavas, because the idea was appalling, appealing, and completely impossible.

A laugh, Maglor’s, bright and high.  “Surely you’ve had friends before?”

“I don’t remember,” Anniavas said sharply, staring at his hands.

“Don’t you? Hemmoril will be hurt.”

Three months?  What was three months weighed against a lifetime, even a forgotten lifetime?

“I don’t know how to have friends.  Ask Echeleb and Dernodhos.”

“You’re in luck, then,” Maglor said brightly.  “I think Maedhros has forgotten how as well.”  He clapped Anniavas on the shoulder in a slightly too-friendly manner.  “Come on,” he said.  “You don’t have to kiss him again.  Just come back and enjoy Yule and think about it?”

“The meaning of friendship?” Anniavas said, voice too shaky to be arch.

A sharp-toothed grin.  “That, too.”

The lurking memory already seemed gone, banished by the tea or maybe just by the distance.  Anniavas could almost believe he’d imagined that sudden, visceral impression of cold loneliness.  His hair was too short to toss, but he jerked his head in the motion anyway.  “Fine,” he said, in a way that he hoped sounded natural.  He put the mug down and followed Maglor back the way he had come.  The watching cold in his mind seemed to settle, as if lulled to sleep.

* * *

It had been stupid, Maedhros told himself.  Tradition or not, consent or not, lord or not—it had been too much for Anniavas, after only a few months of freedom.  Fool.  Too much drink, and something about the way Anniavas had been standing, alone and with the light limning his short copper curls—queer and compelling.  Dangerous.  He should never have listened to Maglor’s goading.

Limral sat at his elbow and whined, and he stroked her head gently.  “He’ll be back in a little while, girl,” he told her gently.  “There’s nothing to worry about.”

Alcohol was always such a gamble.  It could blunt the edges and blur away the sharp painful points of his memories—or it could leave him colder and hollower than before.  Sometimes, he swung from one to the other in the blink of an eye.

He took another drink anyway.  If nothing else, it would get him to sleep, and though he thought the healers were right that it caused nightmares, well—not drinking would not keep the nightmares at bay.  The mulled wine burned going down his throat.

Something prickled along the back of his neck.  He set the wine glass down with exaggerated care and turned to see Maglor and Anniavas returning to the hall.  Anniavas’s face was flushed, in contrast to his watchful eyes, but he seemed much calmer than he had when he left.  Once again, the light caught in his too-short hair, tangling up and dripping down his pale throat, as if it were the light of the Two Trees in Valinor.  For one queer instant, Maedhros had the same impression as he had on the morning he had first seen Arién rise; then the moment was gone, and there was only Anniavas’s sharp gaze rising to meet his.

Limral raced to meet Anniavas, and he paused, the serious expression on his face fading as he knelt to shower her in affection.  Maedhros’s heart twisted: there was something about Anniavas’s affection for the hounds that was both unexpected and oddly comforting.  He almost got to his feet, and then reminded himself that Anniavas might very well not want to speak with him right now.

“Oh, don’t be such a martyr,” Maglor said lightly, appearing at his elbow.  “I cannot babysit the both of you all day.  I have a rendezvous with a lovely woman, and I must make myself presentable.”

“What did you do?” Maedhros grunted.

“Just go talk to him, will you? And for Manwë’s sake, remember you’re not the Lord of Himring today.”

Levering himself irritably out of his seat at the long table, Maedhros made his way over to Anniavas, feeling awkward, coltish, and far younger than his actual span of years.

Anniavas stood as he approached, tilting his head to one side, his expression unreadable.  Then he gave a short bow.  Maedhros put out his hand to stop him, and he collided with it as he stood back up, ruining the dignified look he had clearly been attempting.  He shook himself irritably, like a cat, and Maedhros cleared his throat awkwardly.

“I can’t explain,” Anniavas said shortly.  “I had a—reaction.  It had nothing to do with you.”

“A memory?” Maedhros asked, though his lungs expanded as if he had been being crushed and a weight had suddenly lifted.

“Perhaps.”  Anniavas looked around the room.  “Would you—come outside with me?  I, the noise of the hall—it is becoming too much.”

“All right,” Maedhros agreed, and—to his shock—Anniavas hesitated, then reached out and grabbed the wrist of his stump, not looking at him, but turning and towing him rapidly towards the door.

They walked out into darkness; clouds had covered the sky, black and heavy—except at the horizon, which Maedhros realized the next moment when brilliant orange light pierced across the landscape, the beams of the setting Sun escaping from beneath those ugly clouds.  It would not be long before it fell beneath the walls of Himring, and the long night began.

“It’s snowing,” Anniavas said, looking up.

It was.  From those black and ugly clouds drifted pure white particles, a soft curtain growing heavier by the instant.  Each flake caught the orange light of sunset and refracted it until the air seemed to be filled with miniature Suns.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” Anniavas said, and he moved closer to Maedhros.  Instinctively, Maedhros put an arm around him, shielding him.

“That you remember?”

A considering pause.  “I don’t think I’ve seen anything like this at all.”

They stood together in a silence that settled into comfortable.  Anniavas did not pull away from Maedhros’s sheltering arm.  The snow fell softly; no wind rose, but the Sun sank steadily.  Peace descended slowly over Himring, the flashes of orange light slowly fading.  Night stretched creeping fingers across the world.

“Are you afraid of the dark?” Maedhros asked abruptly.

“Of the dark, of cold, and of shadows, I think,” Anniavas replied.  “Though if there is some reason for it, it has itself been lost in the penumbra cast across my mind.”

Maedhros found that he did not like the way Anniavas stood quietly, resignedly, tucked in on himself, as the dark and cold closed in around him.  It was not the way a man stood when he was bracing himself to face a fear: it was the way he stood when he had learned that there was no escape from pain.

“Let’s go inside,” he said. 

“But—” Anniavas started, then caught himself.  “I don’t understand,” he said, after a moment, instead of whatever he had been going to say.

“To the greenhouse.  It will be warm there, and light, even if there is darkness and cold outside.”

Anniavas’s mouth tugged to one side.  “The light is dying,” he said, nodding stubbornly at the Sun.

“Yes, we’ll have to create more.”

Seeming to shake himself out of a reverie, Anniavas’s chin came up and shoulders strengthened.  “All right, then,” he said.  “It shouldn’t be too loud in the greenhouse.  Besides, I—I wanted to talk to you about something that Maglor said.  About—friendship.”

“I would be honored,” Maedhros replied.

When the long night cast its shadows across the world, the Elf who was not currently the Lord of Himring and the entity who was not his servant drank tea together and laughed.

End of part 1.

---

Chapter End Notes

Mistletoe, as some part of Anniavas is evidently aware, contains the toxin viscumin, which interferes with the ability of your cells to make proteins, which they need to stay alive.

don't @ me about snowflake optical properties i'm not worrying about it