The Mirror Crack'd by AdmirableMonster  

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Rooms With No Doors

LAST TIME on The Mirror Crack'd: Fingon and Celegorm had a fight, and Anniavas and Maedhros came to an understanding.

THIS TIME on The Mirror Crack'd: Anniavas and Celegorm talk philosophy.

No particular warnings for this chapter other than Celegorm having a mouth on him, I guess.

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The sound of unexpected voices in the stables drove Anniavas to duck down, hiding himself in the kennels.  Limral, whom he had been spoiling with some dried fruit, whined softly and nosed at his side, and he put a hand on her neck to calm her.

The puppies were growing fast; they were weaned and wandering around happily on their spindly legs.  When Anniavas stepped into the kennel, he was quite well aware that although they were nowhere near their adult weight, one of them could probably knock him off his feet with a determined enough rush.  Not that any of them would try to attack him, but several of them were extremely enthusiastic when they saw him, not the least of whom Limral.  Anniavas was already wondering if he might be allowed to take charge of her training, but he had the uncomfortable feeling that he would have to ask Lord Celegorm for permission, and he had been trying very hard not to cross paths with Lord Celegorm.

He was very much afraid that had been Lord Celegorm’s voice.

“—you have had me do, Curvo?”

A dry laugh.  “Not lose to fucking Fingon?”

The sound of a blow and a curse.  “You think you’d have done better?” snarled Lord Celegorm.  Anniavas held his breath, crouching even lower.

“I’m not always bragging about my fighting prowess, Turko, dear.  And while you’re sulking in here about your dog, my son is—”

Another blow.  Lord Celegorm’s voice was low, furious.  “He’s fine, he just doesn’t want to see your face, and no wonder.”

“You have no way to know that.”

“That kid would have been loyal to you until the end of days if you’d treated him right, even though you got his mother k—”

This time it was the sound of an open palm, flat, sharp, and ugly.  “Don’t talk about Tinwë, don’t you dare—”

“Get out, Curvo, before I do something I regret.”

A wild laugh.  “Don’t you mean that we both regret?”

This time there was only a deadly silence, and then a soft response, “No.  I don’t.”

Anniavas shuddered.  The silence stretched.  Then Curvo’s voice said, “I’ll get out, but you’d think you’d know better than to drive off your only remaining ally.”

There was only that predatory silence in response, and a moment later, the sound of footsteps retreating.  Then a groan and the sound of someone slumping against the outside of the kennels.  Anniavas did not dare to move.  His situation was now balanced on the edge of a knife—if Celegorm found him there, he would know that Anniavas had been eavesdropping.  Given his not-unjustifiable suspicions, he might not believe that Anniavas had been doing so unintentionally.  

He might be able to wait undetected until Celegorm left, but he found it unlikely—yet the longer he waited, the more dire it would be if he were discovered.

Before he had a chance to think about what he was doing, his body was rising smoothly from amidst the dogs, his voice sounding clear and confident in his own ears.  “Do you always have such arguments in public where anyone can overhear you?  I, for one, am not interested in being privy to your petty squabbles.”  Stars, where had that icy, regal tone come from?  Anniavas had not known he could sound so, and yet it did not feel unnatural.  Was this how Maglor felt, when he put on the cloak of the Lord of Himring?

Celegorm was sitting with his back against the kennel.  Now he sprang to his feet and whirled on Anniavas, a wicked-looking knife clutched in one hand.  Presumably that was what he’d used to threaten Curvo.  “You,” he snarled.

“Is it so surprising that I am to be found visiting my dog?” Anniavas asked in that same chill voice of command. (He was not sure that this would work.  He had not bargained for the knife.  Would they treat his body as Noldorin if he died?  Placed upon a pyre and burned to prevent it from rising?  Some mad, quiet panic wondered if that was what he wanted.)

But Celegorm did not attack him.  Instead, he looked down at the knife in his hand as if it sickened him.  “Gods beyond,” he said.  He flung the knife down.  “No.  That’s—not surprising at all,” he continued, his voice strangled.

“If I may go,” Anniavas prompted distantly.  Celegorm barely seemed to hear him, waving a vague hand toward the exit.  His heart pumping to a terrible beat, Anniavas found himself walking in the direction indicated.  His steps were lightly punctuated by Limral’s low, distressed whine.  He did not look at Celegorm, though the blood rose to his cheeks, hot and obvious, his body’s fear making itself evident in a way his mind had no idea how to suppress.

He had reached the door and put the flat of his palm on it to push it open, but something drew him to turn back.  Celegorm was on the floor again, slumped forward, his head in his hands.  Despair writ itself through every line of his form.

Leave, Anniavas’s body urged him, a prey animal given unexpected succor from a predator.  Limral whined again, soft and pleading.

Under his breath, Anniavas muttered a particularly obscene Orcish phrase.  His face scrunching up with an emotion he didn’t fully understand, he turned and walked back to the kennels, leaning over and putting out his arms for Limral.  She trotted eagerly over to him and licked his face thoroughly, then submitted to being picked up, although that was awkward—she was too heavy for it already, and too gangly.  But he got her out of the pen and set her on the stable floor, then gave her a gentle nudge in Celegorm’s direction.

She didn’t need much urging.  She padded over, put her nose in his hair, and snuffled deeply.

Celegorm blinked as if dazed, looked up.  Limral immediately took the opportunity to lick his face as well.  “Good girl,” he mumbled, slinging an arm around her, and she pranced and preened at the praise.  His troubled gaze moved to Anniavas.  “Thought you were leaving.”

Anniavas crossed his arms, still fighting an urge to run and hide.  “You do not seem well,” he said.

“This isn’t going to make me trust you,” Celegorm bit out, which did not seem relevant.

After a moment, Anniavas said so.  “Irrelevant.”  Limral whuffed lightly and bounced up and down.  “She wants to play.”

“I know that.  Maybe she’ll have to learn she doesn’t get everything she wants.”  Bounce, bounce, whine, whine.

“Will she?”

Sigh.  “No.”  Celegorm produced a short, thick length of rope from somewhere in his tunic, and offered one end to Limral, who immediately took it in her mouth and began tugging happily.

“She likes you,” Anniavas said, after a moment.  Some strange instinct still pushed him to remain, and he hovered, awkwardly shifting his weight from foot to foot.

“I said you could go,” Celegorm mumbled after a while.

“Technically, you only indicated it.”  Tentatively, carefully, gingerly, Anniavas crouched beside Celegorm.  He did not touch him, he only waited beside him, hoping to hold himself nonthreateningly.  This was partly to ward off a further attack, and partly because he felt—well, he thought he must feel the way Limral did.  She had dropped the rope and her tail, and was whining in a puzzled kind of way, approaching Celegorm with her tail wagging gently between her legs, her ears down.  Anniavas did not have the benefit of a tail or of mobile ears, to his chagrin.

They might have stood there in silence for an age, had Limral not been so impatient as to break it with a single, loud bark. Even Celegorm, dour as he was, could not restrain the faintest smile. “A loyal dog, if not always patient.”

“Does loyalty require patience?” Where did that question even come from? Celegorm shifted to give him a piercing look. Ah. This was the misstep, then.

“…what do you know of oaths?”

Unexpected.  Anniavas considered the question, his mind offering up only a chilly litany of facts.  “There are many situations that may require an oath, or that may be resolved by one.  Should I list them?”

Celegorm stared at him, his mouth pulling to one side.  “What do you personally know of oaths?”

Oh.  Somehow, it was even more unexpected for Celegorm to ask him a question like this, when he had (not unreasonably, Anniavas still thought, no matter what Maedhros and Fingon had to say on the matter) questioned his truthfulness.  He tried to find an answer, but only grew cold.  Everything he tried to reach for slipped away.  “Nothing that I recall,” he was forced to say after a minute.

“Huh.  Keep it that way.”

This was nonsensical.  “Surely you would prefer that I at least swore an oath of fealty to your brother.  Or do you believe that I am faithless enough to break my word, even in such a circumstance?”  That thought stung in a way that all Celegorm’s caution up till now had not.

“Yes.  No.  I don’t know.”  He shrugged.  “I wasn’t thinking about oaths you may or may not have sworn to Maedhros.  I was thinking of—I was thinking of kings and oaths and—rooms with no doors.”

His mode of speech had shifted subtly, his words slower, his Quenya accent more pronounced.  “Rooms with no…doors?” Anniavas asked, confused.  His mind failed to suggest a relevant idiom.

“It’s from some essay, long ago, I don’t remember who wrote it.  Doesn’t matter.”  Celegorm’s face moved in a way Anniavas associated with physical pain.  “An old—lover of mine and I debated it.  Doesn’t matter why.”  He kept saying that it didn’t matter; Anniavas wondered if he was trying to convince someone.  “The idea was, could you shut someone into a room with no doors?”

“Clearly not,” Anniavas said, irritated.  “No one could go in.”

He got a faint, queer smile for that.  “Yeah, that’s what I said.  My lover didn’t agree.  He said, what if the room doesn’t have a roof?”

“Sophistry,” Anniavas retorted.  “Which is fair enough, if it’s a riddle, I suppose.  But I’d say it doesn’t really count as a room without a roof and all four walls.”

“Some rooms have more than four walls,” Celegorm pointed out.  “But even if you make it have a roof, there are windows, you can shut someone in and lock the windows.  It was a stupid thought exercise, just a foolish riddle to pass the time when nothing very pressing was happening.  We talked about it again, years later.  My lover said, what if there were doors when you went in?”

“A door cannot vanish,” Anniavas objected.

“It can be boarded up.  Or—it can stop being a door.  Take the right oath—” Celegorm mimed a shutting motion with one hand.  “That’s what he always said, that an oath could stop the doors from being doors.”  He laughed, pressed his face into his hands.  Limral whined again.  “I said that was stupid.  I thought he meant mine, I never thought—”  He made a strange noise, like pain and laughter and weeping all wrapped up into one.  Anniavas wondered how he could tease all those apart, it seemed so complicated.

“I never thought,” Celegorm repeated.  “I never thought—”

“You never thought?” Anniavas prompted after a moment.  Some strange impulse pushed him closer and drove him to lay a hand on Celegorm’s arm.  Limral poked her head in to lay on his thigh.

“I never thought he might mean his own.”

Although he still was not sure he understood, Anniavas squatted beside Celegorm.  “It’s still a stupid thought exercise,” he said after a minute.  “But it seems to have taken on more importance than one might expect for such a thing.  Your lover…?”

Celegorm shook, grasping a hand in his hair as if to tear it out.  “We betrayed each other,” he blurted.  “Looking for doors.”

“In a room with…none?” Anniavas tried, still not understanding but attempting to follow the pattern of the logic as it had been laid out.  “Because of your oaths?”

Making a futile and somewhat affirmative gesture, Celegorm fisted his hand in the loose skin at the nape of Limral’s neck.  “I know I’m not making sense,” he said.  “Nothing makes sense for me now, I never know which way to turn.  You—”

“I don’t even make sense to myself,” Anniavas said sourly.  “I don’t blame you for your suspicion.  I would be suspicious as well, and I have no way to prove to you my intentions.”  He shook his head.  He did not quite feel that he could say, when Maedhros had firmly proscribed any sort of punishment or action against him, that in some sense he was suspicious of himself as well.  It was not as if thoughts and memories could not be planted and hidden deep within a mind, actions enforced despite the will of the actor.  It was surprisingly foolish for the lord of Himring to accept thralls at all, but it was clear by now that there was no way Maedhros could be convinced to do anything else.  

Celegorm grunted and shook his head.  “Thanks,” he said quietly.  “What Fingon said to me—he wasn’t entirely wrong.  Gods beyond, I hate him, but he wasn’t wrong.”

Anniavas swallowed the insistent and obvious question, but Celegorm, glancing at him shrewdly sideways, seemed to read it in his silence.

“It was about friendship,” he said.  “And kingship.  And doors, in a sense.”

They sat together for a while longer, but neither of them spoke again.

* * *

It was early morning, and Fingon was leaving.  He had already overstayed his time—not his welcome, never his welcome, Maedhros thought bitterly, but the High King of the Noldor had work to do in his own fortress.  He could not be forever at Maedhros’s side, no matter how much they both wished it.  

The sun was not even showing above the horizon, though the songbirds were awake and beginning to chirp.  They were not in the main courtyard but waiting outside the walls for Hemmoril to bring out the horse Fingon would use to ride to the first relay station between Himring and Hithlum.  Better to avoid the possibility of little brothers with too much curiosity.  It was bad enough that Fingon had taken charge while Maedhros was injured.  But Maglor was tired and stressed and had fallen too easily into old bickering as soon as Fingon was there.  And Fingon had had to come.  Maedhros knew it.  It would not have been fair not to let him make that decision, with the outcome so much in doubt.

Fingon interlaced their fingers and squeezed.  “I know you’re still angry at me,” he murmured, not sounding the least bit sorry.

“Yes,” Maedhros agreed.  “But I accept that Turko has been impossible lately.  You have probably made things easier for me, if anything.”

“You were frightened.  You shouldn’t have been.  I know how to beat Turko.”

“Evidently,” Maedhros said stonily.  Although they had spent most of the night together, he wanted to kiss Fingon again.  He schooled himself to stillness and just squeezed his husband’s hand in return.

Slyly, Fingon gave him a little elbow.  “Anniavas cares for you,” he said quietly.  “I think he cares more than he’s willing to admit.”

“He’s loyal,” Maedhros said, wondering why they were talking about Anniavas.  The name brought to mind a frisson of sensation coiled deep in his belly, the echo of the little pleased twinge he had received when Anniavas asked if they might take tea.

“Ah, is that all, I wonder,” Fingon said with a grin.  “And has he sworn fealty to you yet, Lord of Himring?”

“He hasn’t, and I won’t have it,” Maedhros said, hearing his own voice creak in the middle.  He controlled it hastily.  “I’ve been thinking about the things that could be hidden by such loss of memory.”

Fingon hummed, in a pleased, triumphant sort of way.  “Well, I like him, and I’m grateful to him,” he said frankly.  “And I think he may be good for you, and you may be good for him, as well.  Just don’t let Turko ruin him.”

“I won’t,” Maedhros growled.  “He tried to agree with Turko at first—I told him that I wouldn’t have him imprisoned for such a thing.  I think I scared him a little.”

“He has clearly been hurt in the past,” Fingon agreed, with a little thoughtful look on his face that made Maedhros slightly uneasy.  Fingon looking like that always seemed to have plans, which could sometimes be very interesting or exciting for the other unwitting participants.  “But then, Himring is a good place to unlearn the patterns of hurt.”

“I hope so,” Maedhros said.  “I sometimes feel as if I’ve never done so.”

The look on Fingon’s face made it clear that he wanted to kiss him, but he restrained himself.  Maedhros felt the gentle whisper of a brush against his mind that was the most he had been able to receive since returning from Thangorodrim.  He brushed back.  “Take care,” he said to Fingon, which was all he felt he could say.  Fingon would understand all the rest.

His husband grinned at him.  “I will,” he said.  Then, “please know that Anniavas has my permission for any request that either of you might wish to make.”

This was somewhat incomprehensible, even for Fingon.  “I have no idea what you’re trying to say,” Maedhros said.

“You don’t?  Well, perhaps you will find out.”  Fingon bounced up on the balls of his feet, again as if he wanted to kiss Maedhros, but he recovered in a way that made it look like simple restless energy.  “I will return when I can.”

“That’s all I ask.  Farewell.”  My love.

Fingon’s love brushed his mind once again and then withdrew as he turned to mount his horse.