From That Rubble by StarSpray  

---

Seven

---

Love doesn’t discriminate
Between the sinners and the saints
It takes and it takes and it takes
And we keep lovin’ anyway
We laugh and we cry and we break
And we make our mistakes…
- “Wait for it” - Hamilton

 

- - 

 

Fëanor occupied himself in his forge the next few days. He kept the palantír locked away, knowing what he should look for but unwilling to do it yet. He had that necklace to finish making the chains for, but it was slow work and not complicated enough to hold as much of his attention as he wanted. He dug through his half-started and mostly-finished sketches instead, looking for something he could use a hammer on. Then he realized how disorganized all of his drawers and cabinets were, and so he set about fixing them.

It was on a sunny afternoon, while he sat cross legged on the floor surrounded by drawings and notebooks sorted into piles of various sizes, that someone knocked on the door. “It’s open,” he called without looking up. He expected Findis, or perhaps Fingolfin, come to worry at him—or if not either of them, maybe one of the twins or Celebrimbor, who sometimes brought Calissë and Náriel to visit. 

When he looked up, however, he found Daeron in the doorway, looking rather bemused to have found Fëanor sitting on the floor in the middle of a mess of papers. For a moment they stared at each other in silence. Then Fëanor said, “If you were looking for…” Only he really didn’t know what or who Daeron would have been seeking, out here in the palace workshops. It wasn’t as though he was likely to find Maglor there.

“I was looking for you,” Daeron said, “but it can wait if you’re busy.”

“I’m not.” Fëanor glanced around and then got to his feet, carefully stepping over a stack of notebooks. “I was only reorganizing some things.” He wanted to ask what it was Daeron wanted, but couldn’t quite think of a diplomatic way to do so. “Is something the matter?”

“No, not at all.” Daeron stepped inside and let the door close behind him. His clothes were plain and sensible, soft blues and purples, though he wore strings of amethyst beads wound through his braids, as he most often did at the formal events where Fëanor usually saw him. He also wore the wooden pendant that had been the cause of their original—Fëanor wasn’t even sure what to call it, since he did not think it really qualified as an argument. An argument would have included more back-and-forth than what had really happened. Confrontation, perhaps, was a better word. “Maglor’s fine,” Daeron added. “He didn’t send me, either—he doesn’t even know that I’m here. He’s gone away to Formenos.”

Fëanor blinked. “He—what? You just said he was fine.”

“He is. He just thought he should visit, since he’ll be singing of it, and apparently it isn’t very far. He and Elrond left yesterday.”

“Why didn’t you go?”

“Because Elrond did,” Daeron said, as though that explained everything, “and because I have a few things to do in Tirion before we leave for Alqualondë—including this visit.” He paused, and then said, with surprising frankness, “I would like to apologize.”

Fëanor couldn’t have said what he had expected from Daeron, but it was not an apology. “What do you have to apologize for?” he asked, baffled—not exactly at the thought that an apology was warranted, but that Daeron thought so. Daeron had struck him from the start as someone deeply unapologetic, and had neither said nor done anything in the years since to change that impression. 

“I think we both misunderstood one another very badly when we met, and though I cannot be sorry for what I said, I am sorry that I spoke so harshly,” Daeron replied. “It had not been my intention in coming to Tirion to make enemies.”

“Was it your intention to make friends?” Fëanor asked incredulously, and then bit his tongue hard.

But instead of taking offense, Daeron grinned at him—a real smile that made his dark eyes crinkle. “No,” he said. “Truthfully, I did not expect us to speak more than we did at that first party—I already did not like you, but I was not planning to let you know.”

“I think I should be the one to apologize,” Fëanor said. “You were right when you said I had no right to question you—or Maglor. I didn’t mean…” He hesitated, because he had meant to be insulting, if he were honest. “You just seemed—”

“How I presented myself before your brother’s court was not quite how any of your sons knew me or would have spoken of me,” said Daeron. “Well—it wasn’t very unlike how both Maedhros and Maglor first met me long ago, but from the start I found it very easy to let those masks fall away in private, with Maglor, and never really put them on again when I met the rest of your sons here. Really, I’m a bit surprised that you did not see through them then, because I was not at my best.”

“I did not know what to make of you,” Fëanor said, because Daeron seemed to appreciate frankness over politeness. “You did not seem to really care about anything—and that was at such odds with what everyone else said about you.”

Daeron’s smile turned rueful. “Careless? I suppose I did come off that way, didn’t I? I only meant to seem more cheerful than I was, and maybe I tried a bit too hard. But I had also forgotten,” he said, “that time does not pass the same way for the dead as it does for the living. I have been told that it passes oddly in Lórien, and I can only suppose it is even stranger in Mandos.”

“It is,” Fëanor said. 

“So for you it did not really feel as though thousands of years had passed, did it? Between the First Age and now.”

“I suppose not.” It mostly felt like he had just slept for a long time, and woken up into a very different world than the one in which he had fallen asleep. “But what…?”

“For you it was still all very new, and I suspect rather easy to forget that I, conversely, had had a very, very long time to come to terms with the events of the First Age,” said Daeron. “Both my part in them, and Maglor’s, and so of course it would have seemed strange to you that I was so easy in the company of your sons, and that I would openly wear such a token from Maglor.” His hand went to the pendant around his neck, fingers brushing lightly over the purple flower inlaid into the pale mallorn wood. “For a very long time I did hate him, and I could not bear to come back among even my own people because the grief was so sharp. So I returned to my wanderings in the far east and did not look back. I’ve had many adventures of my own, and met many people good and bad and in between, Men and Elves and Dwarves—and wizards. By the time I felt myself called west—I did tell you the truth, you know, when you asked why I took ship when I did—I had made peace with it. I had long ceased to be angry by the time Maglor and I met again.”

And if Fëanor had stopped to think, he would have been able to guess at least some of that—to recall that it had been a very long time, and that of course feelings could and would change over the years. “I’m sorry,” he said. 

“Thank you,” said Daeron. “I am sorry too—your words then did come from a place of care, I do see that now. If all continues to go well, I think you and I will be seeing a great deal more of one another than we have, and I would not have any resentments linger between us.”

“Continues to go well,” Fëanor repeated. It was going well with Ambarussa, but he hadn’t thought either meeting with Maglor had. They hadn't gone badly, and that was as much as he could have hoped for. But well? Amras had said that Maglor would stop avoiding him when the song was done, but Fëanor knew better than to hang any real hopes on that.

“Whatever you said to Maglor, both the other morning and the other night, meant a great deal to him,” Daeron said quietly. “He is burdened by this song he is writing, and all the grief for Finwë that it has reawakened—but he shed his own anger long ago.”

“But he is still afraid.” Everyone said so, and it was still so obvious, and he still didn’t know what to do about it. 

“Yes, but he is not as afraid as he was, and I think…” Here Daeron hesitated, and then seemed to decide that saying whatever was in his mind would be better than keeping it in confidence. “I think what fears remain are rooted in Dol Guldur, more than in you, even if some of them wear your face. Even the nightmares that I spoke of before—they came from Dol Guldur too, where for a long time he was alone with nothing but his nightmares.”

“I thought Lórien was supposed to—”

“It has! Please do not mistake me. He found great healing there, and he never wakes up in tears now, but—” Daeron shrugged, all trace of his earlier good humor gone, replaced by solemn concern. “There will always be scars,” he said. “On the body and on the spirit. They do not torment him as they once did, but he will always have them. He’s restless and struggling a little now, but only because of this song, as I said.”

“He should not have to write such a song if it burdens him so.” Finwë deserved to be honored in this way, but it should not come at any cost to Maglor’s own peace, hard-won and still-fragile as it was. Maybe that was why Míriel hadn’t told him of it, Fëanor thought. She would have been able to guess at these thoughts and protestations—but if that was true and she asked it anyway…

“He wants to write it,” Daeron said. “He told me once that he was unable to write any songs such as this for any of you, and I think that has weighed on him for a very long time—that he couldn’t do the one thing he is supposed to be good at when it mattered most to him. There’s no need to write such songs for you or his brothers now, but there is for Finwë. This is important to him, and not only because it was Lady Míriel who asked—he both wants and needs to see it through.”

“Are you helping him?” Fëanor asked.

“Not as a musician,” said Daeron. “I told him when it was first brought up that this is a task for Canafinwë of the Noldor, not Daeron of the Sindar. If he asks for my opinion I’ll of course give it, but the words will be entirely his own. He has my support in all other ways, and he knows that.”

That, more than anything else, was reassuring. If only there were some way he could help. All the things Fëanor was best at, though, were not what Maglor needed—and he made his own instruments and didn’t seem to like jewelry anymore, or—

A sudden thought came to him. “Maglor told me that he does not regret going east,” he said. “Does he regret returning west?”

“No,” Daeron said. “He misses Middle-earth—so do I—but that isn’t the same thing.”

“You said before only that it was time, when I asked why you took ship. Is that really all there is to it?”

“Well, yes. I put it to Thingol once as…the verses of my life sung in Middle-earth had come to an end. There could be no return home for me—Eglador, Beleriand, Doriath—that was home, and there is no returning there any more than there can be a return to Cuiviénen. It was chance, more or less, that brought us to Mithlond at the same time. I had intended to take ship, but I did choose that one in particular when I heard that Maglor would also be on it. By then I missed him more than I had ever hated him. As for Maglor—it is true that he only boarded that ship because of the promises he made to Elrond, but even if given a chance now he would not go back. He is happy here. But he does speak, sometimes, of the lands where he used to wander, and whenever he does it is with fondness and a wistfulness that I think he tries to hide even from me. He doesn’t have to, because I feel the same way when I think of the holly groves of Region, or the Esgalduin glimmering under the stars.” Daeron’s voice took on a hint of that wistfulness even then, speaking those names. “There are many here, I think, who feel that way.”

Maybe there was something Fëanor could make for Maglor.

Daeron laughed suddenly. “Oh, I recognize that look—I’ll leave you now to whatever idea has come into your mind. I’ve said what I came to say, and I hope we can meet going forward without any awkwardness.”

“Of course,” said Fëanor. Then as Daeron turned back toward the door he said, “Daeron.”

“Yes?”

“That song you sang when you first came to Tirion—the last one of that performance. Was that one of Maglor’s?”

“Of winter giving way to spring? Yes. Several of the songs that I sang that evening were his—that one he wrote in Rivendell, not long after he recovered enough to begin writing music again. It doesn’t sound so in the beginning, but it is a very hopeful song. Maglor laughs every time I say so, because he so rarely feels truly hopeful himself these days—but what else do you call the unfailing expectation every year of sunshine and daffodils after long months of darkness and snow?” Daeron did not smile, but his eyes had gone very soft—softer than Fëanor had ever seen them. “It’s one of my favorites of his, that song. I chose it that year because I missed him, more than any other reason.”

“It was beautiful,” Fëanor said. “The words and your performance.”

“Thank you.”

“Is this visit meant to be a secret? You said Maglor doesn’t know you intended to come.”

“Oh, no of course not. We don’t keep secrets—it’s only that I knew he would worry, and he has enough on his mind. I’ll tell him about it sometime after he returns. Or you can tell him, if you see him before we leave for Alqualondë!”

“Who are you to see in Alqualondë? Olwë isn’t there,” Fëanor said, before remembering that his own brother lived just outside of the city, and of course Maglor would not leave him out. Elrond had even said so.

“We’re to stay for a little while with Prince Finarfin—and I am to have a little family reunion of my own, after which we might stay for a time in Avallónë, or we might come straight back to Lady Nerdanel’s house. Our plans are not set in stone.” 

“A family—? I thought your uncle and aunt were in Taur-en-Gellam.”

“At the moment they are in Alqualondë—they have been for the past year or so. My parents live there.” Daeron grinned again, but it did not reach his eyes. “It’s rather a long story—I’ve never known them, you see.”

Fëanor had not expected to feel such a sudden sense of kinship with Daeron, let alone sympathy—at least he had had his father, growing up. He could not imagine being orphaned entirely. “I’m sorry.”

“Oh, you needn’t be. I was far too young when they disappeared to remember them. This meeting is long overdue. And now I really will leave you to your work. Farewell for now!”

Fëanor watched Daeron leave, thinking of how brightly he had just spoken of meeting his lost family, and how much it sounded like the way he had spoken of nearly everything when they had first met. Then, he said he had been acting far more cheerful than he felt. Now…? He shook his head and turned back to his piles of papers, gathering them up to put them away. There were enough things for him to worry about without adding Daeron to the list. 

Two hours and a look into the palantír later, he had a rough sketch, and went to find Celebrimbor. “That sounds like a wonderful idea,” he said when Fëanor told him of it, though his tone didn’t quite match the words. “You could make it for one of the windows of his room at Grandmother’s house—I have the measurements around here somewhere—though aren’t you to leave for the mountains soon?”

“I honestly have no idea when Ambarussa want to leave, but I don’t think this will take that long,” said Fëanor. It was a stained glass window—hardly the most complicated thing he could do. The most time consuming part would be the enchantments, to turn the image into something a bit more than just a simple pattern of colored glass. “I might have to ask someone else to install it.” He hadn’t yet set foot in that house; Nerdanel wouldn’t have him under her roof when any of their sons might object, even if they weren’t there, and Fëanor wasn’t going to argue with that. 

“I can do it,” said Celebrimbor. “I should have plenty of time after I finish these windows of my own—they’re very small—and I can take it to Grandmother’s while Maglor is in Alqualondë. But—are you sure? I thought you didn’t think it went that well, speaking to Maglor.”

“I’m not sure, no,” said Fëanor after a moment. He was so rarely sure of anything these days when it came to his children. “But I want to try anyway. If he doesn’t like it—well, he doesn’t have to keep it. I won’t take offense.”

Celebrimbor still looked skeptical, but he picked up the sketch. “What sort of enchantments were you thinking of putting on it?”

Fëanor didn’t have the materials or space for making such a window in his own workshop, but Celebrimbor and Curufin had plenty of room—and it was nicer to work there than in the larger glasswork shops at the palace. Curufin came and went as Fëanor worked on it over the next few days, offering occasional commentary. Náriel came to watch sometimes, fascinated by everything that went on. There was something very pleasing about seeing a stained glass window come together, all the pieces fitting like a puzzle. This one would depict a seaside scene, a stretch of empty shore under a gently overcast sky. Whenever Fëanor looked for Maglor by the Sea, this was the place he most often found him. It was somewhere south of Lindon, all white beaches stretching toward grassy dunes and rolling hills beyond, near to cliffs where sea birds flocked, under which were coves full of tide pools that he’d watched Maglor sit beside for hours at a time, apparently fascinated by the goings on inside them. Fëanor had seen him too gathering driftwood—a piece or two each time he came back to that place in the years between Elrond’s departure and his own. Some must have been made into his harps; Fëanor didn’t know what he had done with the rest.

It was that part of the shoreline that had seen his misery start to fade away into something softer. Míriel had woven Himring, and Fëanor had since heard that Maedhros appreciated both tapestries deeply. He hoped this might offer Maglor the same sort of pleasure. He hummed similar songs over the glass that he had sung over the palantíri long ago, so that to look at the window was also, in a way, to look through it into the scene itself, just enough to make it look more real than it actually was. It was something of an experiment, but when Fëanor stepped back at last and took in the finished piece, he thought he could count it a success.

When the window was done, Curufin looked at it and frowned a little. “It’s so empty,” he said. “I know Cáno always says he likes lonely places, but I never really know whether to believe him.”

“He liked this one,” Fëanor said. He wiped his hand over his brow, feeling odd and unable to account for it. Curufin glanced at him and then rolled his eyes. “What?”

“You’ve been out here for six hours, and I suspect you haven’t so much as taken a sip of water in all that time.”

“Six hours, really?” Fëanor glanced toward the windows and found that evening was coming on. Across the room Celebrimbor snickered.

“You don’t get to laugh, Tyelpë, I know you’ve been out here all day too,” Curufin said.

Celebrimbor held up a flask and the paper wrappings that had once held his lunch. “I have been drinking and eating, thank you very much, Atya,” he said. 

“Oh, damn.” Fëanor sighed, and wiped his forehead again. “I was supposed to dine with Rúmil tonight.”

“I already sent him your apologies,” Curufin said. “You’re dining here instead.”

“Am I?” Fëanor asked, amused. Curufin did that sometimes, especially since Calissë had been born—took over as though Fëanor was his own child in need of some gentle correcting. He was always right, so if Fëanor made a mild show of protesting once in a while, he never actually meant it. 

“If you don’t, the girls will be very disappointed—especially since you’re leaving soon, and they won’t see you until the spring.”

There was certainly no arguing with that. And in a surprising turn of events there were no other dinner guests either. It was a quieter evening than Fëanor suspected Curufin’s house had seen in quite some time, and a particular contrast to the day before when Maglor had returned to Tirion, and he, Maedhros, Caranthir, and Daeron had taken the girls out for the afternoon. Fëanor was informed by Náriel that all of Curufin’s brothers were a little scared of Rundamírë—she laughed at this—and that Curufin himself wasn’t scary at all. Curufin rolled his eyes as Celebrimbor coughed into his napkin to hide his laughter. 

“Uncle Nelyo looks scariest,” Náriel went on, and Fëanor glanced at Curufin, who shrugged. “But Daeron said that’s only his brooding face, and Atya says it’s because he frowned too much when he was our age and it got stuck.”

“It’s true,” Curufin said. 

“It still doesn’t make sense if he got a new face from Mandos,” said Calissë. 

“He frowned too much right after he got out of Mandos too,” Curufin said. Celebrimbor snorted into his wine glass. 

“Why?” asked Calissë.

This gave Curufin pause, since he clearly hadn't thought that far ahead—always a mistake when talking to small children. There would always be another question, however many answers were given. “He came first,” Curufin said finally, abandoning the gentle teasing of his brother for a more serious answer, “and I think he was lonely for a long time. He isn’t lonely at all now, though. Even when he isn’t with us he has Aechen to keep an eye on him.” That made the girls giggle. Fëanor, though, couldn’t quite muster a smile as he was meant to. 

“Was it really that bad for him when he came back?” he asked Curufin a little later, after the girls had gone to bed and Celebrimbor had gone out with Rundamírë to visit someone down the street. “For Maedhros, I mean?”

“Yes. He…well, you saw him when you came back. He wasn’t much better then than he had been when I came back, or when Moryo did, and Moryo came only a few years after him. Mandos was doing him more harm than good, so the Valar just let him out to find his own way. What he needed,” Curufin sighed, “was Maglor, more than any of us—Maglor knew him best, especially after—well, after Thangorodrim, but especially after the Nirnaeth. And then when Maglor did come back and didn’t even write, or send a message…” He shook his head. “It’s our fault Maedhros was lonely for as long as he was, really. None of us knew how to talk to each other for so long, and…I, at least, didn’t even try. He needed Maglor but he should have had us, and he didn’t.”

“None of you are lonely now,” Fëanor said. 

“No. But it took far too long for us to start trying to fix things. We talk about it like your coming was what did it, but I think it would’ve fallen apart after we left Ekkaia if we hadn’t found Maglor there.”

“But you did find him there.” Fëanor leaned over to kiss Curufin’s forehead. “I’m proud of you—all of you. Maybe it took time to get started, but you’re all building new lives for yourselves, together and separately. That takes both courage and strength. I hope you know that.”

“I don’t feel either very strong or very brave,” Curufin said quietly. “I’m just—I worry about things when I know I don’t need to, and—and then I worry that it will restrict Calissë or Náriel, or that they’ll start worrying because I do, when I don’t mean for it—”

“If you need someone to reassure you that all will be well, you only have to ask. If not me, then your mother. I cannot see the future, but you are a good father, Curvo.”

“I wasn’t when—”

“You are now. Isn’t that what you keep telling me matters most? I’m trying to be a good father right now in praising you, so just indulge me and accept what I say, all right?”

That got a smile out of him. “You are a good father, Atya,” he said. “You were when we were young, and you are now.”

“I’m trying,” Fëanor said. He didn’t really know whether he was succeeding—he just knew that if he really had been a good father from the start, he wouldn’t have to wonder if keeping his distance now was really the right thing to do. He wouldn’t have to wonder what it was that he said that cut into his oldest son’s heart so deeply that six thousand years later it kept him from meeting his gaze for more than a few seconds.

He couldn’t change the past, so all he could do was try to be better going forward—to listen rather than speak, to continue letting his sons come to him in their own ways and on their own time. They had time, now, even if it was sometimes hard to believe. He had meant all that he had said to Findis—and that had to be enough, because time was all he could really give them.