A Song Amidst His Torment by Elrond's Library  

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12

Maitimo takes some drastic measures.

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Maitimo, knees pulled to his chest, holding himself as tightly as he could, let go of the control he had over himself. He let emotions he had been holding back for these past minutes, hours – all the time since he came to Mairon’s apartments, really – rip through him with terrifying speed. His heart, his lungs, his fëa all felt jagged. His eyes ached from the force of his tears.

The events of the last quarter-hour replayed in his mind, picking out details, leaving him more and more confused.

His reactions, while Mairon had taken him – the languid bliss; the sweet kisses he had accepted and returned; the sensual and habitual touching he had before only given to his lover, his husband! The quiet grief of failing to conceive …

Where had that come from?

What the fuck was that?

What had he done?

He had known. He had agreed to the surgical alteration of his fëa, accepted Línemírë’s womb into himself, consented to the multiple sexual encounters it would take to get him pregnant, or to mix the lines of Tata with Eru, or whatever flowery language Mairon wanted to use.

He had said yes.

He had said yes to every step, because he had wanted to survive. He had wanted to survive long enough to go – not home, but back to his brothers, his friends who had followed him into Beleriand. To find a way back to his beloved, if he would take him back.

He had said yes because he thought he could handle it. Out of an excess of hubris, or pride, or arrogance, he thought he could take it and survive it.

He had said yes.

And yet, confronted so starkly with the realities of his choice, the consequences of saying yes for all the wrong reasons, he …

He hadn’t wanted this.

The Eldar didn’t have a word for this.

A flash, a memory of flipping through a book – a compilation of oral stories of the Great Journey. One had stood out, of a nís thought lost, returning to her sister, unmarried but pregnant. That had been enough of an oddity that Maitimo had read closer. The sister, who narrated through the page, described what her sister birthed – something monstrous, which Maitimo now recognized as orc-like – and the slow decline of the mother. She faded from the world. Laid down, and never got back up.

Maitimo stared at the flames in the grand fireplace, barely seeing them through the film of unshed tears. Fire … Fire cleansed, purified. Introduced flexibility, made metal malleable and strong.

He wasn't metal. What was dirty and spoiled in him could not be purified in fire. Fire would only hurt him.

He was so tired of hurting.

He was so tired.

Laying down and never getting back up somehow sounded very appealing.

He didn’t have time. If he wanted to leave this place, or at least the appalling realities of his flesh, he needed something faster than the slow fading he had read about.

Maitimo slowly got to his feet and shrugged on the discarded robe, not bothering with the buttons or his pants, ignoring the cold seeping into his bare feet. He turned, bent, fished the sketch of his husband’s happy face out of the pile of papers. Traced the lines of his kind eyes with his own, wished they were real, committed them to memory.

The paper burned so easily, edges curling and disintegrating into ash.

Maitimo’s hröa moved without conscious thought, down the hall to Mairon’s laboratory. In a stroke of luck, or perhaps naive arrogance, the fool had failed to lock it. Maitimo looked around, found what he was looking for, and the tools he’d need.

There would be a poeticism in doing this here, on the cold table where Línemírë had gone to Mandos, but Maitimo quickly realized he was shivering, the needs of his hröa coming back to the forefront. He was cold. Tired. Sticky with unfamiliar and too familiar fluids, now tacky and drying. He reeked of sex. The space between his legs ached.

The bath, then. There was no sense in being uncomfortable.

Water could cleanse as much as fire, after all.

He walked in an exhausted daze, not really seeing the apartment, or his room, or the bath. Steam rose from the surface of the water as it spilled from the pipes – warmed from the mountain itself, far below, piped up through a combination of clever physics and Song. Maitimo let the water run. He dragged the chair from the vanity over to the edge of the bath, deposited his pilfered materials on the chair and started shedding his clothes, leaving them in a haphazard heap.

He normally took better care of his clothes. He just didn’t care anymore.

Maitimo slipped into the bath. The heat immediately began its work of loosening tense muscles, soothing aches, loosening the mix of dried semen and vaginal fluid from his skin. It was almost enough to deter him from trying.

Not quite enough, though.

He turned, leaning over the edge of the bath. His hands were steady as he unscrewed a jar of clear liquid and filled the syringe as much as it would allow. He had noted this jar, and particularly where Mairon had put it, after it had been used to kill Línemírë.

Maitimo could only presume it would do the same for him.

He set the needle against his skin. Took a deep breath, pushed it into a vein. Took another breath, and pressed down the plunger, letting the liquid slowly mix with his blood.

His hand spasmed, a flinch as his mind caught up with the actions of his body. The syringe fell out of his hand, needle catching and cutting. He hissed in vehement frustration, clamping his traitorous hand over the freely bleeding wound. He heard the syringe shatter, watched the rest of liquid that would take him away from this place seep into the grout of the stone floor.

Before he could get annoyed, or even worried, the feeling in his chest changed from tense resignation to a blooming sense of euphoria, a warmth spreading from his heart to the tips of his fingers and toes.

He floated. Settled deeper into the bath, he closed his eyes, and waited.

It didn’t take long.

His head felt like it was humming, a thousand thousand bees buzzing in the apiary that was his skull. Round and round, the bees flew, arching over his eyebrows where dew coalesced into droplets for the little creatures to drink. They settled in his stomach, in his gut, in his loins, buzzing and shaking and squirming. They shook themselves apart, little pieces of wing and leg and fuzz dissipating into mist.

Maitimo was weightless, he was flying, the stars behind his eyes moving in rhythmic waves, in a dance only Varda Elentári or Eru Themself could interpret.

The blazing fire that had met him that fateful night, the joining of two fëar into a single, stronger whole, the completeness, the rightness, the unadulterated bliss of finally, finally, finally having unrestricted access to the interiority of another’s mind, to call Findekáno HIS and really mean it, even in the privacy of his-their mind, the mingling of light and joy and madness, rushing to heights of pleasure and satisfaction never dreamt of, long, long ago in the silver and white city he might still call home someday …

It was nothing compared to this.

He could picture Findekáno’s lovely face, an indulgence he had not let himself have for years and years, but which he had been quietly taking comfort from in recent months. Findekáno smiled sadly at him in the space between his eyes, the touch of his gold-laced braids ghosting across his cheeks, the weight of him settling under his skin. He glowed with a vitality Maitimo could not match.

“Dear one, best beloved,” the ghost-Findekáno whispered. “What have you done to yourself?”

“Trying,” Maitimo breathed. He licked his lips, his tongue worrying at fuzzy caterpillar skin and dewy wings. “Trying to get back to you.”

“But you left.” The ghost-Findekáno should have sounded hurt, but his voice, his whisper was nothing more than a statement of fact.

He had left. He had left Findekáno behind. “Better,” he mumbled. “Safer. Happy. You’re not here.”

“I’m here now.”

“Yes,” Maitimo let the weight, the heat of his husband sink over his hips, his chest, his face. Ghostly hands caressed him, pulling his arms into the weightlessness of water. He palmed himself, callouses both rough and soft on the sensitive skin of his cock, swiftly re-hardening under his touch. He could feel Findekáno’s eyes on him, the ghost of a kiss on his cheek.

Maitimo distantly recognized the arousal, his body’s base response to stimulation, as an aftereffect of how he had been taken by Mairon, on the floor, like a bitch or a broodmare. Here he was in control – Findekáno was touching him now – but the memory of Mairon’s attention, his weight, his voice, blurred with Findekáno. Findekáno’s hair shifted, golden ribbon becoming streaks of fiery blond and then back to black. Maitimo growled, forcing his husband to stay centered in his mind.

He came with a sigh, the tension of decades of fear and the base need to survive releasing in one, deliciously golden orgasm, the liquid burning in his blood took him higher, and higher still. “Love you,” he mumbled, but Findekáno dissolved into golden light before he could say it back.

No matter. The stars were enough. They would always be there, even as all other lights went out, faded, were eaten.

Nothing seemed to matter. He floated in the gentle embrace of the sea, lights swirling behind his eyes like the vortex of a thousand lightning bugs, winking in and out in a kaleidoscope of color.

A bright blue star became Línemírë’s gleaming eye, and thinking of her brought her fully into the space between mind and eye and heart. His chest ached, his breathing erratic. He had failed her, fully and completely. She was dead, gone to Mandos, and it was his fault.

Línemírë stared at him, single eye calm, a smug smirk on her lips that said I got the better deal and This is what you deserve and You’ll see me soon and You had better be sorry. But she said nothing. Not for a very long time.

He quailed under her gaze, shuddering under the force of her attention.

“You’re dying,” she whispered. “A true scion of Míriel Þerindë; you’d rather die than face the complete annihilation of the self that is motherhood.”

“That’s not what happened,” Maitimo muttered, but Línemírë transformed into that of his grandmother, silver hair in the braids of a bride, eyes closed in gentle repose, hands folded beneath her breast. Her deep blue dress was embroidered with gold wire and silver beads and silk in a faithful reproduction of the roiling sea amidst Manwë’s greatest storms. This was the very visage of Míriel Þerindë as he had seen her countless times in Lórien, unwithered, and utterly still.

There was no force behind her attention, though he could feel it nevertheless. He could feel her rooting around his fëa, finding every nook and cranny, delving into every depth, uncovering every secret long held dear to his heart.

“Unhappy you are, child of my House,” Míriel murmured, her musical voice bouncing around the edges of his hearing, though her lips did not move, her eyes did not open. “Weary you are, child of my hands. Changed you are, child of my fire, changed from what you are to what you ought not be.” She paused, and Maitimo rubbed his thumbs against the tips of his fingers, the sensation reminiscent of silk thread running under his hands, or black hair and gold ribbon being braided under his careful attention. “So set upon your path, you would allow yourself to be transformed, neither nér nor nís.”

“I am myself, Haruni, as I always have been.” Maitimo wanted to argue more vehemently, but everything felt so heavy, and he was weak in the wake of the dragging force in his blood.

“Your Oaths will not allow your fëa to escape your hröa as mine did, child of my grief, unless the hröa is destroyed. Completely. Utterly.”

Maitimo made an unhappy sound in the back of his throat – the bees were back, vibrating and dancing along the lines of sinew and skin.

“You are dying, but you must live. This is not yet your time. Tears and blood aplenty will you shed, but you must live. You must see yourself through until the last days of my House are utterly spent. This do I charge, child of my wrath: Live. Find your strength. Fight the Shadow that lies upon your heart. Do whatever you need to do to survive, and I promise you, child of my love, you will see the days of your hope and peace renewed. Follow me only when your task is complete, and no sooner. Be bold, be steadfast, be vicious. Survive, child of my Finwë. Rest. Sleep.”

The Míriel of his mind’s eye did not move, but he could feel her lips brush his forehead, a kiss of benediction, of forgiveness, of mercy. Perhaps even love. Maybe even acceptance.

He slept.

He stirred not as his face slipped below the water of the bath.