Life, Like a Face Between Your Palms by gaydhros  

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Chapter 1

The Siege is broken. In the fallout of the Dagor Bragollach, Fingon begins to fear for his father.

Content warnings for this chapter: Themes of suicide, death, animal death

Everything was lost.

The assault had come upon them so suddenly— in one moment the night sky was ink-dark and moonless, in the next it was on fire. The chaos that followed was like nothing Fingon had known since the Darkening: panic, terror, confusion. They could not see. They could not comprehend.

On the burning fields of Ard-galen, the heat was so blinding it was impossible for Fingon to tell who was friend and who was foe until they were already upon him; who had been lost and who still fought by his side until the smoke thinned enough to see his men dead at his feet. His eyes stung with smoke and sweat, his lungs burned, flame licked close enough to sear his flesh through armour. The world burned, and there was nothing to do but fight to survive it.

On the fifth day of the assault, with his throat full of ash and his furious heart splitting open in his chest, Fingon looked at his father.

The High King of the Noldor stood at the window of a high tower of Barad Eithel, looking out over the devastation. Ard-galen was naught but ash. Fires still burned intermittently everywhere life remained to be burned, choking the orange skies with billows of dark smoke. Fingolfin’s face was tight. His jaw was set. In his eyes, behind the fury and the flickering of reflected flame, there was only pain, as vast and as deep as the outer seas.

There was no news out of the East. There was no reliable news out of anywhere.

Dorthonion was lost, that much they knew. Excepting the possibility of a miracle— something Fingon knew better than to hope for in these lands— Aegnor and Angrod had been lost with it, the hosts of Hithlum having been forced back before they could come to their aid. Sirion and Teiglin had saved the Talath Dirnen from the worst of the onslaught, but the Gap had ever been a vulnerability in the defense of the East. Had Maglor held?

Fingon’s heart foreboded that not even Maglor, with all the skill and might of his cavalry behind him, could have withstood the force of the Enemy for long. Not if the endless waves of Morgoth’s armies had been as relentless in the East as they were in the West, and Fingon saw no reason why they would not be. And if the Gap fell, Himland and Thargelion would fall behind it, as surely as the ground quake brought the mountain’s rockfall. And Himring—

Himring would stand. As long as Maedhros lived, Himring would stand. And if Maedhros fell…

Well. If Maedhros fell, then they had already lost.

The dark weeks of winter passed each in their turn and still the tide was relentless, still the sky burned, still the hosts of the Enemy beat against the rock of the Noldor as waves against an eroding cliffside.[1]

Fingon moved through life as one dead. Each day was much the same, each breath lacked sufficient air to fill his lungs. Time and again he led troops out into the ceaseless onslaught, and each time he returned with far fewer men than he had left with. He sat at his father’s right side though countless war councils that all lasted well into the night, arguing and strategizing and watching, helplessly, as what little hope remained to his father crumbled away from him like rocks into the sea. He presided over the funerals of Hador and Gundor his son, and for all the love that Fingon’s heart held for their mortal vassals, these fierce and valiant men who had died in defense of the Crown, he watched as they both were lowered into the ground, and he did not feel anything at all.

With the coming of spring the onslaught began to lessen. War did not wholly cease, but as the worst of the smoke began to clear and there was time at last to count their dead, the casualty and damage reports began to roll in.

Fingon stood beside his father as they were read out. Each one was worse than the last. Trade routes annihilated, infrastructure razed to the ground, countless thousands dead and thousands more whose bones had been charred beyond recognition. There was still nothing out of the East, but what whispers had reached their farthest troops spoke of utter ruin and destruction. Slowly, quietly, the horror that had been settling in Fingon’s bones over the past months began to calcify.

Fingolfin, stone-faced, listened to each report as it was read out. When all was said and done, he stood wordlessly and swept from the room.

Fingon’s father was not a hopeless man. But unlike Fingon, who clung stubbornly and destructively to hope even when his fingers bled under the strength of his conviction, Fingolfin’s hope was a measured thing. It was not bottomless. And as spring slowly bled into a chill and grey summer, the sky still blanketed by a haze of smoke that blocked most sunlight from getting through, Fingon began to fear for his father.

It was a constant, ever-present sort of fear. Fear of the kind that had driven Fingon to wakefulness each night on the Helcaraxë, which had not let him sleep for more than two hours at a time without getting up to put a hand in front of his siblings’ faces to make sure they were still breathing.

He began to spend every available moment in his father’s company. He joined him in court, in councils he would normally have shirked, he took breakfast and supper with him despite the fact that Fingolfin’s appetite had become a rare and fickle thing. He sent out scouts to bring back news from the East, and when they failed to return, he sent more. After the third time this happened, his father forbade him from sending any more. Fingon was wont to go himself, then, and he might have done so were he not terrified of what his father might do in his absence. After all, an Elda may be slain by their own hand just as surely as by grief.

Hope, to Fingon, was not something innate. Only in its broadest sense was hope a quality that burned unlooked for in the heart of every Elda; if hope was not tended, if it was not cultivated, it was wont to wither in the very moment it was needed the most. Fingon understood that hope was a choice. It was careful and deliberate, and it was hard, and the times when having hope seemed the most impossible were the times one had to choose it over and over again, every second of every day. This was the fundamental truth at the core of Fingon’s beliefs, the centre around which he understood the world and his place in it.

Very seldom did he waver in this conviction more than he did in the months following the Dagor Bragollach.

There was just so much to rebuild. It felt impossible to know where to start. Some days it felt impossible to think clearly enough through the haze of grief and fear to face the present day, let alone the future.

“What future?” his father said once, bitterly. “We are defeated. The Enemy has won.”

“If even one of us still stands,” countered Fingon sharply, “then we are not defeated. You must not lose hope.”

“Hope,” said his father, and smiled an awful, cruel smile. “There is hope, and there is foolishness. The problem with you, Findekáno, is that you have never known the difference.”

That night, Fingon lay sleepless in his bed, staring out the eastern window into the murky horizon. As he had done every night of the past six months, he cast his thoughts out across the desecrated ruins of Ard-galen and reached far, as far as his mind could carry him, seeking out the familiar curl of one reaching back. As ever, he found only a cold, impassable wall.

It was on a night of late autumn rain that a rider bearing the Fëanorian banner reached Barad Eithel’s gates at a gallop. He would not stay, not even for a night’s rest in a dry bed, making immediately for Nargothrond the moment his message had been delivered into Fingon’s hands.

Fingon could not wait. At the bottom of the grand staircase in Barad Eithel’s foyer, he tore open the sealed scroll. At the sight of Maedhros' scrawling script his knees nearly buckled.

Himring stands. All else is lost.

  — M

Fingon was trembling so much it was all he could do to clutch the railing to keep himself upright, the parchment crushed under his palm.

When Fingon had ridden for Angband, sneaking away from the lakeside camp at Mithrim in the dead of night with the near-certainty that he was going to die, he had told no one of his going. Secrecy ensured that none could hinder him, but it also ensured that no one person could blame themselves for failing to stop him. His father, his siblings, Finrod and Angrod and Aegnor— at first they all would tell themselves they should have known, that perhaps if they had acted sooner he could have been talked into reason, but once the initial shock of grief faded they would come to accept that Fingon had acted alone. They could not possibly have known what he might do, and so there was no fault or blame to be found in their inaction.

Fingon’s father gave him no such gift. When Fingolfin rode for Angband, he came to say goodbye.

He was arrayed for war. He spoke to Fingon as one already dead in tones empty and monotonous. There was a madness of grief about him, something in the light of his eyes that was fell and fey and entirely beyond reason; never did he look more like the half-brother he had loathed and loved than he did on that day.

Fingon begged. Fingon shouted. Fingon hurled venoms and cruelties that he would later wish desperately he could take back, but his father was not swayed. His father couldn’t be swayed— he was already a walking corpse, all the living parts of him chipped away, leaving in their wake only fury and bitter despair and hubristic, suicidal desperation.

“Do not pretend,” Fingon hissed at last, his heart frantic in his chest, “that this is bravery when it is madness.”

His father cradled his face in warm, tender palms. His thumbs stroked the ridges of Fingon’s cheekbones. He leaned down, kissed Fingon’s brow, and turned and strode from the room.

“Please!” Fingon cried out after him, voice breaking. “You can't leave me!” But it was not enough; he was not enough.

From the gates of Barad Eithel, Fingon watched as his father mounted Rollachor and spurred him into the North without ever looking back. He did not weep. He stood in the winter chill until long after his father had disappeared from view; until the scorched sands of Anfauglith had been swallowed up by the black night.[2]

The following day, Rollachor was espied on the horizon. For the briefest of moments, there was hope. That was before they saw that he was riderless; before he reached the fortress, exhausted and alone; before he collapsed in Fingon’s arms upon the cobbled stone of the courtyard, and died.

Chapter End Notes

[1] The compressed nature of the Silmarillion makes everything read like it happens in very quick succession, but the Grey Annals (which was my primary source used for dates in this fic) places the beginning of the Bragollach in the winter at the beginning of 455, with Fingolfin's ride to challenge Morgoth not occurring until 456. I was really interested here in playing with the Dagor Bragollach as a long, drawn-out defeat, and how that would gradually beat down even the most resilient of spirits.

[2] For the purposes of this fic, I've placed Fingolfin's death somewhere around mid-late winter in the year 456.

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