A Handful of Seawater and a Cheekful of Salt by Isilme_among_the_stars  

---

Open your eyes, look and see

Nerdanel and Maedhros care for Maglor in the aftermath of his breakdown and Maglor finally opens his eyes to other perspectives.

---

Istarnië dips a cloth into a basin of water. Curlicues of thready crimson spread at the contact. She squeezes. Water falls, a thin pink stream, to ripple the surface. Istarnië dabs the cloth against Maglor’s brow again.

“You are truly her?” he asks. The question is mad (and that he spoke it aloud is worse).

She purses her lips. “Your mother? I always have been.”

The cloth is cold against his skin. It stings and drags, despite her tender hand.

“I am sorry,” Maglor says.

Nerdanel raises an eyebrow. “For what?”

His regret is too vast, too vague. It squeezes his lungs. It slips fingers around his gut and clenches. Maglor cannot answer.

Nerdanel thumbs carefully at his hairline. She surveys his brow with a critical eye. “This appears cleaner at the least,” she says and sighs. “It is quite bruised.” She dabs an earthy-smelling ointment that prickles painfully onto his smarting skin.

Starlight and regret. They were all that remained when Elrond had stumbled away. When the last of his wailing had droned into silence and the last of his tears had fallen, there was still starlight, pulsing and shrinking, flying back home to the sky. Had Eärendil heard? Was he as desolate? He, at least, had never wronged his sons. His desertion was forced by the hands of others.

“I was foolish,” Maglor says.

“You were,” Nerdanel agrees. “People often are when they are hurting.”

“A poor excuse.”

“No excuse at all.” Nerdanel wipes greasy hands on a clean linen cloth. She looks him in the eye and says, “You are my son. You are capable of better.”

Muffled weeping carried in the air as Maglor lay unsleeping on a soft bed swathed in velvet. The sound threatened to smother him. He counted wooden imperfections in the ceiling beams above and they numbered fewer than the sobs. Despondent sounds stifled in the hand. Implacable tears. Maglor knew them for what they were. Nerdanel’s eyes were red-rimmed when they lay together in the grass below stars that hung like silver berries in the night. And Maglor uttered not a word.

“I have been cruel to you,” he says now. He does not flinch nor look away.

“Must I repeat myself?” Nerdanel asks.

“I marked your words.”

Words. They fail to slip easily from his tongue in this moment, as words have been wont to do all his life. It is aggravating. Maglor worries fabric between his fingers. He exhales heavily through his nose.

Nerdanel has eyes like the sea. She is as patient and unyielding as ocean currents. She folds her hands and waits.

“I have wounded you,” he says. “…and I have done far worse to others. I apologise.”

Nerdanel has eyes like the sea. The sea towered and broke over Círdan’s ship. It tossed Maglor about the hold. It delivered him. “You are not absolved. Perhaps I will find forgiveness within me for the transgressions that are mine to forgive, in time. Until such a day, the care I have comes stained with wrath and anguish, and with that you must make do. But nothing,” she says, fierce as a tempest, “nothing, could dislodge you from my heart, Makalaurë.”

Maglor would ache less if that were not true… if each motion of his mother’s hands, each measured word, were not suffused with tenderness as equally as anger and sorrow… if he cared not for her in return.

“I know,” he says. And he does know, for is there not an estranged child refusing to quit his heart also? Starlight rippling over the crests of waves haunts the backs of his eyelids. That last shard of fatherhood buried itself deep and cannot be ripped out. He could nurture it, if he tried. He could let it grow outward, into something kind. Or he could continue fashioning it into a bitter blade with which to injure himself, folding inward upon its sharp length until nought but misery remains.

Nerdanel is silent for a long moment, considering him with fathom-deep eyes. She watches and she knows. “I believe you do,” she says. She thumbs away the tears that wet his cheeks and leaves him in terrible silence.

✦

There is a lyre in the corner of the room. A small thing. Entirely new. Maglor traces the curves of its pale wood with his eyes as Maedhros sets out quill and ink.

“The message must be brief,” Maedhros says.

“I have not forgotten,” he replies. The morning is aflutter with memory and unreality. Messenger birds take flight on whirring wings but there is not a feather in sight. Sunlight creeps, predatory, through the window to steal the shadows. It seeks to spear him with its lucent beams. It could burn through the darkness, exposing and exposing until there is nought left of him at all. Maglor presses the heel of his hand to the bruise on his brow until it hurts.

Maedhros tuts. He pulls Maglor’s hand away. “What do you wish to say?”

Starlight over the water, a cheekful of salt and his name screamed in desperation. Choice denied. “That the decision is his. I will not steal it away.”

“What decision?”

Sunlight ripples over the paper. The room floats and blurs.

Maedhros sighs. “Your wits are scrambled,” he says. He caps the ink. “We will write later.” He drags a thumb gently over the crests of Maglor’s cheeks.

“No,” Maglor protests. His thoughts are less tangled than they have been in years. But Maedhros could not know. He wasn’t there. He had burned by then.

Maedhros is a bulwark that will not budge. “Later,” he promises. 

“Very well,” Maglor concedes.

Regret is a beast that eats Maglor whole. Regret is a chasm he could trip into and fall and fall and fall. “How do you bear it?” he asks.

Maedhros looks up. Sunlight turns his red-brown hair to copper and his grey eyes silver. “Bear what?”

“To act as Lord and make decision after decision after all that came before. I cannot even sing.” From the corner of the room silver strings wink at him.

Maedhros deposits the lyre in Maglor’s lap. “Play the damned thing. That is what it is for.”

“How?” Maglor pleads.

“With your fingers, as you always have. Sometimes there is nothing for it but to move forward in defiance of regret and despair. And to stop thinking so much of yourself.”

Maglor plucks a string hesitantly. It sings.

“There is much I must attend to,” Maedhros says softly, regretfully. He kisses Maglor gently on the brow and departs. Quill, ink and paper he leaves on the desk.

The lyre sings. It sings beautifully and it says what Maglor cannot with words. The sound pulls at all that is strange and makes of it a song, haunting and otherworldly and melancholy.

There comes a gasp from the doorway. Maglor’s fingers falter.

“Do not stop,” Nerdanel urges. Her sea-deep eyes shine.

Maglor plays until the shadows grow. When he sets down the lyre, he picks up the quill.

✦

Maglor is real and he has a name. He has hands and they shake. He has a heart and it aches. He inhabits his skin cautiously, as if at the first sign of danger he might throw it off and bolt, a decoy left behind to bear the hurt he cannot.

His feet touch the earth but lightly. It is enough, for now.

“What do you have?” Nerdanel asks.

In his fingers Maglor grasps a small piece of paper rolled into a tight tube. He slips it into a tiny canister and holds it up. Sunlight glints, liquid and bright over its metal.

“What did you write?”

“Elrond will understand,” he says.

Nerdanel watches him. She nods. She asks no more questions.

Elrond had not seen him on that night six millennia ago. He never knew how close he came to finding what he sought. What choice would he have made? What choice will he make now? Maglor doesn’t know. Uncertainty eats him. It swallows him whole.

“He is kind, Elwing’s son,” Nerdanel tells him. “I should not think he will seek to wound you grievously.”

“Have I done so to you?” Maglor asks.

Nerdanel bows her head. “No Makalaurë, you have not.” She says it with the kind of sincerity that suggests she wishes it were true. It sounds as if she tries to swallow the sea.

Maglor watches and watches (he is akin to her in this, if he tries) and knows she bleeds more than she wishes known. “I do not believe you,” he says. 

“No,” she agrees. “You would not. We are too alike for that.”

“Not alike enough,” he tells her.

Maglor raised another man’s children and he learned how to stitch wounds inflicted by his own hand. Perhaps they healed badly, but they healed. A wound, no matter how well tended, no matter how faded with time, is still crueller than no wound at all. But it is better to bind it, once inflicted, even if it is inexpertly done. In his arms Nerdanel is warm and real. In hers he feels solid. The ground is firm beneath their feet and the sky above is grey and that is well enough. “I have missed you,” he says.

She sighs, and the sound is like a bowstring releasing its tension, its arrow unfired. “And I you.”

They can keep this moment if they wish, deserving or not. They can keep it and repeat it like a familiar refrain played over and over until it is etched into the memory of their sinews, worn into their souls.

“Come then,” Nerdanel says. She takes his hand. The winding stairs leading to the dovecote creak beneath their feet.

The birds are grey and the sky is grey and so is the cannister weighing heavily in Maglor’s hand. He ties it securely with shaking fingers while Nerdanel holds the carrier bird firmly between hers.

“Ready?” she asks.

“No,” he says. “Release it all the same.”

And she does. Her hands fly up, up into the cloudy sky. Her fingers spray open like a fountain. Wings flutter. The bird is gone. A choice is winging its way to Elrond. A chance that was once stolen away. Perhaps it will right nothing. Perhaps the ink that flowed has been for nought, just as the blood spilled that once brought them together was. But Maglor is here beneath the sky and above the earth and he breathes and he hopes. That is enough for now. It has to be. Time has never stood still for a melancholy elf.

Elrond will reply, or he will not.

“Watching it fly away will not speed its wings,” Nerdanel says. She comes to stand by his side. He does not move away. Between them span a myriad of shimmering, ephemeral threads. And Maglor could reach out and grasp them if he tried. He could weave them into a tapestry vast and long, and the cloth would be beautiful and terrible and full of care and sorrow. 

“I know,” Maglor says. “Walk with me?”

Maedhros’s estate is large and the grounds are well ordered, but after a time they will pass into a summer-green forest of ancient trees, wild and vast. The forest goes on for miles and miles. It has changed, and it has not. So too Maglor. So too Nerdanel. Maglor’s feet are still prone to wandering. Nerdanel still watches and knows more than most.The trees will be gnarled and the shadows will be grey and the stars, when they come out, will seem altogether ordinary.

They will walk and walk and walk.

And then Nerdanel will lead him back to a house with whitewashed walls, a creaky door, and a collection of familiar, alien comforts. 

It will not feel like home. 

It might, one day.

✦✦✦