How high a price, not only for words but for blood on holy shores? For smoke on the horizon? For trust and love unyielding, tossed aside in the hours of one dark night? And what, then, the price for unearned forgiveness? For offering the other cheek, for offering to slay kin all over, again, again, again in his name?

“Would you have come with me, if I had asked?” The truth is, Fingon is not sure of the answer. The truth is, he had asked himself, nights on end, what the answer to that question would be. Had asked himself where they had gone so wrong, that he no longer knew.

“Would you have asked, if you were sure of the answer?”

Fingon rescues Maedhros. He and Finrod grapple with the aftermath.

Maedhros watches him for long moments, his eyes cold in the dim light of morning. “If I wanted to talk to you, I would ask, not use my brother to trick you.”

The implication lands like a blow, precise and devastating. Finrod takes another step closer, then stops himself, fists clenching at his sides. Maedhros has ever been like this, to him—every single word eliciting a reaction; making him fly, bringing him low, tearing him open. What a terrible thing to still find it true, so many years and betrayals later.

Once, Fingon and Maedhros had been Finrod's lovers, the past participle of it carrying the sentence. As it turns out, not everything agrees to be relegated so neatly.

“Can I not what?” he asks, at last. “What do you want me to say, Nolvo—oh no, brother, please do not wed, so that we may continue our ill-advised perversion behind closed doors? Do you want me to fuck you slow and gentle, tell you that it has always been you? That I will ruin your wedding and leave my wife, so we may run away to live life—“

Nolofinwë reverses their positions with such force that Fëanáro is slammed into the wood panelling, all air punched out of his lungs. This is more like it; this is how they began, what they know; what is, in the end, all they ever ought to be to each other—Nolofinwë’s features contorted in fury and hurt, Fëanáro baring his teeth like he is just waiting to cause more of the same.

They stay there for a moment, both breathing harshly, a precipice that is only waiting for them to fall.

Fëanor, Fingolfin, and their last night before Fingolfin is to be wed.

His brother has returned for the first time in four hundred years, and Fingon does not want to start a fight. He is glad; he is. It has been so long since there was anyone he called family to lean on. It has been so long since he heard Turgon’s booming laughter, his haughty commentary from beneath his breath that he would deny uttering to anyone but his siblings. Since Fingon thought of his younger brother and felt anything that was simple and fond, rather than complicated, threaded through with resentment, and guilt, and anger that tastes a little too much like regret.

“Findekáno,” Turgon says, and this is the lesson his father never finished teaching—how to swallow the words, and how to keep them off his face, too.

Fingon and Turgon, and their long-awaited reunion at the Nirnaeth Arnoediad.

From one panting breath to the next, the forest goes silent and empty, its absence like a blow. The shadows lengthen, thicken, turning into a tangible, weighty thing that shivers across Celegorm’s skin. It is silent, and he is alone. The hair on his body stands with dread and shivering anticipation.

He turns still. Against the back of his neck, he can feel hot breath; can feel the presence, wrapping itself around him, both home and threat.

“Do you think you can outrun me?”
 

---

Celegorm refuses to return. Oromë gets inventive about it.

In the war camps of Beleriand, Finarfin assembles the missing pieces of his family’s history; assembles the bits and pieces that make not-regret calcify into something jagged and uncomfortable, where it makes a home beneath his breastbone.

He meets men whose ancestors used to march beneath his son’s banner. Most of their house, too, is decimated now, a strange, hollow kinship that Finarfin wants to flinch from, and that they weather as they bend their knees to him, seeing someone other than Finarfin. He meets victims of his nephews’ terror; meets those who are left of Fingolfin’s people, of Fingon’s, of Turgon’s. Learns how they passed, each of them falling to blazing heroics and bristling despair, and wonders how any of them are ever meant to return from this. How these serrated, brittle remains of a devastated land are meant to be spit out into Aman’s idle serenity, and not break the world all over.

---

Finarfin, the War of Wrath, and the price it demands.

Those who survive do so by cutting parts of themselves off; their innocence, sacrificed to the altar of devouring hunger. Their faith, drowned alongside their children. Their fingers, toes, limbs, coin the Ice demands in exchange for passage.

Those who survive do so in despite; they do not know yet that this will be true for centuries to come.

---

The House of Nolofinwë, and their time on the Ice. A deed of great renown and endurance, told in an assortment of loosely connected drabbles.

Once, on one of Findekáno’s visits to Nargothrond during which Celebrimbor had had more wine than advisable, he had leaned into Findekáno’s side. Had ignored his father’s sharp eyes, and asked if he believed that there was yet any hope left for them.

It is clear that that had not been Curufin’s plan, but that Finrod’s tardiness must have got the better of him. He is dressed only in a burgundy robe of silk that leaves little to the imagination, where it hugs him close, a stark contrast against his pale skin. Wears, far more notably, the Nauglamir around his pale throat, a blatant taunt made all the more offensive by the fact that he is not even awake to throw it into Finrod’s face with scathing words.

Finrod closes the door behind himself carefully, then lingers by the doorway. Outrage is mingling with arousal at the sight—the long lines of Curufin’s body, the way the silk clings to him, hides him elsewhere. The way his hair has come loose from its braids, like ink spilt around him.

The colours of Finrod’s house sitting snug around his throat, put there by Curufin himself, no matter the impudence of it.

Finrod is not fool enough to have missed the way Curufin, too, at times looks at him. Is not fool enough to make himself believe that his own attraction is some new thing, something only pushing to the surface now that they are trapped together like this, the undeniable way Curufin had saved Finrod from a worse fate, tonight.

Not that Finrod will ever thank him for it; he cannot. But he knows Curufin’s sharp-tongued, bristling demeanour for what it is, and it does not change that the two of them, whatever lies between them, are a cataclysm waiting to happen. Does not change that, in truth, Finrod should be careful to turn his back, lest he find a knife in it.

And yet.

---

Curufin and Finrod get snowed in. It goes about as well as can be expected.

In the corner of his eye, Finrod’s form morphs and twists, dark spots against the flickering light like gore and blood on sun-kissed skin.

Is this what he did to you? Curufin had asked once, one of the first times—drunk, not-grieving, his mind a war zone. Finrod had smiled at him then, almost tenderly. It revealed the gorge within his well-loved cheek, and Curufin would have flinched if not for the memory of pressing his fingers there, a coward’s imitation of intimacy.

“Worse,” Finrod’s ghost had said, and then had vanished, leaving Curufin to the rolling nausea of sour wine on an empty stomach.

---

On the eve of the battle for Doriath, Finrod pays a visit—or rather, whatever is left of him does.

Various instances there are, of the two of them crashing into each other as if it were a contest. In truth, it is unclear who is winning, what they are playing for. Whether there is a prize to be had in the end, or merely mild to severe destruction—of sanity, reputation, hearts; no matter.

It would be wise to stop while he is ahead, Findaráto knows—alas for the ambition and hubris of Finwë’s line.

---

Curufin and Finrod, a summer lake, and the folly of youth before the world taught them better.

Maedhros, unlike most, watches closely—has not known how to do anything but, ever since Fingon brought him back. Does more than that, too, and few Elves care to guard their mind so closely that someone who wishes to would be hindered from catching surface thoughts.

Back in Aman, there was no need; it was a matter of courtesy not to go rummaging around in other people’s heads, and for all of Tirion’s political scheming, not even his father would have ever considered breaching such trust.

This is not Aman, and Maedhros is not his father. And Fingolfin’s mind, for one, is very loud.

---

Fingolfin struggles beneath the weight of the crown. Maedhros does what he must to help.

“It is called having friends, Fëanáro; you should try it sometime,” Nolofinwë spits, and it comes out sharper than he means it to, but he is—

Lord, he is tired; of Fëanáro’s vitriol, of how easily he himself still unravels at the slightest push. How effortlessly Fëanáro slides beneath his skin, and Nolofinwë wants to dig his finger into the unmarked flesh, wants to hurt, wants—

He wants; that is perhaps the most terrible part about it all.

---

Ever has the House of Finwë been renowned for its sense of competition. This, though, Nolofinwë knows, must put even the worst of it to shame.

Or: Fingolfin and Fëanor will turn even brother-fucking into a contest. Who could have guessed.

He wants—oh, Fingon wants so many things. To flee the bathhouse, first and foremost. To meet Maedhros halfway, forget about the ruin they have made of each other—slowly, meticulously, over centuries—and kiss him until their lips are bruised and their lungs empty of breath. Wants to laugh at the absurdity of it all, and perhaps wrap his hands around Maedhros’ throat, ask if he still prefer that Fingon kill him, bloody his own hands once more in ways that can never come off, if only it will bring Maedhros his much-sought salvation.

Fingon wants; ever has it been his greatest vice, that hunger that gnaws through him, makes him reckless, selfish, rapacious.

---

Fingon merely needed a bath. Maedhros, as ever, complicates things.

Once, in gold-cast days of careless bliss, the three of you used to be—something. A triangular shape, always revolving around each other. Warm hands, late nights, a tangle of limbs in opulent beds. A reprieve, a stolen treasure, and you all thought, then, that it could always be like that; that one day, the world would bend to your folly, and all would be well.

What fools you had been.

---

Fingon, Finrod, the Ice, and the gaping space between them.

And Celegorm? Well, Celegorm simply wants a fight, wants revenge, wants to see his debts repaid. He wants to tear that godforsaken forest apart piece by piece, one step further on the inescapable road to their inevitable end.

He knows of monsters, after all. Knows how to speak their tongue, how to coax them along. His brothers, by then, are hardly any different.

Celegorm wants it all to end. He cares little, now, for how they will achieve such a thing.
 

---

The Fëanorians, the Second Kinslaying, and how they all reached that point—an attempt to trace their fall from grace, from Valinor to Doriath.

“Are they fighting again?” Idril asks, wandering over to the fireplace the moment Fingolfin lets her down.

“It is what you do with siblings,” Fingolfin says, and succeeds at not laughing at the irony.

Oh, how much would be different if it were not so true. She treats him to a look full of sceptical disbelief and sets to restacking the fire.

---

An exploration of the Nolofinwëans in early Beleriand, and the effect that Maedhros' rescue and abdication would have had on the relationships between them, in the wake of the Ice and all its horrors.

“I do love you, Russandol. You know I do, do you not?”

For a long, drawn-out moment, Maedhros only stares. Something is taking root in his chest, something he knows, then, he will not be able to extricate from himself again. “I know,” he says, voice rough. “I—“

But Fingon stops him, pressing a hand to Maedhros’ mouth. “Don’t, not yet; tell me when we see each other next.”

---

Five times they share their own small ritual upon separation and reunion, and one time it takes a little longer than either of them can endure to mark its completion.

And of course, of course it is about the boats. Fingon wants—oh, Fingon wants to forgive Maedhros so badly, but he dreams of leaping flames, of the feeling in his chest like something is crushing his ribs, slowly, inevitably, to dust and grime.

“What do you want, Makalaurë?” he asks again, except that this time, it comes out angry. He has ever had an atrocious grip on his temper.

“You should ask him about it.”

---

Forgiveness takes time and honesty. Fingon has never been a patient person; Maedhros, in recent times, has not been an honest one.

Eventually, they work it out.