Spherical by Himring

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Chapter 1

 

Within the story arc, the first part of this story is approximately contemporaneous with the end of the Military Relevance of Sewage (about two years after the Dagor Bragollach).

 (Names: Findekano=Fingon, Findarato=Finrod, Maitimo=Maedhros, Turukano=Turgon)

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The effect lasted for about a week. 

 

For about a week after Fingon had left, Maedhros remained wrapped in his love. Those seven days they had spent together seemed to have saturated him and all about him with Findekano. He could smell or taste or feel nothing else. He could not wash his hand or his face or choose a tunic to wear without being conscious that all that, all of himself belonged to Findekano and being intensely grateful that it was so.

 

For once, being Maedhros, usually such an intensely crafted and dedicated performance, seemed almost easy. He was aware of irrational happiness and watched himself like a hawk in case he might be tempted to make some careless mistake in consequence, while it lasted.  What he didn’t expect was the strength of the backlash.

 

One morning, he awoke and found that the imprint of that last urgent kiss on his lips had faded. Findekano was gone; there was no trace of his presence left anywhere. Not only was he absent, worse, he was out there somewhere, out there with the orcs, the balrogs, the dragons—in a word, Morgoth—and nothing to defend him except a bit of flimsy Noldorin cutlery and tinfoil or, if he had made it safely home, a few molehills posing as mountains and a pile of bricks and gravel unconvincingly pretending to be an impregnable fortress.

 

That was nothing new, certainly, and he had thought he had trained himself to cope with it. But during those few days together, he seemed to have unlearned everything of patience, of endurance and of resignation that he had so painstakingly taught himself, just as he seemed to have unlearned everything he knew of abstention. Like someone who has lived on starving rations so long that his stomach has forgotten what it is like to eat a full meal and then is presented with a banquet, only for all food to be whipped away again as soon as he has re-learned hunger, he found need gnawing him.

 

It is almost always easier to do without, if one doesn’t know from experience exactly what one is missing. To some extent, he was only going through those pangs of love others go through in their adolescence. But he had spent those years wondering what it might be that the others were going on about and why he himself never quite seemed to get it. He was no adolescent now, he had been rendered vulnerable in other ways, and it hit him hard.

 

He handled it better than he thought. One way or another, he had had a lot of practice. Nobody in Himring noticed anything except Maglor, and even Maglor had only just begun to toy with the idea of forcing a sedative down his throat. But sleep, which had always been hard to come by, deserted him completely. He spent night after night trying to sit down and concentrate—distract himself by any means whatever—but always returned to restless pacing, to the struggle to get a grip on his emotions and tamp down the foolish conviction that kept persuading him against all evidence that he could somehow summon Findekano straight back into his arms, safe and well, just by the strength of his wishes.

 

Kneeling in front of the open window one night, he knocked his forehead in frustration against the sill, trying to drive all the idiocy out of his brain. Silly with exhaustion, he hit his head harder than intended, and pain shot through his skull, blinding him. The next moment, he seemed to be flying out of the window and soaring upwards.

 

The speed of his ascent was dizzying; soon he was well beyond the moon and the stars, and eventually he realized he had left Arda behind him. He had stopped, suspended in mid nothing. He saw no one, heard no one, and yet was suddenly presented with a sphere of blue glass, not heavy, but large enough to need the whole circumference of his arms to hold in front of his chest. Gazing into it and seeing nothing definite in its depth except more blueness, he yet knew that his was himself, beyond Arda Marred, not as he was, but as he might have been, not only free of the Oath, but also of its consequences, and even of the flaw in him that had made him swear it in the first place. He contemplated it in mute delight and then turned around, aware he was no longer alone, and attempted to pass the sphere to Findekano.  For a moment, he was aglow with pride that he finally had something perfect and undamaged to offer his cousin and lover. But even as Findekano reached out for it, the sphere slipped from both their grasps and shattered far, far below in the market square of Tirion.

 

Maedhros awoke on the floor in front of the open window, spattered with rain, weighed down with a ton’s worth of Oath and Doom. Unable to raise himself under that weight, he crawled across the floor, somehow heaved himself onto the bed and lost consciousness. When he awoke again the next morning, he was almost back to normal. Despair, after all, was an emotion he was rather more familiar with.

 

***

 

He had had no intention of telling Fingon any of this. But he was, now and again, haunted by the image of that shattered blue sphere and, when they met again, one evening as they sat alone together, he had had a bit more wine than he was used to, he supposed, and some of the story slipped out.

 

‘So, you see’, he said, as lightly as he could manage, ‘I had a vision like Findarato and Turukano, but I brought nothing back for you.  It was all a delusion hatched by my Angband-addled mind, of course, and nothing more.’

 

Fingon was silent for a moment.  For all of Maedhros’s shame and embarrassment, a small un-distractible part of his mind went on raptly observing the candle light play across his cheek bones, verifying Findekano’s continued physical existence at the core of his universe. He tore his gaze away, glancing down at the table in front of him—on which the wine glass sat, barely touched since the beginning of the evening—but he could not keep it there.

 

Fingon asked quietly: ‘You say you held yourself in that sphere, unmarred, everything you had the potential to be, and you tried to give it to me?’

 

‘Theologically unsound, isn’t it?’, responded Maedhros defensively. ‘But you know you can expect no better from anybody from my side of the family.’

 

‘Is that what Feanorian heresy was all about? I guess I should have listened more closely at the time.’

 

‘Now I know you’re laughing at me.’

 

‘Not really. It just strikes me that that is one of the more extravagant declarations of love anyone could expect to get. And yet you say you brought nothing back for me’, said Fingon. 

 

He looked away and then back, smiling hesitantly.

 

‘Also, not being perfect and spherical myself, of the two of you, I think I care more deeply for the giver than the gift he tried to give me.’

 

Maedhros regarded him with profound astonishment. Fingon wondered whether Maitimo considered he was being unaccountably frivolous. He found it difficult not to be; he had been basking in Maitimo’s presence all day as in intense sunlight.

 

Maedhros said slowly: ‘Do you know, I think you’re right! It was just Feanorian arrogance, wasn’t it?’

 

‘But I said nothing of the kind!’, Fingon protested, alarmed.

 

‘I was sure, you know,’ said Maedhros, ‘that that sphere somehow not only contained myself, unflawed, but the key to salvation, a way to make everything all right for the Noldor. How childish that sounds, now I’ve said it aloud! What right have I to assume that, even unmarred, I ever held that secret?’