Swans by Dawn Felagund

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Swans

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I know I'll make it,
Love can last forever,
Graceful swans of never
topple to the earth.
And you can make it last forever,
You.
"Thirty-Three," The Smashing Pumpkins

 

 

Swans

ORON HYARMENO RETREAT
EST. 231 FIFTH AGE
WELCOME

It's impossible to untrain a Noldorin eye. I noticed right away that the letters were awkwardly chiseled and slightly uneven. The FIFTH AGE puttered out at the end so that the E was almost a miniscule but then WELCOME flared up robust and bold beneath it, like a carved shout. I suppose that the sign was meant to convey a zeroing of expectations with its lack of artistry, combined with a warm, hearty benevolence, both meant to put us at ease.

"That," I said, and I poked at it with the pencil I'd been nibbling on for the whole journey in an attempt to create the effect of nonchalance, "looks like the carvings poor Turukáno used to do while trying to keep up with Findaráto."

The joke was watery and stupid, but Nelyo would have once chuckled just to humor me, and he does, but it comes out sounding the way a clockwork wound up too tight managed to sound strained. Actually, upon reflection, my words sounded far too jovial for such a stupid joke.

"That was a stupid joke," I said. "I'm sorry."

"It's fine." Nelyo's voice was placid and mild, but both hands clutched the reins of the horses drawing the cart up the drive to the retreat, fingers smooshed tightly enough that a white crescent appears beneath his thumbnails.

In a previous life--literally--we would have been driven in his family carriage or mine, but in a representative democracy, families no longer have carriages but everyone drives their own or, if inclined to splurge, hires a taxi. Which I'd wanted to do, imagining the two-hour journey in the back, behind drawn velvet curtains, with his long skinny legs wrapped around me and kisses enough to sustain us for most of the week apart, until Family Feast a week from now and his return to pick me up. (And I fantasized then of a broom closet or a pantry or a whatever and those long skinny legs and kisses again: bookends delectable enough to make the tedium between them inconsequential.) But no. The taxi, he said, was simply unaffordable on his teaching salary, especially one for an institution as prosaic (his word) as the Lower Circles Academy of Tirion.

Besides, he pointed out (I'd shared my fantasy in an attempt to persuade him to binge, just this once--there is much for me yet to learn about this new democratic life, but I cannot believe that one who lives as frugally as Nelyo can possibly be perpetually without), taxis have cotton, not velvet, curtains because the climate of Valinor is particularly conducive to growing it and it provides manual labor jobs for those who harvest and process it. Thus, most everything is made of cotton now.

"Velvet is an extravagance," he told me.

That was one of the arguments we've had over the last month: over the taxi. Trust me, there were many others of consequence far weightier than our mode of conveyance and the fabric of the curtains we may (or may not) find within.

I suppose he won because we made the journey in a cart he borrowed from an administrator at his school. He did not, he reminded me, command the kind of salary that allowed for ownership of his own horse, cart, and apartment. He had to choose two, and as a cart without a horse or a horse without a cart weren't of particular value, and he refused to relinquish a place to sleep and perform bodily functions indoors, then he went without both.

"Then we should be able to afford the taxi!" I'd argued.

But no, we clattered in front of the ADMISSOIN hall in his shoddy borrowed cart with the swaybacked borrowed horse and no curtains whatsoever--cotton or velvet or otherwise--and when a woman in a purple tunic brightly blazoned with STAFF began to amble toward us, cradling a clipboard and smiling with the wattage deprived of Laurelin by Ungoliantë, we fumbled words at each other: "Well … yes … so … this is … yes … sure … well … here … goodbye. Goodbye." And the kiss was a self-conscious peck that missed the other's mouth entirely, but somehow (how?!) my feet were on the ground, and Nelyo was clicking at the horse, and I was watching the cart's broad, unflattering wooden back return the way we came with the license plate hanging crookedly and Nelyo jostling awkwardly back and forth in the seat.

And I was somehow smiling at the STAFF woman with a smile that matched hers in wattage, at least judging by the way she hugged her clipboard closer and her smile stretched till it seemed to eat her lower face with teeth, and she said, "You must be Findekáno!"

~oOo~

I am Findekáno.

I am the fifth lawful king of the Noldor in Beleriand.

(I insist both on counting Nelyo's reign and not counting Macalaurë's regency.)

I am the uniter of houses; my hand in Nelyo's was for a while the only frail link holding our fathers' houses together (when Fëanáro soured even on Arafinwë and his unconditional benevolence). I was one of the few equally welcome in both houses; equally loved by both brilliant and contentious men.

I was the Valiant, perhaps for the earnestness with which I tried (with Nelyo) to forestall the slow then sudden topple of our families into ruin.

I was Tirion's most eligible bachelor (after Nelyo). I am the subject of wall-high paintings of the sort that involve a lot of fabric rumpling on the wind, paintings resplendent with the artificial glint of artificial light on artificial gems. Schoolchildren sigh over the chapters about me in their history texts (or so Nelyo complains).

Because I rode out when others quailed. I drove back Glaurung. I provided peace like an umbrella amid a deluge of war.

I was the Valiant.

I was the frightened boy who was sent with my uncle's family for a single summer and discovered courage under Fëanáro's benign neglect and Nelyo's careful tutelage. I was rescued by him to assume my place in history.

I rescued him, in a time of which I will not speak.

(Yet here I am. Námo released me despite).

I am the passionate one, the unthinking one, the angry one, the impetuous one, the precarious one. I speak in shouts and tells tales in tangents. I overuse exclamation points and (Nelyo complains!) parentheses. I touch him too much (he claims it distracts him) and take my half out of the middle in bed (he claims I make the bed too warm and keep him awake) and do not understand the value of peace and quiet (he claims he can get nothing done in a studio apartment with me around).

I am imperfect in so many/too many ways, and he complains about them constantly, and he loves me with constancy, and it is a good thing he does because

~oOo~

Icebreakers are a thing now. This isn't the first time I've encountered the idea: I go to a group therapy session for reembodied Noldor, and we wasted the first meeting on these things termed icebreakers. I wasn't sure what to expect then and thought we might be performing some kind of manual labor or perhaps chewing ice with our teeth (although my mother always warned that this was an excellent way to crack my teeth), and I was confused when it turned out to be a series of games--that's the closest word I can find, although winning wasn't exactly the objective and there was very little strategy beyond extroversion, which I possess in adequate quantities--designed to put us into contact and eventually intimacy with as many people as possible in a short time.

I like to think I excelled at it.

But it also leads me to wonder how we used to meet each other, back in the time we now call the Time of the Trees and the First Age. I remember being a child and dumped by my parents with other children under the presumption that we would not only get along but want to play together. Later in life, we would gather in the clearing with other adolescents and allow slow inebriation dispel any awkwardness; I suppose that when you find a person only recently a stranger with a hand down the front of your trousers, then the ice may be presumed broken. Later still, I met lords and their hosts of all manner of peoples, and I don't recall that any special procedure was needed to help us root out our common causes and begin constructive work around them. Nonetheless, I am good at icebreakers, so I did not particularly mind when those of us gathered in the ADMISSOIN hall were handed cards decorated with grids and told that the first person to complete a grid would receive a prize. The prize was at the front of the room, on a low stage: candy and stickers, wrapped in bright paper.

Each box included a description that could presumably fit a person in the room. I scanned mine quickly first to see which described me so that I had something to offer those whose names I was requesting for my grid. Few do--actually, none, unless a stretch the truth a bit (I could perhaps claim an accidental death, since I certainly did not intend to be smashed to pieces by Gothmog's mace), but this retreat was pointedly not just for Noldor, so we were to expect to see a range of experiences represented and not just our own.

This had been one of the things that Nelyo resisted.

"Findekáno," he said, "I don't feel that you really have a grasp of Noldorin experience in the Fifth Age, much less that you are ready to begin grappling with the experiences of Elves very different from us so soon after being Returned."

I hated how he said Returned. I could practically hear the capital R, trembling in his voice like one of Manwë's decrees. Stupid.

I accused him of not giving me enough credit.

"There will be Avari there, including from the south of Middle-earth. There will be Teleri …" He paused. "Perhaps some we killed."

I scoffed at that.

But, yes, there it was: the assumption that there might indeed be, right there on the card.

There it was. Death. Staring us right in the face in playful letters: the thing that united us. We'd all been dead until recently, and the manner of that dying was apparently going to be a subject open for discussion.

Well then. I took a deep breath and dived in.

Ten minutes later, I was studying my card: only one square left to fill. I had cheated a couple of times and used the same person twice. Everyone was disappointed (some didn't show it as much but I knew they were!) that they couldn't use me. I looked around the room. There were twenty of us. I'd talked to eighteen. So I was missing someone but--

"Pardon me? You don't by chance speak Ilkorin?"

He was small and less silver-haired than white-haired, and I don't know how I missed him. His eyes were unusually pale; his skin unusually tanned. "I--I don't," I had to admit. "My half-cousin did."

Nelyo did. It was an obscure dialect spoken by the Sindar of Mithrim, isolated long enough from their kin in Doriath that the ancient roots of Sindarin arose as two branches, one reaching for the morning light and the other--Ilkorin--for the harsh setting sun. The caregivers we paid in horses and grain to care for Nelyo spoke it exclusively; in his convalescence, he learned enough of it to converse awkwardly with them in it, but they delighted in his clunky speech, for he'd taken the trouble to learn, more than could be said (he told me) of their kin to the south, who used the shared gesture system of both people when they rarely encountered each other. "It is a raw language," Nelyo said. "It remembers--and it longs for--the light of the stars." The Sindarin hated it because they thought it ugly: a stone fresh from the earth, muddied and unpolished.

The young man smiled wryly. "Not enough, I'm afraid. As usual, Ilkorin is there as the rare prize, the find that will determine the winner, and as usual, I am the only one who speaks it." He crushed his card in his hand.

I was torn between wanting to ask him why he did that and asking him his name, so that I might write it down and win. My tongue flopped one way, then the other: a why and a what, as gasping and senseless and foolish-looking as a fish flopping on a dock.

"Winner!" someone cried from the center of the room, and it was too late.

He dropped his crushed card onto the floor and I asked: "What is your name?"

~oOo~

Ice broken, we were gathered for orientation, also known as the opportunity for the Director of the Retreat to gather her disparate charges--Noldorin and Sindarin and Avarin, former victims of murder and battle and grief all trying to mutually shed the last vestiges of that victimhood--under a single set of rules. She wore an unbelted printed dress that fell from her shoulders like a fall of flowers and that was meant to convey softness and openness and acceptance, but beneath the soft fabric, her shoulders were as rigid as a statue and her collarbones jutted to either side like a coat rack.

The Oron Hyarmeno Retreat was formed shortly after the first Noldor began to be reembodied. It existed when Nelyo was reembodied (I have to resist saying Returned. Damn him.) but it was new, and when he resisted attending, it was not thought unusual or wrong to do so. Those of the Unexiled have a choice, but now, it is given to understand that Returned (damn him!) Noldor really do not. Or so I tried to explain to him.

He hadn't wanted me to go. "I didn't go. I turned out fine."

"That is arguable!" I exclaimed in the reflexive urge to insult him that persisted from our youth together. But we both knew that he really had. He was the portrait of a successful Returned Noldo: gainfully employed, unresisting of the new form of government, and quiescent. Except in this, except in the case of the Oron Hyarmeno Retreat, which he watched edgily but silently until it was my time to go. Then he certainly Resisted.

And it wasn't like Nelyo had been given, in our prior life, to sensational shows of defiance. Rather, he usually swam--and operated--within the currents. He'd been the only one of Finwë's many grandchildren to serve directly within his court. He sought to mend the breach between our families from within the government--the monarchy, to use the term that Arafinwë had coined to distinguish his father's government from his own--and by propelling our respective fathers toward each other using their respective natures. He didn't give grand speeches or stage dramatic actions. When his father rebelled, he simply went along, unobtrusively shoring up the places of destruction his father wrought where and when he could. (The kinslaying at Alqualondë was irreparable; he didn't even try, but rumor has it that he spoke with an emissary of Námo, trying to convince the Gray Vala that making a grand show of banishing his father would only strengthen Fëanáro's resolve. Námo didn't listen, and Fëanáro's resolve became--if it was possible--stern enough to crush adamant.) When Fëanáro burned the ships, Nelyo stood aside: the barest act of resistance on behalf of the one he loved: me. Two shuffling steps to the side is what I was worth at that turning point in our people's history. Even when he sought to cheat Morgoth, he did not do so with enough force; he was himself taken and (from what I can discern) never tried to escape, probably assuming that he'd eventually be able to operate from within Angband itself on behalf of his brothers' interests. (I don't actually know. Nelyo and I don't talk about that time.)

So why now and why the Oron Hyarmeno Retreat of all stupid things?

"Why this hill to die on?" I asked him, in what may have been a poor choice of words. I'd died on a hill--a slight one; he, of course, had died in a chasm. "You see nothing in our uncle's grand new scheme worthy of resistance but this, but the stupid retreat for reembodied Elves?"

"I mislike the idea of conformity in post-reembodiment experience," he explained in that stuffy way he had when he became defensive. "Namely, the sense I get of the Valar meddling in it."

There it was! The old mistrust of the Valar: Fëanáro's peculiar obsession, passed on to his sons, even logical-to-a-fault-in-every-other-way Nelyo. I would have thought they would have rooted that out in Mandos before ever agreeing to release him, but if I have learned anything since my own Return, it is that whatever system guides Námo's choice of spirits to rehouse, it is inscrutable to the rest of us.

He went on. "I actually support Arafinwë's ideas, Káno. Not all of the details, but the general idea of what he is trying to do."

"Because it is in defiance of the Valar."

He did not reply to that, but I knew that was certainly part of the reason (although it also seemed unfair to Nelyo--if any of us, the deep pool in terms of intellect--to suggest it as the sole reason. But our relationship has long been salted by periodic and casual injustices to the other.) Being "monarchial" in structure themselves, the Valar believed that it was the superior system of governance--perhaps even ordained as the ideal by Eru Ilúvatar, although none did more than tiptoe around that idea--and had forbidden Arafinwë's democratic experiments. Arafinwë held an election among his people and defied the Valar on the basis of the results, then further angered them by citing as precedent Nelyo's voluntary unkinging in favor of my father: The Valar hadn't objected--had in fact supported--that act, and what he was doing was not much different. He was, he stated in a speech famed among the Noldor of this age as perhaps only Fëanáro's words had been before, "bestowing the crown upon the Noldorin people." (And then he dropped the crown onto the ground in front of the crowd gathered to hear him speak, a dramatic that I suspect he got from Findaráto.) I don't think it was only his Returned relatives--whom he'd once abandoned to exile to return to the laps of the Valar--who were surprised that he had it in him.

But here at the orientation to the Oron Hyarmeno Retreat, the particular complexities of the condition of being a Noldo in the Fifth Age did not receive much airtime. Instead, the director--I had caught her name during the Icebreaker and then forgotten it because it had a lot of syllables, but she wore a sticker-badge with the curlicued name Ainiómë swirling upon it--was trying to subdue Avarin sexual customs in a culturally sensitive way. "We respect--even support--the seeking of multiple partners. Some of our people even permit homosexual unions"--this is the bone I am thrown as a Noldo: a glancing reference to Arafinwë's law expanding the definition of marriage (actually, the Noldorin people's law expanding the definition of marriage--crown on the ground)--"but we believe you will reap maximum benefit if you keep your attention turned to your spiritual nurturance rather than the urges of the body--"

"Gorn," a voice breathed next to me, and I found the white-haired, pale-eyed Elchin beside me. We had been given chairs, but he knelt on his, his folded body seeming to thrum with bottled-in energy. His eye caught mine and the corner crinkled as he smiled. My stomach did the thing that happens when you miss a step going down and it feels like someone has whisked the floor out from beneath your innards. Whatever it was fell directly into my balls, and I was suddenly aware of everything that existed down there.

I chuckled. It was a weak defense. His eye held mine.

I became aware that I was the only dark head in the room; the only one who could answer none of the categories on the icebreaker card; the only Noldo; the only one with a cultural tendency to a particularly upright adherence to monogamy. We weren't being released in great numbers, and it appeared that I was the only swept into this particular cohort for the Oron Hyarmeno Retreat. If Elchin's response is representative, then I will be a lonely island tonight amid frantically coupling Sindar and Avari. A blue-balled, lonely island.

~oOo~

I initially suggested to Nelyo that he might come with me. "You've never been" was the first (and obvious) parlay.

It was not enough. "It existed when I was newly Returned." (There was that heavy R. I felt my lip twitch.) "I had no interest in going then and even less an interest in going now."

I found out that the others of our family who had been reembodied (just Findaráto and Carnistir!) had not been either. "Aren't you curious?"

"No."

I tried next to appeal to our relationship. Dirty, yes, perhaps: I was always the weak point in Nelyo's armor, inviting the bloodthirsty blade, and it was hardly fair of me to wield it, but I did. Always. "After so many ages apart," I said, "I don't want to suffer a week without you."

"Then don't go."

It was the night before I left, before he drove me here in his awkward cart and left me here. He was grading student papers as we had this conversation. He became surly at such times, as much by the tedium and interminableness of it (he said) as by the fact that he felt the urge to echo the sentiments of every pedagogue across the ages in declaring this generation more decadent and incompetent than those prior--I remember my father saying that of me on many occasions--and hated that about himself. And so it was perhaps not the best time to broach the subject. I watched his pen make florid blue marks on the page he was grading, which he cast quickly away from himself once he was done, revealing an identical sheet beneath, and the florid markings began again--

"We might learn things of the other if we went together. It could be interesting."

He set down the pen. He looked tired, not at all like the artists imagined him, astride a black stallion, armor glinting gold in the sunlight. But in truth, he'd looked tired the last I'd seen him before I died, as though time had merely telescoped in Mandos, and he hadn't been renewed at all, but we'd picked up our lives from before in this strange place that was neither Middle-earth nor the Aman we knew. "Findekáno," he said, "I have known you in my bed and known you in battle. The ground between those extremes is well-trod. I do not think there is much left to discover."

That was a forlorn idea. I would not think of it. I went to him and lifted his hair from his neck--he unbound his hair each night and rebraided it each morning because the weight of it gave him headaches--and kissed his throat. The pulse beneath my questing tongue thumped steadily. "Káno, I have a lot of work to do," but when I tugged at his hand, he rose and followed me to bed. His apartment was a single room (though it had a private water closet that he always despaired he could not afford), and his bed was intended for one.

The Fëanárian boys had never been sharp dressers. Their father's refusal to hire servants meant that his fleet of children spent part of their days at housework, in the stables, and in the gardens so that Fëanáro and Nerdanel were mostly freed to work with their students and on their commissions. The rest of the time, they were at their own studies and work--pursuits that didn't have to be wrung from their time as with the rest of us but that they honestly desired. So frippery was worse than useless to them: It went completely unacknowledged. The fine, embroidered and brocaded fabrics I brought to their house the first time I summered with them were packed away--carefully, yes, but away--so that I would not ruin them sweeping and forging and riding, and I adopted the soft tunics and leggings that the other boys wore. Nelyo maddened his rivals in Tirion, for the tunics, plain trousers, and scuffed boots that were his uniform when he went into the city were no barrier to making him the most desired young man of the Noldor. His tastes did not improve in his new body. If anything, they worsened. The long tunics of our age were replaced by buttoned shirts that Nelyo never failed to tuck into his trousers. He wore mismatched socks, and in his haste to rebraid his hair each morning, the braids were more often than not crooked. His shoes were not flatteringly made and caused his feet to look far too long. He looked gangly and unkempt and more than a little awkward.

But as in his unvarnished youth, none of this diminished his appeal. By the time we reached the bed, I was kissing him deeply and tugging his shirt out of his trousers and scrabbling to get at the perfect body underneath. His hands fluttered at my elbows. "Káno," he gasped once, in a tone more of reproach than of longing. I peeled his shirt over his head and sent his hair awry, and we had to pause for a moment so that he could extract it from his mouth, but this gave me pretense to begin working on his trousers. I shanked them down and knelt in front of him. "Káno, you don't have to, I can--"

"Hush," I said. "If I'm going to go a week without you, I want something to think about on those lonely nights."

After a few minutes, he said, "Káno, let's try something else." He drew me up, and now it was his turn to undress me: but carefully, mindful of buttons and fabric, like a nursemaid readying her charge for bed, not like someone in the throes of passion and arousal.

We tangled on his bed. This was better. Flesh on flesh, his breathing grew heavier and his eyes rolled back. His hands clutched my buttocks; I felt his fingernails. I pressed myself harder against him and--

I had never grown past the pleasure of him as violent as pain but so good that, would I have been standing, I would have sunk onto the floor on knees rendered suddenly boneless. I heard myself shout his name; felt my foot kick into the mattress. Sharp and sudden, it was over just as fast. "Oh, no. Nelyo--"

"It's okay, Káno--"

"No! I'll finish you."

"You don't--"

"Nelyo. I want to."

But when a few minutes passed, when I kissed his throat again (and did not leave a mark because he had recently scolded me for that) and his pulse thumped steadily and he breathed even and slow against my ear (which he could have kissed) and nothing happened, he said, "Káno, it's okay." Then: "Káno, it's starting to chafe a little." And we drew apart.

"I'll just hold you until you fall asleep," he said. He drew the blanket over us and wrapped me in his arms--his belly to my back--and at last, he kissed my ear. I could feel him against my thigh, already wilting. "I love you."

But as soon as I began to drift to sleep, I felt him lift his head. He was watching my eyes; listening to my breathing. I pretended, even though it meant that I shortly felt him carefully extricate his arm from around me. He tucked the blanket close against my back, already going cold. I dared a look: He was shrugging on a robe and returning to his grading.

~oOo~

After orientation, we ate lunch at long tables under a canopy propped up on legs that looked none too sturdy. Clearly, they were not of Noldorin design. The food was served out of large kettles by bright-smiling people in purple STAFF shirts. It reminded me of how we fed armies. Ainiómë circulated among us but did not eat any of the food. Perhaps that was how she kept her collarbones so sharp.

Or maybe it was that the food didn't taste particularly good. It was vegetarian to appeal to the Laiquendi but seems to have missed that the Laiquendi made their plates full of leaves and roots palatable through the liberal application of spice. Shakers of salt on the table have become common in this new society (we used to trust the cook to know the correct amounts of spice to add) and were being liberally waved over the lunch.

After lunch, we let our food settle and learned the retreat's theme song/chant:

Everywhere we go,
People want to know
Who we are,
So we tell them:
Oron Hyarmeno!
Retreat high in the mountains!
Shining up our spirits bright
For a new great chance at life!

I was never particularly known for poetry among my kind, but that was particularly dreadful. The Teleri, especially, looked pained.

We eased into physical activity by being broken into teams of five and seeing which team could keep a beach ball aloft for the longest amount of time.

(A beach ball is a brightly colored ball of a covering thin enough that it lofts in the air rather than dropping straight back to the ground; it is filled with the air from one's own lungs. I'd never heard of such a thing until Nelyo mentioned that he sometimes used one in his classes.)

Next, we combined two beach-ball teams each to form two sides for kickball. The rules of kickball were briefly explained to us as thus:

1. One team kicks and one team fields.
2. The kicking team sends one kicker at a time to stand on what is called home base and is pentagon-shaped (like the townhouses in Lower Tirion).
3. A pitcher on the fielding team rolls the ball to the kicker, who tries to kick it as far as possible then runs to touch as many of the four bases, in order, as possible.
4. When the kicker cannot safely proceed to the next base, she or he stops and remains there but will try to move to further bases as other kickers kick the ball.
5. But the fielding team can get a person out if they touch the base before the kicker reaches it or throw the ball and hit the running kicker.
6. Three outs and the sides switch.
7. Making it back to home base earns a point.

It seemed simple enough, and fun. My team won the coin toss to kick first. I went fourth in the lineup, enough time to watch the way the ball rolled and responded to being kicked and to remember the physics my Uncle Fëanáro once taught me. He and Nelyo were trying to make flying machines; I was always underfoot. The Elves before me tapped the ball with just enough force that it trickled far enough to let them make it to one base. When it was my turn, I angled my toe under the ball just so and kicked it far enough that I made it around to all four bases, as did the three runners ahead of me, so my team scored four points on my kick. There was a lot of celebration at that.

But the third time it happened, the other team was beginning to become tired of me. I heard a snippy remark about Noldorin imperialism as the teams finally traded sides.

My teammates banished me to left field, where I could do the least damage to our reputation. Nonetheless, I managed to hit a player on the other team so hard with the ball that he gasped, and I kicked five more homeruns (as I learned they are called) before we were summoned to Group.

~oOo~

I was familiar with the concept of Group. All of us newly reembodied Elves were required to see a therapist until it was ascertained by some unspoken and mysterious criteria that we were High-Functioning and were permitted to carry on solo. There were three types of therapy: Individual, Family, and Group. I was very new, so I still had to go to all three. I went to Individual weekly, on the second day of the week. Family was sporadic, thanks to my mother's political career and Nelyo's constant stream of grading; more often than not, Family turns into another session of Individual, but according to my therapist, I can use the time. Group was the fourth day of the week. Thankfully, I was in it with Carnistir, and he and I tried to embellish our personal stories to the amusement of the other (although we never spoke otherwise except when our mothers or Nelyo forced us), so it was actually somewhat fun.

(Nelyo went to my Family sometimes and Carnistir's Family sometimes, and even once he went to Findaráto's Family a long time ago, he said, but he did not do Group anymore. He would be--or so he claimed--in Individual therapy forever.)

Here, Group was conducted in a mountain meadow studded with lupine and hawkweed and margarets, nodding in the cool breeze that chased away the worst of the sun's heat and lifted everyone's hair so that we all looked like heroes in paintings. Each of us had a little round mat, and we sat directly on the ground (well, the mat did) in a circle that denoted (according to Ainiómë) complete equality and safety and completeness. She gestured expansively when she said things like this. She'd changed into a flowsy blouse and a skirt that trailed the ground in a train like the First Age princesses, but the blouse still swooped low enough to show off her collarbones. I liked watching how they rose and receded with her gestures, like the backs of skinny, starving sharks poking themselves out of the sea. She didn't wear shoes.

In fact, she had us all take off our shoes and toss them into the middle of the circle, and we began Group with a shoe greeting, which I was familiar with from the time we had a substitute therapist for Group. Carnistir had refused to participate. When pressed, he said he had an awful nail fungus that he was embarrassed about. He remained shod and ungreeted.

"Let's start with you," Ainiómë said, nodding to Elchin, who was beside me again. He went into the middle and extracted a shoe, returned it to its owner, and greeted that person. And that person repeated the process. We all, it seemed, knew the shoe greeting.

Soon, there were three shoes left: a delicate Telerin sandal, an Avarin clog, and my oversized clunky boot. Then two. Then just mine.

Ainiómë seemed embarrassed that I had no one to greet me. "This rarely happens!" she insisted. Everyone else seemed to think it was me showing off again by being the last in the middle. There were a lot of narrowed eyes. Only Elchin smiled at me.

"I'll greet you," he said, and he held out a slim hand to me. "Hello, Findekáno. Well met."

"Hello, Elchin!" (Why did I find myself comparing the feel of his hand in mine to the feel of Nelyo's? Well, really, it was always my hand in Nelyo's, his proportions being notably more expansive than mine. With Nelyo, it was the sensation of being enveloped. But I found myself wanting to run my thumb down the fish-slim bones on the back of Elchin's hand--what was that about?!) "Well met!"

Ainiómë smiled so that both top and bottom teeth showed. "Thank you, Elchin--how generous of you! Now I would like to reflect on our experiences of the morning and the afternoon. Especially the afternoon. You see, I chose this afternoon's activities especially, knowing they would be difficult and stressful at times, because I wanted right away for you to ascertain one of our primary objectives here. I wanted you to work in groups, in teams. I wanted you to become aware of each other and what each person contributes. None of you are returned to a familiar life, and all of you will have to infuse with new groups, some of them diverse or unfamiliar, even uncomfortable, with respect to cultural norms and traditions. I want to take a minute for each of you to think on what this was like for you."

Everyone stared into the grass and pretended like they were thinking about it, but if they were like me, their minds were elsewhere. In my particular case, it was the slim bones of Elchin's hands and the tickle of Nelyo's breath behind my ear that consumed my entire attention.

Hands on my hips, slim hands that, without Nelyo's size and strength, compelled but didn't force, and yet I complied, I slipped beneath--

"Findekáno, would you like to begin?"

"Ack! Yes! Sure. I liked it. I liked the kickball. I've always been a leader--well not always, but I eventually assumed and became comfortable in that role--and so to lead my team to victory felt very natural. I think we won the beach ball thing too? I'm not sure, but I liked it. I liked playing with all of you--" I started to nod at each other person in the circle but realized quickly that nineteen nods would be overkill and stopped. "Yeah. So I know that there aren't kings, at least my people don't have them." It occurred to me then that I was making a terrible assumption that everyone--even though none of them were Noldorin--would be familiar with the ways of my people. Nelyo had taken to calling my attention to those kinds of assumptions; we simply were not the dominant culture any longer, he said, and could not assume that others knew about Noldorin doings, or cared. So I explained: "The Noldor, if you haven't heard, are trying representative democracy. It's when everyone votes but they don't vote directly on questions but elect a representative they hope will settle those questions how they wish, and all those representatives get together and decide on stuff. So I know that leadership is different now. I won't always get to kick the ball over the fence …" I laughed but quickly realized I was alone. Ainiómë was nodding quickly like she wanted me to get it over with. Only she and Elchin didn't look like they absolutely despised me.

Quickly, I reverted to a peacekeeping tactic I'd learned from Nelyo, with his six volatile brothers. I smiled. I swept my eyes around the circle. "And what of all of you?"

~oOo~

Nelyo my love,

I wish you were here! It is only the first day and this is Quiet Meditative Time. I'm not sure if I'm supposed to be using it to write to you but whatever! I miss you so I'm writing to you.

It sucks here without you. I'm the only Noldo, which is surprisingly awkward. I don't think I've ever been the only Noldo before, ever. The other Elves don't seem to like me/Noldor much, which is probably not surprising, all things considered.

I wish you would reconsider coming for part of the week. Don't give me excuses why not! We could spend the week in open rebellion, running off to the boathouse or whatever to make passionate love to each other; it would be a little like the old days, without the possibility of exile, torment, and death. And the director of this place is big on honoring cultural norms, so would you believe that I think we'd actually get away with it???

We sleep in this big barracks hall, so here's a scenario for you: sneaking across the room in the night and trying to do it while being entirely silent. Or not!

So today we played kickball, and I scored six homeruns! Here's a little diagram of how kickball looks and works. I wish we had kickball in the First Age; I feel like it would have helped to dispel some tensions in our family. Maybe you and I should join a league when I get back?

THINK ABOUT COMING EARLY NELYO!!! You are really missing out! Think about the boathouse! (Or the barracks, if you prefer!)

All my love,
Káno

~oOo~

My dearest Findekáno:

Stop begging; it is unseemly. And I have told you before that using all capitals is the equivalent of shouting, so I would prefer you refrain from that chirographic tic as well.

I am very familiar with kickball. It is played at my school and I detest the game not from having played it but because my students are consumed with it to the extent of frequently handing in tardy assignments under the pretense of "having a game." Also, even for someone who knows the game, your diagram is dreadfully hard to follow.

Remember that we had artistic swordfighting in our age and that did not dispel tensions but only gave my father ideas.

As for the fact that the camp "sucks": I did warn you of this. I warned you that the camp is suspect, in my opinion. Nor is the camp a device of rebellion but precisely the opposite. Its very purpose is to cram inconveniently autonomous peoples (Avari, Noldor) into a mold of obedience. If you want to rebel, then leave early; I will borrow the cart again and come and pick you up, even if I must take a day of leave to do so. Otherwise, I will see you on the last day of the week.

Yours truly,
Maitimo

~oOo~

After such a full first day, I should have slept easily that night, but I did not. Nor was it the experience of barracks living: I was well accustomed to shared quarters from our military forays in my previous life, so the soft discord of diverse snores and farts was in fact somewhat soothing, like the way some people fall asleep better if they can hear the sea.

Upon returning to this body, I found that some of my memories were missing, though I didn't know that they were missing till they resurfaced suddenly, the way a bubble long trapped in the cold dark at the bottom of a lake will suddenly slip free of the plant or debris that has been harboring it and wriggle to the surface and-- Pop! There was a memory, bright as glass in my mind and my innards reeling with the sudden vertiginous feeling of two edges on the long ribbon of time being suddenly brought and stitched together.

Tonight, as I lay awake, I remembered a time with Nelyo. We were both grown but not yet lovers. He was working on an Ancient Quendian translation of a poem found scratch inside a gourd used to carry water. "It seems a stupid place to write a poem," I said at the time.

The poem had been copied onto a piece of parchment, and Nelyo was working over it, and he didn't look up as he explained, "The early Quendi believed that writing was magic. With it, they could pass their thoughts to another without speaking, and that seemed pretty amazing to them." He was toiling over something small: squinting, writing, scratching out, rewriting. "They used to write things in places where they'd have daily contact with the letters as a reminder. Putting a poem inside a water jug meant that the writer drank of her promise every day."

"Her? How do you know she was a woman?"

"I don't, I suppose." Carefully: "She could be a man."

"What was her--his--whoever's!--promise?"

"It's a love poem, Findekáno." He hunched closer to the page and his writing quickened, then he crossed it out, then he began writing again. Lately, it was uncomfortable to talk of love. As I said, we'd not yet become lovers, but we'd had an indiscretion--just a kiss, but still a kiss--at Uncle Arafinwë's last begetting day party. He had slipped his hand down my hip, then away. "This line is giving me trouble. It makes no sense. I can only assume it is an idiomatic expression, perhaps among the Avari."

"What does it say?" I leaned in closer to his shoulder. I could not understand a word of what was written there, but I could feel the warmth of his body, which I'd once craved as a small boy wanting only love and acceptance and now craved with a different, baser desire.

He held up the parchment in front of his face and intoned, "'Graceful swans of never.' It makes no sense!"

Yet it came to make sense, over time. If I thought of the words and their precise meanings, the phrase was as senseless as it had been the first day he'd translated it for me. But once we became lovers, it began to make some sense that lurked in the folds between my innards, out of reach of my conscious brain: the kind of sense that sent a tickle or a lurch through me without explanation. Then we would name our swans of never: often silly things but occasionally serious.

"A swan," I recall Nelyo saying once.

We were at a party. "A swan of … never?" I asked in mock seriousness.

"The same. A swan: that I will never wear a tunic that short with breeches that tight."

Indeed, young lordling Langowë was parading his not insignificant endowment for all to see in a tunic that barely passed his beltline and breeches that might have been painted on in a thinned wash. It was interesting to observe the mixture of interest and repulsion that he was causing among the supposed maidens. (I was also trying not to look.) "I hope that swan might relax its graceful, never neck," I said, "in the privacy of our rooms."

A swan of never, from me to Nelyo: that I'd never use the word hate about him or anything he did.

(I came close, once or twice, but closed my teeth and felt it stop short, like a beast breasting a fence.)

From both of us: that we'd always at least consider the feelings of the other, even if we ended up having to make a decision that preferred someone else. (This was at the last gasps of the supposed Noontide of Valinor. We faced those decisions increasingly often in those days.)

(And that swan produced Nelyo's two-step rebellion at the burning of the ships and my disregard of both my father and my cousin Macalaurë when I went to fetch Nelyo. Macalaurë assured me that it was Nelyo's wish that none endanger himself or weaken our force with such an attempt, but I considered that it would hurt too, ironically, to have his wishes in the particular matter of his abandonment so readily obeyed, especially since we tended to disregard him at will at other times.)

From Nelyo: he'd never take offense if I told him he was talking about something too much, as long as I was nice and discreet about it.

From me: I'd never open a conversation complaining about his father or his brothers. (This led to a lot of conversations beginning with dull observations about the weather, things like, "Raining a lot, isn't it?" or "Think this heat's going to end anytime soon?" which became a sort of requisite prelude to complaints about his father and brothers--almost a warning of what was to come--but I was keeping my promise. Nelyo swore that he could predict who I was going to complain about on the basis of the weather phenomenon invoked, but I still doubt that.)

From him: he'd never touch another. Like that.

(His words, his eloquence reduced by--what exactly? Shame? Determination? Hope that I'd echo his pledge?)

But I didn't make that promise, and when he did, I waited for the air to thicken with anticipation as he expected me to swear the same, but the words wouldn't form in my brain much less arrive to my tongue. Even as I could imagine wanting no one but him, I seemed to know that it was a promise I could not keep. And the expectation never came, and the topic never arose again. Once a swan of never was raised, it stood without need for further remark.

When I went to him that Merilin was expecting my heir, I expected a fight; I expected wounded feelings. But he said simply: "I know the difficulties of living so far apart and for so long." But that was an overly generous assessment. There was the occasional (then not-so-occasional) young soldier too, untried in battle, briefly preferred not because Nelyo was unavailable--certainly not because he was superior in any way to Nelyo--but simply because he was young and untried, and I sometimes needed to lie with someone who had known more of love than of war. I am certain Nelyo must have known about this.

And if he truly knew the difficulties of living so far apart and for so long? He never suggested that he did. When I'd arrive at Himring, he'd be Maedhros: imposing and sexless as the hills themselves, wearing both beauty and authority intrinsically, not as a construct requiring comment, just as no one remarked on the overarch of the sky. It seemed as senseless to lust over Maedhros as it did to lust over the waterfall you could not look away from. His beauty was unavailable in that way. It was only with my touch--mine--to move aside the robes that hid the scars and the badly healed breaks, that melted his expression from sternness to passion, his lip pulling between his teeth, his eyelashes fluttering closed--that he became touchable, became Nelyo.

~oOo~

The next day, we were instructed to meet at the lake after breakfast. I grabbed a breadroll and a sausage (that I suspected had been put out just for me, on a tiny platter amid a trayful of what appeared to be fried leaves) from the dining hall and headed down, then paced around the beach while the sun rose a handspan further across the sky and no one else appeared except a half-dozen Elves in purple STAFF shirts, who gave me chirpy helloes, then ignored me and began setting out canoes. I was beginning to wonder if I'd misunderstood when the others began to appear, congregating a little ways down the beach from me, chattering to one another in a language that was not Sindarin and certainly was not Quenya.

Another handspan of the sun and everyone was finally there. A short, muscular Teler named Daintáro hefted himself onto a rock and waved us to gather around. His purple STAFF shirt had additional embroidery that identified him as DIRECTOR OF AQUATICS. He also wore a whistle around his neck; I wondered what he thought he might be whistling at. I thought he would berate us--well, them, really--for being late, but he did not. He paced upon the top of the rock--two steps this way, two steps that--and shouted at us to pair up.

As a child, I never lacked for playmates, and when activities required pairing or teaming, I tended to possess a gravitational field of my own that attracted others without much effort from me. I stood for several long seconds before I realized that pairings were happening all around me but not actually to me. I used to feel sorry for the children who would have to beg, in the form of the question, "Will you be my partner?" And were often as not turned away purporting a prior engagement or suddenly, effortlessly partnering even as their stammering question emerged. (My brother Turukáno was always such a child.) Now, it seemed, I was that child, only I lacked courage to even speak the question to the few Elves who remained unmatched.

My eye caught Elchin, the tawny-skinned Ilkorin. The only person, I realized, whose name I remembered. I began to move toward him.

He caught my eye. He was talking with a tall Sinda. I wondered if they'd partnered yet. I thought I might see in his eyes the distinct flicker of dread at being awkwardly compelled into a partnership motivated by pity, but I did not. Instead, he smiled an apology to the Sinda and began to move my way.

Others touched him arm, called his name on the way, but he did not stop until he reached me, then laughed breathlessly, spread his hands, and said, "Findekáno, it looks like we are the last two without partners."

Indeed, the other Elves were paired up and dragging their canoes to the edge of the lake. A few had even launched off into the water. "So it seems," I said.

We claimed the final canoe and paddles with blades at both ends of the shaft. I was puzzling over that anomaly as Elchin shoved our canoe into the water. "Hop in," he told me.

"These are different," I remarked about the paddles and stepped into the canoe and hoped I looked more confident than I felt as it wobbled from side to side.

"Not really." He gave the canoe a shove, and I sat back hard on the seat. "The Laiquendi of Ossiriand--you know, the land of seven rivers--always carved their paddles like this. They are easier to use, especially in a tandem. You dip one blade, then another. Keep a steady rhythm and I will match you." The canoe barely rocked as he hopped in and we drifted off into the lake.

His accent was mild but interesting: a little further back on the vowels and a tendency to bear down on consonants like he was feasting upon them. Nelyo would already be asking him questions, senseless that he was being dull and prying. (I'd never found Nelyo to be such before. My sudden cynicism surprised me.) River. I tasted the syllables as Elchin said them, tearing at the first R with my voice and letting the terminal ebb away. I felt an odd quiver pass through my belly and busied myself with trying to master the strange double-bladed paddles. I didn't know if it was easier having him seated behind me, out of sight, or more difficult. His hair was arranged in a knot at the back of his head, and I knew my gaze would caress the tanned curve of his neck and my fingers tickle with imagining the feathery touch of the ends of hair that spiked in a rough corona from one side of the knot. As it was, I was left only to imagine these things existing behind me--but imagine them I did: and his arms damp with sweat, the muscles bunching as he pulled at his oars, his jaw squared and set, his legs slightly spread to keep his balance, his--

We bumped across a partly submerged log. "Pull harder," he instructed. "We'll clear it." We did. "It is good to have your strength in the front."

There was that quiver again.

"Thanks," I said, then braved the confession: "Hey. I'm glad we are partners."

He didn't say anything to that. We were headed toward three rocks poking just above the surface of the water. I heard him breathing hard as he pulled. I pulled harder to the left to steer around the rocks.

"The others … they don't--" I laughed. "Well, you're the only one who seems to like me."

I was pulling as hard as I could, but the canoe wasn't turning from the rocks. I heard him gasp with exertion, then with a shudder the front of the canoe ran aground.

"I don't--" I began, but he interrupted me: "Were you trying to turn?"

"Of course I was! I didn't want to run into the rocks, believe it or not, even though we did."

He was rocking the canoe, trying to dislodge us from the rocks, without much success. I joined him in rocking. I was much bigger than he was, and my body weight might--

"Just stop. Stop." His voice was irritated but his hand between my shoulderblades was light. "You're running us further aground." And a splash, and he surfaced beside me in the water, guiding the canoe from the rocks and back into the water. I held myself perfectly still until I heard him roll back into the canoe. I turned to see him stripping off his shirt and wringing the water from it. I turned back quickly.

A quiver …

"You do understand," he said, "that the front person only pulls and keeps rhythm, he does not steer."

"I didn't know that, actually."

It had been a long time since I had been incompetent at something. Last I recalled, I was the one who was sought, whose expertise was ample enough to serve as the rudder upon a ship, turning it from a dangerous tide and even into the wind if needed, whether that "ship" was an army or a council or my sprawling, cantankerous family. I had forgotten the feel of failure and, more importantly, the shame of inconveniencing someone else with my failure. (I suppose if I'd stuck around after my death, I might have gotten used to both.)

Clearly, Elchin didn't expect me to be so bad at this either. His voice barely concealed his contempt. "You know," I told him, "I am a Noldo. If you do not tell me how to--"

"If you do not ask," he interrupted, "then how will I know to explain? Your people disabused mine quickly of the urge to help unbidden."

"That's hardly fair! Just because I can't paddle a canoe as well as you--"

"At all, really."

"At all, even! We rode horses; we didn't row boats." I said boats like I might speak of vomit or feces. My heart was beating hard with anger. This wasn't what I'd expected--not of him and not of this experience! And I was so angry--at him and at the sniveling note in my voice--that my paddling was becoming erratic, and the canoe was zigging and zagging all over the lake.

"Pull in your paddle and turn around," he said, and it occurred to me that he was using the same commanding voice that I expected to hear from myself, speaking to foot soldiers or errant siblings. "That's it. Swing your feet around the bench."

I thought about defying him, about swinging the canoe around (not my feet!) and returning to shore, but I wasn't sure I could maneuver it around, and my face burned just as the thought of bumbling in an awkward half-circle while he watched. So I obeyed.

"Findekáno, there is much to like about you," he said. He was still shirtless, the knot at the back of his head drooping with wet and beads of water still on his shoulders and chest where they had dripped from his hair. "But there is much you do not know."

"I'd be willing to bet," I said pointedly, "that there is much that you don't know either."

"Very true." He nodded. "But I don't assume that my not knowing means that it is not known."

I boggled. "What is that even supposed to mean?"

For a long moment, he stared over the lake. There was a bump in the profile of his nose; his ears were longer at the tips than Nelyo's and more elegant. (The Fëanorians, for all of their beauty, had rather small and unremarkable ears, inherited from Fëanáro himself.) At last he went on. "Take the conversation at Group last night. You explained to us was a representative democracy was."

"So?" I snipped. "If I hadn't, then you'd be complaining that I assumed Noldorin politics were as central to everyone else's life as they were to mine. I hear that all the time." I didn't--and there was the sniveling again.

"Findekáno. The Laiquendi had a representative democracy from before the rising of the Moon and Sun. Maybe they never called it that, or called it anything at all, but it was not much different from what your uncle has devised, though they managed it with far less pomp. They never took another king after Denethor. Did you never wonder what that meant? And even my people--the Sindar outside of Doriath--governed ourselves, as you would say, democratically. Thingol never strayed beyond his borders to rule us, and we quickly realized that we didn't need the rule of a man who sheltered himself behind the Girdle in a cave. Our lives were very different, and we governed ourselves best. It was not a remarkable thing to us to realize that. Each household sent one person to a seasonal council. The old, the young, women and men--all were welcome, and all votes counted equally. You never knew that, did you? Your Arafinwë is hardly the revolutionary your people want to believe him to be. He is merely reinventing what became a way of life for us that lasted thousands of years. When your kingdoms collapsed and kings like you died--well, there are still Avarin Elves in Middle-earth, living still as we did on the shores of Mithrim when you and your kin first arrived, ruling themselves, as you would say, democratically, not because they felt some great moral imperative to do so but because they were forced to learn early that allowing the wisest and most skilled to govern meant they would survive. And they did--long after you died."

"You died too." It was a childish retort. His gaze dropped to the bottom of the canoe.

"I did," he answered.

We drifted. Somewhere out of sight on the lake was a shout of laughter and a splash, but that seemed inconceivable here. I suddenly didn't want to even dip my paddle again into the stillness. My anger was gone and I wondered at that, and worried that it might return. I let the paddle lie across my lap.

"Were you married?" I asked. "In Middle-earth?"

He watched the reflections pass in the water for a long moment, then shook his head and replied simply: "No."

"Neither was I."

His glance darted to mine. "But--"

"Merilin and I weren't married. She was just--" I realized that there was nowhere tactful for this to go. "And then. Well. Oops."

"Well, your people got a fine king out of it," he said, but his voice was distant and disinterested, and his gaze had wandered back to the water. I was fumbling to find something to say to break the silence when he spoke again. "It is one way in which your people have surpassed mine."

I resisted saying that I thought there were actually many ways.

"You allow marriages of … all manner of marriages. My people--they did not forbid that I loved other men but recognized marriage as an institution tied to procreation. But then elevated the status of marriage so I--" He broke off.

"We recognize it now," I said. Now that it's too late. I didn't say that. "We didn't always. Your people were more enlightened than mine in that regard."

"Your cousin--"

"Nelyo. Yes." There was a lot unspoken in that yes. The silence of the lake--broken only by the distant sound of laughter--absorbed it all. "But married? Never, no."

~oOo~

It took hundreds of years for Nelyo and me to evolve the courage to love one another fully. I was an adolescent, almost full-grown, the first time I realized how beautiful he was. I would like to say that he was riding his horse or playing at his sword or some dramatic, manly pursuit but he wasn't. He was down on one knee, wiping a spill of fruit juice from the floor that Curufinwë (just a baby) had sloshed from his cup. It was the Mingling of the Lights and the light caught just right on the long muscles of his thighs, of the wiry strength of his bared arms, of the noble lines of his face, and brought forth the threads of gold amid the crimson spill of his hair.

I was experienced with girls, but the next time I lay with my then girl-friend, I caught myself thinking of Nelyo: imagining the tangle of his hair (never unfettered in my presence but suddenly in my imagination it was) on the pillow, twined in my fingers, the whiteness of his throat as he gasped his pleasure.

I was a man long grown before we had our single indiscretion at Arafinwë's party, meeting in the cellar and reaching for the same bottle of spirits, our hands touching, both of us drunk, laughing and trying to wrest the bottle from the other. My triumphant crow as it came suddenly loose and then my back against the shelves (a bruise left on my spine that, for days, ached and ached) and his hands on my face as he kissed me, then slipping down my thigh and lifting it so our hips suddenly fit together. And I was long past the madness of youth when a single touch or even a look was enough to undo me, but I felt him hard against me and nearly released in my trousers.

But he pulled away. "Findekáno. I'm sorry." His lips were red. I'd kissed them that color. And he grabbed a bottle of wine (not even what he came for!) and I heard his feet pound up the stairs.

The Nelyo I'd known to that point was studious and chaste. When he was asked--and he was asked often, being of remarkable beauty even for a Finwëan--he said that he wanted to focus on his studies and his work with our grandfather before starting a family. Yet as I thought of that kiss in the days (and years) that followed--and think of it I did--often--I realized that, however fleeting, it was not the kiss or the touch of one inexperienced, or of one inexperienced with men.

The incident in the cellar (as I came to call it in my own mind, somewhat melodramatically) did not ruin me on women, but I did part ways with my girl-friend not long after, and I wandered further along the lower streets of Tirion than I had before, and I sometimes answered a glance from another man that, before Nelyo, I would not have seen as amorous. I did not delve deep below the surface of that world on the Tree-dark side of the city, and I studiously avoided all mention of Nelyo--I did not want to know how he had learned to kiss and caress me so expertly--and I conspicuously and sometimes ardently courted women, as was expected of me, and I sincerely enjoyed their company in all senses of the word. But I never fully forgot Nelyo.

It was many years later, and if he remembered the incident in the cellar--for I certainly did recall it often when in his company--then he did not let it perturb the well-trained composure of his face and posture when he was with me. I was traveling north, and he sent word that I should stop at his family's home outside of Tirion for the night. I'd hoped to travel further than the House of Fëanáro on my first day, while still riding fresh, but I could hardly refuse his invitation, and upon arrival, found him alone. His parents were wintering with the family of Macalaurë's wife in Alqualondë, and his brothers were absent on sundry errands. He made me a simple huntsman's supper while I kept him company in the kitchen, and we ate right there at the worktable and talked of politics and music and the soils of the new farmlands cut to the south of Tirion. He wore a workshirt and trousers. His feet were bare; his hair was bound simply at the sides and hung mostly loose.

After supper, he took me to his bedroom, and I let him seduce me.

He'd prepared for me, it was clear, before I'd even ridden up the road on my horse. A kettle of hot water steamed over the fire to heat a shared bath afterward, and only the light of that fire and a scattering of candles near the bed gilded the Light of Telperion that streamed through the open windows. He'd scented the room with incense. The sheets were not the plain linen that Fëanáro used in his house but something silken and cool. On the bedside table were scented oils and objects the uses of which I did not yet know. (But came to know, quickly.) Like everything he did, my seduction was attentively and deliberately executed.

He pulled the workshirt over his head and slid the trousers from his hips. He wore nothing underneath and was naked in seconds. We'd grown up together, and his body was familiar to me, but I hadn't seen him disrobed since long before the incident in the cellar--before I saw him wiping the spill with the Light of the Trees upon him even--and had never looked upon his nakedness as anything other than fraternal. Me, he undressed slowly--almost painfully so--until when at last the lengths of our bodies were bare against each other, I gasped my assent to things I normally did not allow. His touch was practiced and exquisite. When he held me in the bath afterwards, I fell asleep in his arms, wrung out to the point of exhaustion, but let him carry me to bed afterward and make love to me again beneath his quilt with the cool breeze of winter evenings north of Tirion coming through his open windows.

I did not ride onward for some days. I might never have, but his brothers began to return, and making love in silence and darkness while they slumbered in the rooms around us--at first exciting in its own way--quickly became unsatisfying after having untrammeled access to each other for those few days.

On the day I rode onward, he helped me prepare my horse. "What took you so long?" I asked.

"So long? So long for what?"

"To … love me. Like that. I'd come to think you weren't interested."

He swung the saddle onto my horse's back and raised his eyebrows. "What about that kiss in the cellar said uninterested? It took so long because I live in a house with at least ten other people--more when my parents' apprentices are here--and it's almost impossible to be free of all of them at once. It took that long for the conditions to align correctly. When it happened, I wanted it to be right, even if it meant I had to wait."

That was like Nelyo, who meticulously planned everything. After the experiences we'd had over the recent nights--which were the best of my short but not inexperienced life--I had neither the heart or nerve to tell him that a hasty coupling in a pantry or behind a shrub would have been equally welcomed: perhaps not as excruciatingly pleasurable, but there was something to be said also for not waiting over one hundred years between his initial overture to me and our eventual consummation. I came to learn that of him, that he was not spontaneous--in fact, he was often impossible to arouse when his mind was consumed with his work, and the dutiful attention he paid me at these times was disappointing (and my dreams of having him at his desk unfulfilled)--but for a begetting day or anniversary or festival night, I learned not to plan anything early the next morning, for whatever he planned for us, it would be exquisite.

In Middle-earth, he was often unavailable. We struggled to make love to one another again after his return from Thangorodrim, his tormented body no longer looking or responding as it once had. (And I unable to fully forget the scars and their implications.) But even once I stopped fixating upon his torment and he stopped seeing himself as primarily maimed, he was often preoccupied and seemingly unable to experience pleasure. His body became a pawn, then it was a bulwark and a weapon; it was hard to remember when he was able to simply be a lover. I stopped visiting his tent the night before battles and took my pleasure elsewhere, then returned to sleep in his arms while he laid awake and machinated. The night before we parted ways to finalize our plans for the Fifth Battle, that is what we did.

~oOo~

Nelyo, my love,

I am three days here now and I have come to regret my earlier and not-entirely-kind remarks about the retreat. I no longer regret coming here. I've found value in it: maybe not in the things intended to be valuable, but I am a Noldo after all! We have a way of tipping things sideways and proclaiming them something else than intended. You of all people know what I mean!

It helps that I have met a friend. His name is Elchin; he was one of the Sindar (the "Ilkorin") around Mithrim. He remembers our arrival, and I wonder sometimes if we knew him then. He certainly knew of us but that is not particularly remarkable. It's rather like saying, oh look! to the mountains looming over you. As a people, we were not discreet in those years.

But do not let my friendship with Elchin dissuade you if perhaps you were planning to surprise me by arriving early? There is plenty of space for you here, and I miss you terribly! Particularly at night. My cot is so narrow and lonely. My hands need something to do with themselves. My mouth likes to talk and kiss and can do neither for vast swatches of time here. Take that as you will! I wish I wrote more eloquently, like you, so that I might stand a chance of making you fully guilty! Besides, the two of us would have fun with Elchin; I know you would enjoy his company. He, too, partnered with another man, and we have had many fruitful conversations about the ethical and legal meaning of that. I know you enjoy that sort of thing--yes that is a final plea to please come!

We have a lot of quiet time here to think (though Elchin and I sneak off at time--oftentimes!--to talk), and I believe that I am looking back and fully appreciating the span of our time together. It's like, do you remember the time your father built that tower in the middle of the plain northwest of Tirion? He had your brothers and you and me gather in all those stones (and it was summertime and hot as a furnace), and you and him and Curufinwë drew up plans and argued over them the way you did and then built with them anyway? But none of us knew what he was even doing. The tower was useless! Just a pile of stones! But when he was finished, we figured, well we might as well climb it? And we did, and we realized that we rose above the trees and there were the Pelóri ranged in the distance, a jagged shadow backed by stars, and we'd never seen them before like that, all spread against the horizon? We'd stood beneath them, in their shadows, and marveled at their height, and we'd stood upon them, at their summits, and marveled at what dizzying wonders they revealed, but we'd never seen--and never appreciated--them in their fullness till then. I wonder if that tower still stands? (Do you know?)

Anyway, that is where I find myself now with regards to my long (I want to say long-suffering!) love for you, and I realize that, like the Pelóri, there is this time of intense brightness--like Taniquetil, rather--when we first loved each other and, remember, could scarcely keep away from each other? And you were scolded for laxity in your work (and no one gave a damn what I was doing, but my parents kept pointedly drawing my attention to fabrics and favors and all the like related to weddings, so I knew they were hoping I was in love--if only they'd known!) But after that, like the mountains alongside Taniquetil, that ardor fell away if only because we had to make room for so many other things, and even as we talked with hope of reclaiming it if we did this or did that, ever more crowded in upon us, so that I don't think I thought of you at all on the day I died--not as Nelyo, my beloved, anyway. Only as Maedhros, my ally.

But here we are, with a chance to begin again, don't you think?

Forever yours, and always in love with you, waiting to round again upon the full light of that love,
Káno

~oOo~

My dear Findekáno:

Pardon my brevity; your letter arrived on the third day of my week, and you know that is my busiest day, with tutoring after the school day and papers I thought to have so much time to mark on the first day still unmarked and time quickly thinning …

But I did want to respond because you gave me words to think over. (Even if I would call your metaphor a little mixed, were you a student of mine. But well-intentioned, I know.) Our experiences of Middle-earth were vastly different, as strange as that may sound to the one who was my closest ally and, apart from Macalaurë, knew me best in those years. We will speak of it when I arrive to collect you on the final day.

Yours,
Maitimo

P.S. Yes. It still stands.

~oOo~

We were more than halfway through the week at the retreat, and the icebreakers and the team-building must have worked because we had all grown comfortable with each other. After all, we dress together each morning and share which items on the buffet are worth eating and conspire together in awkward activities and confess to each other in Group and then undress together again at night. I no longer felt so odd as the sole Noldo among those who never set foot on Aman until their reembodied feär staggered out of the Halls and navigated that strange white-gray forest back to life. I imagined now that I could have strode out of the fortress at Eithel Sirion and lost myself in the woods and scrubbed the Noldorin accent from my voice and become a Sinda. I regretted that I did not. They would have, I realized, accepted me.

I doubted Maedhros would have noticed as long as the troops marched out on time. And I had consummate captains; they would have. Was Nelyo even there to notice? Or had the Darkness subsumed him as it did so many other things?

I fed his letter in pieces to a quick-flowing stream while I was guarding the (then empty) jail during a game of capture the flag. I imagined the ink leeching out into the water and becoming indistinct from the dust and grit the water bore along, and the paper coming to rest on the earth or some once-living thing and decaying to feed a new lifeform. It was a hopeful imagining.

I liked the way the Sindar don't stretch time to make it feel longer (which Nelyo's twin brothers always claimed as their reason for preferring the southlands of Beleriand, as though they alone of all of us felt their mortality) so much as they obliterate it. I had marked my week alongside Nelyo's, knowing which days he tutored and when he had his weekly faculty meeting, knowing which classes he saw at which points of the day, but I realized that I didn't know what he was doing in that moment, and I was content to not imagine.

I was lax in my duties and my captives escaped, and we lost, but my team didn't care much. They were planning a furtive outing for that night. I was drawn into their plans.

"Many of our families arrive tomorrow," a bright-eyed Avarin woman explained. Someone's hand on my back eased me gently and more tightly into the circle. "We want this last night."

We had a nightly curfew, intended (so I was told) to limit the mingling of opposite sexes after dark. It would be a terrible embarrassment to the retreat if children were born a year out from it; on behalf of the retreat, Ainiómë still professed the old Valarin insistence on abstinence until marriage and monogamy after, in spite of the more colorful customs of most of the attendees.

As they spoke, I came to realize that this outing was not the first, and soon enough, I came to realize that the tradition was in fact nightly and I'd been excluded until now. (I had wondered that it sounded like many were leaving for the latrines after curfew and assumed it was just the effects of the herbal tea we were permitted before lights out.) "You've done this before?" I blurted and was swiftly assured, "We just didn't know about you before" and "We trust you now."

"You were rather uptight and pedantic at first," the Avarin woman told me in that blunt way that is their custom, and I surprised them all by laughing.

"You should meet my lover!"

With the mention of a lover, I was fully absorbed into their midst and trusted with the plans to meet in a clearing in the forest where past Sindar and Avari had built a fire ring and circled it with seats carved from logs.

Group seemed especially tedious and the dinner exceedingly long and bland and the songs afterward endless. I had learned them all by now; our voices mingled and carried them high into the heavens in a way that might have been described in Middle-earth by the non-Elvenkind as otherworldly and surreal. But we were subtly pushing the tempo to finish, and it was all I could do to keep from running down the path to the men's bunkhouse.

I laid in bed in my clothes, having taken off only my shoes, my body humming in anticipation as I heard the appointed STAFF member making the rounds to douse the lanterns outside of bunkhouses. Then I was rising quietly and slipping my feet into my shoes.

I found the path with ease, and it was not far before I heard the burble of voices and laughter and the whipcracks of logs fresh on the fire and saw the undersides of the leaves painted by flame. "Káno!" they hailed me, and I crouched on a stump too short for my long legs (their stature being slighter than the unusually tall and leggy Noldor) and drank from the flask proffered me and called out to each new arrival in turn and felt like one of them.

The spirits were strong and it was not long before I was drunk on them, for I hadn't had much more than cider since reembodiment. (The healer assigned to advise me on the care of my new corporeal form counseled me against all but the mildest alcohol--sweet cider and thinned wine--for the first year of my new existence, and since both my mother and Nelyo insisted on attending all of my appointments with me, there was no escaping that requirement save drinking alone--until now.) I had forgotten the pleasures of drunkenness. In Middle-earth, my body became inured to all but spirits strong and abundant enough to send me to sleep through the night, and I liked remembering the way it felt to have each sip feel like it addled the scene around me just a little more, like dipping my fingers against fresh paint and dabbing and swirling colors and sounds and sensations into places where they didn't quite belong.

Then a hand on my shoulder. Elchin. "Come. Let's take some air."

And I became aware that I was overheated, and I pulled at the neckline of my shirt, and I realized too that the crowd around the fire had thinned, even though the flames leaped vigorously still, and I realized what he was asking, and eagerly, I went.

We headed down a path into the dark of the forest. At this elevation, the nights were cool. I slipped my arm around Elchin, though born as he was in Middle-earth--which its dramatic seasons unmatched in any part of Aman that I knew--I doubted his body was cold. Mine was, and he was a little slip of warmth against my side, my hand cupping a slight shoulder and his silver-haired head at the level of my mouth.

Then I was impersonating the incident in the cellar, and I had him pressed against the tree, and I was lifting his leg so--there!--his hips matched mine. I was the practiced one now, though with his hands in my hair, slipping to caress the back of my neck, my shoulders, my chest, and his hips sliding slowly against mine, he was no captivated youth. He kissed ardently and used more tongue than Nelyo did (and I cursed why I was comparing him to Nelyo!) and I was beginning to tease the edge of his shirt up past his waist when he ducked free of my arm and left my body suddenly with only cool air against it and my hands with nothing to do with themselves.

He did not flee but hovered near me, though not touching me. "Káno, I'm sorry. My partner--I know he's not been reembodied yet, but back then I said I'd never--"

And it took a moment, but I did manage to say, "I understand." And there was Nelyo in my thoughts again, and I truly did.

~oOo~

I awoke with a headache and the thought in my mind that today was Nelyo's last teaching day of the week. He'd spend most of tomorrow at his desk in our apartment marking papers, and the day after--

I quashed those thoughts, gripped my aching head with both hands, and willed myself to slip back into the Sindarin senselessness to time where I didn't think always of Nelyo and what he was doing at every damn moment. Around me, some were beginning to rise and dress but quite a few were drawing covers over their faces and sapping a few extra minutes of sleep from the morning. Clearly, I was not the only too exuberant last night in his new body.

When I jerked awake again, sunlight was angling into the bunkhouse, casting itself into my face and making my eyes ache, and I suspected that I'd missed breakfast. It was feverishly warm, and I dressed in the lightest clothes I had and tried to walk to the dining hall without betraying my pain or barfing alongside the path.

It was the day when families came to visit and stay for the weekend. The area around the ADMISSOIN hall seethed with people, most of them Avari, by appearances. But this was not surprising. The Avari did everything in sprawling clan groups, and it seemed that Námo had the foresight, at least, to release them alongside others of their families. For them, so new and never intending to come to Aman, this retreat was almost a rite of passage for the newly reembodied, and the families arrived en masse to welcome the new hröar back into the clan. They did not look much different than I remembered from Middle-earth, seeming to carry all of their worldly possessions bundled inside brown felted blankets that they balanced on their heads. There was much shouting and loud conversation and what appeared to be at least one strident argument (between two different groups) that Ainiómë was attempting to intercede between, but I didn't let my gaze linger long. I hastened into the dining hall to see what remained of breakfast.

Elchin was the only one still eating. He'd set aside a plate for me, and when I reached for the glass of orange juice, he stayed my hand long enough to tip something into it. "For your headache," he said.

"I cannot tell how grateful I am to you right now." Grateful. With a lurch of my heart, I realized I'd been on the verge of saying how much I love you right now. I shoveled a forkful of eggs into my mouth and didn't wait to finish chewing them (which was a bad habit of mine and one that irritated Nelyo) before asking, "Did you see that mad scene outside? Do you have family coming today?"

"Yes, I did. No, I don't. My partner has not been released yet, and my parents are still, as far as I know, alive in Middle-earth. As soon as he's reembodied, we'll take ship back to them. But for now"--he shrugged--"I'm alone."

"Take ship?" I boggled around my eggs, but before he could answer, another Sinda stuck his head into the hall and motioned frantically to us. "They're having a duel of songs out here!"

I'd never seen a true Avarin duel of songs, but I'd seen the Ambarussa often enough impersonate the lively exchange of insults that had long ago become the preferred means among the Avari of settling disputes and restoring one's honor. I wanted to finish my breakfast, but Elchin was already pushing back from the table, so I took a last regretful swig of the spiked orange juice and followed him outside.

The sunlight hurt my head less but only incrementally so, and I saw that two males from the groups that had been disputing now circled each other slowly, taking in the other's weaknesses, while a crowd tightened around them. I stood at the fringes with Elchin in front of me so that he could see.

When I spotted Nelyo, my sense of time warped and skidded and righted itself with the conviction that this must be the date of our departure, and indeed, my time here had been stretched and hastened, for I'd believed it two days earlier. But he'd said he'd be here on the departure date to retrieve me, and Nelyo did not invert and blur time the way the Sindar did; he marked it with thick lines in carefully measured increments. And he did not merely act. He planned, and he planned in ink that could not be erased.

But red-haired and taller than everyone else present, there he was, so it must be the departure date or--

Our eyes met, and he began to thread his way through the crowd to me. I let him come. "Is this the departure day?" I whispered to Elchin, still hung over and giddy with confusion over time, but he was engrossed in the duel of songs, and he did not hear me.

Then there was Nelyo before me. Awkwardly dressed in an ill-fitting shirt tucked into trousers that made his too-long legs look even more freakish and his shoes like bricks on his feet. His braids were crookedly done (but they would be, for he would have been doing them himself in my absence), and his hands kept sliding in and out of his pockets. No one so ill-fitting in his body should be so beautiful, but he was.

"I hired a substitute for the day at the school," he said by way of greeting, as though my first concern would be how his school was managing without him. His eyes darted around, to the ADMISSOIN office and the Avari spatting their duel of songs and the roaring crowd and Ainiómë watching in horror with her face in her hand and the pines nodding in the wind, and he lifted his eyebrows and I knew he was judging me. "It seemed this really meant something to you so--"

I laughed and extracted one of his hands from its pocket said, "You might say that."

---

Chapter End Notes

A few final notes …

Elchin is Ilkorin for swan with sincerest gratitude to Helge Fauskanger of Ardalambion for all of his invaluable work with Tolkien's languages. Using his pages and the shattered remains of Darth Fingon's name generators (still kinda sorta available via the Wayback Machine), I constructed the names in this story. I know jack about Elvish linguistics, so if there are mistakes, trust they are mine. (And feel free to suggest improvements.)

Fingon's anecdote about Fëanor making his sons and their cousin gather stones to build an awkward tower with a dubious purpose is an adaptation of a metaphor from Tolkien's famous lecture "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" about a man who built a stone tower for reasons inscrutable to his family and friends … so that he could see the ocean.

The icebreaker bingo card is something I use in my middle-school class, I've never done a shoe greeting but I've considered it, and the awful camp theme song that Fingon can't stand is based on my school song, so I guess I'm making fun of myself a little in this too.