Belated by Dawn Felagund

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Belated

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Finwë, King of the Noldor, was late and scarcely cared for dignity. The Treelight was a watery silver after the Mingling, and the streets were quiet as people sat down to their evening meals. No one would remark on seeing the King's sockless ankles as he lifted his robes to run up an incline in the street because no one was there to see his sockless ankles. No one would marvel that he who had led them through leagues of vegetation-choked forest and over mountains that scraped the sky now puffed a little too hard as he ran up a mild hill on a cobbled street.

So Finwë ran.

What should I care for dignity anyway? This is my son.

What is wrong with me?

But he'd been able to forget Fëanáro through the entirety of his day. Well … that wasn't entirely true. When his clerk placed his schedule in his hands that morning, it hadn't looked particularly rigorous. He'd been certain he'd be home in time to see Fëanáro off to his first apprenticeship away from home—not just away from home, but far away to the North. But each item on his agenda had stretched just slightly longer than anticipated, and while his son and his departure loomed at the back of his awareness, he hadn't fully accounted for the series of delays, and when at his final meeting, one of the artisans in the guild had remarked on the Mingling of the Lights, the sudden recollection that the wagon bearing sacks of correspondence and a gift of furniture and his precious firstborn son was supposed to depart the royal quarter at precisely the Mingling …

And yet he could hardly bolt from the meeting, and though he'd done all he could to bring it to a rapid conclusion, it hadn't ended until after the Mingling, which was what accounted for his lack of dignity now.

He won't be there. How could he be? He was supposed to pass out of the gates a full turn of the glass ago. I have failed this boy in so many ways—

Yet when he rounded into the palace courtyard, the wagon bearing the gift of furniture still remained, the furniture lumped and waiting under gray canvas coverings. The wagon that was supposed to bear the bags of correspondence and the several trunks he'd had palace staff pack for Fëanáro (as well as bearing Fëanáro) was there as well but empty, the bed still scattered with the traces of firewood it had hauled before being commissioned to take the King's son to his apprenticeship in the North. The traces lay, horseless, upon the ground, and there was no buzz of activity to suggest an endeavor frantically behind schedule but an endeavor—abandoned.

Finwë found himself staring at the puzzling scene and drawing too-deep breaths into his tired lungs before he again remembered—Fëanáro!—and into the palace he went.

More running, up the stairs, more sockless ankles; draperies and tapestries and the occasional servant whisking past unnoticed, heavy carpets muffling the frantic weight of his footfalls; he was out of breath again by the time he arrived at Fëanáro's chamber door, the adjoining rooms that used to belong one to him and one to his son, when his son still answered to Finwion, before Finwë married Indis and moved to the floor above in the palace and—

Finwë burst through the door. Fëanáro was carefully layering his clothing into a remarkably compact pack, his back turned to the door.

"You're still here!" Finwë wasn't sure himself of the meaning of the note in his voice: relief or accusation or a bit of both?

"I'm still here." Fëanáro was fastidious about his belongings. He was carefully folding the sleeves of a tunic so that they would not wrinkle, smoothing them with a long stroke of his hands, then rolling the tunic into a little cylinder that disappeared into his pack. His voice was slightly deeper than it'd been the year before; his legs a little longer on his body but still not awkward, as was common in pre-adolescence for the Noldor, who tended to be tall and grow fast in these years midway to maturity. No, nothing was awkward about Fëanáro; he looked and spoke like a little adult. Finwë felt himself slightly disarmed, like he'd lost his footing during swordplay.

"I—" I'm glad I caught you, was what he intended to say. I'm sorry I almost missed your departure, was what he knew he should say.

What he did say: "I want to know why you dismissed the wagoners?" For it was plain, in Fëanáro's bedroom, that that was what had happened. The trunks, carefully packed with everything a twenty-eight-year-old Noldorin prince might need, were pointedly stacked against the door that led into the rooms that had once been Finwë's. One—the trunk that had contained his clothing—had been opened and rummaged, the finer items cast aside with a carelessness and haste (almost disdainful, Finwë realized) that he did not show toward the dingy work clothes he was presently stowing in his pack with an almost loving care.

"I gave them their wages," said Fëanáro.

"That is not— Fëanáro, you cannot walk into the North!"

"Why not? I will be faster on foot than by wagon, having to stop at each town to deliver correspondence and needing a full day to ford each of the large rivers and probably getting stuck at least once on the Marsh Road."

"That furniture was intended for the family that will be hosting you. It is no small request to ask someone to feed you for a year."

The latter was intended as a joke, to lighten the mood—he could tell by the set of Fëanáro's shoulders that it was becoming perilous—but it did not come out that way. He heard himself continue, "There are right ways to do these things, Fëanáro. We cannot simply assume because you are the high prince of our people that—"

Fëanáro whirled. "Atar, their house is too small for the furniture. It will be awkward for them to find space for it, and they will not feel they can turn it away, not while I am there. And it will mark me as their better, when they are my betters. That is the whole point of my going, to learn from them what I can of mining. I will work in the barns and help with the cooking to account for what is required to feed and shelter me. The eldest son is just married, and they could use my hands more than your furniture." He turned back to his pack and tightened the laces. "You have never been to the North; you do not know their ways. It is not Tirion."

This was true. Finwë had been once on progress as far north as Formenos but never beyond it. He sometimes laughed that the Great Journey had cured him of long travel for at least a millennium. And there was always much work to be done in Tirion.

When Aulë told him that he'd found a master engineer in the North willing to take on his son for an apprenticeship in mining, Finwë had burst out, "Must it be so far? To a place without even a name? Just 'the North'?" Aulë had pondered him in one of those long moments typical of the Valar that felt like it occupied a year in the space of just a few seconds before saying, "I think it for the best that he goes to the North, yes."

A small cooking set was secured to Fëanáro's pack. A bedroll; his bow and just three arrows. A knife in an elegantly simple sheath went onto his belt. His hands were dexterous, practiced, fast.

"There is a reservation for you at the inn just outside the city—"

"I won't need it. I will be able to walk farther than that tonight." A hesitation. "I like walking in the silver hours." He took up a walking stick, smoothed and shaped by the hand of time but carved minutely with the alphabet he'd made. Finwë still preferred the Sarati; he wondered briefly what his son's carvings said. "I will stop at the inn, though, and compensate them for not fulfilling my reservation."

"I do not think—"

"No, it is the right thing to do. Perhaps I will take my evening meal there too."

"They will give you waybread in the kitchens."

He bent to rearrange the tongue on his boot. "Atar, you know it is custom that my mother should make the waybread." He had to loosen the laces and tugged at the leather for several seconds where neither knew what to say. Finwë stared at the alphabet on Fëanáro's walking stick, letters that sussed and glided like the wind upon the surface of the sea. He made up his mind: By the time Fëanáro's year-long apprenticeship in the mines to the North was over, he would have mastered the Tengwar. Maybe he would surprise his son with a letter in his own script.

Fëanáro tightened his laces and rose. He was still small enough to slide past Finwë to the door, but Finwë caught him and embraced him hard, like that sudden clutching, desperate affection might make up for so many things. But he felt little of his son in his arms: just the laden pack, a saucepan, the jut of a knife against his thigh, and Fëanáro's furiously beating heart.

~oOo~

Finwë, King of the Noldor, was late and scarcely cared for dignity. He kept find tiny things to fix and change, then change back again, in order to keep himself from shouting at the grooms, who seemed to be tacking up his horse as slowly as possible. But when he stooped to unlace and relace his boot for the third time, he understood that he must look ridiculous.

He unlaced and relaced it anyway.

"Come on already!" he wanted to yell. "Do you not know what will be lost if I am late?"

But no, they truly didn't, he supposed. Perhaps, from their view, the loss was in his leaving.

The trouble was that the ceremony to transfer regency to Indis had taken overlong, and the signing of documents to make it final took even longer. He blamed her people and his: hers for their insatiable need for ritual that included layer upon layer of readings and music and vows, readings and music and vows, readings and music and vows, before he placed his crown in her hands. (Not on her head! She'd been adamant about that, as that would make her king rather than regent, and that required a different ceremony, one neither of them was willing to contemplate.) His people he blamed for the bureaucracy afterward, for the conviction that until something was written down and affixed on every page with the signature of every person concerned, and three witnesses in red ink, then it could not possibly exist on the plane of reality. This is the use you have made of my son's beautiful Tengwar! he wanted to shout, even when he knew that one of his favorite duties as king was the daily signing of documents: the beautiful illuminated borders and the flutter of the script and the smell of ink and his own imposing signature at the bottom of it and the knowledge that shelf after shelf in the royal library documented all that he'd done since the Noldor had come here.

Down the line they'd gone: first his signature, then Indis, then Nolofinwë, then Arafinwë—the sons agreeing to uphold their part of the revised succession were their mother to abdicate. Then onto the witnesses: Sailaheru and Mornólo for him and Elemmírë for his wife. Page after page marched down the line of them until there was a whole sheaf of them clipped on a line for their signatures to dry.

And he was permitted then to leave.

He ran to the stables, his family staying behind to make the necessary overtures of gratitude to the scribes and the witnesses.

He checked the saddlebags for the fourth time to make sure he'd packed his good knife and extra arrowheads. So he didn't feel so ridiculous, he dug deeper this time: a roll of bandages, a packet of healing herbs, and waybread—

"Atar?"

She made me waybread. She must have slipped it in while I was bustling around to prepare my pack this afternoon. She must have feared I wouldn't otherwise take it—

Guilt clutched his heart. He rose.

Behind Nolofinwë, the Lights were mingling. It caught the fine silver embroidery of his dark blue robes and surrounded him with a corona. He was stunning, Finwë realized, in a way he rarely saw. Magnificent. For a moment, he almost faltered. The light at Nolofinwë's back made it hard to see the expression on his face, but Finwë knew his second son well enough to imagine: worried and severe.

He tucked the waybread away and closed the pack again.

"Atar, before your departure, which I agree is not unreasonable, I just wanted to say—"

"He always does that! Everything he says requires sentences of prelude!" So Fëanáro had accused once when Finwë found him kneeling, balled on the floor of his old bedroom in the palace, with tears on his face that he should have long outgrown. Little Nelyo played on the floor in the next room over. "You ask the weather and it takes him five sentences to tell it. He's so annoying! He's—"

"My King! Your horse is ready."

Now everything seemed to be happening too fast: the horse coming toward him, led by one groom, while the other was lifting Finwë's saddlebags and pack and bow and arranging them upon the horse and him, and there was a mounting block (Fëanáro always leaped straight from the ground, and occasionally if he'd had too much wine or was expounding fervently on some subject and was thus distracted, he missed and slid back, and he'd laugh with such hilarity with his sons, half-fallen on the ground beside his horse), and the poor beast was being piled with baggage and Finwë—

He turned to Nolofinwë. Sensing Finwë's anxiety, the horse beneath him pranced and fidgeted. "I am glad to hear it. Speak on our family's behalf before the Valar. When they will cede control of our family again to me, in recognition of my rights, then I will return with your brother and his sons, and with joy I will take up my crown again." Behind Nolofinwë, Finwë caught a glimpse of a scribe, taking down his words to be filed, unsigned, away in the royal library.

He heeled his horse and clattered out of the courtyard at a reckless gallop.

From the royal quarter and down the road and out of the gates of the city, pausing not even (as was his usual habit) to speak to the guards, across the plain northwest of Tirion, the grasses silvered by Telperion and parting to make way for him as though they in their multitude recognized the rightness of his cause. He should have slowed—the plain was dotted with rabbit holes—or taken the proper road, but this was the most direct route, and a broken neck seemed a small price to pay compared with being late.

His firstborn had always kept his house outside of the gates of the city, claiming he needed the silence and relative solitude to do his work. Finwë had believed him. Now he wondered if there wasn't something more to it and briefly hated himself for not being more insistent: You belong here, in Tirion, beside me.

Fëanáro still loved to travel in the silver hours. Eight horses were lined up at the gate. He'd taught his sons to travel light and fast, as he'd always traveled himself. He could see them, the seven boys in a little knot that looked nervous even from afar, clutched too tightly and milling just slightly as though restless for something unknowable, unnamable.

And Fëanáro, striding from his gates, leaving them carelessly ajar to flap and bang in the wind, and shouting something that the wind took before Finwë could make out the words. Whatever it was, it loosened the knot of his sons, and they went to their horses and began to mount in the manner of their father, leaping from the ground. No one fell; no one laughed.

Finwë urged his horse down the hill. "Fëanáro!" he called and then, desperately, not knowing what dredged the ancient and long-unused name from the depths of his chest: "Finwion!"

Fëanáro stumbled a little as he extracted his foot from the stirrup and turned.

Finwë reined his horse to a stop and dismounted, nearly falling from the force with which his legs—weakened by the long, hard ride—trembled beneath him. He staggered toward Fëanáro but did not have to go far. His son was already there.

Fëanáro caught him and kept him from falling with the force of his embrace. He was taller than Finwë now. Finwë clutched his shoulders, slid a hand down he ripple of his spine, buried his face in his neck as he'd done the day he was born. He smelled the same, with undernotes of woodsmoke and sweat. Fëanáro held him so hard that it hurt and started to speak but it came out only as a wordless, surfacing gasp.

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Chapter End Notes

I asked on Tumblr for some prompts for Day 12 of the Fandom Snowflake challenge and received this request from Anonymous: "If you think you'd be up to it would you make something sweet with Finwe and Feanor?"

I'm afraid that everything I try to do that's sweet is always more along the lines of bittersweet, but this is about as close as I can come! Anonymous, I hope you like it.

A few notes on canon/verse: I am currently rereading LotR and encountered the idea the other day of Hobbits requiring the signatures of six witnesses in red ink. I like the idea of some of the Third Age traditions beginning, completely unbeknownst to those who practice them, with the ancient cultures, so here is my imagined origin of that practice.

Finwë's witnesses are OCs that appear in other stories: Sailaheru is Pengolodh's father and Mornólo is a scribe who briefly teaches Erestor in By the Light of Roses.

This is a Felakverse story that adheres to the timeline of AMC and the prequel that I've created an outline for but have been supposedly writing for years now.

Finally, Quenya names:

Fëanáro = Fëanor
Nolofinwë = Fingolfin
Arafinwë = Finarfin