All Hues and Honeys by Dawn Felagund

Daffodil

Maedhros recovers after Thangorodrim. A double drabbled for the ribbon-cutting party, using Zhie's photo of a single daffodil in a winter landscape as a prompt.

At first, leaves like blades nudged aside the final tracery of snow. Eyes undimmed by his torment, Maedhros could loll his head just right and see them.

"They arise each year from a knob in the earth," Fingon told him as distraction when the healers were up to the painful work of changing his dressings.

Then a single flower unfurled, a golden trumpet belled toward the sun.

He clutched Fingon's hand and watched its chin lift.

"They give me hope," he might have said, once, in his sentimental past. Now, he gritted his teeth against a shout. His heels dug into the bedclothes. A yellow spot throbbed in a red haze.

It snowed that night.

It heaped like a quilt upon the single yellow flower with its face belled toward the sun. When it ebbed away, the flower drooped, defeated, proud green sword-arms shriveling and its trumpet face tipped toward its grave.

When the healers came, he didn't kick, he didn't shout, he simply and silently wept.

Morning: the sun simmered like a furnace over the sea. The bell face lifted in fanfare.

Maedhros let a leg slide free, toward the floor, touched its icy breadth with just a toe.