All Hues and Honeys by Dawn Felagund

Idle

Pengolodh has heard little about the youngest sons of Fëanor. At last, as Sirion is sacked, he gets a glimpse. A ficlet written for the Holiday Party prompt "Never Have I Ever." Grundy asked if Pengolodh had ever met or spoken with a son of Fëanor.

I was never entirely sure how to write the youngest sons of Fëanor, the twins. Even in Valinor, they rarely came among their people and were something of an enigma—or so says Rúmil. I was well aware that, using only the scraps of rumor that trickled like icemelt over the high walls of Gondolin, what I wrote of them was mostly a contrivance, and so I sought to steer from characterizations of convenience.

And so I did not give them magical powers. I did not have one flinch at the faraway injury of the other. Their isolation in the eastern wilds of Beleriand had nothing to do with vestiges of sentiment from their brothers—a desire to preserve their youth and innocence—but was simply opportunistic on the twins' part. After all, sixth and seventh in a family as ambitious as theirs, very little responsibility need trickle as far down as they. They wiled away the centuries in idle pursuit, as they must have as young men of leisure in Valinor: hunting, feasting, cavorting in the drunken revels of the local Avari. The effort to entice them otherwise would likely have not been worth their brothers' efforts.

Therefore I must confess that, as the Fëanorions descended upon Sirion, I watched for them most of all. At first, I flooded with the other refugees toward the docks and boats while the warriors among us held the village as long as they could. Then, I will confess, I idled. The danger felt small, and my curiosity overwhelmed me. I saw Maedhros and Maglor and others of their company whose names I knew from writing their histories. But I did not see the twins.

Suddenly, there was an explosion of fighting amidst our warriors. Our defense was breaking with the shock of a thunderclap on a blue summer day. And there they were.

They'd been there all along, concealed among our warriors somehow like snakes amid the fallen leaves. While their brothers were bright scintillae in their armor and crimson cloaks, they'd insinuated themselves among our own men. Unseen.

A spray of blood pattered along my jaw. I do not know which one it was who came nigh to me. He was neither an innocent youth nor a man of leisure. Even as I watched his approach my eyes struggled to fix on him. I blinked. Ornisso? Egalmoth? His appearance shifted like looking directly at a star and not seeing it. It is only as I looked away that the scrap of red hair escaping from his helmet wrenched him right in my perceptions: a Fëanorion, his face hardened and lined by malice and hurt, the dark blade at his side a warning to run.

Yet I stood idle, a rabbit quivering in the grass.

He came so close I heard his breath. "Write of it," he said, before he let me go.