Long Hair by Elisif

Chapter 1

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Getting out of bed one morning, Maedhros trips and stumbles on his still-weak legs and slips on the edge of the thick rug laid across the rushes. He catches himself against the bed frame, fallen forwards, his left arm wavering from supporting his weight, but when he stops for breath, he feels something he doesn’t recognise, an alien presence against his chest, and he panics.

His breath quickens in terror, heart hammering, the awful tightness in his arms and chest... Perhaps I’m finally dying— On the mountain, his state was so unchanging in its fixed agony his mind came to hopefully conclude that any change in sensation, however slight, was merciful death at last. Even now, for the most part contentedly alive, the reflex remains, set off by things as simple as the feeling of wind upon his face or of warm water splashed against his skin.... Perhaps I’m dying. He swats the thought like an errant fly, pulls himself unsteadily to his feet pressing on the backbar of a chair, pauses for breath.

And finally, when his eyes meet the small corner of the mirror on the dressing table not deliberately obscured by a length of draped red satin, he realises that the utterly alien sensation which frightened him so is the soft, free-falling touch of near-waist-length copper hair tumbled and brushing against his naked chest.

He stops in shock, straightens his back, stares downwards. Hesitantly, with the nervous apprehension of a small child— daring to stroke with one finger a sea anemone or a crab held out in a father’s hands, perhaps— he touches it, and darts his hand back, genuinely shocked by its presence. It has been so long... It was hacked off and ripped out within mere minutes of his capture, and since then he has been in simply too much pain to care, not even when they sheared it off entirely after Fin found him...

Daring growing, with the merest silver of stunned pride, he takes the length of hair into his hand, lifts it to his face cradled in his palm, bright copper splayed across his outstretched fingers.

How did it ever get so long without him noticing? Of course, he bitterly remembers. He has nosensation at all left in his back. Too many scars, hand-sized infected sores from the all the filthy damp dripping down the stone pooling where its passage was blocked against the base of his spine...

He pauses. With an indrawn breath of quiet pride, still proudly holding the tress to his breast he steps forwards towards the dressing-table in the corner of the chamber, reluctantly, surrenders hold of it to pull out and fumble through the pine-scented drawers.

It’s more medicine table than dressing table in truth; his eyes scan rolls of bandages and glass jars of salves and his fingers flit the contours of medical paraphernalia of every kind piled in the narrow paper-lined drawers before he finds a comb that one of his brothers must have left behind, cream-hard bone carved with an image of the Two Trees.

Sitting down on the neighbouring stool, studying the what of himself he can see in the visible section of mirror— even now he is not prepared yet to unveil it entirely— he lifts the comb to his temple and— braced with gritted teeth to find himself somehow incapable— runs it hesitantly down through his hair to the base of his chest.

The moment of incapability does not come.

Smiling, he continues, with ever stronger strokes, indomitable pride in his heart from something so unthinkably simple as combing his own hair.

Another smile. Then he switches the comb to his right temple, prepares to run it down the right side of his back.

The manoeuvre required, tested reaching both upwards and downwards with his right arm, is awkward. He searches through his memories to recall how he went about combing waistlength hair in the past, remembering swings the full length of red over his left shoulder and bends forward to comb it vertically downwards from his tilted head.

And he is assailed by the discovery of incapability he had so briefly hoped to forgo.

Lacking a second hand to hold his thick hair in place or steady it, the light comb simply pushes it away, the teeth creating static as they lightly skirt the edges of the thick tresses but push no further. He debates clutching them fast within the crook of his right elbow, but even reaching across his chest to that extent is well beyond the limited motion of his wrecked arm and shoulder.

He stops, bites down hard on his bottom lip. And then, lifting his head with the comb still perched in his fingers, in the small visible sliver of mirror he makes out his younger brother standing in the doorway, Maglor’s fingers frozen stiff against the doorframe.

There is a moment’s silence as their eyes meet, then Maglor strides neatly into the room, takes the comb and gently sweeps his hair behind his back, wordlessly and easily begins to comb it out and deftly braid it down his neck.

“You should have asked for help,” he quietly says.

“I know,” he says in return, and Maglor holds him tight.