Numbered Tears by Luxa

Chapter 1

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“They were right. The Valar were right all along.”

His brother said it so softly, lacking any of the certainty and hard-won pride and determination that Maglor knew him to have. Without that tone, without the voice he used to sway his troops and his friends to his way of thinking, he sounded so tired, his voice straining against the scars on his throat that made it so difficult for him to even speak.

Maglor almost asked his brother what he meant, but he was too exhausted to lie to himself. They were deep in the forests now, far from the battleground. They’d heard there was a group of survivors holed up around Mount Dolmed. They had little hope of reaching it, but as Maglor watched Maedhros stand, unwrapping his arms from around his long legs and leaving the little shelter they’d made to walk out in the pouring rain, he realized that they had had little hope of anything for a long time.

He followed his brother into the rain. It was the kind of downpour that soaked you through the moment you were in it, chilling you to the bone and drenching your clothes. It would take hours of shivering together to recover, stoking their fire and coughing from the smoke they had to hide from the forces of Morgoth. Maglor knew Maedhros didn’t care.

“There’s nothing we can do,” said Maedhros, face turned upwards toward the sky.

“We can fight,” said Maglor, words hollow, coming from someplace inside that he didn’t want, he didn’t want to fight, he wanted to let the past go, he wanted to run far away from the living torment their lives were becoming.

The battle had been a horror. A complete mess. A betrayal. Maglor could not put words to the way his chest ached when he thought of it. He could see the banner they’d been presented with as they’d fled in his mind, Fingon’s blood staining the torn fabric. The way Maedhros’s face had crumbled in a way so similar to the way he’d sobbed in the aftermath of his torture, when the faces of evil had taunted him in the dark.

Maedhros did not reply for a long time. Maglor did not mind. What he had said was not worth replying to.

He reached for Maedhros’s shoulder, to hug him the way he had when they were young, when their biggest problems had been petty fights (when their brothers had been hot-headed, yes, but not unkind, not monstrous and capable of terrible deeds), knocking over their mother’s statues (she had had fire in her eyes as she refused to plead, hair whipping in that unbelievable wind, he could remember it so strongly, her face so set and hard like the stone she chipped at) and the favor of cousins and uncles (Fingolfin’s needless but noble death, Fingon’s banner with more mud than blood on it, the broken helm, the broken man).

Maedhros didn’t stop his touch, flinching slightly as he always did. Maglor made to embrace his brother, to pull his head down so he could release his pain into Maglor’s shoulder, but Maedhros pushed away.

“This was my battle,” he said, throat rasping. The terrible scars on Maedhros’s face stood out lividly against the rain, thunder crackling in the distance. They paid no heed. The anger of the gods no longer scared them. “This is my fault.”

Maglor could tell him the truth, that it was not. But he couldn’t. It was too hard, the wound too raw. They had just lost their land, their brothers could be dead, could be anywhere, and perhaps Maedhros was right. That there was no hope of defeating Morgoth, no hope that any of the Fëanorians would ever hold a Silmaril again (did he even want to).

“Leave me,” said Maedhros.

Maedhros’s gaze turned back to the sky when Maglor did not speak. Some part of himself, he realized, wanted Maedhros to hurt. Ashamed, he returned to the shelter.

Maedhros had not shed tears since his recovery. That did not change. Instead Arda itself wept.