Once More, For the First Time by Elisif

Chapter 1

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Snow was falling, tumbling down upon Mithrim’s sheltered lakeshore in wide, fat flakes, soft as lamb's-down against bared skin on which they happened to glance and blow. Fingon had thought himself to be drained of any and all affection for the cold by the misery of the Helcaraxë’s crossing, but Maitimo had recently been gifted the first true glass-pane windows successfully crafted this side of the sea for his bed-chamber, and as such he was gladly content watching the quiet storm of swan-white snow which peppered a night sky the colour of bruises from his cousin’s almost smotheringly well-piled bed.

The shadows of the snow-dusted pines flickered across the pine branch rushes and new-cut boards between them as he sipped from a porcelain cup of spiced mulled wine, leant back against the headboard. Beside him, Maitimo had contentedly curled himself up below the blankets, his one hand clutched tight around a fistful of blankets under his chin. An unusually peaceful expression was on his face tonight, Fingon thought, his smattered freckles standing out more in his flushed cheeks than they usually did amidst his now largely gaunt features.

His cousin rolled over slightly.

“Do you think it would be alright if you got me another cup of wine, Finno?” he said sleepily.

“Of course, Meldonya,” he said.

Maitimo noted his cousin looking at him and smiled; he smiled in kind, then pushed aside the covers to stand up and refill his cup of wine from the brazier on which a kettle of the stuff was being kept continuously heated.

He took a long sip still bent over the kettle, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Um, Finno?”

He turned back, the cup held aloft in his hands. Maitimo had shifted to perch himself upright upon his left elbow, right fore-arm laid gently out in front of him on the sheets as he looked up at Fingon.

“Is something wrong?” he said and hurriedly rushed to sit back down on the edge of the bed.

“No, nothing is wrong, I just—“

He held out his hand, helped Maitimo pull himself into a full seating position. When we was upright, he tugged the dropped blankets over his chest with his right arm. Fingon leant in closer and held out his hand almost to Maitimo’s shoulder in quiet concern.

 “Whatever it is, you can tell me,” he said.

“No,” said Maitimo. “ It’s nothing about— about then, it’s… I’ve been thinking about it, and—“

He paused.

“I think I might like to give us lying together a try again. Lying together, or being pleasured maybe.”

Fingon set his cup down and gently touched his cousin’s shoulder.

“You truly think you’re ready for that?” he asked.

He laid his own fingertips gently across the backs of his cousin’s fingers.

“I don’t know,” Maitimo said, glancing downwards at his severed wrist against the fold of blankets. “But I’ve certainly thought about it. I’m just ashamed—”

Fingon’s chest clenched.

“Of your hand you mean?” he said.

“No,” he said. “Of other things, like—“

He swallowed hard.

“I can’t lie on my back anymore.”

“Your wounds? Are they still bothering you?”

Maitmo’s voice hitched.

“No! It— it makes me feel so exposed. That was how I was when they were— there is no way I could lie on my back, with someone positioned over me, touchingme…”

Fingon spread his fingers out a little further across Maitimo’s knuckles.

“That is fine,” he said, and leant in to wrap his arms around his cousin’s neck, before drawing back with his hands on Maitimo’s cheeks. “All that means is that if we do try, you must be on top— if tha’s still alright for you, of course,” he paused, “And I can’t honestly say I object to that proposition. It’s not,” he said with a wink, “as though we never switched before, yes?”

Maitimo smiled, but then frowned and with a slight stammer continued:

“And I can’t have you undressing me. Not even buttons or anything like that.”

Fingon’s chest tightened again. He remembered with how much distress Maitimo had reacted when initially requiring help with said task. His voice hitched again, and gently he continued:

“You do not have to tell me what happened. Unless of course you want to, in which case I am here to listen, yes?”

He moved his arm around Maedhros’ back, seated at his side in the rough tangle of bedclothes.

“But you still want to try?” he asked.

“Yes,” said Maitimo, smiling and shifting forwards on the bed.

“Then can I kiss you?”

“Same answer, meldonya,” he said, blushing.

He leant over and planted a soft kiss on Maitimo’s faintly pink-tinged, freckled cheek.

The shift from nervousness to apparent confidence was startling, but not unusual. It was a feature of his cousin’s trauma that he could flicker from the terrors of memory to happiness even between sentences, one that Fingon was familiar with dealing with and prayed would be rectified eventually with the passage of time.

“Right then,” he said, biting his lip and shifting his legs out from under him, “I guess we should—“

“I’ll lie down, and then you can… um, Maitimo?”

He glanced nervously downwards at his cousin’s chest.

“What?” he said.

“Can you really balance yourself on your right arm? If you’re to position yourself on top of me, I mean…”

“Oh,” said Maitimo, sharply hugging his stump even tighter to his chest and staring mournfully down at it. “Right.”

They were silent for a few moments.

“What if… we used a chair?”

Maitimo paused, then cleared his throat and said:

“That would be alright I think. Moringotto didn’t have any chairs. In fact, I think Moringotto missed out on the invention of sitting entirely,” he quietly grumbled, rubbing his stiff right shoulder and rising to his feet. He tossed aside the blankets and shuffled over to the wide oaken chair next to the dressing table.

“Right then,” said Fingon still seated on the edge of the bed. “So… I’ll sit on your lap and kiss you, and you can direct me from there? Would that be alright?”

He smiled.

“Yes.”

As Fingon rose and stood before his cousin, Maitimo leant happily back into the chair, spread his legs slightly, and happily kicked his feet against the carpet. He held out his hand, and when Fingon stood before him, he jokingly said:

“You may now give my hand the kiss of peace, vassal.”

Fingon’s smile widened and he bent down and exaggeratedly kissed his friend’s knuckles, knelt on the floor.

“Permission to arise and fulfil your desires?” he said, his eyes glinting, lips still fixed on Maitimo’s knuckles.

“Goodness, I don’t think I’ve felt this kingly, since, well… since I was King.”

Fingon’s chest swelled with happiness as he moved into the chair to sit on his cousin’s lap and straddle his hips with his legs, feeling the shudders of Maitimo’s laughter in his chest as he leant in affectionately against it.

He nestled his face gently into Maitimo’s hair.  

“I love hearing you laugh,” he whispered.

“And I love it when you hold me.”

He nuzzled in closer and planted a gentle kiss against Maitimo’s neck. From his neck, he moved upwards to his jawline, skirting the faint trails of scar tissue to caress his cheek, his forehead and then his eyelids, trailing the gentlest of kisses across his skin as he embraced him tight, careful to avoid pressuring his right arm and shoulder as he proceeded.

“Keep going,” his cousin said, and Fingon could feel the tension dissipating from his chest. Softly, he repeated the cycle of head and neck kisses, gently trailing his lips across Maitimo’s skin between each of the nuzzled touches.

Beneath him, Maitimo smiled with half-closed eyes; he gestured at Fingon to pause and then fumbled with the buttons of his shirt, opening the loose blouse and baring a stretch of his chest from collar to navel, brandished with thick, broad stripes of red and white scar tissue, raised and puckered in places.

Fingon looked up at him, eyes tentative; Maitimo gave a firm nod, and Fingon shifted his head downwards and planted a kiss against the skin of his cousin’s bared collarbone, this time with a little flicker of tongue.

A little sigh escaped from Maitimo’s lips. Fingon took that as a sign of encouragement and continued, softly stroking and kissing his cousin’s chest, finally lingering on a spot on the left of his ribcage.

He focussed his caresses there for a few seconds, then his cousin said:

“Um, Finno?”

He swiftly withdrew his head and hands.

“Is something wrong?” he said.

“Do you think you could move a little lower maybe? I don’t have much feeling in that spot.”

He nuzzled downwards. Hesitantly, his traced his fingers stroked downwards, finally pausing against a small patch of unscarred skin to the lower left of Maitimo’s hip, just above his groin.

“Here?” he asked.

“Yes!” said Maitimo, taking Fingon by surprise with his apparent enthusiasm. He lowered his head and began to kiss the spot in question, tracing down his cousin’s chest with his fingers; Maitimo’s hips bucked as arousal slowly overtook him, but when Fingon looked upwards, he seemed contented.

Just to be on the safe side, he sat up again and wrapped his arms around Maitimo’s neck, leant in against his flushed cheek, and said:

 “Are you comfortable? Any further suggestions?”

He pulled his head back a few inches as Maitimo knotted his fingers through a strand of his hair, pulled tight on a flicker of gold ribbon; his lips parted for a moment, then he tilted his head back and rocked his hips forwards against Fingon.

“I think,” he said, “I think I’d be alright undressing myself a little further… if we were under a blanket.”

“I’ll get one for you.”

He walked over, lifted the discarded quilt from the floor and returned to the chair.

“How should I arrange it?”

“Anything’s fine. So long as I don’t feel— out in the open.”

“I’ll sit on your lap again and wrap it around both of us then?”

“That would work.”

He paused.

“Would it be alright if I were to undress myself now?”

“I certainly wouldn’t object,” Maitimo said, smiling as he leant back, and swiftly Fingon unbuttoned his shirt, tugged it over his head and discarded it. In the oppressive heat of the room, he was already not wearing much; baring himself entirely was only a question of pulling his trousers down to his ankles and kicking them aside, then working his loincloth down his legs to stand naked, before straddling Maitimo’s hips again and leaning in against him, holding the blanket awkwardly over them both.

The manoeuvre of Maitimo pulling down his own trousers one-handed beneath him while he held the blanket steady over them both was awkward, but he managed to open and tug them down at least a few inches, shoving his hips forward to ease their passage down his legs, his erection pushing hard against Fingon’s groin and hip as he shifted. Hot pleasure coursed through him, and he tried his hardest not to move suddenly and drop the blanket. Next time, he would just have to wear an oversized cloak, he noted; that would solve the problem.

They paused; Maedhros’ hand was worked into a tender knot in Fingon’s braids, Fingon’s hand held up gently against Maedhros’ cheek.

Fingon tilted his head back; then, reaching down with a deep breath, he took his cousin in hand,  stroked his fingers along his hard, throbbing length, felt the drizzle of pre-cum from his own cock pressed hot against Maitimo’s hip.

“Fin…”

Pleasure coursing through him, he pressed forwards even harder into Maitimo’s hips, stroked both of their cocks simultaneously. He gasped for breath, and he glanced downward at the press of bared bodies between them down to their groins.

He instantly regretted it.

At the angle of the position, looking down at the two of them with Maitimo naked and held tight against him with his right arm, his chest constricted in a surge of pain; he felt a sharp tightness in his arms his breath seemingly trapped in his throat and nausea flared up in the pit of his stomach. Now that the panic attack had been triggered, he could not shake the image from his head— Maitimo’s emaciated naked body covered head to toe in infected, pus-oozing cuts and sunburns and clutched to him in just the same position, pinned under his right arm while his left steadied its sweaty grip on a blunted dagger.

With a start he rolled back his hips as the image assaulted him and the hardness in his groin felt distasteful, wrong; no image in Ea could have been less erotic than his cousin’s state at that moment in time, and he felt shame burning down to his very core— such that he was almost sick— to be thinking of Thangorodrim at all in that way, to be placing any judgement at all on Maitimo’s state at the time. He gasped for breath; the image would not leave his mind.

“Finno, stop.”

To his immense relief, it was Maitimo who ended the situation first, gave him an excuse and a distraction from the horrifying memory in fussing over his friend and kinsman, instantly stopping and rising up to brush his cousin’s  hair affectionately from his face and hold him tight; this, at least, was familiar routine.

“Are you alright? Did I hurt you?” he said, holding a tress of red off of Maitimo’s cheek.

 “No,” he said.

“It just didn’t feel… right. I’m alright though. I’m proud that I tried…. And glad that we stopped,” he said. He did notice anything, thank Arda; Fingon breathed a sigh of relief and hugged him.

Still, he struggled to retain his composure; horror and guilt burned within his stomach, the painful tightness in his arms still unrelenting, but he shoved them back to his mind in the name of familiar concern and tenderness.

 Quietly, he said:

“Do you want to move back to the bed? I’ll hold the blanket over you so you can put your trousers back on first, if you want.”

Maitimo nodded; Fingon pulled himself awkwardly to his feet feeling oddly exposed in the quiet bedchamber, his rapidly fleeting erection still hot against his leg, while he stood and held the blanket over Maitimo with the edges of his fingertips. When he was dressed, the two of them shuffled over sat exhaustedly down on the bed next to each other. Maitimo clutched his right arm to his chest.

Fingon closed his eyes, swallowed down the temptation to sigh and bury his head in his hands – how cruel would that have come across to have done? – until he felt the touch of a hand against his shoulder.

“Fin, are you alright? You look hurt.”

Maitimo’s eyes were wide with concern. Here is fussing over my comfort and I was repulsed by remembering what he looked like then while I bedded him, thought Fingon. He deserves better than this.

Their fingers touched.

Coward, his mind echoed. Coward to be crippled daily by these attacks when Maitimo was the one who had hurt, and been hurt by him. Though he had never had a trigger quite like this, not before. You disgust me.

“Please tell me if I made you uncomfortable. If I did something wrong… I should be showing as much concern for you as you have for me, really.”

Fingon’s chest clenched with guilt. He felt guilty as sin for lying—they really ought to have been equally honest and open to each other, after all, and he wanted to be—but how would it have sounded? Sorry, I pulled out because the memory of sawing off your hand hurt me? Maybe someday he would tell Maitimo about his own struggles, but for goodness’ sake not now. It had only been two years, barely long enough for scar issue to form over some grievous hurts. They had yet to even discuss the amputation in earnest, let alone in a moment of intimacy.

Privately, he was grateful when Maitimo hunched his knees against his chest and said:

“But I guess I’m not ready yet anyway, so it doesn’t really matter for now. I’m sorry.”

Fingon’s throat hitched and his fingers tightened.

“No,” he said firmly, leaning in close enough to feel his cousin’s breath against his cheek, throwing himself fully into the comforting familiarity and sense of duty ha was countering Maitimo’s self-loathing. “No. It was brave of you to try and I’m proud of you and I love you and you don’t need to apologise. You’re the one who— underwent terrible things. This is about you taking back something Moringotto took away from you, and I’m here to help you reach that on your terms. Someday, things will be… like they were again, but that’s a long way off, yes?”

He withdrew his fingers held against Maitimo’s cheeks.

“But for now, the night is young and we can hold each other and lie in bed and drink spiced wine and look out at the snow, yes?”

“I thought you hated the snow.”

“Well,” said Fingon, wrapping his arm around Maitimo’s back, “With time, I think my mind can come to love pretty much anything. After all, my heart still does” he said and leant in for another kiss.