Worse Than That by Elisif

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Chapter 1

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He had thought Maitimo was standing on a ledge.

That revelation- the true extent of Morgoth’s cruelty, of what had been done to his friend, hit Fingon like a nail to his chest as Thorondor reached the platform set against the peak of Thangorodrim and for the first time he saw clearly just what his friend had been subjected to.

He had thought….

“I thought you were standing on a ledge!” he screamed as he jumped down from Thorondor’s back onto the platform set in the side of the cliff.

“No…” Maitimo said, looking down at himself in abject misery as Fingon frantically searched for a means to reach him.

Even with the knowledge that his friend had been captured and imprisoned, the confirmation the last few minute that he had been exposed and tortured, the image of him in Fingon’s mind had not changed.  Maitimo, who had been renowned for being poised and famously beautiful, who Fingon has on more than one occasion threatened to whack with his own hairbrush if he spent any longer at his dressing table, who had taken the time to debate between robes and necklaces even when living in a lightless field after the world had ended… He had been defined by that very combination of vanity and dignity, and to see him like this- hair a short and matted tangle of unnamed filth, so thin you could see every bone in his skeleton sticking through his skin, coated in cuts and open sores and sunburns and dried blood and muck, stark naked without even the merest suggestion of attempting to cover himself— the very notion that Maitimo simply didn’t seem to care about any of those things was almost more shocking than what had been done to him, Fingon thought, and immediately felt sick to his stomach for having done so. It took him a moment to shake himself back to reality, to remind himself that he was looking at his friend and not transfixed by a horrifying illustration of some unknown abomination in a book his mother had warned him not to read and hidden atop a cupboard, in morbid fascination halted from looking away.

“Are you real?”

Maitimo’s voice was like a strangled croak as Fingon leapt down from Thorondor’s back and scrambled for a means to reach him. Only a few feet to the left of Maitimo’s listless, helplessly dangling feet he found a pile of borders, jumbled together as though they had been purposely shoved out of reach. Heaving, Fingon lifted one into his arms.

“I’m real, Maitimo,” he said, and set it down just below his cousin’s feet, laid another flattened slab of rock on top of it and scrambled upwards to the level of his cousin’s face.

With a small, broken squeak of pain, Maitimo’s hand ghosted over to Fingon and his fingers picked at the embroidery along his coat sleeve, traced the soft silk of his surcoat and felt their way tentatively up his richly clothed shoulder, gasping at the unfamiliar touch of silk and fur against his fingertips. Fingon was suddenly appallingly aware of the rich layers of soft cloth against his skin, felt grotesque and pampered and swaddled to an almost sickening degree. Frantic, he ripped off his furred cloak, at which Maitimo flinched as though he expected to be slapped. He whimpered and tilted his head back with his eyes closed, bracing himself, as Fingon pushed his arm behind his raw back to wrap the cloak around him, but gave a gasp of shock that turned into grateful sobbing and trickles of wet tears down his cheeks when finally he opened his eyes and realised what Fingon was doing.

Fingon swore under his breath as he struggled and failed in the attempt to cover his cousin properly with his trapped arm suspended above his head, eventually admitted defeat and left the cloak draped over his left shoulder and dangling. A pathetic attempt at warmth and modesty he thought, for all his cousin’s gratitude. He grabbed his cousin’s hand and pressed it over his heart in a fist. Squeezing, he felt something pockmarked, misshapen and wrong with those spindly twigs masquerading as fingers; he opened his clenched hand, looked straight down and saw deep, bloodied bite and tooth marks criss-crossing over every inch of Maitimo’s free hand from knuckle to fingertip and his eyes widened in horror.

“I’m sorry,” his cousin sobbed, pulling his hand back and biting down hard into a gash sliding across his bloodied knuckle and throwing his head back against the rock with a muffled scream. “It’s all I’ve got—“

“Shh, it’s alright. You don’t need to apologise. I’m here now. I’ll make it stop hurting. I’ll get you out of here,” he said, barely masking the white-hot fury that was threatening to explode from his chest. Maitimo did not seem to notice; his voice fluttered and trembled like a hesitant, soft-voiced prayer when he asked:

“Really?”

“Really. Let me look at your arm?”

As gently as he possibly could, Fingon skated his fingers up Maitimo’s arm to the rusted, unthinkably tight shackle which pinched the juncture of Maitimo’s wrist in a wealed band of dried scabs and blood, cut mercilessly into the bruised and shredded skin of his wrist. The band itself was chained to a broad-headed nail that had been driven deep into the bare rock of the mountainside. It would not be easy to pull it or break it free, but he would manage it somehow, he thought.

A fat raindrop struck him in the eye, hard enough to sting as he bit his lip trying to decide how best to proceed. Heavy on his cheeks and forehead, others followed. From below, he heard his cousin whimper.

Fingon unsheathed his dagger, brought it upwards and slammed it down hard against the shackle.

The effort accomplished nothing.

Again, he slammed the dagger hard into the side of the manacle, angling upwards. The blade slipped against the wet steel to angle sideways and Fingon’s knuckles scraped open against the rough rock as he repeatedly tried to pick apart the fixings of the chain with the blade point. A distant roaring of thunder sounded; he turned his head and could make out a broad blanket of black-tinged storm-clouds rolling in like a tidal wave across the open ravine towards the exposed and tiny platform where they found themselves, dark and menacing. Honest fury now awakening in him, he wiped his bloodied knuckles against his damp cheek and, tears welling hot in his eyes and fist clenching around the dagger handle to the point of pain, he pounded and slammed the ever duller blade against the gyve. Each blow landed more carelessly than the last until the point of the blade caught in the runic insignia of the shackle and his hand, damp with sweat and rain, slipped and, to his horror, nearly slammed into his cousin’s wrist.

The dagger was now blunted to complete uselessness. He dropped it then and tried shifting his cousin’s wrist upwards within the gyve with his fingertips. It budged the tiniest measure, evoking a cry of pain from its pititful owner trapped below, but the only things released from Morgoth’s trap in that moment were flecks and shreds of dried, black blood that fell from the tight ring of scabs and cuts the manacle so brutally ensnared.

“It’s alright,” he whispered, more for Maitimo than for himself as he glanced upwards at the hellish trap extending above their heads, shifted his efforts from the manacle to the rusted chain and pin that nailed it to the sheer face of the cliff. Desperate, he seized the broad head of the nail with both hands and scrambled his legs up the rough surface of the stone until his feet lay flat against the vertical rockface and his full weight was suspended angled to draw the pin from the stone.

The rusted head of the nail sliced into his palms; he let his weight drop, over and over, wresting his full bodyweight against the chain in the hope of pulling it free until at last the rain and sweat on his palms again proved too much to hang on any longer and he let go and dropped back downwards onto the boulder.

He stared downwards at his hands. Sharp lines of open crimson sliced across them, wet and bleeding, the nail and chain having rendered them a bloodied mess.

“Finno…”

At the pity in Maitimo’s voice, blind fury awoke in Fingon’s chest so white-hot he could barely think. He wiped his hands on his tunic and reached forwards to scoop Maitimo up into his soaked arms, taking his weight under the armpit and against his chest as his friend whimpered, glanced downwards his nervously kicking feet.

 “Don’t you dare feel sorry for me,” Fingon said, Maitimo’s breath hot against his cheek as he followed his eyes to glance downwards at his mangled, naked body pressed up against him. “They did worse than that to all of you.”

The filthy mat of Maitimo’s once-glorious hair fell in front of his eyes as he looked downwards at his injuries. It was truly raining, hard and fast and cold on them both now. Maitimo’s eyes traced upwards to his helplessly trapped arm, and Fingon’s followed.

For a moment, they both stared at his trapped hand and wrist, then Maitimo screamed, a wordless cry of desperate, impotent fury wrenched from his throat with alarming strength. He wrenched his head and neck forward and Fingon could see the pitiful twitches of the atrophied muscles in his forearm as he summoned all the muscle he still possessed in an utterly vain effort to move his arm away from the rock even the merest inch, but the arm was still immobilised utterly, dislocated in every joint it contained and stuck fast against the damp and dripping stone.

An awful shudder coursed through him and he fell back against the rocks, rough sobs making his legs twitch and his ribcage shudder, gulps of pain and stammered gasps of tears forcing their way from his throat. Dangling helplessly beneath the trapped bonds of his right arm, he shook so hard that Fingon’s cloak fell from his shoulder and left him fully naked again. Fingon reached forwards to help him, but with another anguished howl of pain, Maitimo’s left arm pushed him away.

His eyes clenched tight for a moment, then with a visible gulp of pain he opened them and strained himself to remain still and meet Fingon’s eyes, biting down on the joint of his index finger in agony.

“Just do it then,” he gasped. “Just get it over with…”

His eyes opened wider.

“Kill me Finno…”

“No!”

“Please! Just do it and get it over with, they left me here to die, I can’t take it anymore! Please!”

He pushed his cousin back and as though frozen and chained in an unwaking nightmare Fingon watched he struggled and twisted, his legs kicking and hips twisting, helpless and naked and filthy and sobbing openly, covering his eyes with his free hand. Desperate to do something, anything to end this this abject misery, he leapt downwards from the boulder and lifted the fur-lined cloak from the damp ground where it had fallen, brought it upwards and wrapped it over his cousin’s front, tucked it in around his shoulders, propping up his full meagre bodyweight under the armpit and holding the folds of the cloak in place behind his neck. The gesture made him cry even harder.

The rain lashed onwards. Fingon glanced down and made out the silver glint of the now useless dagger he had dropped onto the rocks of the ledge as Maitimo cried against him. And as he cradled Maitimo’s head against his collarbone in his spread fingers as one might support the crown of an infant’s head, murmuring childish little words of solace and comfort, he thought to himself that it was so, so unfair. And the thought was childish and a waste of time and no help at all to Maitimo, but it was so damnably, unthinkably unfair. To be holding a friend you’d only moments before braced yourself to kill with your own hands and never see as anything but an unreachable smudge on a cliff-face again and a dead one at that in your arms, to be offered a divine reprieve and have him in your arms and against your heart but no further than that because he was still utterly, utterly trapped, he wasn’t standing on a ledge, Manwe had given them a divine reprieve and Maitimo was still trapped because Morgoth had made him that way and Morgoth had put him there.

Sobbing against Fingon’s chest, Maitimo sniffed.

“Please kill me, Finno.”

“I can’t! I won’t do that to you!”

“No!”

Maitimo lifted his head. Looking up at Fingon, he wiped his cheek with the knuckles of his free hand. Along with the intended tears, some of the dried blood and ash against his knife-sharp cheekbone wiped away, and with a catch in his throat Fingon recognised the familiar smatter of freckles on his cousin’s cheek in that tiny smear of clean The merest, littlest trace of that beloved face that for all the shame in the world it caused him to admit, Fingon could barely make out In the person crying against his heart.

Urgent raindrops slid down the back of Fingon’s neck, made loose strands from his braid stick to his skin. Low and deep, resonating in the high stones of the mountains, thunder crackled. Maitimo opened his eyes.

 “The storms are the worst up here,” he pleaded. “I don’t want to be here for another one. Please, Finno. Just do it quickly. That’s all you can do for me now. Get it over with.”

He swallowed hard.

“Please.”

Fingon gulped.

“Alright,” he said. “I’ll do it, I’ll—“

He couldn’t finish the words. A sob bled from his throat and tears slid down his face as he leant in to gave his friend one last long lingering embrace. The catches in his throat and his cousin’s sniffs were the only sounds in the cold deathly stillness of those mountains as he held Maitimo close against his chest, patted his raw back. One last memory of warmth and tenderness before it all ended, ended here, in rain and in cold and in darkness so far from home.

Criiick, crick.

Fingon swore beneath his breath as he looked up at the chain that so brutally ensnared his friend’s arm. Maitimo’s chain was creaking back and forth in the wind. At this very moment torturing and damning to death his dearest friend and all the while mockingly making a sound as innocuous and repetitive in tone as a rusted garden-gate swinging on unoiled hinges. Criiick, crick. Criiick, crick.  

Criiick, crick. Ensnared within its bonds, his cousin’s hand strained itself, his deathly fingers stretching desperately to bend over far enough to pick at the band around his wrist to no avail.

“Maitimo, I can still free you.”

“What?”

He repositioned the grip of his arm beneath his cousin’s armpit, tried to quell the vile mixture of horror and hope that welled up inside of him. Maitimo sniffed, did not respond, still tearful against Fingon’s shoulder. Fingon pushed his chest back a tad, touched his cousin’s cheek with his fingertips.

“Maitimo, I can free you, do you understand?”

“No…”

“I’m going to—“ Eru help him.

“What?”

“I can free you, alright? I’ll be fast, I promise—“

Maitimo looked up at his arm.

“No! “

“Only a few more minutes of pain, I promise you. I promise you. On my honour, I swear it will be over, and then I can take you home. Then— there’ll be a nice dry bed waiting for you with clean clothes and warm blankets and medicine for the hurt and we’ll wash your hair and your brothers will be with you, and it will be spring and there will be strawberries and warm bread and fresh milk for you to drink, alright?”

A desperate broken sound slipped from his throat, and then he turned his head away. Again the fingers of his bound hand flexed, and Fingon forced himself to choke down the nausea brewing in his throat.

It was raining harder now, as though pacing itself with Maitimo’s tears.

Look strong for him, Fingon told himself. Act like you know what you’re doing, no matter how much you don’t. Don’t let him know you wish you could run away to your mother’s arms and make someone else do this while you cover your eyes and ears. You owe it to him. He has no choice but to trust you.

Fingon bit down on his lip, swallowed hard and gently traced his fingers up Maitimo’s arm to the ragged skin of his ensnared wrist, the site of the shackle so bruised and shredded with cuts he barely dared touch it.

You’ll be doing far worse than touching it in a few seconds.

With the tips of his fingers, Fingon traced the green and blue mottled skin just below the shackle, searching for the narrow join between the bones of his arm and hand, obscured by the swollen bruises that painted his skin in such grotesque shades.

Assured by his silence that he hadn’t hurt Maitimo he continued—

Findekano Nolofinwion, you fucking idiot. How do you ever expect to do this? How do you ever expect to cause and carry on causing him the worst pain a person can ever experience if you can’t even bear to touch a few bruises?

Fingon gulped, and dug his fingers into Maitimo’s wrist, making him gasp with pain. A few quick squeezes, and his fingers located the thin gap between the bones, small but mercifully elongated the tiniest bit by his suspension. Wide enough for a knife to pass through, he thought.

Fingon’s sash was yellow silk, embroidered with a pattern of bluebirds by his beloved sister-in-law lost to the ice, the finest piece of clothing he had left from Aman. With trembling fingers, he undid the knot that secured it around his waist, looped it between his hands and pulled it tight between them. The gesture made Maitimo cry out, but Findekano said nothing. What was he even supposed to say? "I’m not going to hurt you?" He mouthed the words “please forgive me, Nelyo” as he brought it up to his cousin’s forearm, looped it behind his arm and tied it into a knot. Then he wrapped the fold around his sheathed, blunted dagger and began to twist it as a pivot, compressing Maitimo’s forearm.

He groaned; beads of sweat plastered his forehead and he whimpered.

“It will be over soon,” Findekano said. With a last sharp twist, he finished the tourniquet, then tucked the wrapped dagger within the folds to prevent it from unravelling, praying it would hold.

He leapt down from the boulder, grabbed his pack from where he had flung it aside. Inside, he found his other dagger, and a wineskin of water, both of which he brought back up with him, sticking the dagger in his pocket before Maitimo could see it.

“Do you want some water…first?” he asked, trembling.

Maitimo nodded; gently, Fingon uncorked the wine-skin and passed it firmly into Maitimo’s shaking fingers, gave them a firm squeeze, helped him to clutch a fold of the leather and hold the container to his bleeding lips. Water spilt down his neck and cheeks as he drank with unsteady fingers.

Quickly checking that his cousin was distracted, he tested the dagger in a slight cut through his breeches against his thigh, a drop of blood pooling through the rip in the fabric, mercifully sharp.

With a silent prayer, Fingon leapt upwards. He seized his cousin under the armpit and pulled him up the rockface by sheer force, knocking the waterskin out of his hand and bringing the knife up to his wrist.

“FINNO!” Maitimo screamed, struggling and against the rockface and kicking.

Now, Fingon told himself and brought the dagger up—

His hand stopped a few inches short of the flesh.

Findekano swore to himself, foul and furious as the rain bled down his cheeks and Maitimo squirmed in his grasp. It was so damnably stupid, speed was the only thing in the world he could offer Maitimo right now, and he had failed, he couldn’t do this, by delaying he had hurt him more, he couldn’t do this, he had to distract him somehow, but what could he possibly say, he couldn’t do this—

“Maitimo,” he stammered, testing the angle of the dagger in his unpracticed hand. For god’s sake get it right this time.  “Do you- do you remember that thing you used to do when I was a child? Where you would tell me to list my favourite books or toys…”

So you could distract me and then rip a stocking off of a scraped knee or clean a cut with rubbing alcohol.

“Tell me things that you want. List them for me. When I get home, I want a hot bath and some fresh bread, what do you want?”

Maitimo sobbed, let his head fall back against the rocks.

“I just want it to stop hurting, I don’t know…”

He cried out and the deathly white fingers of his bound hand flexed.

“Food. Something to eat. Anything but this. I don’t care anymore—“

Taking that as all the permission he would ever get, Findekano drew the blade across his cousin’s wrist, hard and sharp, ripping open a straight line of red droplets which began to dribble down his arm. Maitimo shrieked, bit down hard onto his left fist, his scream lingering into a shriek as he turned his head. Whispering a prayer to himself and half-closing his eyes, Findekano brought the knife back up, pivoted the point of the blade against the rock and with the pressure of his other hand against the handle of the blade, slammed it down hard into the narrow crook of Maitimo’s wrist.

Maitimo’s scream was fit to shake the very peaks of the mountains as blood shot from his arm, squirted into Fingon’s face with such force he swallowed a mouthful and choked. Maitimo wailed in agony and Fingon leant over to spit out a mouthful of blood down his front, gagging, before searching through the blinding haze of blood, sweat, rain and tears to realign the dagger and continue as his cousin shrieked onwards. He couldn’t see; he had to use his hand to feel up his cousin’s arm and find the cut. The touch of the raw exposed flesh and the touch of slippery bone beneath it sent another rush of vomit into his throat that he only barely managed to choke back downwards.

A wild rush of adrenalin coursed through him, and in a few brief seconds of explosive, unthinkable energy, five times he pivoted the blade back into Maitimo’s open wrist, slamming down into narrow strip of flesh with all the pressure his arm and fist could muster. Maitimo screamed until his voice broke, over and over, until he was beyond even tears; when Findekano finally stopped for the briefest instant, trembling with adrenalin and shock, he could he hear him gasping, his throat too strained to muster any actual noise, but still shrieking in silence out of instinct, shaking in utter, utter agony.

Fingon’s dagger was now stuck fast in the flesh of his wrist. He tried to tug it free; the pain of that movement prompted a final, sudden scream, then Maitimo fell limp against his chest.

He looked down. In the tightness of his hold, his cousin had fallen unconsciously forwards with his knuckles still in his mouth where he had been biting down on them, blood running down his clenched fingers. His head drooped. Knowing he probably had only seconds, Fingon braced himself and began to saw through the butchered flesh, tearing the blade back and forth as fast as he possibly could.

He kept his eyes closed; he did not see the moment when the hand and beleaguered wrist finally parted, only felt the slumped weight against push him as Maitimo fell forwards into his arms.

Rain. Just rain.

The sudden silence roared in Fingon’s ears like a damned river released to the earth, like ice hitting the sea. No more screams, no more crunching of flesh, just gentle, pouring rain, and the race of his heart and pulse of blood and nerve sounding in his throat and cheekbones, his hand still in place with the dagger-blade— flat against the rock beneath his cousin’s lifeless, severed hand.

The realisation hit him, then he dropped the dagger, doubled over, and retched onto the rocks, tears running down his face as he gagged and spat up blood, over and over, his chest heaving. He allowed himself this one brief moment to weep in shock and horror and self-hatred, before wiping the blood and sweat from his face, bending Maitimo’s bleeding and mutilated arm over his shoulder and turning back to his cousin and what he had done.

Amidst the unending black and indigo of the driving storm and hellish rocks, there was a flash of cold brightness as the lightning turned the pouring rain running down Maitimo’s bleached, deathly cheeks to streaks of molten silver, Telperion’s shadow for the briefest moment visible amidst the horror. His head fell backwards; strands of his soaked, filthy hair clung to his forehead, and as his neck lolled further against Fingon, streaks of rain tumbled down the mess of snot, blood and tears in a wash of deathly, silent cold, mingling with the ash and muck.

Alone in the deathly solitude of the storm, Fingon held him. Cold rain poured down his forehead and into his eyes; over and over, he wiped it off with the back of his free hand as he waited for Maitimo to awaken or die, whichever came first.

“Please…”

Shaking, his fingers peeled a strand of bloodied hair back from his cheek; Maitimo’s lips parted in a moan of pain and with the faintest flicker of hope, Fingon held his hand over his eyes to keep out the rain running down into them, hand slippery with blood.

“Russo, wake up. Please. It’s over. I promise you.”

His eyes flickered open; for an instant, his lips parted and with the merest smile, Fingon brushed a smear of blood from them with his fingers. Maitimo’s lips moved to speak, but then his eyes rolled back in his head and he fell limp against his cousin again, groaning.

“It’s alright,” Fingon said, patting his slippery, naked back as he clutched his cousin to himself. “Shh, it’s alright…”

Maitimo slipped further down against Fingon’s chest; he struggled to haul him fractionally more upright, trying to gain a handhold against his buttocks, but he was so piteously thin there was nothing to hold onto. In the end, his fingers dug into and pulled him upright by the hollow below his ribcage, the ridges and patches of rough scar tissue at its base finally providing traction against the bloodied mess of his back so he did not drop him as he moved.

But at the sudden shift upwards, his butchered right arm slipped from its precariously upright position tilted against and over Fingon’s shoulder to fall limply downwards at his side, and at that he screamed so loudly Fingon almost dropped him.

 “Pull it back up, pull it back up…”

Frantic, Fingon grabbed his arm and yanked it back up over his shoulder, his left arm holding it partially upright and extended. Again, Maitimo screamed, tortured shrieks fit to shake the walls of the mountains, before he finally fell forwards against Fingon again, biting down on his fist as Fingon struggled to hold him up by his ribs in one hand and keep his arm outstretched in the other.

For a few seconds he sobbed, dry lifeless heaves of desperate, unfathomable pain against Fingon’s chest, his knees kicking upwards into Fingon’s stomach. He turned his head, looked at his arm and screamed in horror.

Fingon’s arm was cramping now, aching and slipping as it struggled to hold Maitimo’s fore-arm outstretched. There was no way he could maintain the awkward position without dropping him.

Fingon swallowed hard.

“Russandol,” he said.

Maitimo only sobbed harder, burying his face in Fingon’s shoulder. Struggling to maintain his grip on his bloody forearm, Fingon gritted his teeth.

“Russandol, I need both of my hands to keep holding you, alright? I’m going to let your arm down as gently as I possibly can, over my back, but I can’t keep holding it like this. I’m sorry.”

He whimpered.

“It’s only for a few seconds, I promise you.”

As gently as he possibly could, Fingon leaned forward against him and let Maitimo’s arm fall over his neck and back, bending at the shoulder and elbow at last into the unfamiliar position, his bleached trembles of pain turning into drawn, voiceless screams, beyond even tears, as his arm settled into position. The blood from his arm dripped down warm and mingled with cold sweat and rainwater drenching Fingon’s back.

 “Shh, shhh…”

This time it was Maitimo’s turn to be sick. With a dreadful shudder of his chest and shoulders, he retched then, vomited down Fingon’s back, thin liquid soaking into Fingon’s sweaty shirt and splashing against his mud-spattered legs and boots. Another heave and his head tilted; with sudden realisation Fingon jerked his maimed arm away by the shoulder and held it in another awkward position off of his back.

The gag turned into a disconsolate wail of pain, and Maitimo kicked his knees upward into Fingon’s stomach, hard.

“Please…” he gasped. “Just for the love of god stop moving my sho-houlllder, just just stop touching it!”

He howled as he fell forwards, beating his fist against Fingon’s chest and sobbing in dry, heaving breaths.

“I hate you,” he stammered, weakly pounding his fist against Fingon’s breastbone. “I h-h-ate you…”

Fingon choked back tears, patted his cousin’s slippery naked back as gently as he could, sick with guilt.

“Please forgive me Nelyo,” he said, leaning in against his friend’s shoulder, pulling him further upright with both arms below his ribcage. “I’m sorry I touched your shoulder like that, alright? I didn’t mean it, I’m sorry. I just couldn’t let you be sick on your arm, alright? We need to keep it clean, then when we get home the healers can fix it, they’ll know what to do for you. They’ll know how to help…”

Maitimo groaned. His eyes rolled back in his head and once more, he went limp, his face a grotesque mess of snot and blood, vomit and tears.

“There, there,” he said, embracing Maitimo as tightly as he dared as turned his head to search for Thorondor amidst the rain-lashed abyss beyond, wiped the rain from his eyes and made ready to step back down from the rock. “There, there, shhh. Almost home now. You’re free now, hush…”

For all his weighing about as much as a dead bird, Maitimo was still the taller of the two of them, and unconscious, his knees jolted and bumped against Fingon’s calves as he moved backwards on the boulder. Still holding Maitimo up by clutching him beneath his protruding ribcage, his legs swaying— like a child lifting a cat, he thought to himself—at long last, Fingon leapt downwards onto the ledge with his cousin held in his arms. Finally, he was able to pick him up properly, scoop his naked, unconscious cousin up into his arms like a child, one arm under his legs and the other supporting his back, the bleeding stump of his right arm tucked up against Fingon’s stomach. Warm blood trickled through his blouse as the butchered stump pressed through the thin cloth against his navel.

His cousin’s left arm dangled, and his limp fingertips traced against the rocks as Fingon carried him to the rim of the ledge.

“Look, Thorondor is here now. He’ll take us home, yes?”

He gave a soft nod to the great eagle as he hovered by the side of the cliff; crushing the horrible images that flitted through his mind of him dropping his cousin in the process, he straddled the golden bony expanse of Thorondor’s back and adjusted his legs. As he cradled his cousin in his arms the great eagle soared soundless into the unending skies, left Maitimo’s wretched prison and the depths of Angband far behind, and Fingon felt the cold wind in the cracks between the patches of dried blood on his cheeks.

Maitimo shuddered in his arms; remembering himself, Fingon tore off his shirt, wrapped it tight around the bleeding, butchered stump of his friend’s arm, rendering the grey cloth a lump of soaked, scarlet gore within seconds. He propped the arm up against his collarbone to keep it elevated, then scrambled for his cloak.

Idiot, he thought to himself as he realised he had forgotten it entirely, left the cloak behind where it had fallen on the ledge. The thing was damned polar-bear fur! Now how exactly do you expect to keep him warm?

He removed his surcoat. The material was thin, decorative, but it would have to do.

“There there,” he said, his fingers shaking as he wrapped it around his cousin’s body, tucked it in around his neck. “You liked it so much before up there, well now it’s yours to keep, yes?”

Maitimo only groaned, squirmed in his embrace. Fingon leant down and planted a soft kiss against his forehead.

“Shh, shh…”

Breathless, Thorondor soared higher and higher, out of the filthy muck that was the air of Angband, high above the battle-scarred earth and into a sky that was pale ice-blue and dotted with the soft stars of departing darkness and warm, approaching morning.

Thorondor flew onwards. The morning-light bore down on them in rays, as Fingon cradled his friend’s bloody head against his collarbone in his spread fingers, allowed him to curl up against his chest so far as his atrophied muscles would allow.

He shifted his head and turned, ever so slightly, and the light of the sun shone down his front. For the first time, in the absence of the darkness and the rain and with time to spare, Fingon could see the true horror of Maitimo’s injuries and at the sight he was nearly sick again. The entire front of his body was from head to toe was sunburned crimson and ragged; you could actually make out the lines running down his sides where Arien’s burning light had ceased and scrapes from the rock had overtaken them in the prime position of torturing his skin. Whiplines and scored burns marked every inch of his skin; his back was a seeping mess of infection, leaking pus and blood into Fingon’s arms. His feet were bent into permanent arches, his right leg badly twisted from an old breakage, to say nothing of the dislocation of his shoulder, and he had wet himself from the pain; Fingon toyed with the idea of mopping up the mess, trying to give his cousin back even the merest scrap of dignity, but decided to prioritise keeping the precious surcoat dry. Tucked around his chest, his hips protruded sharply enough to keep the blood-soaked cloth off of his groin, as Fingon cradled him, the blood from his arm dribbling down from his collarbone and shoulder to his stomach.

“Shh, shhh…”

Waveringly his lips parted and another groan escaped them. Fingon held him still tighter.

“Finn…”

“Hush Russo, you’re safe now,” he said, pulling a strand of hair back from his face. “Angband is behind us. Can you feel the wind on your face?”

He moaned, struggled against him, his hips shaking.

“Hurts, hurts…”

“Hush now. It’s alright. You’re safe now.”

With a corner of his tunic Fingon attempted to mop some of the blood and tears from his face, staining the yellow silk red. Maitimo tilted his head back, and his lips parted.

“Are those….”

He squirmed, tried and failed to lift his head. The tendons in his neck pulled taut, then he fell backwards and said:

“No they can’t be.”

“What, Maitimo?”

 “For a second there… I thought those were the stars.”

“Those are the stars. You’re free now, Maitimo. It’s over. Those are the stars you’re seeing, because you’re in my arms and I’m taking you home.”

 

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Chapter End Notes

End credits song, because I'm kind of a sap like that https://youtu.be/Ay80nO7xzSo