God, I Pity the Violins by StarSpray

---

Chapter 5

---

Nile retreated back inside, leaving Maglor alone with his thoughts, and with the clouds that soon came to cover the stars and rising moon. It was just weather, but it was also difficult not to take it as an omen as he watched Gil-Estel disappear behind them. After a while the lights of Calais came into view, and he realized that he had not called Linnoriel—neither to tell her about Lumorn, or to say that he was on his way and bringing unexpected guests. Copley had given him a new phone, on the reasoning that Turralba could probably track his old one, but he'd put all of Maglor's information onto it, and had promised to send him anything useful that he found in his own research. When Maglor turned the phone on he found that Copley had already made good on that promise.

Linnoriel answered after several rings. "Lumorn?"

"Maglor, I'm afraid. Have you heard from him, then?"

"Once, very briefly, but I believe his phone was nearly dead. Where are you?"

"On the ferry just coming into sight of Calais," Maglor said. "So it should only be another couple of hours before we arrive."

"Oh, good…you said we? Who is with you?"

"Five others."

"Elves or Men?" Linnoriel's voice was sharp. Someone in the background asked something but she did not reply to them.

"Men," said Maglor. "But I believe they can be trusted, if for no other reason than they have secrets of their own to keep. And they want to help. More than that I do not wish to say, not until we meet in person."

Linnoriel sighed. "Very well."

"I think they can help," Maglor added. "They are soldiers, of a kind, trying to do good in the world in such ways that they can. And they have some experience with rescuing those who have been taken by such entities as Turralba for similar purpose."

"If they can be trusted, and if they can help us recover Daeron and my brother, then I will welcome them with open arms," Linnoriel said. "Very well. You say you are coming into Calais?"

"Yes."

"Good."

As Maglor slipped his phone back into his pocket, movement out of the corner of his eye caught his attention, as well as the sound of heavy boots on the stairs. None of his companions were wearing boots. He spun just in time to duck beneath a fist. It was hard to tell if these were the same men who had come to his cottage, but it didn't really matter—they were from the same place, under the same orders. All of a sudden he did not feel weary anymore. He rammed a knee into someone's groin and managed to rip a knife out of a sheath and shove it straight through another's Kevlar vest before kicking him over the railing. But where he disabled or killed one another two seemed poised to take his place. One tackled him to the deck, wrenching a shoulder from its socket. Another slapped a piece of duct tape over his mouth—they had learned from their previous mistakes—which muffled the bellow of pain he let forth. He twisted beneath them, wrapping his legs around one's neck and flipping them around so that he could get to his feet, or at least to a crouch, grabbing another knife as he did so and taking advantage of his low position to slice into their legs before he took off at a run toward the back of the boat. They followed, of course—away from the ferry workers and the small handful of other passengers who might wander up onto the deck.

When he turned around he spotted Nile and Joe at the same time the Americans did. One pulled a gun and fired, the sound muted by a silencer, and Joe went down with a bullet between his eyes. Nile took another to her shoulder but only cursed as she kept coming; Maglor did not see Joe get back up because he had to fend off two men, each wielding a syringe. He smashed the first and shoved the second into the neck of the man holding it, before stealing his gun and shooting two of the other attackers. They went down, sliding in the blood that was beginning to pool on the deck.

There was a pause, just for a moment, as Joe straightened an arm that should have been broken, and Nile flexed a few fingers that had been nearly shot off. For a second Maglor thought the men on the deck around them were all dead—but then more appeared around a corner, and one lurched up, gun drawn. The bullet hit Maglor in his already-injured shoulder before he could react, and his vision went black and then white and then black again as he tried and failed not to howl with the pain. When his vision returned he saw Joe and Nile still reeling, but recovering from ruptured eardrums, blood trickling down the sides of their faces; the others were not so lucky; most had their hands over their ears, some were stumbling back and away from the fight. But one recovered himself enough to lunge at Maglor like a tackle in American football. Maglor slammed back against the railing, bending back over it, and in a split second he knew he had to chose between a broken spine and going over. So he grasped the edge of his assailant's body armor and kicked off of the deck, sending both of them hurtling down toward the dark waters of the English Channel.

He regretted that decision the moment his feet left the solid deck of the ferry. Seconds later—or an Age of the world—they hit the water, still tangled up together, and sank like a heavy stone. But Maglor had the advantage in lighter clothing and agility, even with his wounded shoulder, so he managed to kick away from his flailing assailant, diving in a direction more or less at random and gliding until the burning in his lungs drove him to follow his air bubbles up to the surface. His shoulder felt as though it were on fire, and so did his nose. Maglor ripped the duct tape from his face and gasped for air, gulping seawater in the process and sinking as he choked on it. When he surfaced again, he saw the distant shape of the ferry—far too distant to even think of trying to catch up—and the even more distant lights of Calais, bobbing in and out of sight as the waves buffeted Maglor to and fro. There was no sign of the man he'd dragged over the railing.

Grimly, with gritted teeth, he started to swim. It was a clumsy, lurching affair, since he had only one working arm, a myriad of bruises, a bleeding bullet wound, and could not breathe through his nose. But it was swim or drown, and the thought of appearing before Mandos because he drowned in the English Channel within sight of shore was unbearable. The irony of leaping to his death in the sea was not lost on him and if he could not imagine what Námo would say, he could imagine his brothers.

He swam, stopping occasionally to try to catch his breath, for what felt like hours. As his shoulder continued to bleed he started to wonder if sharks ever wandered into the Channel, and he tried to swim faster, which didn't really work. And then he started to think about tides, and what the chances were that the tide was going out of Calais as he tried to swim into it. Considering his luck that evening, he thought the chances were good.

Eventually he could not muster the willpower to keep kicking. Everything hurt. He managed to turn onto his back, which made it easier to float, at least. That gave him a glimpse of the sky, which was growing brighter with coming day, but still heavy with clouds. It was impossible to tell if the sound of thunder in the distance was his imagination, but he hoped it was.

It wasn't. He heard it again, louder, and accompanied by a distant flash of lightning, and then the heavens opened. He got a face full of rainwater that had him struggling to catch his breath again, and he jerked, and a wave washed over him again. As he sank beneath the surface the pendant around his neck somehow got dislodged from his shirt, and its light was sudden and brilliant, like a star had burst into being before his eyes. He grabbed it and felt warmth flood through him, starting at his palm and spreading through his veins. With it came strength, and a sudden memory from his long-ago childhood, when he had fallen into a stream near his grandparents' home and was small enough that even that current had been too much for him. Fëanor had been there, of course, and had lifted him out easily, his hands big and warm and gentle as they wiped away both water and tears. Maglor clung to that memory and that warmth and kicked, once, twice, and then broke the surface. It was still raining, but he was closer to the shore than he had been, and he could feel the tide working—not against him, but dragging him forward, inexorably, toward the French coastline.

He had just enough strength, by the time he was spit out onto the shore, to crawl a few feet up the weedy, rocky, trash-strewn spit of beach and collapse just beyond the high tide mark. The rain still poured down, the drops all like cold stones hitting his exposed skin, but at least he would not be dragged back out to sea. Maglor lay on his side and tried to catch his breath, tried to think, but while he managed the former—more or less—his thoughts drifted beyond his control. He wondered what his father was doing at that moment, and his mother, and his brothers. Old memories of cold and rainy nights spent trying to shelter Elrond and Elros from the elements intruded upon him, and colder memories of those last days with Maedhros as he retreated farther and farther into himself, beyond Maglor's reach, as the Oath gnawed at them both. Old wounds throbbed alongside fresh ones.

At some point he drifted off entirely. He dreamed of Quynh shouting in an old dialect that he did not know, in a hotel room with horrendous wallpaper, while Andromache tried to calm her down. Then the dream shivered into a small room with strange walls—the sort in recording studios to deaden sound. On a bed in the corner sat Daeron, his hair unkempt and dark circles under his eyes. He was hunched forward, elbows on his knees, staring into the middle distance. Either he was deep in thought or not thinking at all.

The dream shivered and changed again, blending fancy with memory. Maglor walked through snowy woods with shadows that moved in strange ways, with the trees whispering angrily and reaching for him, and he climbed mountain peaks against driving snow, and raced across wide fields beneath heavy storm clouds—all the time searching for something, or someone, that he could not remember except that finding it, or them, was very important. All the time he was alone—until, abruptly, he wasn't, and all of his brothers were there jostling him and talking over one another, each one in a different language. "What are you saying?" Maglor kept trying to ask them, but his tongue did not seem to work. "Nelyo—Curvo, why do you call me Max?" Curufin's smile was sweet as it had been when he was a small child, but his fingers gripped Maglor's wounded shoulder, digging into the gunshot like he was trying to trace the full path of the bullet. Maglor screamed.

With the fire of pain came consciousness, and a dim awareness that he was moving, though he still lay on his back. And there were people, someone leaning over him and grumbling in antiquated Greek while something dug around in his shoulder. When Maglor tried to jerk away, fear rising like bile in his throat, someone else clamped hands down on his other shoulder, and other hands grasped his legs. "What the fuck are you doing to him back there?" Andromache's voice floated over them like a wisp of smoke, barely audible over a rattling noise and the grumbling and a rumble of tires on asphalt. It held no concern, just idle curiosity. Somehow the sound of it was comforting.

"We should have taken him back to the motel," said the one digging in his shoulder. Nicky, he thought? He could not quite focus his eyes. "There." He pulled something out of Maglor's shoulder, rounded and slick with his blood.

"We stayed in Calais too long as it is."

Nicky pressed a bandage tight against Maglor's shoulder, and peered at his face. "Can you hear me, Max?" he asked.

"Here." Joe was on his other side, and lifted up his head just enough so he could sip at a water bottle, the water tasting vaguely of plastic and more of it splashing down his chin and neck than going into his mouth. But it was cool and there was no salt. Maglor let his head fall back afterwords and closed his eyes. Everything still hurt horrendously, but he was neither strapped down and being hauled back to America, nor still bleeding out on a godforsaken spit of littered shoreline, and if Joe and Nicky and Andromache were there, then Quynh must also be, and so the fear ebbed away, leaving bone-deep weariness in its wake.

"That was an exceptionally stupid thing to do," Joe remarked after a few seconds, something like amusement and something like admiration in his voice.

Maglor forced his eyes open. "People swim the Channel all the time," he rasped. Joe threw his head back with laughter. On Maglor's other side Nicky huffed a quieter laugh. He heard voices ahead of them, and Joe repeated what he had said, and then Quynh squawked, "They do what?" And everyone around him was laughing. It was comforting, and Maglor did not try to resist the pull of sleep when it reared up to drag him down again.

The next time he woke it was to a hand on his good shoulder, and Joe's face hovering above him. "Can you get up?" he asked, as Maglor blinked at him stupidly. "You're gonna have to get into the hotel on your own feet; you're too tall to carry."

Maglor managed to sit up and also to not fall over again, though the van spun around him. Quynh was there, ready to steady him on the other side as they made their way carefully out of the back of the van. "This isn't your car," he said, words slurring together and his voice almost nonexistent.

"We got all your stuff before we ditched yours," said Nile, there suddenly as he was being lowered out of the van. She had a jacket in her hands, which was only just big enough to drape over Maglor's shoulders to hide the worst of the blood, as they shuffled their way out of the parking lot and to a room on the ground floor of a small bed and breakfast, past a front desk with no one at it, which he thought distantly was a little strange.

The room was small with two beds, each just wide enough for two people if they did not mind squeezing a bit. There was a lamp casting a soft warm glow over the room, and a door stood open that reveals a bathroom tiled in a hideous shade of pink that made Maglor think of blood on sea foam, which then made his stomach lurch in a way it hadn't since he last saw blood on sea foam, and he only just made it, with Joe's help, to the sink to be sick. It was all clear bile and seawater that came up, burning his throat as it went. He did not make it to a bed before passing out again.