Poisoned Peace by eris_of_imladris

It began with a broken promise.

Maglor should have known, by now, not to trust Men, even after all this time, but their promise of a war to end all wars was spoken from everyone on every street, from the children who played in the mud to their grandparents who muttered over the daily newspaper. Even in the little town where he settled in silence, the words made themselves known, slipping through his defenses until even he began to believe them.

It would be nice to see the end of war, he allowed himself to think. There had been too much war in his too-long life.

And yet, it took less than a Man’s lifetime for war to erupt again, fiercer and bolder, and he set off for the sea once again. Ever-changing yet constant, it shuffled the same sand across the beach even when most of the men who would watch it from their homes were an ocean away.

(His hands kept him safe, an irony he would never forget.)

That empty loss, that gaping hole where hope once sent out a fragile tendril, made him weak. Vulnerable to the appeal of the army recruiter who offered him another way to be useful, even when this war seemed to be drawing to a close.

It was only a matter of time until the next one, he believed. But the rumors of this war that still tapered down, tales of the atrocities that defied his knowledge that his own deeds were the worst that could be, swayed him to take a stand. Even he couldn’t sit by any longer, not when a mixture of relief for not holding a warm gun and terror of what his inaction had bred to take away all doubt.

It would work, the recruiter promised, under the deepest terms of secrecy. And it would work with no involvement in the fighting, nothing that could reopen old wounds. He’d looked at Maglor’s hands then, a quick glance, nothing more.

A way to make himself useful, to contribute to lasting peace stuck in Maglor’s mind. A way to ensure that war would never happen again, to provide such a tool that would make his country invulnerable. From a position like that, peace could come. And he could be a part of it, on the right side of history for once. Perhaps never lauded, for the work was too secret, but at least he would know in his heart that he had finally done the right thing.

He shook the man’s hand as firmly as he could, and returned to his little house with a new sense of purpose. Maybe all his waiting would come to something, after all. Maybe it was even time to trust again.

He knows to expect something big, but even through all his thousands of years of life, Maglor is completely unprepared for the blast.

It is a burst of light before him that he never knew could burn so bright, even when the newly created silmarils glowed in his father’s open hands, even when he saw the Trees up close in all of their glory. This, however, was not like those beacons of light, iridescent as they illuminated his world. This is the sort of light he has to look away from even as some brave souls look at it through camera lenses, the kind that blares even behind his closed eyelids.

“Success” floats around the workers as they chatter excitedly about their project come to life. He sits quietly, making his way to his designated shelter along with a small crowd. Words fly by, everything from military jargon he has yet to decode to exaltation of the test’s success.

It burns as he turns away. Burns like an explosion from the pits of Angamando, like the torture inflicted on his poor brother that stripped away everything to his core, and this is on such a large scale that he can hardly comprehend it. This is a test, but now that it worked, he has no doubt it will be used for real. Europe is no threat anymore, all anyone could say today was that Hitler is finally dead, but there is still another war front, still more people to get caught in the cross-fire.

He sinks down in a chair in the shelter beside a friend - or at least someone whose basic life details he knows - and picks at his nails. He needs to do something - hum a tune, think his way through some sort of problem - but he can’t get his mind to work straight. Every time he closes his eyes, he sees Maedhros stepping into the fire just a little out of reach, he feels his feet slapping against the ground even as his hands burned, and then he sees hundreds, thousands of people trying to save their loved ones from their fiery fate… He tries to concentrate on the man next to him instead, recalling something solid from this world rather than one long gone.

Glasses, short hair. Maglor’s been working alongside Clarence White for years. Unmarried, no children. His mother lives not too far away. He’d lost his father in one battle or another; it was getting easy to lose track of them all.

Clarence pushes his glasses up his face and starts chewing on rations. Looks like nothing with any sort of taste, not that Maglor thought he’d be able to taste anything anyway, but he doesn’t even make the attempt.

“Impressive, huh?” Clarence breaks the silence, and has to repeat himself before Maglor looks up.

“Dangerous,” Maglor replies solemnly, his voice as broken as his hands. Even as he speaks, he knows his word is useless, as pointless as it ever was. He helped to create this catastrophe, and now, he cannot stop it.

“Not for us,” Clarence says. “It’ll win us the war, just like we knew it would.”

It sounds like the first time he was told his family’s deeds would be the matter of song until the end of Arda. He’d assumed ballads for their heroism, and received funeral dirges for their victims.

“It’s a cruel way to win,” Maglor says.

“What’s gotten into you, Mike?” Clarence asks, looking at him strangely. (Mike hadn’t been the name of a failure yet, unlike all his other names. He supposes it’s this name’s turn now.) Maglor stays silent. “My father was at Pearl Harbor,” he continues. “Think he’d think it’s cruel?” A look of grief coupled with rage fills Clarence’s slim face.

Maglor knows that look, by Eru, he knows it all too well, but he has also found no way to counter it. Thousands of years have passed, and he is still helpless as he was in the ruins of Formenos, watching his father cradle Finwë’s bloody body as tenderly as he’d held each of Maglor’s little brothers, his hands roaming over the lifeless skin as if the pure desire to give his father life would make the fallen chest rise again. And the underlying rage, the shuffling of robes in a less-than-kind way, because he knew all too well that even the most obsessive love could never bring anyone back.

“This is not war… this bomb will not discriminate between the soldiers who shoot at us and their families at home,” Maglor says quietly. “There are people over there.”

“Not my people,” Clarence replies, and behind the skinny frames, Maglor could have sworn he sees the silmarils burn.

The morning dawns like any other for Maglor, but across the sea, thousands of people open their eyes to a brilliant light and never live to close them. Some people cheer for victory even as he thinks of the innocents, the ones he never used to think of in his own wars but now considers as he sits at his little kitchen table with his head in his hands.

Spread out across the smooth surface are a handful of rocks that shine with a pale green color. They were sand once, before the test changed them forever, bonded them together as a tangible symbol of loss.

Maglor has lost nothing today. He still sits in his little home, safe as he has ever been, indulging his curiosity about the strange rocks. Trinitite, some people call them, for the name of the test bomb, Trinity. It feels strange, almost like a thought his father would have, to name a bomb after a deity beloved by so many.

They aren’t pure green, like the emeralds of his youth. Instead, they are born of fire yet gleam with the color of the sea, ever-changing with an ethereal glow. He runs his fingers over the jagged edges, noting that they even burn a little, although no one could call them good. Some distant part of him wonders about the gem’s properties, if it would simply shatter upon striking it with a hammer, or if it is a true gemstone that could be molded and shaped and turned into something beautiful.

He’s never seen the creation of a gemstone from nothing, but he’s seen something built from destruction. His father destroyed everything when he made the silmarils. Their world, their peace, their home and family. Everything and everyone that he knew and loved was gone or irrevocably changed, all for the sake of three gems that glowed with a light beyond reckoning.

Maglor had to turn his head at this light too, and he already knew how it was going to end before it even truly began. He was helpless, for no one would believe his tale of the things he’d seen and done, and all he can do is wonder how no one else thought this was the worst way to end a war. This was even plainer than the silmarils that at least looked fair in the beginning. This bomb could be nothing but foul.

And yet, the bomb and its brother bring a surrender in eight days. One that still needs discussion, but it stops some deaths even as it creates so, so many others that are too easy for people here to dismiss.

The war will end soon. As for how, Maglor learns to be careful what he wishes for.