Poisoned Peace by eris_of_imladris

Chapter 2

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.