Family Portraits by arriviste

Family Portraits

Maedhros is so gaunt now. The harsh line of his cheek against the sky reminds you of a cliff-face that has fallen away in pieces, some levels of sediment holding together while layers above and below decay raggedly. Worn. Stark. You can remember his smile and the way it changed the shape of his face, even after Angband, but you cannot imagine that smile on this face anymore.

The boys are still so young. Their faces are still uncertain with childhood, soft flesh curving like fruit, concealing the bones beneath. You can’t see, yet, who they will be. Young children all look alike, similar in their unformed youth, but these children look more alike than most. They are like an image and its wavering reflection on the water, not a mirror held up to a mirror; the resemblance to each other is clear, but not confusing. You had twin brothers once, alike as mirrors, a closed circuit completing each other until it was broken.

The people who still follow you, who followed your father over the sea so long ago, they leave a little space around the four of you, room for privacy, which frames you as a family. They used to do that, before, when you fought with your brothers around the fire and built a hesitant settlement in wood beside the lake in Mithrim.

You can almost believe you are a family, some mornings, when Elros is still cross from sleep and Maedhros reaches out to ruffled his dark, downy hair with his left hand, when Elrond watches you as you take your harp upon your knee, wide-eyed. You were used to small dark-haired children clustering around you once. Aredhel and Argon, Fingon and Turgon, Caranthir and Curufin. Little Celebrimbor, a child without a shadow, the first of what you imagined would be a host of nephews. Elros and Elrond could be any of them, if you squint a little. You look for family in their faces, and you find it. They have Finwë’s dark hair, you think, your hair, and you will not remember the songs about Lúthien of Doriath and her legendary hair of shadow and sleep, floating on the air. Turgon’s solemn eyes, you think, and you do not linger on what these children's round eyes have seen and lost, or wonder whether they were so solemn before Sirion. Your stories about them start there.

You are not a family, but rather what is left of one layered over what is left of another. You plaster over the join every day. In the beginning, you say, and the stories you tell the boys about themselves start in the mudflats beyond Sirion as you ride away from it together. When they ask about their parents, you have no stories; you have no answers. You never met Eärendil. You think he must be dead. If he was alive, he would have come back for his sons.

Elrond and Elros don’t remember his face, and if his features are hiding under their round cheeks and small snubbed noses, you won’t recognise them when they surface. You touch their minds, gently, when they ask about him, but the images there are blurred, golden, dim. You think he must have been blond, like Idril. Turgon never forgave you, and he was stiff as stone in your arms at the Mereth Aderthad, but Idril was speaking to her Fëanorian kin again before she disappeared into the abyss of Gondolin like a cap going over a candle. By the time the cap lifted, the world outside had changed. The leaguer had fallen, and the Noldor had scattered. Doriath was no more, and Idril and her Aftercomer husband and half-mortal son went to live with its survivors. You were never going to be introduced to her child, even before you came visiting armed with flame and sword. You don't remember if you noticed when you arrived that the Havens of Sirion were all wood, white-washed and salt-licked, built for the present and not the future. You burned it them afterwards. You noticed then.

Their questions about their mother are harder. You didn’t know her, but you met her. You remember her long, pale face, her thin body, the eggshell-blue stains of sleeplessness under her eyes. What can you learn from someone in a brief handful of moments in a tower room overlooking the sea? You didn’t know then that you should be fixing her face in your mind for all time. You didn’t know that in years to come, in camps under the stars, her small sons would press close to you and want to know who she was, what you said, what she said. Why she fell. The most and the least you can tell them is what she looked like.

In your memory Elwing is always already framed by the window she will fall from. Her dark hair is already lifting in the air the way it did as she fell, but she hasn't fallen yet; your mind is working backwards, layering the last moment over the first. One hand is curled tightly around the jewel hanging in the hollow of her throat, and the other hand is curled into the wood of the window. You remember that. You don't remember the moment her grasp on the edge became a letting-go. You were too busy looking at the other hand, the one at her throat.

What you remember is the light streaming out between her fingers. You remember the shape of her finger-bones and the fan-like spread of the bones in her hand, their dark shadows cloaked in the radiant flesh between you and the light.

The light was all you saw, and all you see when you remember.

It was the light of yesterday, a forgotten world in the palm of her hand, all the sweetness of far away and long ago rolled up into a ball. Every Mingling you ever lived through, the daily miracle you took for granted; the endless days you never numbered. Yesterday, if you could only reach it. If only you could reach it. If only you could have it back again.

It is Amras lying in the corridor in his gore like one of his own kills, and then the blood flowing back into him like the tide turning; your brothers buried in their shallow rockfall graves outside Menegroth, brushing away the gravel and getting to their feet. You remember the dust collecting in Celegorm's yellow eyelashes as you covered his face, but now he's blinking it away. It's Caranthir watching the purple ribbons of his entrails curling back inside him, and Curufin with his hand over the hole over his heart, the blood ceasing to run through his fingers.

Amrod's red hair is tongues of flame rising around his head, but in the light it’s settling meekly back onto his shoulders. Father is brushing ash off his front from a day working too hard at the forge, not his own crumbling body. He's leaking fire from the hollows of his eyes and nose and mouth and ears, and then it’s only blood, and then it's gone, and the tide is turning in Alqualondë. You can hear it coming in, and the sound of seabirds, but there's no blood in the sand anymore, and the water is clean and clear. You might even recognise your hands when you next look at them.

Your hands are still stretching out to the light when Elwing falls. All you can hear is the sea. You don’t see the moment she lets go. Her mouth is open but she's not speaking any more. Her hair rises in the wind, light as ash.

You never met Lúthien of Doriath, so you don't know whether Elwing was like her, but you have one clear memory of Queen Nimloth; the moment your brother’s sword caught in her ribcage. You remember Celegorm looking shocked, as though he hadn't meant to do it. Nimloth looked shocked, too. You remember her blanched face when you watch Elwing her daughter falling away from you, taking your unwinding yesterdays with her. Their open mouths are the same shape.

Elrond lays his dark head on your knee and you take your hand from your harp to touch his cheek. His mouth is shut. He wants a story about his family. You never met them, but you tell him a story about a mother and father and two small sons in the morning of their youth, in a wooden tower by the sea. Elros and Elrond, Eärendil and Elwing. Their names fit them together, framed them as a family like a miniature painting on ivory. Across the fire, Elros’s eyes are round and serious. You touch his mind, light as a feather, and all you see is golden light.

Maedhros is looking at the fire. In the ruin of his face, you cannot see your family anymore.