Cruellest Month by Himring

Cruellest Month

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Spring surprised him, coming over the Narog with a brief shower of rain. The raindrops were warm on his face. He walked on in bright sunlight, out into the meadow, and found everything around him burgeoning with green growth and blossom. All through winter, spent comfortably in the caverns of Nargothrond—unlike as they were to the mines of Angband—he had been conscious how lack of natural light and confinement were conspiring to slow his recovery. He would be better, he kept promising himself, come spring. And now it was spring and he was not ready.

He turned. Finduilas was coming up behind him. She stooped to pick a primrose, adding to the slender bunch gathered for her father, before she joined him.

‘It is beautiful,’ he said.

She waited for him to continue, as patiently as she had done throughout those dark winter months.

‘But?’ she asked, finally.

He shrugged helplessly.

She nodded.

The only one who had recognized him, when he returned a stranger, the only one who recognized him, unfailingly, even when he could not recognize himself, during all the struggles since—how he could not help but lean too hard on that recognition! Even knowing that his bottomless need for support must inexorably throw things between them out of kilter.

Finduilas reached out and pressed his hand.

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Chapter End Notes

Prompt fill for both parts of the April challenge at the tolkienshortfanworks on Dreamwidth: "sudden change in the weather" (also "April shower") and for fixed length of 222 words.
The ficlet alludes to the beginning of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, from which the title is also taken.

Himring 'verse Gwindor has no surviving parent at this point (which goes against Christopher Tolkien's later editorial decisions in "Children of Hurin"). Gwindor's backstory in Himring 'verse is covered in most detail in Such Great Deeds (especially in the third chapter).

This short piece is about Gwindor's return from Finduilas's point of view: Fugitives at the Gate.

[These links go to AO3, but those fics are also posted to SWG.)