Who Told Me Time Would Ease Me by sabcatt

First Cut

There's a voice that sounds like God to me
Declaring, declaring, declaring that your body's really you
—Leonard Cohen, “Closing Time”

In Aman, he cuts his hair short only twice in all the Years of the Trees, vain creature that he is. Once when he loses a bet with Findaráto, and once when Curufinwë’s latest stroke of genius—some new polymer—turns out to be rather more sticky and prone to popping than his calculations had predicted. He yells at Curvo for it, ostensibly for experimenting in the family kitchen and really for rendering him ugly—how foolish he will think himself later!—and gets a stern lecture from their father in turn.

“It hurts now, but it will not hurt later,” Fëanáro says. “Your hair will grow back, but the memory of cruel words may last forever. Do not repay a temporary hurt with a permanent one.”
 

 
The third major haircut in his life is the second stand he takes against his father. It is not fair, he knows; Atar did not know. He must not have known. He is mourning too. But Maitimo was the only one of his family to argue against the burning of the ships, and so he is the only one who can mourn Ambarto—ai, my little brother!—publicly without declaring his folly to all and sundry, so he does.

He slices his hair off roughly above the shoulders, as was once common amongst the Eldar before they came to Aman and away from the sorrows of the Moringotto’s works (or so they thought), and pretends not to notice the pain in his father’s face at the sight of him.

(He is not so good that he could acknowledge it with anything other than fury and—though it burns him to know about himself—satisfaction, that he is repaying to his father at least a portion of the hurt Fëanáro, in his pride, has done to them all.)

The darkness when the Enemy’s forces attack this time is less than the last, but there’s still a moment—just a moment—where he’s young and foolish in Formenos again, Grandfather telling him to gather his brothers and go—he shakes his head and the newly-short braids hanging from his temples flash across his vision, and (thankfully) the moment is gone.

He fights. His brothers fight. For days—if days can be said to exist, with only stars wheeling overhead to light the battlefield—the stars, ever distant, reflecting on blades and pools of blood alike.

His father fights. He blazes—far off the front lines, there are fires all around him. Atar is burning, or maybe the world is—he doesn’t know. Atar is—Atar—

Atar is rasping great breaths inwards, desperate to get the last word in, to finish his latest speech. Maitimo missed the first part of this one. Maitimo wishes Atar couldn’t breathe because of some new fumes Curvo has cooked up in the kitchen with Tyelko’s encouragement. Maitimo is watching his father die. This is too much. He wishes they were all back home. Too much. Oh, Amillë, I am so sorry.

“Nelyo—Pityo—Telvo—my sons—I am sorry—do not mourn me overmuch. Only avenge me.”

I will not avenge you, Atar, not now, because you will not die, please, I cannot—I cannot—

“Swear to it. For me, and your grandfather—he deserves your vengeance as much or more than I do—do not let our losses be in vain. The Silmarils—remember our oath. Children—I am sorry to leave you so soon—Telufinwë, I am sorry. I love thee. My sons, I love you all. Do not—only—”

For all his anger against his father, it is hard to begrudge a final reassurance to a dying man.

(And this talk of oaths, in their father’s final words… Maitimo may not have been able to save Ambarto from the flames, nor to protect his father from them, but maybe—this time, if he speaks well enough, maybe—maybe this time he can save the rest of his brothers, as much as he still may.)

“Atar, I swear I will avenge thee, and thy father as well, though I should die in the attempt. I will uphold our oath, and I shall lead my brothers who remain, thy beloved sons, in the same.”

“And… do not…”

There is ragged fire dancing in Fëanáro’s eyes, a vision not yet of embers but neither of the conflagration they have all become used to. Maitimo grasps his father’s hand in both of his, pressing tight. It is warm. It is almost burning. He presses his lips to the back of his father’s hand, knows he will taste ash later. It is all the forgiveness he can offer, and a promise.

“I will not mourn thee more than thou deservest, Atar. I will not cut my hair for thee.”
 

 
Moringotto—he will not furnish his family’s enemy and his grandfather’s murderer with the titles he demands, he will not, no matter how they abuse him—doesn’t deign to have his hair cut. His creatures yank sections out, and doubtless the blades that catch at his skin also catch at his hair, but to cut it—even short enough to shame him—would be to acknowledge him as an Elda, a thinking creature capable of shame, and not just—a toy.

His hair grows slowly, in Angband. Where once it was down to his thighs, by the time he is rescued—rescued—taken away, the ragged tips only brush the ridges of his lowermost ribs. And then it is gone completely, and he thinks maybe the Enemy or his Lieutenant has decided that he is better as a disgraced king than a cast-off carcass after all, but whatever new pains are in store for him in his newest role do not come too quickly. He sleeps.

He wakes, and they are lying to him, but that is fine. He says as little as possible, dissembles as well as his scrambled mind allows him to when he can’t completely avoid answering a question, sleeps again. Findekáno is there, sometimes silent and sometimes vibrant, making demands of the—healers?—and murmuring reassurances, but of course he is not real. His right hand burns with a new pain, when he can feel it at all. Someone calls him Maitimo and he can’t—doesn’t hide the flinch well enough, stupid, stupid—but what is left to do? They have broken his body, scourged his mind, crushed his crown and his soldiers before him, hung him up to rot on that forsaken mountainside and still he has not died, still he has not died—

And now they have cut his hair. It is the smallest of things, he has learned, that make him realize they will always, always, always find new ways to break him.
 

 
He flees to the northeast as soon as he can stand and hold a sword. His brothers follow only grudgingly, making unconvincing excuses as to why there is always one or more of them at Himring, then unsubtly setting spies on him as the years pass and the worst thing he does to himself is keeping his hair cropped above the shoulders.

He lies when they ask why; he says he is mourning for their father, mourning for the Silmarils, for Grandfather, for Ambarto, and when they ask again he says he is mourning his lost self. And any of these could be true—he has no want of things to mourn, they have lost so much—but they are not the truth. He doesn’t know. The fall of his hair down his shoulders is only—it should be nothing but it is not nothing. It is maddening, it is unbearable, it does not strictly hurt but it is a distraction and a torment more potent than even the phantom aches of his missing hand. It does not send him back in his memory as other things do, but those provocations he learns to handle, and this, this, his hair remains the sole thing for which he finds no solution. It is with shameful relief that he cuts it, now, not the smoldering sorrow and anger that had prompted him the first time.

He knows that Findekáno loves—loved—his hair, and he always thinks: maybe, this time when I cut it off, he’ll see. Maybe he’ll realize. The thought hurts, exquisitely. He doesn’t know if it’s a healing sort of pain or not. (He hasn’t been able to tell, since Angband.) Maybe it’s good that it hurts, maybe it means he’s doing something right; maybe it just hurts.

The haircuts are choppy and rough. He hacks at his hair with shears held awkwardly in his one remaining hand, doesn’t care if it comes out uneven because who will comment on this, now? He is already ugly. Findekáno assured him, throughout his recovery, that the wise would know to look past his tattered ears and sunken cheekbone, the manifold scars visible even on his face alone, but he thinks that the truly wise should know them for what they are: a warning. He cannot even protect himself, so how can he protect anyone else? Better that the unprepared stay away from him, that they withdraw in instinctual disgust at his ruined body even if they fail to understand the true meaning of the story written on his skin.

Maitimo—Russandol—once-Maitimo, and now no more—is not strong enough, not good enough, to—well, a lot of things. But the worst thing he does is taking Findekáno’s love. He does not deserve it; he cannot return it. Still, he selfishly accepts it, selfishly clings to Findekáno in the few spare moments they manage to share, selfishly cherishes the letters he receives. In return, he sends off a few short lines of his own, which he knows Findekáno will feel obliged to respond to. If he were stronger, better, he would make a clean break of it, would stop writing. Findekáno might not understand, might hurt at first from the shock of it, but it would be better, in the end.

Instead, every few years he cuts his hair, encloses a short lock in a letter—never more than a few inches, he can never bring himself to let it grow much longer than that—, writes I have cut my hair again. Hopefully you will not mind overmuch because he can’t bring himself to write I am never going to be whole again and you should be mourning me, not writing to me, even I am mourning myself or I feel like a wild thing when my hair brushes my back, Finno, I am only a fragment of what I once was and there is nothing for you in me, there is nothing left in me for you or for me no matter how much we both wish there was or I don’t know why you can’t see that I am nothing, can’t you see, why can’t you see?