Finrod: 30-Day Character Study - Writings by cuarthol

Regrets: One

For Day 9. Weak Points. ...Write a scene in which their failings play a pivotal role.

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This ficlet explores the possibility that Finrod was, perhaps, kind of a shit boyfriend.

The silence was agony, but he knew it was not undeserved.  He had left her nothing but silence for almost five hundred years.  If she wanted him to sit in it for a few hours it was not too much to endure.

He had almost given up, almost risen and said he’d come again, if she would allow it, when she at last spoke.

“Did you ever regret it?  Even once?”  She did not look at him.

Finrod did hold some regrets, but he knew they were not the ones Amarië cared about.  

Did he regret leaving Valinor?  Choosing Exile?  Crossing Helcaraxë?  Did he regret knowing only his death would ever reunite them?  He considered giving her a kind lie - that he regretted every step that had carried him away from her - but there was some spark of pride still within that would not let him.

He would not say he regretted his choices, he would not call his path a mistake or wish that he had done other than he had.  To regret his choice to go into Exile would have been to say he thought everything he did there had been worthless; to say the lives he had become entwined with were somehow lesser bonds.

Worst of all, it would mean he had wished his death to have not happened, or to have been otherwise, or that all that had followed had not been as he had to believe it to be - by the design of Eru.

The only thing he could truly say he regretted was that he had not urged Aegnor to follow his heart.  That choice would haunt him until the end of Arda, forever separated from his brother who would not return.

“I wish you had been there with me,” he said at last.  It was the most he could offer.  It was all he could give her.  He did not wish he had stayed, though he could say he wished they had not been parted.

“I see.”

He valued too deeply all that he had encountered in that distant land.  He could never bring himself to truly regret his choice.  Even if it meant losing the one he loved so deeply.  But perhaps he ought to consider how deep his love could truly have been if even now he would choose all those other things over it.

Silence returned again.  

Though he had always considered himself an honest person, he wondered if it was himself he had lied to.  Perhaps he didn’t love her enough after all.