Extinguished by Rocky41_7

Extinguished

The thing I always try to remember about Elves and death is how unnatural it is to them. For us, we expect to bury a parent. Sure, the time and method of their going can add additional trauma, but there is an expectation you will see your parents die. But when it's a child, or a younger sibling, or someone you had expected to outlive you, there's this sense of wrongness that makes the grief that much worse. I imagine for Elves, all deaths feel that way--that this was a mistake, this shouldn't have happened, this isn't fair, it wasn't supposed to be this way.

Also, Valinor's first murder! I'd bet many of them have never even seen a dead Elf before.

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            Nerdanel reached Formenos just after Fëanor, and cursed herself for not being faster. Maedhros had gone to Taniquetil, and Maglor and Caranthir had run to her, and she had known not to bother wasting time trying to get to the home of the Valar—Fëanor would not be there by the time she arrived. But she had hoped to beat him to Formenos.

            (“Finwë, dead?” she had breathed to her shaking sons. “Fuck.”)

            As she drew up to the front doors of house in Formenos, Fëanor’s howl rang through the open doors and she knew she had come too late. She raced down the tile entry hall to the base of the main stairway, where Fëanor was sunk on his knees, rocking back and forth, cradling the mutilated body of his father against his chest. Blood and black hair and viscera dripped through his fingers from the back of Finwë’s shattered skull, spattering and pooling on the tiles beneath them both.

            Nerdanel came to a dead halt, panting; her heart beat so loudly in her ears it almost drowned out Fëanor’s horrible wailing, like an animal on the spear. It was dark as pitch outside, not the gentle slide into evening they were accustomed to, but a jarring shift like blowing out a candle. An Elf, murdered, in Valinor! And they could hardly have picked a worse one, Nerdanel though with an acrid taste on her tongue. Míriel’s death had rippled out through Fëanor’s entire life and he had never, never gotten over his grief of it. His anguish over her loss had fueled a double portion of love for his father—the same one who was now growing cold in his arms.

            In the midst of his senseless keening came gurgling repetitions: Atya, Atya, Atya.

            She hesitated, holding her breath. Nerdanel knew him—she knew there was nothing she could say or do, nor anyone in Arda, nor Iluvatar himself, to soothe this wound. But at least in the past, she might have known Fëanor would appreciate the effort. Now she knew not even that. They had barely spoken since his exile, since her refusal to go with him, since their children’s choice to follow him. But at that moment, all their quarreling, all Fëanor’s secretive and paranoid and anti-social behavior of late fell away, and all she saw was her beloved, and he was in pain.

            “Fëanáro,” she said, her voice cracking in the nearly empty hall. “Fëanáro, come away from there,” she said more firmly, her hand twitching towards him. Fëanor lifted his head for the first time to look at her and that look she would remember until her death or the end of the world, whichever came last, for in the years after, she would know that at that moment Fëanor’s fate was sealed and everything that came after had been decided in that moment when he looked at her with his father’s blood smeared over his mouth, with eyes that burned like some fell fire unquenchable, with wild, wounded rage unbound from the tethers of reason.

(In the distance, the thunder of hooves—Finwë’s other children, doubtless coming now with the news of his death.)

“Fëanáro,” Nerdanel whispered, her fingers trembling. His grip on the corpse of her father-in-law tightened. In this face was only the warped reflection of the Elf who had been her partner, now twisted in the madness of grief and the whispering of Melkor; Fëanor, with all his bright light now turned to wrath and ruin; and it was only later she would know he had already been beyond her grasp at that moment; that there was no way for her to save him then, for he was already gone.

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Chapter End Notes

Feanor and Nerdanel break me. She knows everyone is about to see her husband lose it in the most spectacular fashion x_x

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