Thy Brothers' Keeper by sallysavestheday

Thy Brothers' Keeper

The wine in Alqualondë is too light, Arafinwë thinks, for the kind of drunkenness he would like to seek tonight. It is sweet and fine and sparkling, easily leading those who imbibe into music and merriment and play. It suits that Telerin lightheartedness that he loves so much -- enough to have made a life for himself in this city of strangers, among these singers, these gentle swans.

But tonight he craves the harsher spirits of his youth in the taverns of Tirion. He wants to drink until his head spins and his heart opens and his lips pour out his sorrow and despair into the equally-jaded ears of a bitter jewel-smith or master of lore. His lady wife, wise though she is, will not welcome this bleak mood nor understand it. Her smooth progress along the current of life gives her no context for the swells against which he struggles. It is the one gap between them, and tonight it yawns wide and dark and deep.

The sea wind tangles his hair as he drinks and frets on the veranda. His mother’s letter flaps accusingly on the table beside him, recounting his elder brothers’ latest angry tangles and pleading with him to come home and play the peacemaker, as he has ever done. Arafinwë ignores it, gulping at his wine and squinting at the lights on the opposite side of the great bay as they flash and flicker in the dark. He kicks off his sandals and props his heels on the balustrade, arcing his toes tipsily from side to side to make the distant flames appear and disappear.

Would that his family’s wrangling could be so easily obscured.

Indis writes that Fëanor and Fingolfin have been at each other’s throats in council and in the marketplace and in the guildhalls, each searching for words to diminish and cut the other as they quarrel over precedence and position and their father’s love. If his mother has her way, it will fall to Arafinwë, last and least of his father’s sons, to paper over the aching holes between them and tease and cajole them to behave.

It is the role he has always played, since first he understood the longing and the fear that plagued them both. Arafinwë the gentle, the consoling, the kind. The baby, distracting his elders from their snarling with his sweet face and his disappointed eyes.

Arafinwë snorts into his goblet. Neither of his brothers will take direction from him now, although they may still be persuaded or coaxed or wheedled, depending on their moods. But he is tired of being the buffer between them. Tirion’s workshops and courtyards are full of strain; its palace is silent except for the outbreaks of shouting when Finwë’s older sons are both in residence. Arafinwë understands his mother’s pain, but his own has driven him here, to the edge of the sea, and he feels no great obligation to return.

Alqualondë is where he feels safest and most secure. He loves these sandy shores, where his own children sing together in harmony, without fear that he will ever choose one of them above the others or turn any of them away. His quiet, thoughtful presence -- so undervalued in hot-blooded Tirion -- is an asset here, and he knows he is both welcomed and valued as Finwë’s ambassador. It means something, to have a role of his own, other than The Baby, or The Quiet One, or The One With the Vanyarin Hair. He is happy. He is settled. He has flown.

Nevertheless, he is troubled by his mother’s latest appeal. Her letter fairly steams with her frustration: with her own son, with Míriel’s, and with his father, whose craving for family harmony blinds him to the chaos that is blooming under his own elegant nose. Her pleas for Arafinwë’s intervention are more strongly phrased than is her custom, and a chill tickles up his spine that he cannot attribute to the sea breeze alone.

Things are more wrong than ever in Tirion, it seems.

Arafinwë wants nothing more than to stay away perpetually, to forge his own way and place in the world with an eye to freedom and cheer. He has no appetite for Noldorin power games; Tirion holds no charm for him now that he is grown. The sea air is more wholesome than the gales upon Túna; he has come to love the salt that coats his skin.

And his children thrive here: Findaráto a bright blossom in the weekly concerts at the Academy; Angaráto and Aikanáro flexible as eels from their long days in the rigging of their grandfather’s ships; Artanis wise and wondering, accumulating secrets like the layers of a pearl. And there is Eärwen, who glided into his life with her steady, tender beauty and raised him to a place of honor in her heart. Leaving Alqualondë would diminish her, he knows. Swans in Tirion are out of place, swimming round and round in the city’s parks and gardens with weary, reproachful eyes.

He tips the last of the bottle into his glass and wishes again for a stronger burn. All this quibbling is fruitless. It is not his fate to be the one who got away.

He will write his acquiescence to his mother in the morning. A short stay in Tirion will help her, and he cannot ever truly resist her call. Perhaps his father can be persuaded at last to manage his brothers and settle the question of the order of his heirs.

Arafinwë swallows the dregs of his unsatisfactory wine and barks a laugh. He raises his glass in a careless salute to Finwë’s virility. The sole benefit of being last in that long line of children is that he will never have to face the dreadful doom of being king.