Borne Away Like Smoke by sallysavestheday

Borne Away Like Smoke

The dust clings in their hair; it cakes in their damp nostrils and where their eyelashes are wet from weeping. It leaves grey circles under their eyes and traces their misery over their wind-chapped cheeks. It finds its way into every fold and funnel of skin on their faces and throats. It curls under their fingernails and into the piercings of their ears, gritty under the metal, under the anachronistic finery of their former lives, all burnt away by Beleriand. It stings their tongues with the taste of rage, of despair.

Curufin refuses to bathe.

He cannot understand his brothers’ haste to the washtubs, their frantic scrubbing behind their ears and around their wrists. Maedhros rinses his mouth over and over, spitting and spitting his fury and horror, scraping his teeth and tongue until he gags himself and vomits, then turns to wash his mouth again. Celegorm disappears from the camp as soon as they arrive, chasing his anguish into the lake, submerging until his breath gives out and the fine dust disperses in the freezing waves. Maglor and Caranthir wash grimly, thoroughly, with multiple rinses, then join forces to bathe Amras, whose crying and shivering have not ceased.

Curufin leaves them to it with a curl of his lip. For him to cleanse himself would be a betrayal, an abandonment. A step toward a forgetting that he must not permit. He cannot bear to brush away the cherished fragments of his mirror self, the last, soft kisses of that fire. He does not know how to live without the burning echo of his heart, the greater pulse to which his own hot blood has always surged. He rubs the fine ash into his skin; he swallows it down.

He does not know how much time passes. The routines of watchfulness consume him utterly, his mind shuttered even as his skin itches and his angry lungs burn.

It is only when the sky opens and floods the camp with a bitter rain that he can finally stand under it, weeping, and let the last of his father be washed away.