Scorched by polutropos

Elros

Chapter contains a reference to an underage character (12) experiencing sexual bodily reactions. Puberty-typical stuff, but potentially uncomfortable to some readers.  

There is so much they do not know about Maglor and his brother — about the long and murky river that stretches behind them, back, back, back to some clear and luminous wellspring to which they can never return.

“It is better not to know,” Elros has always told his brother, when Elrond’s eyes light up with reckless wonder.

Elros has never been able to reconcile the grim bastion of Maedhros, the one who stalks the ramparts of Amon Ereb or passes them by in the corridors as one would dodge a cat scrounging for scraps, with the warrior, the hero of Maglor’s tales: the one who stood aside, the one who returned from the dead, the one who lifted up his heart.

Elrond did. Elrond drank up like sweet milk the paeans rolling off Maglor’s lips. Though they had never known a time of plenty, or perhaps because of this, his brother had a hunger for sweet things. Elrond would push his way through thickets of thorns to get at a single plump berry.

Cruelties coil on the tip of Elros’ tongue when he draws the confession from Elrond (it is not difficult to do, once he gathers the strength to confront him; they know each other too well). Cruelties he should perhaps have unleashed long ago, before Elrond’s infatuation toppled him into Maedhros’ crueller arms.

Still, he must hold them back until he has pried open the whole of Elrond’s story.

“How many times?” Elros asks.

Elrond is perched on the edge of the bed, head slumped towards his chest. His fingers curl around the sheets. “Four. Only four.”

Too many. Elros closes his eyes, a curtain over the fury his brother will surely see burning there. “And has he—” Elros swallows. It is one thing to think of Maedhros’ lips claiming Elrond’s, it is another to imagine his brother splayed open like some sordid offering to an indifferent god.

“Yes,” Elrond says. “Once. But, brother, he was careful. He did not hurt me.”

Elros’ throat clenches around the bolt of anger that rises from his chest. The feeling jumps to the backs of his eyes instead and he wishes not for the first time that it was not so hard to cry.

Love wins out; love propels him to sit beside his brother, to clutch both of Elrond’s hands in his (they are the same shape and size, but at this moment they feel so thin). He holds them as a man holds the lifeline towing his crewman from the unforgiving ocean.

Only when he feels Elrond’s spirit wince in pain does he loosen his grip. “I am relieved to hear it,” he says, and hopes his brother knows he means it. He brushes a strand of hair from Elrond’s forehead: a touch to be sure. “But you know there are other ways you might be hurt.”

“There are,” he agrees, and takes a shivering breath. Elros waits, and several times Elrond’s mouth opens and shuts as if to say more, but no confession follows. Finally Elrond collapses against his chest. “Would you stay with me tonight?” he asks.

Of course Elros does.

Elros blinks awake before the sun has turned the smoke-thick sky from ash to umber. Elrond is still asleep on the bed beside him. Watching his brother, a memory bunches in his gut, a disgusting knot of shame that is not his own.

— Lying sleepless, cold, on the hard ground, before Morgoth’s hordes emptied the stronghold of Amon Ereb to fight a more formidable foe. His back to Maedhros, asleep, or so he thought. But then the rustling of clothing, the whisper of a groan. Elros was twelve and as yet had little understanding of why his body so often ached for touch. He wept the first time he had woken to soiled sheets, grieving for the gaping space in his heart where his mother, his father ought to be. Perhaps, he had thought, it was some incongruity of his Mannish blood. If it were some human imperfection, he knew then by animal instinct that it was one he shared with Maedhros.

He deliberately slowed his breath in mimicry of sleep, held himself entirely still, and waited as Maedhros, that unknowable ghost, gave himself over to a base desire. —

Not until now had he dared touch the suspicion that had long groped at the edges of his thought: that the object of Maedhros’ unseemly lust lay prone on the ground beside him, as Elrond had lain before Elros then; as he does now. That Maedhros, twisted by torment, lusted for his own kin. His own brother.

Elros scrambles from the bed.

He cannot even name the true weight of this entanglement before the taut string of his anger is loosed. It has found its rightful mark.

Not Maedhros: Maedhros is naught but the fractured likeness of a man, and though he hates him, Elros cannot find it in himself to direct blame at so broken a thing.

Maglor is to blame. Maglor who failed to guard them from the monster Maedhros became; who gilded his brother with praise and fond looks and gentle words. Even his anger, when it rose, was sinuous and soft.

Elros turns on his heel, sharp and resolute, and with hands bunched tight at his sides he seeks the one who by long familiarity has eroded his resistance to naming father.