Incongruity by sallysavestheday

Incongruity

Read Incongruity

Anairë resents how much she misses him.

After all, he has not really been present for years -- more and more given to his work at court, to his reading and writing and interpretation of the law. To his driving need to make his own place in the world secure. What is between them has always felt secondary to what was between him and his father, what is between him and his brother: that tangle of choices and vows, all raw-edged and bitter where they were meant to bring joy.

In the roiling square, as Fëanor made his promises and cried his appeals, Fingolfin turned his head and looked for a moment as he had when she first saw him: lit from within, giddy with possibilities, following his elder brother into the darkness as into the guildhall of the Lambengolmor, so long ago. The bright, sharp lines of his profile struck at her, keen as that first time, and her breath caught, her heart suddenly craving and miserable where for so long she had been steady and calm.

Always that fierce gaze had been given to others. His cool touch had been hers, and his absentminded tenderness, but she had never known how to reach deep enough to claim his fire.

She had believed herself content to be a helpmeet, a gentle buffer against life’s blows. But the Darkening’s madness shook the faults between them, the gaps suddenly yawning, the spaces where meaning should have bound them now aching and wide. 

Let him go, then, Anairë had thought, in sudden grief and bitterness. He has never truly been mine.

And what more could she say when the news came from Alqualondë? When Eärwen stumbled into her rooms, shivering and sick, her mind a jumble of fire and water, scarlet livery under torchlight and then Fingolfin’s blue, blood in the streets, on the decks, on the faces of the fallen, the stain of Finwëan misery spreading slick and wet and dark across the stones?

They are none of mine, she had cried again, and meant it, gathering Eärwen up, holding her close and folding away marriage and motherhood and love. Let them go.

Let him go.

But the wire that binds her cares nothing for her fury. It cannot be dissolved or broken, not for all her hollow rage and desperate weeping when Finarfin comes home alone.

Anairë can feel Fingolfin’s determination, his tamped-down but simmering wrath, his bitter resolve. He bleeds into her thoughts as she sits in council, as she manages the household, as she bathes and eats and tries to sleep. He does not reach for her – her rage at his departure will not allow it – but he is ever-present, more connected in his absence than he had ever been when their days were full of one another’s movements and their nights were one shared dream.

His deep self is murmuring in the back of her mind: a voice that she has never truly heard.

The link draws fine and pale and still, then, as the Ice takes them – it quiets to a whisper. But despite herself, she listens.

And against her better judgment and her promises, she yearns.

*****

As the wind howls and the Ice creaks and the bitterness of their predicament makes itself ever clearer, Fingolfin regrets. But whether he rues more the leaving or the loving, he cannot be sure. Anairë has been twined through and around him so completely for so long that this sudden separation feels like a killing wound.

That she would not follow had never crossed his mind.

Always she has been his silent anchor, the calm voice soothing and easing when the world’s sharp edges cut too hard. If there has not been passion, there has been partnership – a truer tie, he had told himself, than his brother’s wild cleaving, his father’s dual bonds.

The still wall of her face when he turned to her, fearful yet almost eager, will never leave him. What drove her anger? When had their common purpose slipped away?

The loss of her beats under everything, the slim pulse of their lingering bond echoing as the great host passes under stars he cannot name. It is too late to turn, to choose again, but he clings to that pale thread, braids it into his heart, wears it under his skin and in the back of his mind as an artifact of what once was, what might have been.

The crown is hollow, in the end; it is no victory. But he knows his duty when he sees it. On the night they make him King he weeps for hours: for his father, for his brother, and for Anairë, whose name he whispers when he finally, wearily slides into his dreams.

Fingolfin remakes himself in Beleriand, both freed and forced to do so.

But still, in the quiet hours, in his small space of peace beneath the stars, it is to Anairë that he sings.

*****

Long silence shapes something of a softening – an easing of her memory that folds Fingolfin away with other things once loved and lost. The matters of daily life overtake her yearning: the delicate herding of their remaining people into a semblance of order, the careful building of a measured peace with Alqualondë. Circumstances draw her from the shadows to lead in restoration and repair.

Anairë goes days, then weeks, then years without tugging at the silent cord that stretches East. Eventually, if asked, she would say that she rarely thinks of Fingolfin at all.

Only when death strikes: the stab and gripe and howl of loss that breaks through her shell of peace at random. Argon while she is baking; Aredhel while she is in council. The bleak glances of sympathy and understanding from those who have known their own griefs are no comfort or consolation.

In those moments, the rage bubbles up again, all her hard-won balance lost. She feels her own wild depths roiling at everything Fingolfin has taken from her, at every possible future they will not share.

She seals those doors, walls off the memories of his slow smile over a child’s tired head, his lean hand in hers, the warm grace of him against her, dancing. Better the deep work, the long recovery, the slow crafting of a new self to walk steadily, sweetly alone beneath the moon.

*****

Fingolfin dies as she is poised at the top of the stairs, her arms full of flowers in a moment of joy.

It stuns her, catches her under her breastbone with a hook through her heart, the pain so fierce and insistent that she can do nothing but gasp and flail for the railing -- and, missing it, fall.

Who knew that the old wire still held her together, that her heart still called for him, that he mattered at all?

*****

The tales find her, of course, as the dead begin to Return. The man they sing of is a stranger to her in his passion, his fierce joy, his love for the wild lands and their peoples. But not in his despair. She remembers Fingolfin’s bleak face bent over his writing desk in what they had thought then were the worst of times: when Finwë withdrew to Formenos and the regent’s role felt like a fetter, a bone thrown to an accommodating dog.

The true crown had proved no gentler, or so it seems.

She grieves for him, then, at last. That in leaving he found no peace; that the following meant no healing; that the loneliness he had chosen lingered for so long.

*****

When the call comes from Mandos she moves with unhurried certainty, packing and preparing and setting his rooms to air. She will take no one with her on the journey – this is her pilgrimage, her burden to bear.

She is not yet sure what she will do, when she holds his hands in hers and hears his voice. She cannot imagine what either of them might say. 

But she wants to see that hawk’s face turning to the sky again, eager and alight. There is no road into the darkness, this time. Perhaps, together, they can make things right.

Her horse is waiting, dancing in the morning air.

Anairë steps over the threshold, choosing to go.