Tales of Thanksgiving: A Drabble Collection by Dawn Felagund

Spent on Joy

For Jenni, the unlikely alternate-universe pairing of Fingon and Caranthir.

Warning: This is a slash story. Not graphic, but if you don't care for slash, please skip this one.

Spent on Joy

I. Tirion

I had the most unlikely ally in my cousin Carnistir, whom few seemed to like and fewer to understand. But we would meet at the city gates and he would warn me of things.

"Your father," he might say, "has just had tremendous row with my father. I suggest that you tidy your room."

Or: "Your mother is arranging supper with the girl with the big teeth, so you and Turukáno might want to go to Alqualondë for a week."

How he learned these things, I would never know. Carnistir was very good at sneaking and hiding, at melting into shadows and catching the faintest thread of conversation. Daily, I would descend to the gates and mill among the throng, where the meeting of two cousins would likely not be noticed, much less regarded as suspicious.

I approached, always, with the thought that he would not be there. With the muscles in my chest held tight as though to buoy my heart, which felt like it plunked heavy as stone next to my stomach when I failed to find his dark head among the crowd. I found myself wondering why his friendship meant so much.

To both of us, apparently.

II. Mithrim

We met at the intersection of Ours and Theirs. Too wearied to devise names, this was what we called the two lands that met at the tip of the lake, in sight of both camps.

It was not planned. I wandered, he wandered--there we were, between Ours and Theirs. Standing and facing each other as though the intervening centuries of discord had not existed. "Findekáno," he said without greeting, scraping his toe in the dirt, "Nelyo is gone."

In life, we take actions, my father often said. I imagined in that moment the actions that I might take. The strange thought came to catch my cousin's face in my hands and to kiss each of his eyes. I wondered at the feel of his eyelashes fluttering against my lips. Or the heat of his flushed cheeks against my palm.

For a moment, I thought hopefully, he might forget that Nelyo was gone.

But only for a moment. Then I would return to Ours and he would return to Theirs, and we would resume our private heartache, each staring at the imagined other across the water. This reconciliation--however brief--need never happen again.

Or maybe--there was another way?

III. Thargelion

When my father died, I rode forth from Hithlum. No one stopped me. They believed that I sought my brother and sister, long disappeared but suddenly desired at this time of terrible grief. Or perhaps solitude: my thoughts erased in a roar of wind and hoofbeats.

None would have believed that I sought the so-called Dark Son of Fëanor.

Yet there he was, loping towards me, dismounting before I had even stopped, and the childish words nearly formed on my lips: "What warnings do you bring today?"

But we'd long ago realized the futility of warnings here. His eyes spoke of them, and I felt a shiver of dread. His lips parted, and perhaps he would have spoken. Perhaps he would have warned me. Or perhaps he knew that I would seek my father's murderer, no matter the cost.

As he had done.

Or perhaps he knew that fate would be what it was, and he could not change it. Not with fiery words or bright swords.

He caught my face in his hands. He kissed my eyes. Then my mouth.

Or perhaps he believed-as I did-that this last time we met: It should be spent on joy.