Havens by AdmirableMonster

Heroism

Pengolodh squeezes his eyes shut and tries to translate Rúmil’s Ainulindalë from written word into gestures.  He can’t stop a pained cry vibrating through his throat, and the poet—Dírhaval, the Man who gave Pengolodh his bed the night before and offered him food the morning after—lays a large hand gently on his uninjured shin.  He blinks eyes open, and it lets the tears slide down the inside of his nose.  His feet have been hurting for days, and it seems terribly unfair that it is the beginning of healing that is causing him the most pain.

Dírhaval looks up at him, pausing patiently.  Pengolodh shakes his head and gestures to him to go on.

“I can wait,” Dírhaval says, brushing his dark hair out of eyes as blue as Tuor’s.  “Elves are made of hardy stock.  It looks as if you trod in broken glass at some point but your feet healed around it.”

Pengolodh can believe it, though he has no memory of it.  The supposedly flawless memory of his people has escaped him, or there is something about the fall of Gondolin in specific that has broken it in him.  It infuriates him, sometimes—he is a witness, the last remnant of the great lorehouse of Gondolin in Beleriand—and he cannot trust his own recollections.

“I need to remove the glass and clean the injuries.  You could take ill.”

Elves don’t take ill, Pengolodh wants to say, but he’s not sure it’s true.  He has seen so many of the Firstborn die over the past months—years, maybe, he isn’t sure.  He is no healer; he doesn’t know what has killed them—injuries, poisons, simple shattered grief.  He thought, once, he would lie down himself and not rise again, but something stubborn inside him won’t give up like that.

“Just do it,” he says, his hands automatically echoing the words his lips are shaping.  Dírhaval squints at him, eyes going back and forth between his lips and his hands.  Pengolodh wants to be back among his own people, where he will be understood—Idril must be worried by now.  He is their history, after all.  He clutches at his own elbow, his nails digging in.

“No one is going to hurt you anymore,” Dírhaval says, and Pengolodh wonders if he misunderstood.  “But this is going to be painful, and I don’t want to make it worse.  Doing it slowly will make the pain less.”

“I do not care,” Pengolodh enunciates as clearly as he can.

Dírhaval snorts.  “Elvish heroes are rather foolish,” he says lightly, and Pengolodh’s ears twitch back in surprise.

“I am no hero,” he says stiffly.

“Do you not hail from Gondolin?” asks the Man, and Pengolodh wets his lips in a nervous gesture.  At his minute motion, Dírhaval looks a little embarrassed.  “So all the neighbors are saying—that it is the great heroes of Gondolin who arrived last night and caused the beacon to be lit.  I have told no one you are here, for I think they might want to gawk, and you’re tired and hurt.  I’ll take you to the keep later.  I—” here he pauses.  “I can take you now, if you prefer.  It was a little foolish of me to think of trying to heal you myself, I suppose.  You must have much better healers with your own people.”

Leave now?  Leave immediately this quiet little cottage where he woke in airy white sunshine, where two kind women offered him thick porridge sweetened with cream and honey—better fare than he has tasted since Gondolin, in truth—where no one needs him to witness their sorrow, write their grief, bear on his back the entire history of his people?  Pengolodh’s hands clench into shaking fists, and he shakes his head, ears flattening right to his head.

“Hush,” Dírhaval says, rubbing a hand across his knee.  “If you want to stay, you shall stay.  But then you will have to put up with my clumsiness.  I’ve healed many a horse of—” here a word that, interestingly, Pengolodh did not know, “—but little healing have I done of Men, and none of Elves.”

Pengolodh nods slowly, letting his fists unclench.  “Go slowly if you want,” he says, hesitating to voice a more complicated thought when he cannot be sure how well the Man lip-reads.  He gets a sparkle-eyed smile in response to that.

“Thank you,” Dírhaval says, and he turns his attention back to Pengolodh’s feet.