no sweeter innocence than our gentle sin by nycterisg

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no sweeter innocence than our gentle sin

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I tell him about the primrose field. “There was blood on the petals. Beautiful. I wept like a child.”

I look at him, shattered: the broken nose, the maimed ear, the missing hand, the undone grace. Despite the torment carved into his face, an unfamiliar, pale glow sublimates him, giving his form a tragic beauty. It’s the compromise this cursed land demands: no life without an initial, terrified gasp; no glory without sacrifice. Broken, Maitimo has never been more beautiful.

“I looked at them for a long time,” I say. “And I realized you look at me the same way: like a bloodstained primrose.”

My words lash at him, stinging his cheeks. “You misjudge me.”

“I didn’t say it bothers me,” I reply sharply, frustrated by the guilt clouding his gaze; as if I were a broken thing;ì. In his eyes, I want to be magnificent. I want to be wanted. “At least you look at me. In Alqualondë—” I pause, exhaling, squinting against memories. “Your blade was still hissing when you turned, seeking me. You found me there, unscathed and victorious. You looked at me as I look at primroses stained by the carnage of orcs.”, like the only pure and divine thing after the slaughter, filthy and profane.

“I was grateful to see you safe,” he blurts out, absolving himself of an accusation I never made. “Grateful to find you there,” he confesses at last, the words dragged out like a sin, cruelly extorted by my need.

I laugh with my teeth, letting rough irony carve out a painful whimper. “Do you often imagine calling for me, only for me not to come?”

“No, never. If I could contain my selfishness, I wouldn’t allow it anyway.”

“I wasn’t myself in Tirion,” I mutter, repeating the same weary litany. “I’ve told you before.”

“You had the grace of the Valar, the love of your family, the admiration of your people.”

“I have all that even east of the sea. This cursed, strange land isn’t so bad after all.” I decide to continue the litany—my solo, antiquated, and tedious— in the hope that he’ll grasp its meaning through sheer repetition. “I wasn’t myself in Tirion, Russ.”

“You were stubborn even then. For once, what do you mean?”

I cradle his absent limb in my hands. It was I who inflicted the most obvious wound, yet I came too late to carve myself upon his heart. My futile longing imagines my tongue suturing his scars, infiltrating his wounds, exorcising the demons nesting within. Perhaps, infecting it with a very different kind of poison.

“We went hunting with Makalaurë in the woods of Formenos. I broke away to chase a deer. Near Oromë’s domain, I stumbled upon one of his handmaids wading in a pond, naked to the waist. She bowed slightly, recognizing me as the king’s grandson, and kept her gaze on me.” I halt. Maitimo’s attention is solemn, puzzled. “I stared back at her - for a long time, indeed. I wasn't courteous at all.”

“I won’t condemn a boy’s curiosity.”

“Curiosity, yes. But not the kind you think.” I moisten my lips, watering words that would have earned me the stake. “At the time, I felt no curiosity about what might be beneath her skirts. It seemed natural that whatever was there would suit me.”

I don’t confess my loneliness—the indecent chatters of friends I had no right to join, the empty seat beside me. Maitimo’s own pursuits were more discreet, yet my eyes never missed the faint bite marks on his neck, the rumpled folds of his collar, the scratches at his shoulders. My gaze lingered in offended silence, finding fault in its impropriety. I ascribed the nausea that rose in me upon discovering his grace sullied to simple disgust rather than envy; to jealousy.

“But that wasn’t the case,” I continue, grasping for a bridge to span the abyss between us: the body of a woman we both know—but in different ways. “She was soft, round. I thought touching her would be impractical. My hands would have slipped on those curves. Her body seemed like jelly, and the emptiness between her legs a lonely place. Her sight left me… unsatisfied.”

The bridge collapses under the weight of my truth. Maitimo, beside me, is adrift.

“This is not the way of the Eldar.”

“It’s mine. Am I not one of the Eldar too?”, I retort. It’s a trivial fact, but perhaps the most significant: I challenge him to overturn it. I myself have long tried to do the same. Although in this Middle-earth, the discord of creation is contested in its singular beauty, my birthplace knows only blessed innocence. I was born uncontaminated, perfect, exactly as I should be. "Were we not taught by the same tutors? Did we not taste the same fruits? Do we not suffer the same wounds that three decades of tribulations have inflicted upon us? Although, I must admit, for different reasons."

To my irrefutable logic, he offers a smile. “Forgive my ignorance, if you can. I have never had any reason to doubt the genuineness of our customs. I was noble, beautiful, and blessed: I only took what was offered to me." His smile is both amused and deeply sad. "As dispossessed, mutilated, and damned, I will surely have more time to reflect on it. Perhaps I do not understand the repulsion you speak of, but I know your heart more deeply than I know our laws, and it is easier for me to believe in its goodness.”

He grants me absolution I never dared ask for. It rescues me from my isolation. I might laugh, if not for the gravity in his gaze.

“Why did you keep it from me?”

“Why—why?”

“Have I ever given you reason to fear me?”

My raised eyebrow is a low blow. The eight-pointed star on his chest marks his loyalty, but I don’t press further. “It has nothing to do with you. I’ve never spoken of it to anyone—don’t you see? My very existence was outlawed by the decrees of the Valar. But here, we make our own rules.”

“Why did you keep it from me?”

I’m moved by the way he secures a place of regard in my life, by the line he traces between us and everything else. I delude myself into thinking I can do the same, soaring bright and precious among the throng of brothers and oaths that equally claim him.

“Because it’s aberrant, this craving of mine, for someone of my kind, both in body”—I falter, teetering on the edge—“and in blood.”

As he exhales, I see our shared moments reshaped in the light of my grotesque longing: the nights in his bed, the glances, the embraces—even the one that saved him from his fate. I want to shield the innocence of those memories.

“I love you.”, and that's all it takes for me to redeem them all. It’s true: I desire him absolutely—in ways my innocence can only articulate with a single imperative: Take me. My love is much more complex than that. I live, uncorrupted, despite the hemorrhage of innocence that three decades have inflicted on me, solely because of my love. A field of blood-stained primroses still manages to move me; I look at Maitimo—broken and defeated, renegade and mutilated—with more tender adoration than my body craves him.

It is not pleasure.

“No.”

It is pain.

“Yes,” I insist. “What do you know of my heart?”

“I know it to be troubled and burdened,” he says, rubbing his eyes, erasing me from his thoughts. When he opens them again, his gaze is elsewhere—on a map that will take him where his devotion lies: away from me.

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Chapter End Notes

I thought I'd say hello here by posting an old work :) Hello! I've just joined the community and excited to be part of it.  

The title of this story comes from Hozier's Take me to Church.