[closed]: dark have been my dreams of late

[fallenlomion]

Maeglin flees the room where a girl is cowering away from him, terrified. He can't decide if he feels numb or worse, can't decide where to go or what he should do.

He does what he always did in Gondolin when his own thoughts were frightening him, or when he was miserable and lonely, or needed to overcome some unnameable fear. There are no towers

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[arid_white_lady]

Mothers have instincts - this one's are very strong, and all the alarm bells are ringing in her mind. She left the girls with her husband, didn't bother to give him a lengthy explanation, and went throughout the Mansion, looking for her son systematically.

When she sees him, her heart clenches.

"Lomion?"

[fallenlomion]

"Mother," he says, quietly, still looking out and down. There's something strange in his voice, perhaps, a note of strange distance and flatness, like he's not quite speaking to her but reciting lines because he feels as though he should.

Has everyone just been lying to him again? More of the false promises of how it will be better and there are others - platitudes, if not lies.

His mother is here, though. Doesn't that make everything all right?

Why should it? Her life is not for him anymore.

[arid_white_lady]

"Lomion," she moves, to come closer to him, just one careful step. "What are you doing, love?"

The worry is making her voice more pitchy - she's ignoring the fact that they're out, ignoring the risks to her own safety.

Her boy - she can't let anything happen to her boy. That's all she can think about, right now.

[fallenlomion]

"Doing?" He sounds as though the question is a strange one. "Little enough." He sways a little, barely, against the windowsill. "Thinking. Perhaps."

She's seen some of his moods before, we don't doubt, but this one is uncommonly black. The last gate is mine, he remembers saying, without feeling. It has no weakness.

And the answer, everything has a weakness. He shivers.

[arid_white_lady]

Slowly, she comes to sit next to him, then. She doesn't touch her son just yet, but her body might give already a comforting heat - there is some closeness involved, after all.

"Would you think aloud with me, love?" Her voice is still a touch pitchy - but she realizes she needs to be calm in order to protect her son from himself.

[fallenlomion]

He half turns his head, to look at her out of the corner of his eyes, and it's probably one of very few times he's ever said this to her, and probably never quite so evenly. "No," he says softly. "Thank you, mother. But I would sooner not."

[arid_white_lady]

She remains sitting with him, then. "Then do not, but allow me to sit with you, at least." She sighs quietly. "And to hold you. I miss your warmth."

[fallenlomion]

He sighs, a little, as well, and hesitates, almost. But doesn't move away, at any rate. Though his next words may be somewhat less than heartening.

"You are ashamed of me," he says, quietly, and if it should be a question somehow it is not.

(What warmth? He almost thinks of asking. I have none.)

[arid_white_lady]

She can't deny it. "And yet I understand and love you all the same. You are my son, and nothing can change that, Lomion. Nothing."

She looks down into the depths ahead. "I should like to think that you can still make me proud."

[fallenlomion]

As always, they seem to suck at him, almost hungrily. He dares them to do their worst. The depths, that is.

"And if you are wrong?" Still calmly, almost strangely so. He wasn't really expecting any other answer, though.

Love. What should that mean? He loved Idril, for what it mattered.

[arid_white_lady]

"Then I will love you all the same," she says softly. "I don't know any other way."

She died for him - she cannot back down from that - when she took the javelin, the dart, whatever it was, she sealed her affections for her son.

"Please -- Lomion -- look at me."

[fallenlomion]

But you died. He knows it's irrational, but all the same...it lingers.

He turns his head slowly, to look at her in silence. His eyes are so dark, almost reflective, and empty of expression.

[arid_white_lady]

Her own eyes are just -- full of worry, and love, and generally very motherly. She opens her arms. "Come?"

[fallenlomion]

For a moment, he almost just accepts it without question, but something - it's not her embrace he wants. Or it is, but suddenly it's not enough. And the longing is too much, too intense.

"I can't do this," he says.

[arid_white_lady]

She reaches to touch his hair. "-- but you can," she says. "And you will. You are strong, you are my son. Look at me."

Her eyes are welling up with tears.

[fallenlomion]

And it's such a long way to fall.

"I can't," he says again, "not when it's just like - being strangled, and there's nothing I can do-" He starts shaking a little, minutely.