(no subject)
Formenos was silent -- most of those who resided in its halls gone to market for the last of the fresh Autumn fruits and meats. That silence was broken, though, when the main doors were thrown open with a sharp crash as the dark-haired Elf stormed in. His black hair was plaited with gold threads, his grey eyes flashing unhappily, and he stomped through, his eyes seeking out the only one who still had answers for him.
"Maglor!" he bellowed when came to the centre of the keep, his voice echoing through that stillness. "I know you are here! Uncle told me you were!"
Maglor hadn't gone with the others, of course; he was in hiding, not yet sure if he wanted to reacquaint himself with the rest of Aman yet. He'd return to that tavern with his mother; and eventually, he'd find himself back in the roadside diner, and the woman behind the counter would call the cops because he'd been raving at the door to the gents'.
He didn't trust the world yet.
So, hearing himself hailed like that, he carefully stuck his head out from the window of the room where he'd been sitting and working on a transscription of some Beatles songs for elven instruments. And yes, the voice was still familiar for a reason - there was Fingon, and he would probably want to ask questions the answers to which were part of the reason Maglor had avoided Aman so far.
"Up here, Fingon," he called, leaning from the window.
Fingon was up to that room within moments, striding toward Maglor with purpose.
"Where have you been?" he demanded. "Thousands of years and you never showed up. Why now?"
Maglor stood. "I was not exactly welcome here, was I?" he said. "Especially as I didn't do them the favour of dying and returning to the Halls of Mandos the usual way. But now the Lord Mandos owes favours to my mother, and that brought me back to her, and finally, here. But I am not staying."
He looked at Fingon, feeling something close to displacement, or rather, a mismatching of concepts. He had not been ready, Maglor realised, to return and face the past.
"You had to know that at the end of the Third Age, all the Elves returned. You could have then!" Fingon was angry -- had been for centuries, and it was Maglor he felt he could vent that anger at.
"But I was the only one left still under the curse," Maglor said. "I got my own punishment myself, instead, by spending millennia in loneliness, among mortals who must not know who I was. And I am not really back now, either; I will leave again when my mother sees fit."
His eyes narrowed. "How is it you live and he does not?"
Which was the root of his anger.
Maglor had feared that question ever since his brothers had told him that Fingon was alive again, and sometimes came here. "I never died," he merely said. He put down his pen, and came a bit closer to Fingon. "The Lord Mandos saw fit to release you, and not him - but he never even got me in the first place."
"Why? How could you abandon him! Eonwë told us you both stole the Silmarils, took them and ran. And you left him! How could you?" There was a note of pleading in his voice, a frantic gleam in his eyes. How he missed Russandol.
"I didn't leave him, we split up. Each of us took a Silmaril, but once we had achieved what we had sworn to do, there was nothing we could do with the spoils. I threw mine deep into the sea - I had sworn to get them back, but nothing was mentioned in the oath about what we were supposed to do with them afterwards. Russandol threw away his life along with the Silmaril; but you will have heard about that..."
Fingon glared. "Yes, I know of it. Why did you leave him at all? You could have kept him from that... kept him with you... then he would be here beside you!" Beside me!
"I didn't want to steal the jewels - he did! I went along with him; but I was heartily sick of all that war and suffering; was that never to stop? My oath had been fulfilled, and to be quite honest, there was no point in sticking to my brother any longer. No oath that bound us together any more. It was done. Finished. So went our separate ways," Maglor said.
"Was it only an oath that bound you to your brother?" he hissed. "No love? No concern? No need for companionship?"
"He was my brother, Fingon," Maglor said. "You don't cling to them all the time. You're glad when you don't see them all the time, because they get on your nerves after a while. Especially after half a yen or so living in the wild, never out of each other's company. Especially after he'd just got me to kill again, for a last time, to take the Silmarils from Eonwe's camp. I thought that perhaps after another yen or so, I'd seek him out again, but for the time being, I was a bit fed up with Russandol. See, you'd never made me swear an oath to keep your lover safe, did you?"
Fingon blanched. "We were so obvious?"
Ahh, so that had got him after all. "To all that knew you two a bit better. And the grooms that took your horses when you returned from your rides, and the maids that laundered your sheets... At least we brothers knew, and our mother probably knew as well. I realise that you must miss him, painfully. Not even when bargaining with my mother, though, did the Lord Mandos agree to release more of us from the Halls, so I fear whatever I might say to him now won't bring Russandol back, either. So, I didn't look after him back when, and can't get him free now - want to hit me now? Nobody hit me yet since I returned here."
He clenched his fist, sorely tempted, but he didn't strike. "What good would it do?" he sighed, the anger slowly replaced by that all-consuming sorrow he had been fighting for so long now. "Striking you would not bring him back, either. He is so near! So close! I can still feel him as a part of me -- but not. I often wonder if that is part of my own punishment; I know he is there, I feel him near, and yet, I cannot touch him, I cannot speak to him. It is torture."
Fingon had, of course, never spoken that openly before about these things, Maglor mused; he had known about his brother and their cousin, but not that their connection was that close, like that of 'properly wed' elves. What was 'properly wed' anyway? Maglor had met many mortals over the years that had made their own definition for that, and Milliways had expaned his perspective even more. "It is not right that you should be made to suffer for what we did," he said slowly. "But then, that was always what happened as a result of the oath and the curse - those that should not would suffer, those that were guilty went free."
The despontant Elf sat down heavily on the nearest surface. "We swore to never wed another," he confessed quietly. "It is so lonely without him." He looked up at Maglor. "Did he truly betray us at that Nirnaeth Arnoediad? That is something I have been unable to discover..."
"I have never been to the Halls of Mandos, so I do't know if the dead can speak to each other there, or whether you retain memories of the place when you are alive again," Maglor said slowly, by way of saying he realised that he might be asked for a second point of view here. "But as for the Nirnaeth Arnoediad, there is no doubt what happened. The men that had come with Ulfang betrayed us, and turned on us the moment the host of Angband had come between your forces and ours, and we made to help you. We barely made it out alive from that trap; and when we had fought free, it was too late. Russandol lost heart then, and was never quite the same again; he didn't care any more how cruel his deeds in the name of our oath turned. And yes, of course - it is not in the custom of the Eldar to wed another, as the one you're already wed to will, sooner or later, return from the Halls."
Relief rushed through Fingon. "He did not betray me." His head fell forward into his hands and he sighed deeply. "Someday. I keep telling myself that. Someday, he will return. Someday, we will be as we were before Ungoliant. Someday."
"You will be; a short time before the world is made anew," Maglor said, saddened. He'd covered all that time on foot, as it were, out in Middle-Earth among men, year after slow, unchanging year; Fingon had gone through the same years the elvish way, but still missing and yearning and remembering, not much different from what Maglor had lived through.
He looked out the window now, avoiding Maglor's gaze. "Aye. Maybe then."