Happy Birthday, Arandil!
Happy Birthday, arandil13!
I would sing to you, but you don't want to hear the off-key warbling that I call "singing." No Maglor, am I ;) So I have written you a story instead.
I had in mind a bit of forge-smut. After all, nothing says "Happy Birthday" like forge-smut, at least to a Fëanatic. So I got my Fëanor imaginary friend muse and my Nerdanel imaginary friend muse and put them in the forge together and....
Nothing.
It's kind of like mating great pandas, apparently. You can put them together with all the right moods but that doesn't mean that they're going to do anything. They kind of giggled together. Fëanor made some pretty bracelets, all of which he gave to Nerdanel (much to my dismay, as it was my birthday too, and the bastard owes me), but no forge-smut. Damn.
So I changed the environment a bit and got...something. It seems my imaginary friends muses don't like mindless stuff, even if it's smut. They want to do everything with a purpose. Pretentious gits.
But there are naughty bits in it. So if you are underaged (I am obviously not talking to Arandil here but to others who might stumble upon this) or bothered by this sort of thing, please stop reading now.
The idea of Fëanor's relationship with the Valar as compared to Nerdanel's and the marital conflicts it must have caused has always fascinated me. I deal with it a lot (later) in AMC. Well, it seems they were determined to deal with it here too.
As always, comments and suggestions are welcome. This is very rough, as a week ago, it was not even written yet. Such is the nature of birthday stories. Happy reading!
Blasphemy
I always knew Fëanaro’s feelings towards the Valar. Even when we were very young-little more than children-and we were both selected to study under Aulë, there was something about the way that Fëanaro would speak with our master, something that differed him from an ordinary Elf, someone like me, brought up to unquestionably revere the Valar. It was in his eyes, in his tone of voice: Aulë was less a master and more an equal. Even then, the boy who would soon be my husband knew his gifts, and he was proud.
Once, working late, we encountered a statue that our master had done of the Lady Yavanna. Fëanaro carelessly pulled away the shroud covering it, and he approached it unabashedly-despite the statue’s nakedness-to study it closer. It was cast from bronze and was beautiful. Yavanna’s hair tumbled recklessly down her back, and woven into it were flowers, so delicately made that I reached out to touch them and gasped to find them made of cold metal, not the warm slips of silk that I expected.
Fëanaro, though, did not see the flowers and the hair but traced his fingers along her face, his brow rumpled in concentration. “It is flawed,” he said at last. “The angle of the cheek is wrong; it is too rounded.”
I gasped. “It is our master’s work!” I chided.
His bright eyes turned to mine. His face remained expressionless, his voice blunt and factual. “It is still flawed,” he said.
~oOo~
Not long after, we were married, and I forgot about the statue. No longer were we students of Aulë, and life was much busier. I had a young son to care for, and Fëanaro was building a house for us outside of Tirion. We were living in his father’s palace, and so there were images to uphold and proper behaviors to observe: No longer could I run about, barefoot and in a dusty apron. I had to put on a dress everyday and shoes and make sure that Maitimo was dressed and his hair combed neatly, and Fëanaro and I had to be mindful of the exuberance of our passions late at night. Under these new expectations, it was easy to forget the twinge of foreboding I’d felt that day, in our master’s forge, and become lost in the bright, rushed life as the wife of the High Prince.
Fëanaro was often gone in those days, to the house, to supervise the builders. After all, the house was of his design, and he wished to see it built correctly. But, some days, I would awaken to the sound of hammerfalls coming from the palace workshop and-following the sound that has beckoned me since birth-would find my husband busy at task and oblivious to all else around him. But, when I arrived, he always tossed a shroud across that on which he worked.
He would greet me with kisses and caresses, closing my eyes with gentle fingers to keep me from looking over his shoulder at that which rested beneath the dusty shroud.
Newly married, our passions still ablaze, it was easy to become distracted by Fëanaro, and many blissful mornings we had in his workshop, with its heavy locks on the door.
The locks bothered me, but when I mentioned them to Fëanaro, he smiled and kissed me. “They are not there for the work I do with metal and stone,” he said, “but to keep our curious son from learning too soon of his origins,” and the silky heat of his lips-on my mouth, my throat, tracing the ridge of my collarbone-distracted me again. How easy it was to forget!
Sometimes, walking by Fëanaro’s workshop on the way to a meal or to look over a new gown with my stepmother-in-law or to retrieve Maitimo from playing with his young half-uncle, I would try the door. But it was always locked.
Maitimo would sometimes rush ahead of me in the hall and try the door, knowing that it was the place that compelled his father and took him from us, his family. “Atar?” he would say, tears glazing his bright eyes, as the knob rattled fruitlessly in his hands, and I would fold his small hands into mine and lead him away. “Atar is very busy today,” I would say, lifting him into my arms, and he would weep silently on my shoulder.
More and more often, I would awaken to the sound of hammers on steel and stone, and I would go to Fëanaro’s workshop and find it locked against me.
No longer did we share bliss in the mornings, bathed by Laurelin’s gentle light warming our naked skin and making Fëanaro’s dark hair gleam as though gilded with gold. Now, I sat through interminable breakfasts with my stepmother-in-law-lonely, cold, and forgotten-while Fëanaro broke rocks with hammers in his workshop.
I had always known that my husband’s love for me was shared with his craft. He told me once that he’d never imagined being married because he could not imagine feeling such love for something flawed and beyond his powers to perfect as he did for the works of his hands. I was not a stone, subject to the will of a chisel in his hands, or steel, able to be bent or remade by the relentless application of heat. “Willingly, I would subject no one my standards for the life of Arda,” he’d said.
But even Fëanaro, with his ironclad will and ambition, possessed a heart that cared little for the reasoning of his mind, and love grew between us.
When Aulë was away, on the late nights when we frantically worked to finish projects imminently due, I would come up behind him; I would put my arms around his waist and kiss his back, between his shoulder blades. I would move my lips to the back of his neck, under his hair, and slide my hands from his waist to his thighs, while his hands fell away from whatever it was that occupied his mind and, triumphantly, my fingers would move to explore the growing tumescence beneath his work breeches, and he whirled to claim me with his arms and mouth.
We ruined many projects in this way, leaving the compounds that were part of his gemcraft boiling for too long-made inert by our inattention-while Fëanaro pressed me to the wall, frantic in his passion, gasping, “Marry me, Nerdanel. I can bear to wait no longer.”
His hands would try to push my clothes from me, tearing many of my tunics in his haste, but I fought his hands away-clasping them in mine, a bond I knew he could not bear to break-under the pretense that for me to disrobe would present unfair temptation to wed, and I wished for us to wait. He would grow calm then, and I’d imagined that I’d tamed him, as a bird upon my finger, and I rewarded him by pleasuring him in other ways, until his passions were momentarily sated, and he’d forgotten about marriage and bonding and was content to hold me and love me until the sky was gilded by morning.
I said that I wished to wait. I did not. I wished to wed him whenever I saw him, whenever the realization came to me that I-the homely daughter of a blacksmith-had managed to capture this beautiful creature and make him love me. I wanted to wed him before he forgot me in favor of his steel and stone.
But in the moments of passion between us, a different unease touched my heart, and always, my hands sought to gather the clothing he opened, closing it against my naked skin. “Not now. Not now. I am not ready. I wish to wait. Please? I am not ready.”
But really: I am not beautiful enough for you.
~oOo~
One day, I was invited to afternoon tea with my stepmother-in-law, and with Fëanaro at work in his workshop and Maitimo just down for a nap, out of boredom, I accepted. I tamed and twisted my hair into suitable order and put on one of my good gowns. I tucked my feet into shoes that pinched and dabbed powder onto my face to hide the perpetual flush in my cheeks beneath cool pallor.
Downstairs, across the palace, came the sound of metal against metal, of hammer and chisel. My hands ached to hold the tools of my craft once more. I spread lotion on them, to diminish the calluses of which I was once so proud. My spirit ached to hold my husband in love, to take him from the ruthless complaint of lifeless metal forced to bend to his will, to become distracted as I once had. I closed my eyes against the tears that threatened to cut through the carefully applied powder on my face.
I flounced from the room and concentrated on the graceless sound of my good shoes against the mahogany floors of the hallway so that I didn’t have to hear the hammers.
Indis had asked me to come to the east rose garden, and with a cold pinch of dread, I realized that I could reach my destination by passing my husband’s workshop. But I would not! Because to do so, to ruminate upon the dark, steel locks on his door, I would admit to being hurt. And I refused to be hurt by something as silly as his desire to work at his trade undisturbed. This was a trait of the women he’d rejected in order to marry me. I would not ask the last time he had been to inspect the progress being made on our house or the last time that he had played a game with Maitimo before supper. I would not try to recall the last time I had felt Laurelin’s light on my skin as he made love to me, outside his husbandly duty of the nighttime hours, when he tried to conceive our second child.
I determined that I would walk past the hallway that led to his workshop without taking it as my route, even though it meant taking a circuitous path to the garden. I would look in on the orchids my stepmother-in-law had given me to grow in the conservatory. I had been absorbed for three days by work on a statue, stopping only to give Maitimo meals when he whined, and I had forgotten to water them for the duration of it, and last I checked, they were dying, but I held out hope that my hands are not good only for cold, dead stone but might also preserve life and beauty not of my devising.
As I passed the hallway to my husband’s workshop, I saw a messenger stop in front of the door. Quickly, I scurried backward, out of sight behind the corner, watching the messenger’s reflection in the glass covering a painting opposite me. He was young, and shifted from foot to foot before raising his fist to delicately knock on the door. Fëanaro answered. I watched him, reflected in the painting. I mourned for his rumpled hair, made so by distraction by his work and a tendency to rake his fingers through it when frustrated. I used to rake my fingers through it too, as his mouth left a hot trail of kisses down my body. I used to straighten it before I left, conscious of the scandal that our nontraditional couplings might cause, while he wound his arms around my neck and pressed his open mouth to mine and begged me not to leave. And, most times, I did not.
I watched as the messenger spoke to him, while his bright eyes darted distractedly around the hallway. His fingers curled and uncurled against the doorframe, bereft without hammer or chisel to occupy them. Straining, I could barely hear their words. “Your father wishes you to-” I heard the messenger say, and then, Fëanaro’s bright, loud voice: “Of course, then, I will.”
I watched as he closed the workshop door behind him and followed the messenger down the hallway.
When they had receded from sight, I stepped back into the hallway. I had heard only one click, of the door shutting. No locks. His workshop was unbarred. Even as my mind screamed not to-not to violate my husband’s trust-my angry, hurting heart urged my legs forward, stepping lightly now with my absurd gown rustling around me, until my hand closed on the knob and twisted, and the door opened.
And I stepped inside.
~oOo~
It had not taken long for Fëanaro’s reputation to reach the ears of the important people in Aman. After all, he was the son of the King and Aulë had named him the greatest craftsman to walk among the Eldar. We had not been long finished our apprenticeships before the commissions began to pour in, mostly from nobles wishing for statues or paintings of the Valar.
Although his fancy was for gemcraft, I know that Fëanaro had been proud of the sudden demand for his work. He had worked through day and night to finish his commissions, and how I’d loved interrupting him, his imperfect betrothed taking his attention away from the perfect form of Varda painting the sky with stars, each captured with such skill that they glowed as tiny flames upon the canvas.
When he’d come to my father’s forge and begged me to escape with him, he’d left behind a trove of unfinished works. “I am free no longer!” he’d cried to me, and alarmed by the agony twisting in the fire of his eyes, I’d dropped my hammer and followed him without question, and we had been married that night, with only Eru as witness to our vows.
After that, he’d made no more statues of the Valar. I’d taken his unfinished commissions and completed them myself, and my own reputation as a skilled sculptor grew as a result. I’d asked him why he no longer painted and sculpted the Valar, and he’d laughed and answered, “When ‘perfection’ no longer pleases you, what is left but to seek it anew?” He’d placed locks on the door to his workshop, and slowly, he’d locked them more and more against me.
~oOo~
But not now.
Now I stood inside his workshop, looking around at tables so cluttered with partially finished paintings and sculptures and scraps of parchment with charcoal sketches upon them. I could see why he locked his door against me now-because there was no way that he could hide all of this.
I stepped forward into the room and let the door swing shut behind me. Facing me, on the centermost worktable, was a statue being worked in fine, white marble. I looked into her familiar eyes, carved with such care and detail that it was as though they looked back at me. I studied her. We studied each other. I reached out and touched her cheek and expected it to be warm and felt my own flush when it was not. She should have flushed too. Her eyes did not move from mine. It was hard to believe that she was not alive.
I knew her.
She was I.
The room was full of statues, drawings, paintings of me. All me. My face twisted in laughter, in anger, in ecstasy; my body, in all stages of undress, some so intimate that I found myself blushing and turned away to see my own face, looking at me from a canvas, blushing.
I was pregnant. I was holding our newborn Maitimo. I was nursing him. I was holding his hands as he took his first steps. I was cuddling him while Fëanaro told him stories at night. I was watching him sleep.
I was working. I was sitting at one of my stepmother-in-law’s luncheons, looking uncomfortable. I was lying in Fëanaro’s bed, laughing, my hair tangled across my face, the sheets draped across my body damp with sweat.
I was lying on the ground on the night of our wedding. There was fear and love in my eyes in equal measure. There was a shadow across my face that I knew belonged to Fëanaro, my new husband.
I was seeing myself as he had seen me, over every day, every moment of our marriage.
I heard a step behind me, the faintest pressure of a footfall. Without turning, I said, “Fëanaro, why this? Why me?”
As plainly as he spoke on the day when he pronounced Aulë’s work flawed, he said, “What else is there?”
I turned to him. My tears made him blurry. I almost wished to see anger or betrayal upon his face, but there was nothing. “What of the Valar?” I asked softly.
“You are more beautiful than the Valar.”
I gasped. “That is blasphemous, Fëanaro!” I said, the tears plain in my voice now. “You are obsessed!”
“I am in love,” he said. A brittle laugh escaped his throat. “Do you know how long I have sought to capture you perfectly? Yet each one of these is flawed. You live in none of them! Oh, they remind me of you, but little else. And, yet, here you are.”
He stepped to me. He took my hands in his and kissed the backs of my fingers. He let his lips move over the sensitive skin there, sending heat coursing through my veins, up my arms, where it reached my heart and was thrust out to all of the extremes of my body. I drew a sharp breath as he slipped my finger past his lips, as his tongue touched the tip. He laughed at the ease of my response and, touching his mouth, I felt his laughter as though it were my own: the tickle of his breath, the tremor of his voice on my skin. I closed my eyes lest he read my desire there.
“Nerdanel,” he said, “I wish for you to lie for me, so that I may draw you.”
“This is wrong, Fëanaro,” I said. “I am not perfect. I am no Vala. You have become deluded-”
“Please,” he said. “Please. I wish to know you perfectly, to never lose a memory of you, and a fool, I was, to think that I could do that alone. Please. Lie for me.”
There was a chaise in the corner. I knew it well because, many times, we wrestled upon it, before he barred me from his work. Before this. Trembling, I go to it and lie down. But his eyes are unsatisfied.
“Do I wish to be reminded of you in a gown that you wear for the pleasure of my stepmother?” he asked.
“What do you wish me to wear, then, to please you?”
“I wish you to wear nothing.”
I have never done this. I have never undressed and lain before him like this, not without him undressing too. His tunic, though, stays firmly laced to his neck; only his face and hands are bare. Not me. I am here for his scrutiny, to have his keen eye upon me, delving, seeking my flaws. I undo the ties on my gown with trembling hands. Did I wish to be known this well? Normally, when his eyes turned to my body, I touched him, as way of distraction, as way of forestalling the moment when he would realize my imperfection. But I could not touch him now; he was far beyond my reach, poised with a charcoal pencil in hand and a naked sheet of parchment, watching as my gown slides away from my body.
As I lay on the rough material of the couch, I heard his pencil begin scratching. He would not even pose me; he would draw me with my arms flung at awkward angles, with my hair spilling onto the floor. I imagined that I could feel the pencil forming the curves of my body, like his warm hands, caressing me. Each curve became suffused with life, twice alive. I closed my eyes in ecstasy and shame. The pencil teased my flaws into being on the parchment: a belly too soft and arms too hard; hair too bright and flesh too pallid; a narrow, shapeless nose and hips that curved to widely. I bit my lip; felt my face twist. “Beautiful,” he gasped.
He came to me, at last, when the longing in his eyes burned so brightly that I was abashed by it, to be its source, for surely, no humble being such as myself should inspire such fire. Surely, that must be reserved for worship. For the gods.
“I would trade them all for one of you,” he whispered, and when my eyes lifted to his, questioning, he waited not for the inquiry to form on my lips before finishing, “The Valar.”
Scandalous. Blasphemous. I moaned as his lips covered my navel, as they traveled lower. I raked my hands through his hair. Beautiful.
I would sing to you, but you don't want to hear the off-key warbling that I call "singing." No Maglor, am I ;) So I have written you a story instead.
I had in mind a bit of forge-smut. After all, nothing says "Happy Birthday" like forge-smut, at least to a Fëanatic. So I got my Fëanor imaginary friend muse and my Nerdanel imaginary friend muse and put them in the forge together and....
Nothing.
It's kind of like mating great pandas, apparently. You can put them together with all the right moods but that doesn't mean that they're going to do anything. They kind of giggled together. Fëanor made some pretty bracelets, all of which he gave to Nerdanel (much to my dismay, as it was my birthday too, and the bastard owes me), but no forge-smut. Damn.
So I changed the environment a bit and got...something. It seems my imaginary friends muses don't like mindless stuff, even if it's smut. They want to do everything with a purpose. Pretentious gits.
But there are naughty bits in it. So if you are underaged (I am obviously not talking to Arandil here but to others who might stumble upon this) or bothered by this sort of thing, please stop reading now.
The idea of Fëanor's relationship with the Valar as compared to Nerdanel's and the marital conflicts it must have caused has always fascinated me. I deal with it a lot (later) in AMC. Well, it seems they were determined to deal with it here too.
As always, comments and suggestions are welcome. This is very rough, as a week ago, it was not even written yet. Such is the nature of birthday stories. Happy reading!
Blasphemy
I always knew Fëanaro’s feelings towards the Valar. Even when we were very young-little more than children-and we were both selected to study under Aulë, there was something about the way that Fëanaro would speak with our master, something that differed him from an ordinary Elf, someone like me, brought up to unquestionably revere the Valar. It was in his eyes, in his tone of voice: Aulë was less a master and more an equal. Even then, the boy who would soon be my husband knew his gifts, and he was proud.
Once, working late, we encountered a statue that our master had done of the Lady Yavanna. Fëanaro carelessly pulled away the shroud covering it, and he approached it unabashedly-despite the statue’s nakedness-to study it closer. It was cast from bronze and was beautiful. Yavanna’s hair tumbled recklessly down her back, and woven into it were flowers, so delicately made that I reached out to touch them and gasped to find them made of cold metal, not the warm slips of silk that I expected.
Fëanaro, though, did not see the flowers and the hair but traced his fingers along her face, his brow rumpled in concentration. “It is flawed,” he said at last. “The angle of the cheek is wrong; it is too rounded.”
I gasped. “It is our master’s work!” I chided.
His bright eyes turned to mine. His face remained expressionless, his voice blunt and factual. “It is still flawed,” he said.
~oOo~
Not long after, we were married, and I forgot about the statue. No longer were we students of Aulë, and life was much busier. I had a young son to care for, and Fëanaro was building a house for us outside of Tirion. We were living in his father’s palace, and so there were images to uphold and proper behaviors to observe: No longer could I run about, barefoot and in a dusty apron. I had to put on a dress everyday and shoes and make sure that Maitimo was dressed and his hair combed neatly, and Fëanaro and I had to be mindful of the exuberance of our passions late at night. Under these new expectations, it was easy to forget the twinge of foreboding I’d felt that day, in our master’s forge, and become lost in the bright, rushed life as the wife of the High Prince.
Fëanaro was often gone in those days, to the house, to supervise the builders. After all, the house was of his design, and he wished to see it built correctly. But, some days, I would awaken to the sound of hammerfalls coming from the palace workshop and-following the sound that has beckoned me since birth-would find my husband busy at task and oblivious to all else around him. But, when I arrived, he always tossed a shroud across that on which he worked.
He would greet me with kisses and caresses, closing my eyes with gentle fingers to keep me from looking over his shoulder at that which rested beneath the dusty shroud.
Newly married, our passions still ablaze, it was easy to become distracted by Fëanaro, and many blissful mornings we had in his workshop, with its heavy locks on the door.
The locks bothered me, but when I mentioned them to Fëanaro, he smiled and kissed me. “They are not there for the work I do with metal and stone,” he said, “but to keep our curious son from learning too soon of his origins,” and the silky heat of his lips-on my mouth, my throat, tracing the ridge of my collarbone-distracted me again. How easy it was to forget!
Sometimes, walking by Fëanaro’s workshop on the way to a meal or to look over a new gown with my stepmother-in-law or to retrieve Maitimo from playing with his young half-uncle, I would try the door. But it was always locked.
Maitimo would sometimes rush ahead of me in the hall and try the door, knowing that it was the place that compelled his father and took him from us, his family. “Atar?” he would say, tears glazing his bright eyes, as the knob rattled fruitlessly in his hands, and I would fold his small hands into mine and lead him away. “Atar is very busy today,” I would say, lifting him into my arms, and he would weep silently on my shoulder.
More and more often, I would awaken to the sound of hammers on steel and stone, and I would go to Fëanaro’s workshop and find it locked against me.
No longer did we share bliss in the mornings, bathed by Laurelin’s gentle light warming our naked skin and making Fëanaro’s dark hair gleam as though gilded with gold. Now, I sat through interminable breakfasts with my stepmother-in-law-lonely, cold, and forgotten-while Fëanaro broke rocks with hammers in his workshop.
I had always known that my husband’s love for me was shared with his craft. He told me once that he’d never imagined being married because he could not imagine feeling such love for something flawed and beyond his powers to perfect as he did for the works of his hands. I was not a stone, subject to the will of a chisel in his hands, or steel, able to be bent or remade by the relentless application of heat. “Willingly, I would subject no one my standards for the life of Arda,” he’d said.
But even Fëanaro, with his ironclad will and ambition, possessed a heart that cared little for the reasoning of his mind, and love grew between us.
When Aulë was away, on the late nights when we frantically worked to finish projects imminently due, I would come up behind him; I would put my arms around his waist and kiss his back, between his shoulder blades. I would move my lips to the back of his neck, under his hair, and slide my hands from his waist to his thighs, while his hands fell away from whatever it was that occupied his mind and, triumphantly, my fingers would move to explore the growing tumescence beneath his work breeches, and he whirled to claim me with his arms and mouth.
We ruined many projects in this way, leaving the compounds that were part of his gemcraft boiling for too long-made inert by our inattention-while Fëanaro pressed me to the wall, frantic in his passion, gasping, “Marry me, Nerdanel. I can bear to wait no longer.”
His hands would try to push my clothes from me, tearing many of my tunics in his haste, but I fought his hands away-clasping them in mine, a bond I knew he could not bear to break-under the pretense that for me to disrobe would present unfair temptation to wed, and I wished for us to wait. He would grow calm then, and I’d imagined that I’d tamed him, as a bird upon my finger, and I rewarded him by pleasuring him in other ways, until his passions were momentarily sated, and he’d forgotten about marriage and bonding and was content to hold me and love me until the sky was gilded by morning.
I said that I wished to wait. I did not. I wished to wed him whenever I saw him, whenever the realization came to me that I-the homely daughter of a blacksmith-had managed to capture this beautiful creature and make him love me. I wanted to wed him before he forgot me in favor of his steel and stone.
But in the moments of passion between us, a different unease touched my heart, and always, my hands sought to gather the clothing he opened, closing it against my naked skin. “Not now. Not now. I am not ready. I wish to wait. Please? I am not ready.”
But really: I am not beautiful enough for you.
~oOo~
One day, I was invited to afternoon tea with my stepmother-in-law, and with Fëanaro at work in his workshop and Maitimo just down for a nap, out of boredom, I accepted. I tamed and twisted my hair into suitable order and put on one of my good gowns. I tucked my feet into shoes that pinched and dabbed powder onto my face to hide the perpetual flush in my cheeks beneath cool pallor.
Downstairs, across the palace, came the sound of metal against metal, of hammer and chisel. My hands ached to hold the tools of my craft once more. I spread lotion on them, to diminish the calluses of which I was once so proud. My spirit ached to hold my husband in love, to take him from the ruthless complaint of lifeless metal forced to bend to his will, to become distracted as I once had. I closed my eyes against the tears that threatened to cut through the carefully applied powder on my face.
I flounced from the room and concentrated on the graceless sound of my good shoes against the mahogany floors of the hallway so that I didn’t have to hear the hammers.
Indis had asked me to come to the east rose garden, and with a cold pinch of dread, I realized that I could reach my destination by passing my husband’s workshop. But I would not! Because to do so, to ruminate upon the dark, steel locks on his door, I would admit to being hurt. And I refused to be hurt by something as silly as his desire to work at his trade undisturbed. This was a trait of the women he’d rejected in order to marry me. I would not ask the last time he had been to inspect the progress being made on our house or the last time that he had played a game with Maitimo before supper. I would not try to recall the last time I had felt Laurelin’s light on my skin as he made love to me, outside his husbandly duty of the nighttime hours, when he tried to conceive our second child.
I determined that I would walk past the hallway that led to his workshop without taking it as my route, even though it meant taking a circuitous path to the garden. I would look in on the orchids my stepmother-in-law had given me to grow in the conservatory. I had been absorbed for three days by work on a statue, stopping only to give Maitimo meals when he whined, and I had forgotten to water them for the duration of it, and last I checked, they were dying, but I held out hope that my hands are not good only for cold, dead stone but might also preserve life and beauty not of my devising.
As I passed the hallway to my husband’s workshop, I saw a messenger stop in front of the door. Quickly, I scurried backward, out of sight behind the corner, watching the messenger’s reflection in the glass covering a painting opposite me. He was young, and shifted from foot to foot before raising his fist to delicately knock on the door. Fëanaro answered. I watched him, reflected in the painting. I mourned for his rumpled hair, made so by distraction by his work and a tendency to rake his fingers through it when frustrated. I used to rake my fingers through it too, as his mouth left a hot trail of kisses down my body. I used to straighten it before I left, conscious of the scandal that our nontraditional couplings might cause, while he wound his arms around my neck and pressed his open mouth to mine and begged me not to leave. And, most times, I did not.
I watched as the messenger spoke to him, while his bright eyes darted distractedly around the hallway. His fingers curled and uncurled against the doorframe, bereft without hammer or chisel to occupy them. Straining, I could barely hear their words. “Your father wishes you to-” I heard the messenger say, and then, Fëanaro’s bright, loud voice: “Of course, then, I will.”
I watched as he closed the workshop door behind him and followed the messenger down the hallway.
When they had receded from sight, I stepped back into the hallway. I had heard only one click, of the door shutting. No locks. His workshop was unbarred. Even as my mind screamed not to-not to violate my husband’s trust-my angry, hurting heart urged my legs forward, stepping lightly now with my absurd gown rustling around me, until my hand closed on the knob and twisted, and the door opened.
And I stepped inside.
~oOo~
It had not taken long for Fëanaro’s reputation to reach the ears of the important people in Aman. After all, he was the son of the King and Aulë had named him the greatest craftsman to walk among the Eldar. We had not been long finished our apprenticeships before the commissions began to pour in, mostly from nobles wishing for statues or paintings of the Valar.
Although his fancy was for gemcraft, I know that Fëanaro had been proud of the sudden demand for his work. He had worked through day and night to finish his commissions, and how I’d loved interrupting him, his imperfect betrothed taking his attention away from the perfect form of Varda painting the sky with stars, each captured with such skill that they glowed as tiny flames upon the canvas.
When he’d come to my father’s forge and begged me to escape with him, he’d left behind a trove of unfinished works. “I am free no longer!” he’d cried to me, and alarmed by the agony twisting in the fire of his eyes, I’d dropped my hammer and followed him without question, and we had been married that night, with only Eru as witness to our vows.
After that, he’d made no more statues of the Valar. I’d taken his unfinished commissions and completed them myself, and my own reputation as a skilled sculptor grew as a result. I’d asked him why he no longer painted and sculpted the Valar, and he’d laughed and answered, “When ‘perfection’ no longer pleases you, what is left but to seek it anew?” He’d placed locks on the door to his workshop, and slowly, he’d locked them more and more against me.
~oOo~
But not now.
Now I stood inside his workshop, looking around at tables so cluttered with partially finished paintings and sculptures and scraps of parchment with charcoal sketches upon them. I could see why he locked his door against me now-because there was no way that he could hide all of this.
I stepped forward into the room and let the door swing shut behind me. Facing me, on the centermost worktable, was a statue being worked in fine, white marble. I looked into her familiar eyes, carved with such care and detail that it was as though they looked back at me. I studied her. We studied each other. I reached out and touched her cheek and expected it to be warm and felt my own flush when it was not. She should have flushed too. Her eyes did not move from mine. It was hard to believe that she was not alive.
I knew her.
She was I.
The room was full of statues, drawings, paintings of me. All me. My face twisted in laughter, in anger, in ecstasy; my body, in all stages of undress, some so intimate that I found myself blushing and turned away to see my own face, looking at me from a canvas, blushing.
I was pregnant. I was holding our newborn Maitimo. I was nursing him. I was holding his hands as he took his first steps. I was cuddling him while Fëanaro told him stories at night. I was watching him sleep.
I was working. I was sitting at one of my stepmother-in-law’s luncheons, looking uncomfortable. I was lying in Fëanaro’s bed, laughing, my hair tangled across my face, the sheets draped across my body damp with sweat.
I was lying on the ground on the night of our wedding. There was fear and love in my eyes in equal measure. There was a shadow across my face that I knew belonged to Fëanaro, my new husband.
I was seeing myself as he had seen me, over every day, every moment of our marriage.
I heard a step behind me, the faintest pressure of a footfall. Without turning, I said, “Fëanaro, why this? Why me?”
As plainly as he spoke on the day when he pronounced Aulë’s work flawed, he said, “What else is there?”
I turned to him. My tears made him blurry. I almost wished to see anger or betrayal upon his face, but there was nothing. “What of the Valar?” I asked softly.
“You are more beautiful than the Valar.”
I gasped. “That is blasphemous, Fëanaro!” I said, the tears plain in my voice now. “You are obsessed!”
“I am in love,” he said. A brittle laugh escaped his throat. “Do you know how long I have sought to capture you perfectly? Yet each one of these is flawed. You live in none of them! Oh, they remind me of you, but little else. And, yet, here you are.”
He stepped to me. He took my hands in his and kissed the backs of my fingers. He let his lips move over the sensitive skin there, sending heat coursing through my veins, up my arms, where it reached my heart and was thrust out to all of the extremes of my body. I drew a sharp breath as he slipped my finger past his lips, as his tongue touched the tip. He laughed at the ease of my response and, touching his mouth, I felt his laughter as though it were my own: the tickle of his breath, the tremor of his voice on my skin. I closed my eyes lest he read my desire there.
“Nerdanel,” he said, “I wish for you to lie for me, so that I may draw you.”
“This is wrong, Fëanaro,” I said. “I am not perfect. I am no Vala. You have become deluded-”
“Please,” he said. “Please. I wish to know you perfectly, to never lose a memory of you, and a fool, I was, to think that I could do that alone. Please. Lie for me.”
There was a chaise in the corner. I knew it well because, many times, we wrestled upon it, before he barred me from his work. Before this. Trembling, I go to it and lie down. But his eyes are unsatisfied.
“Do I wish to be reminded of you in a gown that you wear for the pleasure of my stepmother?” he asked.
“What do you wish me to wear, then, to please you?”
“I wish you to wear nothing.”
I have never done this. I have never undressed and lain before him like this, not without him undressing too. His tunic, though, stays firmly laced to his neck; only his face and hands are bare. Not me. I am here for his scrutiny, to have his keen eye upon me, delving, seeking my flaws. I undo the ties on my gown with trembling hands. Did I wish to be known this well? Normally, when his eyes turned to my body, I touched him, as way of distraction, as way of forestalling the moment when he would realize my imperfection. But I could not touch him now; he was far beyond my reach, poised with a charcoal pencil in hand and a naked sheet of parchment, watching as my gown slides away from my body.
As I lay on the rough material of the couch, I heard his pencil begin scratching. He would not even pose me; he would draw me with my arms flung at awkward angles, with my hair spilling onto the floor. I imagined that I could feel the pencil forming the curves of my body, like his warm hands, caressing me. Each curve became suffused with life, twice alive. I closed my eyes in ecstasy and shame. The pencil teased my flaws into being on the parchment: a belly too soft and arms too hard; hair too bright and flesh too pallid; a narrow, shapeless nose and hips that curved to widely. I bit my lip; felt my face twist. “Beautiful,” he gasped.
He came to me, at last, when the longing in his eyes burned so brightly that I was abashed by it, to be its source, for surely, no humble being such as myself should inspire such fire. Surely, that must be reserved for worship. For the gods.
“I would trade them all for one of you,” he whispered, and when my eyes lifted to his, questioning, he waited not for the inquiry to form on my lips before finishing, “The Valar.”
Scandalous. Blasphemous. I moaned as his lips covered my navel, as they traveled lower. I raked my hands through his hair. Beautiful.