Work Text:
Fingon:
Grief is a marvellously strange and contradictory set of emotions. Five days before Maedhros arrived, I laughed at some small comment of my father’s, written in the margins of a scroll. It was some obscure commentary on Valinorean law and how it differed by necessity from law in Beleriand, and all told it added up to a joke that only four people would have understood, and of those two were dead, and the remaining two only in communication by the occasional bird messenger.
That realisation sobered my laughter rather quickly, and left me all the worse for having lost myself in mirth, even for a moment, when the weight of my grief was so heavy. Drinking wine and sitting staring into the fire, slowly twisting my grief around in knots of guilt and anger, did me no good, but I had nothing else. I kept a mask on my emotions all day, but the mask kept slipping, and my grief only grew with time.
Maedhros knew what to do about grief. The loss of his own father under circumstances all too similar to mine spurred him into rash action and thence to Angband. He was determined that I would not lose myself equally to self-destruction and wine.
Nothing that he tried worked. It failed to work because I would not let it work, because I would not give in and let him distract me. I feared that any distraction would only make the grief worse in the end, as the moment of laughter had.
The final day of his visit passed in much the same way as the others. In the evening after bathing, dressed only in a night robe, I sat staring into the fire, drinking cup after cup of wine, which day by day seemed to do less and less to dull my emotions. When Maedhros entered, taking a seat on the low chair across from me, I barely had it in me to acknowledge his presence at all.
“I shall have to leave for Himring early tomorrow,” he said, his voice sad. Some small note of regret made me look up. I felt guilty about rebuffing all his attempts at distraction.
“I wish you wouldn’t go.” It was the first sincere, heartfelt thing I’d said in weeks.
Maedhros leaned forward. “You don’t know how much it hurts to see you this way.” He made a gesture that seemed to encompass my disarrayed night attire, my slouched body, my unbound hair, deprived of its customary golden ornaments, and the wine carafe, sitting on the table beside me, closer to empty than it should have been. “But I’ve tried all I could think of, anything that I thought might help…” He paused, and then slowly went on. “…Except…”
My head was too heavy to prompt him. I simply closed my eyes and waited. I had a momentary feeling of standing at the edge of a precipice, about to fall.
“I wonder,” he continued after a moment, and I opened my eyes, the feeling of vertigo growing stronger when I looked at his face, “you might send me off to the dungeons for lese-majesty or worse things. On the other hand…”
This time when he trailed off, my curiosity roused itself. Russandol, the soul of courtesy, ever polite, ever diplomatic, suggesting that he might in some way insult or disrespect me? Some part of me was both interested and amused, and I did not fear any insult to the office of king which I had held for such a short time and so badly thus far. I raised an eyebrow, and he took it as an invitation. Rising delicately from his chair, trepidation on his face, he sat down next to me, wrapping his right arm around my back and placing his left hand on my chest.
With a tender smile, he kissed my cheek, and then when I made no move except to look at him sardonically as if to say “Was that all?” he brought his hand up to ruffle my hair, just as he’d done when I was a child, then smoothed it down again.
It was rather nice to have his arms around me. I was hardly going to protest, even if I felt something like the child I had not been for several centuries now, being kissed and cosseted by Cousin Russandol. If this was what he’d meant, that he would comfort me as one would a small child, I was simply going to lie back and enjoy it.
“Oh, little cousin, you take things so hard,” he said with half a sigh in it, and brushed his hand against my cheek, pressing a kiss to my temple, lingering there. I could smell the clean warm scent of him, enough to realise he had bathed immediately before coming to me.
Maedhros’ soft breath stirred against my face and then gently against my ear, before he spoke two words, so softly it was like the memory of a dream. “Dear heart.”
Another kiss, this one to the side of my throat, just under the ear, lips hesitant but lingering again. Another whisper, “Beloved.”
His hand moved, fingers tracing gently but intentionally across my collarbone to settle on my chest again, but this time directly over my heart. “You know you have my love, always,” he breathed.
I had a vivid recollection of a day long ages before, when I had been crying over some horrific blunder in my schoolwork, fearing that Maedhros’ kindness had run out and he would finally lose his temper with me. But instead he said that, and I have never forgotten it. There in that darkened, fire-lit room, it seemed to take on new meaning, new dimensions.
Again I felt poised on the edge of some precipice. I held still, waiting for the next caress, and he did not disappoint, tenderly sliding his hand back up to my neck, taking my chin and turning my head so that he could kiss me on the mouth.
This kiss was even slower and more tentative than the others had been. Though his family was in the habit of kissing each other on the lips, mine had not been, and I was very startled the first time he did it. But no kiss he had ever given me or any of his family was quite like this one. For all his gentle hesitation he was quite firm about it, and though he did not attempt to deepen it, it held promise, a tenderness that was partially teasing, and even more very much not teasing at all.
It is only in looking back on that first kiss in hindsight that I have been able to put words to all this. At the time my senses were overwhelmed. His kiss went through me like a hot knife, sweeping away all thought of grief or defiance in favour of pure simple arousal. Frozen, I held still, beyond reason or rationality, only wanting the feelings Maedhros was sparking in me not to stop.
What was beyond obvious to me (and would have been to him if he had simply looked down) clearly did not come across to him in my total lack of response. Though I learned long afterwards that my sommelier had been — out of concern for my health — watering my wine secretly during this time, my senses were askew with muddled grief, alcohol, and arousal such as I had never experienced in all my life.
When he let go of me with a sigh, I blindly reached out with one hand, determined to drag him back against me, and made a helpless sort of noise, an incoherent protest against him moving anywhere. He wrapped his arms back around me, brought me close and rocked me, pressing tiny kisses all over my face like tender rain, kissing away the salt of the tears I’d cried in the hour before he came to me.
“Dear Findekáno,” he whispered, and then, almost under his breath, “my Findekáno. Heart of my heart.” His hand roamed across my chest as if looking for a place to rest, the sensation through my clothing not quite light enough to be ticklish, just enough to be arousing, even more so when he passed as if by accident over the crest of a nipple.
His second kiss to my mouth was a little bolder, lingering and clinging. His soft full lips, that I had always felt were made for kissing, pressed against mine and I gasped, just a little, but enough to open my mouth to his.
If the touch of his lips to mine was a hot knife slicing me open, then the feel of his tongue in my mouth split me asunder entirely. My hips jerked reflexively, and my whole body came alight with pleasure. Tentative and brief as the kiss was, at least compared to other kisses we have since shared, it was incandescent.
But he hesitated and drew back. His fingers slowly drew circles at my collarbone and throat, sometimes dipping under the edges of my robe. His breath stirred against my ear again, and now even the touch of his breath made me burn brighter. “Dearest, dearest love,” he whispered, saying the words like he had been dying to say them for a hundred years. Losing myself to sensation, I could not muster up breath and speech for a reply, had I even thought then that one was wanted.
Another kiss followed, and this time I opened my mouth deliberately to him. There was very little room left for ambiguity about what he meant to do, or that I wanted him to do it. Brief as that third kiss was, I hoped it was enough to let him know that I was entirely in his hands.
But again, he drew back, unsure, and from the look on his face he still feared that he was transgressing. This time I didn’t let go. I held on tight, drew his hand down my body, and pressed it against my burgeoning erection. It felt so good that I moaned aloud.
Maedhros drew back gently, smiling down at me with an odd sort of look. “I suppose,” he said, voice shaky, “as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb?”
It was such a strange, Mannish turn of phrase that I almost gaped at him. It betrayed his nerves, for it didn’t sound like him in the least. Instead of thinking about it further, I leaned up and kissed him, the first time I had ever initiated a kiss between us. I hoped to comfort him in turn, set his mind at ease about what we were clearly going to do. His mouth met mine like we had done this hundreds of times instead of very few.
When he drew away at last, I rose from the couch. The room was spinning about me, and he was quick to follow me up and wrap an arm about my waist to steady me. By slow degrees we made our way into the adjoining bedroom. He shut the heavy doors behind us and locked them.
The room was dark, lit only by the light of the Moon spilling onto the bed through the white curtains. The scent of lilacs was in the air. I could not quite see them in the dark but I knew that a spray of red ones sat in a large stoneware jug on a table in the corner.
Not that I was thinking about lilacs just then, except to note the scent appreciatively as my fingers fumbled with my clothes. The tie of my robe seemed too intricate for me to unknot but it was, of course, beyond Maedhros entirely, with one hand. Somehow together we got it undone, and he pushed the robe gently off my shoulders and down my arms, to fall into a heap on the floor.
Now Maedhros has seen me naked so many times that nothing could possibly have been a mystery, save for perhaps the exact details of what I look like when aroused. But nevertheless he stopped and stared, looking me up and down as if to memorise me entirely. When I turned to pull at the sheets on my bed, I could feel his eyes following me, tracing every muscle, every movement.
Dizzy from drink and desire, I threw the sheets back, and dropped onto the bed, then patted the space next to me impatiently. He stirred from his momentary reverie, whispered something to himself that I could not make out, and came over to the bedside, shedding clothes as he went.
Prince Nelyafinwë that was in Aman long ago was a figure of beauty, one of the finest and fairest of the Noldor, and he knew it. The man who stood before me now had no illusions about himself, no vanity, no thought to impress or arouse me with the sight of his body. He stood there before me in all of his aching vulnerability, the body I had rescued, the body I had mutilated, the body I had helped to tend and train back to strength, and I loved him for it.
I raised my eyes to his face, and saw there the beginnings of fear, an uncertainty that made me worry for him. “Come,” I said, patting the bed next to me again. With a grateful look, as though he had been given a momentary reprieve, he lay down beside me, and took me in his arms again.
Though not an absolute innocent, I was as absolutely inexperienced as one can be in matters of love. For reasons I did not fully understand until that evening, I had never cared to pursue anyone, and had been more or less oblivious to those who pursued me. The one sole song in my heart, the only one who could have ever stirred me to the depths, was and is and always shall be Nelyafinwë Maitimo Russandol.
The feel of his body against mine, skin to skin, turned the smouldering flame of my desire into a roaring fire. I arched up against him, heard him gasp as our bodies truly touched, felt the light caress of his hair as he bent down to cover my mouth with his own.
For what seemed an eternity he kissed me, breaking away only to whisper sweetness into my ears. “Beloved Findekáno,” he breathed, “my only, only love, dearest one…”
For my part, I was incoherent with bliss. I moaned softly as his hand stroked down my body, waves of shivering ecstasy pouring over me from my head down to my feet. All the pent-up need and desire of centuries, long denied, long repressed, was surging forth in me.
His mouth soon followed his hand as he slowly kissed his way down my throat, pausing at the side of my neck as though he wished to leave a mark there. I ached to have him do it, for in that moment I was not thinking of the future at all, nor of the past.
Kisses trailed fire down my chest, my abdomen, and before my mind could catch up with what he had planned to do, he took me in his mouth. I gasped aloud, and succumbed to the temptation to slide my hand into his hair, to feel those soft locks anchoring me against the roaring tide of bliss that all too soon threatened to send me soaring into the heavens.
Our eyes met. His were gleaming, full of hunger and desire, but far back in them there was a shadow of worry. I wanted nothing more than to make him feel the same ecstasy as me. At the thought of putting my hands on him, of stroking him, of licking him, I could no longer keep my eyes open. My head fell back; I thrust into his mouth, my hand clenched in his hair.
I tipped over the peak of pleasure to drown in long pulses of unbearable sweetness, my mouth trying to form his name. A low gasp escaped me and I all but swooned, drifting in a soundless, timeless place where there was nothing but the warmth of his skin against mine and the reverberating echoes of bliss.
My hand lost its hold on his hair, and as I felt him move, rising up a little, it slid down his arm until it was resting on my thigh. That was enough to bring me at least partially back into my body.
I opened my eyes. Maedhros was breathing hard, head down, something worried and fearful in the very profile of his body. He looked up at me and there was something tremendously sad and guilty in his eyes.
What did he have to be guilty about? “I want you,” I whispered. “I want more.”
Despite my words, I was losing my battle with sleep. He bent and kissed my stomach tenderly, and I raised my hand, wanting to bring him close, to hold him. His wrist was within my grasp as he settled down on the bed beside me, close enough that I could feel his warmth.
“Findekáno?” I heard his voice, soft and questioning, but I was already falling down, down into the deepest, sweetest sleep I had known in months. My dreams were of warmth and love, of being held and kissed tenderly, and I did not wake until late morning.