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Elwing had no say in her survival, nor her transformation. She had leapt from that cliff with the intention of death, and she would not have chosen to be reembodied. They say it is unnatural for one of the Elves to take their own life.
Only two have ever done so. She despises that she can see so clearly what had been in his mind as he threw himself into the flames.
Elwing would not have chosen to be reembodied. Her husband was gone, her sons surely dead, and her home burned for the second time. There was nothing left for her; she craved peace. Not in the halls of a God she cared nothing for, but in the grey expanse of nothingness. Did this make her Un-Elven? Monstrous?
All she had left was the bitter vengeance of disallowing her family’s murderers their long-sought treasure.
The Valar, in their infinite, lofty wisdom, seemingly disagreed with this notion.
Given wings but not the courtesy of freedom. Given her husband, but not her sons. Given a punishment under the guise of a gift, Elwing resides in her lonely tower, sometimes bird, sometimes elf. The two tend to blend.
She is left often to her thoughts. She thinks of Elrond, still in Beleriand, now grown with a family of his own. She thinks of Elros, long dead, aging as a human does, no longer a perfect twin to Elrond. She thinks of Earendil, his endless voyage.
Not nearly so often, but oftener than she would like, she thinks of Maedhros Feanorian as she saw him last, reaching toward the jewel as she fell.
But she doesn’t like to talk about that.
——————————————————————
Her little island is small, sloping upward as hills lined with cat grass and flag irises. The tower is grey stone, long and thin as a needle, reaching high enough for the tip to disappear into the clouds. The air is thick with salt and seaweed, cool winds blowing the grass to and fro, gold and green against the pale, rocky sand. It can be dangerous to step around the island; one is liable to cut their foot on a diamond head and fall head first into the angry ocean. But, Elwing has lived in her prison long enough to know better. Earendil still stumbles on the rare days that he is home, the boat parked among the clouds.
She is not far from Tirion, where the reembodied now stumble, colt legged out of the halls. As a bird she can fly high enough into the sky that she can see the exiled returned to life, welcomed back among the Eldar.
She will not be bitter. She will not give them the satisfaction of bitterness.
The way to her island is not long, but it can be perilous. Over the mud at low tide, through a confusing series of rocky cliffs, crumbling with rock slides at odd times, and beneath the bow of a big-leaf magnolia shading the light of the sun.
Soaring on wide wings, high in the sky, she can see that her newest visitor was undeterred, heavy boots sinking in the mud as he steps toward the door of her tower. She dives down, landing in her elven form before the door, startling him hard enough that he drops the satchel he had been carrying over his arm with a curse.
“Maedhros Feanorian,” Elwing names him.
“Lady Elwing!” He exclaims, sketching a quick bow. He bends down to retrieve the satchel, checking the contents with a relieved sigh. “I apologize for disturbing you. I had hoped that we could speak.” He pulls a bottle of golden wine and a loaf of brown bread from the satchel. “I brought you this. My mother made the bread.”
Elwing reels back and slaps Maedhros across the face, causing him to drop the bread and the wine again. He stumbles back, left hand coming to cover his cheek, wincing in pain.
Elwing’s palm stings, and she feels no satisfaction in it. She knew she wouldn’t.
With a beleaguered sigh, she opens the door and ushers Maedhros through it. “Well, come on then. You will need ice for that at least.” He scoops the bread and unbroken wine bottle off the grass.
She guides him up three flights of stairs to her small kitchen and urges him to sit in one of the four chairs situated at her table. The room has a single window that lets in a light strong enough to make the dust motes glitter. The smell of garlic from lunch still hangs in the air. Elwing glances back at Maedhros, sitting stunned at the table, his pale cheek going red, wide mouth wet.
As a child, Elwing had been told the stories of the Seven Sons of Feanor. Horror stories, stories to teach your children to follow the rules. Stories told by the older children to frighten the younger.
Elwing had loved those stories as a child, back when they were just stories, and the Feanorians were only shadowy monsters hiding under the bed. As a child, she had giggled and screamed as her older brothers recited the tale.
She had imagined Maedhros Feanorian as an ogre, enormous, bloody-eyed eyed and sneering. She had been furious to find that the monster of her childhood stories was only an elf. A tall, scarred, beautiful elf, but an elf all the same. He was not a monster, merely a man who had done monstrous things and believed himself righteous for them.
Elwing reaches into the ice box and wraps a solid block in a towel, handing it over to Maedhros, who nods his thanks. “I deserved that.”
“You deserve worse.”
“Yes,” Maedhros says with a sigh.
Elwing sits down heavily across from him and pours each of them a glass of wine. “Why are you here, Maedhros?”
He stares down into his wine glass. He looks so different from last she saw him, different enough to make it hard to look away as she counts all the ways in which he is different, and the vastly numerous ways in which he is not.
His perfect face is scarless, smooth, and white as sea foam—a straight, sharp nose, and long, vibrant hair, free of gray. He has two hands, though his right rests slack in his lap as if he has forgotten he has it. He is tall and lean and strong, not the gaunt, sinewy creature who had chased her through Sirion, driven solely by will.
She was faster than him, had easily outrun him, and could have kept going had there been anywhere to go. And then what? Try to outrun him for the rest of her existence? No, he would have caught her anyway. He would have destroyed her for the jewel.
And here he sits before her now. She cannot outrun him.
“I’ve been trying to atone,” Maedhros says finally, still not looking at her. “For all that I have done, all the people I have hurt. I can’t undo all this suffering, but I want these people to know that I am willing to do all I can to ensure their health and prosperity.”
“Truly? Well, then. What will you do for me?”
“Anything you wish.”
“Good,” Elwing says, face hard. “Then return to me my children. Return my brothers, father, and mother. Return Doriath and Sirion to me, and you will have your atonement.”
Maedhros finally looks at her, swallowing hard, left hand clutching the half-melted ice. “I can give you none of that.”
“I see,” she says, tightness building in her throat that feels like anger or sadness. There is not much difference between the two. “Then it would seem there is no reason for you to be here.”
Maedhros shoves the cube of ice across the table and digs the fingernails of his left hand into his right forearm. “Is there nothing more that I can give you?”
Elwing tilts her head, a bird-like motion. “Why would you ever think that there was something that you could give me?”
“I don’t know, but I hoped there might be…. Something. Something I could do to atone.”
“How dare you?” Elwing rasps. “How dare you make it that simple. As if you can rage and murder and weep all over Beleriand and still come out the hero. Your youth was so long ago. When you were beautiful, beloved, important. It is barely ash in the history of Middle earth. You are so afraid that none of it matters. That all you did for a fucking jewel was for nothing.
“And Maedhros? It was! It was all for nothing. It doesn’t matter. What you did to me doesn’t matter. You are not important. Not to me, not to anyone else. Your apology does not matter.”
He does not answer her. Only stares at her with wide, grey eyes, mouth agape. She feels no triumph. How could she? It is only the same thing she has been repeating to herself for years. The two of them, unimportant actors in the story of Beleriand, sitting beside each other, friendless and lonely.
Maedhros closes his mouth, opens it again, and then turns away to stare at the wall. She wants to laugh. Is this the manipulative politician of Elven lore? Perhaps all that eloquence drowned in his bath of blood the same way that all his brothers and his lover did.
“I will not submit to you as others have,” Elwing says. “You must earn my respect.”
“I understand that.”
“Do you?”
“I do.”
Elwing leans back in her chair, arms crossed, searching Maedhros’s face for the lie in his words. “Do you feel a sense of achievement?”
“In what regard?”
“In any regard.”
Maedhros’s eyes narrow, face growing cold and hard. It is a more natural look for him than the visage contrition he had worn a moment ago.
“I never broke the oath,” he says finally, nodding as if to encourage her to agree. “I fought the Morgoth with everything I had from the moment I landed in Beleriand. We captured the jewels. The oath was ended.”
“You achieved more in the name of Morgoth than even the orcs did,” Elwing responds, cold as the ocean along the sand. “Your endeavors have been forged falsely.”
“I did much that I regret. But I cannot regret fulfilling my father’s oath.”
She stares at him until his pallor blinds her enough to force her to look away. “Why did you bring war to Doriath?”
“Your father came on spoiling.”
“How so?” Elwing asks, sickened by the very conversation. “How was he spoiling?”
“He refused to return what was mine!” Maedhros bares his teeth in a snarl like a rabid fox.
Elwing smiles to see the face beneath the mask of courtesy.
“Yours? Did the jewels not burn you when you touched them?”
“They were still mine.”
“Then why did you not pluck them from the Morgoth’s crown yourself? What was your true reason for stealing the jewels from my father and not the monster you professed to oppose?”
Maedhros’s lips tremble, eyes widening until they shine nearly the same silver as they once did in his youth.
“It was not fair,” he rasps. “It was not fair that your grandmother should do what I could not. After I was tortured for years, cut in half, stripped of everything. Why should your people have taken what I could not? Why could your father not just give it to me?”
“And there he is,” Elwing says, nodding to herself. “There is the Maedhros Feanorian of Elvish nightmare. It would seem that you have no explanation for what you have done. You have shed the blood of so many elven souls, and yet all I see before me is a bitter and vain and foolish man. So easily riled. So easily beguiled.”
Maedhros is breathing hard, pale face red. He looks away from her in shame.
Elwings stands to her feet. “Come.” She turns toward the stairs without checking to see if he follows.
The next floor up is a little room that leads out to a balcony. Elwing likes to stand here on warm days, squint up into the sky, and watch the patterns of migrating birds, their black and grey feathers dark against the sun.
She leans over the iron railing, hands clasped together, and smiles. Maedhros comes to stand beside her. Under the sunlight, his hair burns like a living flame. She thinks that if she touched it, it would be hot against her fingers.
Everyone had told her that Maedhros had once been considered beautiful. She can see what they mean. But, even so, his appearance has always struck her as bizarre. He was enormous, so tall and broad as to be more giant than elf. His skin was translucent, the blue of his veins standing out at his temples and under his eyes. His eyes were colorless. And, of course, there was that hair. She had never seen red hair before.
“I don’t understand why the Valar chose to reembody me,” Maedhros says, voice gone quiet. “Finrod, I can see. He had done no evil. But, me? I don’t understand.”
Elwing shrugs. “Why did they choose to save my life by transforming me into a bird? The minds of the Valar have ever been cloudy to me.”
“You had done no evil. You were a mother, and you did not deserve to die?”
“Oh!” Elwing widens her eyes in mock shock. “Did I not deserve to die because I was a mother? How odd! My own mother was given no such pity.”
“That is not what I meant-“
“What about my brothers? They were innocent! They had done no evil, and you slaughtered them-“
“I searched for them! I did not wish for them to die-“
“And my sons! I have heard that love grew between you, and I am glad, but I will never have their childhoods. I will never have my family. My home, my life! Your greed is astounding, Maedhros Feanorian-“
“Stop! Stop for just a second! Good god, woman!”
Both of them are scowling at each other, and the birds who usually roost on the floor above them have flown off in a squawking flock.
Maedhros shakes his head, blowing out a long breath. “I came here to apologize, and now I have shouted at you twice. I am sorry for that. Do you know when I was young, I would never raise my voice? I was afraid that with my size, it would frighten those around me.”
“You are quite frightening,” Elwing acknowledges. “But I am no longer afraid of you. Truth be told, I am not even angry with you.”
Maedhros laughs. “Truly? You seemed a bit just now.”
“I am frustrated, I suppose. I leapt from that cliff with the intention of dying a hero, and instead I have been forced to live as a prisoner.”
To her surprise, Maedhros actually smiles, a genuine smile, and ah. Now she sees it. Now she sees the Maitimo in him.
“Ah, to be the prisoner of a Vala! It is a horror. At least you kept your hand.”
Elwing laughs, though she knows it was not a joke. “Well, you had a handsome rescuer, I am told. I do not.”
“Earendil?”
“My heart, but not my rescuer. He is the one they laud as hero, the shining beacon. And I am only that bitch Elwing who abandoned her children and then didn’t even fucking die.”
“It was much the same with Fingon. Only I am a bitch without the courtesy of dying. And you, beautiful Elwing, are not.”
He reaches out, tucking a curl behind her ear. She can see why someone might have loved him once. Before he had stained his remaining hand red.
She takes his hand before he can remove it from her hair and guides him back to the stairs. Several flights up is the bedroom she shares with Earendil when he is home. Surrounded by windows on each wall, she can see the birds fluttering past, the sunlight streaming through, transitioning to moonlight, the ocean, enormous below her. The stone floor is covered in Sindarin-style rugs, piled atop each other until the floor is lumpy and difficult to traverse. The bed is large and round, upholstered in deep, cool blue. It smells of salt water and dust.
Maedhros turns toward her, confused. “Lady Elwing, why am I here?”
She tilts her head up toward him, licking her lips. “Why do you think?”
He shakes his head. “It cannot be for the reason I think.”
“Why not?”
“Because-because of what I did to you.”
“I told you I am no longer angry.”
“You should be!”
Elwing takes his face between her hands, brown against white. “Do you dare tell me what to do? You and I are the only two who know what it is to take our own lives. What it means to be captive of a God. What it means to lose everything.”
He swallows. “It has been… a long time…”
“Don’t worry. I can be patient.”
He allows her to pull his face down so that she may press her lips to his. As she probes her tongue into his mouth, she can feel him tremble as he struggles to catch his breath, already winded despite the simple kiss.
She steps out of her dress, pulling him toward her as she collapses on the bed.
“What do I do? What do you want me to do?” Maedhros mutters between kisses.
Elwing guides his hand between her legs, where she can already feel herself growing wet. She helps him find her clit, coaxes him to massage it until she is gasping in pleasure. He is hard against her thigh.
She wonders how long it has been since he has been with a woman. If he ever has. Decides it doesn’t matter. She can feel his desire and encourages it, pressing her thigh against his cock until he groans, the sound of a tree falling in her forest home.
“Please,” he says in the same voice his victims pleaded with him so long ago. “Mercy, please.”
Elwing sits up, digging her nails into his chin. He gasps, as if her touch was soft and kind.
“No, Maedhros. No, I have no mercy for you.”
She shoves him down to the bed and mounts him, hissing as she gives herself a moment to adjust.
Maedhros has turned his face away, eyes squeezed shut, marble forehead creased as if in pain. He is red all the way down to his chest, the flame of his hair spread across the bedsheets.
She presses her hands to his chest and begins to move, quick and sharp. She and Earendil allow each other the pleasures of others to assuage the loneliness of their long parting, though she knows Earendil does not often take advantage of it. He is too busy and not one to think often of sex when he has not known someone for hundreds of years. Elwing was always the more playful between them.
But, still. She thinks he might be shocked to see her choice of partner. She is shocked by herself.
Maedhros grabs at her hip with his left hand, the other lying stiff and curled, forgotten at his side. She wonders briefly if he was this way with his Fingon, quiet and submissive, despite his size and strength. But it is only a fleeting thought has Elwing’s orgasm hits her, hips stuttering, as she falls forward, limp against Maedhros’s body. He thrusts once, twice, lets forth a gasping moan, and then goes still.
The silence that follows is neither awkward nor comfortable. They lay tangled together, still angry, pleasurable, and strange—the bird and the beast.
He brushes a thumb over her jawline, expression strangely distant, smiling faintly. “You look like him.”
Elwing laughs and sits up in the bed, reaching for her dress. “No, I do not.”
Maedhros’s smile fades. “In the eyes and the hair. But, no, no, you do not. But, you recall him to me all the same.”
“I cannot rescue you, Maedhros. I do not wish to.”
Maedhros still lies supine on the bed, eyes creased and aged. Is she technically older than him now? Now that he has died and she has lived?
“It is alright. The rescue was always very lovely, and I am grateful for it. But it never seemed to stick.”
She leans down and kisses his eyelid, lips brushing against his dark lashes. “You never wanted to be saved.”
“No. No, I wanted to be kept.”
“Kept? As what? A slave, a possession?”
Maedhros stands and takes two cloths from the bowl of water sat next to the nearest windowsill. He hands one to Elwing and sets to wiping himself down. “Yes, either. Were it someone whom I respected, someone who would treat me well. I have been a possession since I was a child. We, each, belonged to my father. His seven jewels, prized beyond all. He used us as he wished, and we were grateful. And then he died, and left his ghost tied to our throats. And we hated him, but he was our father, our creator. We could not escape him even if we wanted to. And we did not.”
Elwing feels a disgust that almost doubles her over with bile. “My father was not so. He was kind and brave. He loved me, and he was mine, and I his. But he would not have cursed us as yours did.”
Maedhros stands with the cloth limp in his hand, nude and glorious against the sunlight. His father’s prized possession.
“No,” he says finally. “No, he would not have.”
He comes to kneel by the bed, taking her hands in his, face upturned, mouth opened only a little bit. “Would you keep me, Lady Elwing? Would you keep me and never allow me to harm another elf, ever again?”
She lays a kiss on his nose, his lips, his brow and then helps him to his feet, though of course he needs not her help. They stand there together, hand in hand, clothed and nude, two dead souls who had dove from the cliffside.
“No,” she says.
He nods, as if he expected the denial. “Then I must leave you now.”
“Yes. I shall see you out.”
He dresses, clothes ragged and wrinkled, hair loose down his back, undone in a way that becomes him. As they descend the stairs, their gaits match each other nearly perfectly. Comfortable together as only the dead can be.
It is bright and strangely warm when they leave the tower, and Maedhros tilts his face up, squinting against the sunlight.
He turns back to her. “I ask nothing of you,” he says. “Only that you always speak to me clear and true.”
“I will.”
He smiles at that and then leaves her. He does not look back, and she does not look away, not until the last glimpse of red hair disappears into the hills.
With that, Elwing returns to her tower and climbs up to the balcony floor, hurrying her pace into a run. She leaps from the tower and falls on vast white wings.