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Ten.
It had been a hundred years since he had heard Elrond’s name.
(It would be five thousand years before he heard it for the first time.)
It was a name he had last heard in the cool shade of a beautiful garden, telling him, You will lose the Ambarussa in the battle for the Havens of Sirion, and, oh, how that made a terrible laugh bubble up in his throat now as he thought of how he had assumed then that it meant they would be defending Sirion or reclaiming it, not that they would be the wolves howling at its door.
It was not a name that belonged in this burning city he had soaked in blood.
It was not a name that belonged in the mouth of a tiny boy soaked with sweat and ash and tears, tugging at a beam far too large for him, trying desperately to make an opening large enough for the identical tiny boy trapped in the hollow beneath it.
You raised me, that gentle voice said, a hundred and five thousand years distant, and he looked at the boys sobbing in fear and stress and at the dead in the streets and the blood on his hands and –
He ran forward, sword cast aside, to heave at the beam, paying no mind to the tiny fists beating against his leg.
He had tried so hard to sing the song aright.
What had he done to cast history so awry?
Three.
When he was abruptly yanked from the cool halls of Imladris to the windswept gap, he’d had to convince his people that abruptly getting separated from his patrol did not equal taken by the enemy.
He at last convinced his captains of this by crying out, “Lauriel, I do not ask that you believe me strong enough to stand against the Enemy indefinitely; I only ask that you have enough faith in me not to believe that I would succumb, unmarked, in less than two weeks.”
Which at least got them to listen to him long enough for him to position them properly before their world was swallowed by the anticipated fire, at which point his people concluded that fighting off a dragon was an excellent argument in its own right.
It was, from what information he’d managed to pry from Lauriel two weeks ago and five thousand years in the future, a better showing than they’d managed the first time.
But better than the first time didn’t mean forever.
It was a hard fought retreat back to the besieged walls of Himring; it was a hard, desperate thing to scan the walls with eyes still streaming from the smoke looking for a familiar flash of red.
You must not leave him alone, not even for a moment, when the victory finally comes. You must not –
He did not know how to look at his brother and not see death. He did not know what he would do if all his clever planning turned to so much ash in his mouth because his discord in the music had sent ripples outward that sent a stray arrow into Maedhros’s back.
“Kano!” the familiar cry came, and he turned just in time to slide from his horse and meet the familiar arms engulfing him.
He was pounded hard on the back, once, twice, three times before his brother finally let go, bloodstained eyes shining. “I expected you a week ago; we feared you were overrun.” And then, quietly, “Everyone here thinks you were here for a visit not a month back. Don’t contradict them; I’ll explain everything when we have a moment to breathe.”
And, oh.
That was where his other self had gone.
“Whatever you say, Maedhros,” he promised, like always, and if his voice rasped, it was only because of the smoke.
Five.
A moment to breathe was more or less literal; the somehow still chilled walls of the inner keep allowed him blessed breaths of cooled, almost clean air that soothed his ravaged throat when he finally had the moment to retreat there.
How his vocal instructor would have wept to hear of it if he had survived the shores of Alqualonde.
The map centered in his brother’s war room had been picked over by advisors for hours, but they were gone now. It was just him and Maedhros, and he had abandoned his honorable chair at Maedhros’s right hand to slump on the floor, head in brother’s lap, like they were children again.
It was a level of vulnerability neither of them had allowed since Mithrim, but in his defense, Maedhros had started it by asking very, very casually about the state of the future before allowing that Maglor’s plaintive theory that maybe the whole mess was just caused by mutual head wounds was at least worth a check.
Despite this desperate hope, Maglor still answered the question.
“The future,” he said, enunciating carefully around his exhaustion and the smoke damage and the utter insanity of what he was saying, “is beautiful. And horrifyingly empty. Did you know that?”
Maedhros’s hand paused in its careful strokes over Maglor’s hair in nominal search of an injury they both knew wasn’t there. “I had . . . hints of it,” he said carefully. “From someone who very convincingly claimed to be a version of you that had traveled here from there.”
The last tendrils of doubt that he had somehow misinterpreted Maedhros’s implication in the courtyard disappeared. “That seems fair,” he said. “As I was abruptly sent there from here.”
The strokes started up again. “It was empty?”
He stared down at his hands. “So many people were dead, Nelyo.”
The Quenya, like the vulnerability, was dangerous. Forbidden.
But it had been there, in that future that had been or would be or could be, and he missed it, for all it hadn’t been worth the rest.
“Your other self was sparing in the details,” Maedhros murmured. “He feared to unmake our victory. And, I think, your sons.”
Sons.
It was a title he would have hesitated to presume to give to Elrond or to Elrond’s long dead brother; fearful in his own time of the political and familial mess that must have led to and resulted in him taking Idril’s grandsons in. But apparently his future self was less concerned with it, which was a hopeful thing.
Or perhaps he hadn’t seen any good in complicating things for Maedhros.
“What else did he tell you?” he asked.
“Mm. That this battle would come. That it would lead Celegorm and Curufin to retreat to Nargothrond, but that it was too dangerous to let them stay there. That we would fulfill our Oath, though not in a desirable manner. And that immediately after we fulfilled it, we must return to rescue your sons lest something terrible occur.” Maedhros went quiet for a moment. “Hopefully the details will be more obvious in the moment.”
He considered this. “That fits,” he said, leaning in closer. “Elrond spoke of his brother a little, but always as if he had been dead for a long time. Someone assured me that it was not my fault . . . which rather implied that there was some reason that might have been doubted.”
“So Elros fell then,” Maedhros concluded.
“He must.” The words scorched his tongue, even when Elros was nothing yet more than an imagining.
He knew more, of course. Knew that day was also the day that Maedhros fell by his own hand.
Knew that was the day Maedhros had left him, had –
He knew.
But he did not think sowing the idea would do him any good, and he thought this theory was a likely one; could imagine, only too well, what horror, what madness, must have overtaken his other self to watch his brother fall and then return to find one of his charges dead by some remnant of the Enemy.
“I know a little more,” he said. “I know the names of the places our brothers die, though I was warned it might not help. The battles are . . . not inevitable, but difficult to avoid without toppling the rest of our victory. And there was nothing climactic about it; only the vagaries of battle. If we are to avoid those battles, there is a particular battle we must win, and they were not at all sure we could win it, even with their help.”
“This mysterious ‘they’ are bolder in their hints than you were,” Maedhros said, amusement layered over strain. “Very well. Let’s hear it.”
“We are not to trust Ulfang or his sons,” he said, closing his eyes. “In anything. We are to trust Gwindor in everything, save for his ability to wait until the proper moment to charge.”
His brother hummed an acknowledgement. “You should write down the rest. Every detail you can remember.”
He hummed his own acknowledgement, which was not quite an agreement. “I remember that Gondolin is apparently allowing duels, the hypocrites.”
His brother’s hand paused once more. “Glorfindel,” he guessed, presumably based on the future Maglor’s companions. “He tried what?”
Two.
He had thought he was prepared for any of the many ways this could yet go wrong in this strange world where the war was won and so many of the faces he knew were missing, and so many of the names most familiar to his tongue were never anything but whispered.
He was braced for Elrond ripping his mask off to reveal this was all a terrible illusion, and that it was Sauron underneath. He was braced for this somehow all being the truth. He was braced for hearing he could never go back; that his last patrol had ended in capture instead of this seeming dream. He was braced for somehow finding his way back to his own time and place and being dropped into the middle of a battle. He was braced for torture.
He was not braced for Glorfindel to stalk up to him in the gardens and challenge him to a duel.
“You want to have a song duel?” he asked incredulously. “Here? Now?”
He hadn’t thought Glorfindel had even liked those; he had certainly never seen him at any of the more fashionable arenas back in Tirion. And this was not at all the proper place for it; you wanted an amphitheater for that, or at least open space, not the tangled paths of a richly grown garden.
On the off chance Elrond was real, he appeared to be suffering more than enough without them trampling through his prized kingsfoil.
“No,” Glorfindel said through gritted teeth, which made more sense, but – “Blades. Now.”
Maglor stared at him. “You’re mad.” Or an illusion, he supposed but – “I don’t know what Gondolin’s been getting up to, but I am not risking an accidental kinslaying in wartime. Our people are divided already – “
“Apparently we weren’t divided enough,” Glorfindel growled, and he lunged forward, blade already drawing loose –
Maglor eeled away and backed toward the path that led toward the library, hands raised placatingly. He allowed just a hint of song to seep into his voice. “Calmly now, Glorfindel. Use your words. Think. Whose poisoned words have you been listening to of late?”
Was Glorfindel part of the illusion? Was he real, and this was some twisted tactic to get them to kill each other so that the survivor would be easier to manipulate?
He had thought they had been on the same page, more or less; he had thought they were allies of a sort, marginally less mistrustful of each other than the rest of this strange dream. He had thought they had been colluding.
But Glorfindel had vanished into the archives in pursuit of his own answers, and now he advanced inexorably, and Maglor’s sword felt so, so heavy at his side.
They had not taken his weapon. With every reason to in the world, they had not taken his weapon.
Maybe they had wanted him to use it.
He kept his hands raised instead, and desperately tried to ignore the certainly illusory sound of waves.
His back hit stone. A wall or a statue, it didn’t matter. What mattered -
What mattered was ducking Glorfindel’s blade long enough to punch him in the face.
What mattered was catching just enough of Glorfindel’s roar to realize he was being accused of seducing Idril, at which point he tripped over his own feet and more or less punched himself in the face.
He decided then and there that this was not how he would be describing this duel if he ever decided to sing about it.
Which would first require him surviving it, a fact he would feel considerably more confident in if he trusted his own mind enough to actually go for Glorfindel’s throat -
“Enough.”
The word was not shouted. This in no way undermined the absolute power with which it cut through all other sound in the garden and compelled stillness.
As a master himself, Maglor was impressed.
(The power was familiar to him, he realized later. The deep waters of Fingolfin’s line. The deeper thrum of Melian’s glimpsed power.)
(And a touch of a spark he could have sworn was Celebrimbor.)
(So . . . Not Sauron. Almost certainly not Sauron.)
Which was such a dizzying relief that he let his head fall back onto the cobblestones as he said, with slightly hysterical childish glee, “He started it.”
“I am ending it,” Elrond snapped, and he sounded so much like Grandfather that Maglor couldn’t help but think, Alright. He’s one of ours.
Eight.
He wondered, sometimes, what they had told Glorfindel. What the man had tried to do to avert his city’s fate. They had not grown close, after that duel, but they had still been allies, of a sort.
But the man fell on the fields of the Nirnaeth, and he never did get the chance to ask him.
(He almost expected the world to end right there when he stumbled over the corpse; for reality to unravel around them.)
(But they had been trying all along to change the future, and this was just proof of what he should have known all along: that they were no more special or protected than anyone else.)
(And that the future could always change for the worse.)
Eleven.
He carried his two sons hostages exhausted children to where the bulk of their forces waited. Maedhros was watching the city burn with grim eyes; Caranthir had given up on stopping him and was counting up their casualties.
Maedhros’s shoulders lost a sliver of their tension when Maglor became visible through the smoke. Caranthir called, with uncharacteristically audible relief, “You’re late!”
“You may attempt carrying two small and extremely squirmy children through a burning city if you’d like,” he said with forced cheer. “If you would kindly check and make sure they’ve exhausted themselves into sleep and not collapsed due to smoke inhalation, it would be much appreciated.”
It took considerably more will than he had expected to relinquish them.
Maedhros’s dead eyes (no, no, not yet, not yet, he still had time to stop it) flicked over them.
“Children,” he repeated.
He wanted, suddenly, desperately, to conceal the whole thing. But he could hardly expect the children to lie about their names on nothing but his say-so.
Not now. Not when he had somehow irrevocably changed who he was to them.
“Meet Elrond,” he said, still with that forced cheer, “and Elros. Don’t ask me which is which.”
(That was a lie. A stupid, senseless lie, because he knew full well, knew them like his soul had cradled them for every one of those five thousand years he hadn’t actually lived.)
(But to them he was just the monster come to steal them into the horror ravaged wastelands, and that was all he would ever be, so he would not horrify them further by claiming something that was not earned and never could be.)
So he forced a smile across his bloodstained teeth at the brother who’d had no idea that all his worrying over Maglor’s lack of wife was for nothing and at the brother who had no idea that he’d been destined to die at Doriath, and that his life had been bought at the cost of his two littlest brothers - another set of twins.
Six.
When the news from Nargothrond at last reached Himring, his other self’s advice to keep Celegorm and Curufin from staying there had become clear.
“They must have reacted badly to the quest for the Silmaril,” he theorized to Maedhros when they were safely alone in his office.
Within him, the Oath quietly burned.
“We will have to think carefully how we will react,” Maedhros said quietly, eyes scanning the letter again and again. “Assuming, of course, our cousin’s quest is successful.”
The news that came after that was more confused. Beren was dead; Beren was alive; Beren was no longer quite human, or perhaps it was Luthien that had been changed.
Finrod was most certainly dead.
The Silmaril was Luthien’s; the Silmaril was lost; the Silmaril was caught up in the stomach of a great beast that was terrorizing Doriath and beginning to expand its range outward.
This last came in a letter from Curufin that informed them in some exasperation that Celegorm and Huan had gone to stalk the edges of the Mantle in hopes of hunting it.
Maglor rode out at once.
He was not in time to bury his brother.
Nor even to claim the prize his brother had died for.
He was in time to nearly start a war with Doriath, and he thought it was only thanks to the Mantle between himself and the border guards that he did not, that he did not let the fury of Alqualonde spill out, a hundred times worse, in his rage.
Celegorm had died with Huan at his side, and Maglor could not sing at his burial, could not now even open his mouth at his brother’s grave, because how could he?
What atonement could he possibly offer his brother now?
Nine.
That they still called the Nirnaeth the Nirnaeth was answer enough to the question of what their efforts amounted to, he thought.
He did not tell Fingon that as his cousin at last woke from the orcish poison that had kept him feverishly delirious for a week.
He should by rights be in a recently cleaned infirmary, defended by stone walls and fresh soldiers and the very best of their healers.
Instead, he was very slowly bleeding out on Maglor’s pallet in a thicket of woods they hoped they would not be followed to, surrounded by the ragtag group of elves that had fled to Maglor’s banner in the retreat.
The wound would still not heal. Despite all their efforts to drain the poison, the wound would still not heal.
A proper healer might could have changed things, but they all had too much blood on their hands to be proper healers now.
“Maedhros?” Fingon rasped, eyes squinting open.
Maglor paused in his futile song. “No,” he said quietly from where he knelt beside his cousin. He had not seen Maedhros since they had been separated in the battle, though he refused to believe it meant anything. Some of Maedhros’s people had made their way to Maglor’s banner; the last they had seen of their prince, he had been alive. “No, it’s Maglor. Though you and Maedhros are even now,” he added with false cheer.
They had done everything they could to drain the poison out.
Everything they could.
Fingon didn’t look down at his arm; it didn’t even twitch. His mind was caught elsewhere, brow furrowed in worry or pain. “Already even,” he insisted. “You know – you know what you did when Father – we were already even, Maedhros.”
Maglor did not know, actually, and was in fact quite certain that Maedhros would have argued the point, no matter what had occurred after their uncle had felt the need to one-up their father in gloriously horrible ends.
But Maedhros was not here now, any more than he had been there when Fingon had sought to best both of their fathers’ records in gloriously horrible ends, and while Maglor maintained firmly that there would come a point when Maedhros was with him again, he was beginning to suspect it would not be in time.
So: “I know,” he said, and he made his voice a little more like softened steel, a little more like Maedhros’s was now. “I know that’s what you said.”
Fingon’s eyes were still narrowed, but the effort looked immense. “You believe me now,” he insisted.
“I do.”
“Good,” Fingon said with a sigh of relief, eyes falling closed again. “Good.”
He held on through the night.
He did not wake up again.
(Maglor found Maedhros again, eventually. Found Caranthir and both the Ambarussa.)
(He did not see Curufin again. Not living.)
(When he found Celebrimbor, he sent him on to Gil-Galad. He could feel the Oath burning now, and it was best Curufin’s son was kept far away from the fallout.)
Twelve.
He wondered sometimes if maybe he hadn’t misunderstood. If they really had fought to defend the Havens in the original timeline, and it was just his horrible stupidity that had somehow made everything go so very wrong.
He wondered –
Too many things.
“Why do you look at us like that?” Elrond asked from the other side of the fire. Others would be joining them around it soon, but they had been forced to move camp today, and there was still much work to do for those who were not limping from their last fight, as Maglor was, or still small enough to be scooped up with one arm, as were the twins despite Elrond’s many protests to the contrary.
Although there were glimpses of the elf he would someday be even now. Elrond might be only slightly less tiny now than he had been on that horrible day, but his eyes were sharp when dried from tears.
“Look at you like what?” he asked, though he knew full well. His hands reached for his harp, desperate for a distraction.
“Like a giant warg’s about to jump out and eat me,” Elros said from where he had managed to clamber up to hang upside down from a tree branch in the thirty seconds since Maglor last looked at him.
“Like you’re about to tell me a terrible secret,” Elrond said from where he was very sensibly staying on the ground.
Maglor abandoned his harp in an instant to catch Elros and gently lower him down. “Half the trees in this forest are dead, and the other half have their own defenses. Don’t risk climbing them unless you must.”
“This is exactly what I mean,” Elros grumbled before flopping spread eagled onto the ground next to his brother.
Maglor ignored this. Elros would thank him when he was older, which he was going to live to be.
Or. Well. No, he wouldn’t, because the idea of Elros thanking him for anything about his upbringing was slightly sickening, but.
The point was, he would live to heal from it.
Elrond had scooted over so his brother could use his lap as a pillow if he wanted but otherwise ignored these dramatics to look at Maglor expectantly.
“There are plenty of terrible things I could tell you,” Maglor said wryly, “but none of them are secret. I’ll answer any question you ask, Elrond, you know that.”
It was the least he owed Elrond, after everything; it wasn’t his fault Maglor had mangled things so badly.
And it was an easy promise to make, given just how unlikely it was that Elrond would ever dream of the right question to ask.
(There was one question he knew Elrond would never ask. Not now.)
(But the memory of it, more word than proper question, haunted him still.)
One.
“Atar? Atar!”
There was a boot in front of his face. Maglor objected to this on general grounds, and objected to it more when he woke up enough to realize that he was lying on cobblestone, not grass, and that there was no possible favorable situation that led to him forgetting the end of his patrol and ending up in a place with cobblestones and unconscious Gondolindrim.
Or one, at least. But that was more than enough.
He laid as still as he could visibly, while the hand mostly hidden by the shadow of the oaf in front of him drifted toward his dagger, just in case.
“Atar!”
It did not even begin to occur to him that whoever was shouting might be referring to him until the hand touched his arm.
The reflex was instant: in a moment, he had the intruder on their back with his knife pressed against their throat.
Glorfindel had also leapt up roaring behind him, so apparently he had not been alone in playing dead.
It was an elf he had pinned, he realized almost immediately. Just an elf.
An elf who was staring up at him with -
Not with terror, actually, he realized, forcing himself to see what was and not what walked in memory. With a shocking amount of soothing compassion, actually.
“It’s alright,” the elf was saying. “You’re in Rivendell. It’s the Third Age. You haven’t seen battle for centuries now. There was some kind of disturbance in the Music of the World; I came as soon as I heard it, but all seems safe now.” And then, with exasperation of all things, he called out, “Glorfindel, I realize you have objections to him keeping a knife, but at the rate you are going, I am going to have to start questioning your fitness for weapons as well. Put down that sword before you hurt someone with it.”
“And who are you to order such?” Glorfindel snapped.
For the first time, a hint of unease crept into the elf’s expression. His eyes flicked toward Maglor almost plaintively.
“Who are you?” Maglor repeated, since for once one of his cousin’s people had asked a good question.
For a moment, the elf’s expression shattered.
Then he pulled himself back together.
“I am Elrond,” he said, “and this is a place of healing. If you will both remain calm, we’ll figure out what happened here as soon as may be.”
Four.
It was a difficult thing to believe.
The main problem with not believing it was -
Well, there were a number of problems with his first terrified conclusion that Elrond must surely be Sauron. The one he would have reported to Maedhros, had Maedhros been there to make a report to, was that Elrond already seemed to know everything. He knew where Maglor’s troops were positioned, he knew where Gondolin was, he knew where Nargothrond was . . .
If Elrond wanted information, Maglor was at a loss as to what it could be he was angling for. The only thing he didn’t seem to know was what, exactly, had happened to lead to Maglor waking up in a stone courtyard with his face uncomfortably close to a still unconscious Glorfindel’s boot. And he had seemingly entirely accepted Maglor’s claim not to know this either; he certainly had not pressed. He did not seem to want anything from Maglor at all, except -
Except what he had wanted from the first. And it was so very, very hard not to give him that.
Especially when he looked so tired and seemed to want so very little in the end.
Because, in the end, the main problem with his theory was that Elrond’s soul reached out to his in a constant, quiet cry, and yet it never once demanded and barely even asked.
If it had been like the cry of Maedhros’s soul after Thangorodrim, perhaps he could have – not resisted. He never could have resisted that. But he could have been suspicious of how well it played to the deepest wounds of his heart.
But this – this was like the cry of his youngest brothers, or what it might have been, if they had ever once been left to cry without immediate and urgent answer. This was worse.
So when he found Elrond with his head in his hands in the library surrounded by a nearly insurmountable pile of books, he did not retreat to the refreshing unambiguity of the hallway.
Instead, he drifted closer until he could reach out a hand and rest it on the other elf’s shoulder.
“I heard about your daughter,” he said quietly. “I’m sorry. I should have realized earlier there was more at stake than my own fears.”
Elrond leaned into the touch instead of startling. “I cannot lose her,” he said, still muffled into his hands. “I cannot lose you. Not after Celebrian. Not after Elros. Not after four thousand years of watching his children die - “ His head fell for a moment before his shoulders swelled with a deep breath and his hands fell to reveal a face striving for calm. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t burden you with such things.”
“Of course you should,” Maglor said firmly, pulling up the chair nearest and claiming it, hand never leaving Elrond’s back. “I have more or less decided I believe you, which makes me your older kinsman one way or another.” It was painful to admit it, to wait with a second’s dread to see -
But there was no laughter, no flash of triumph.
Just Elrond’s pained wince and another answering pang in his own heart that made him regret the lingering doubt. “I am sorry for the confusion - “
Maglor waved this aside. “So tell me what of your burdens you would,” he said. “It’s a family duty, and family seems concerningly thin on the ground here.”
It felt horribly self-serving, abetting as it did his desperate thirst to know how, exactly, this world had come into being, where the maps were twisted into strange shapes and so, so empty.
But he had no other gift to offer here; no other words he dared, with so much unknown between them.
So he would listen. And he would learn.
And he would claw his way back to and reshape the place and the time that had so ripped apart what was left of their family that a cry like Elrond’s could be left to echo alone.
Seven.
“Should we tell them?” he asked his brother dully when he had brought the news of Celegorm back. His head was pounding from the lack of sleep, from the water he refused to admit he had given his body cause to wish to drink. “Do you think he would have lived if we had told him?”
“Come down from the window, Kano,” his brother said softly, still frozen in place in the doorway.
Maglor looked in some surprise to realize that the broad windowsill he had laid claim to was indeed open to the air and a very long drop below.
“Of course,” he said, dropping gracefully back to the solid ground of his brother’s study.
Would it make a difference if I told you I was not the one who needed to be watched near heights?
What does it say, brother mine, that even now, when you see someone near an open window, your first thought is that they mean to jump?
Thirteen.
“Come on,” he said, though he could barely speak through the pain of his burning hand, though he could hardly breathe through the knowledge that he had come so close to bringing Caranthir safely through, only to lose him at the last.
The Silmaril glinted at him mockingly.
Maedhros was still holding his own, staring at it blankly as it seared into his hand.
“Maedhros. You promised me. Please.”
Maedhros’s head at last arose. Slowly. Ever so slowly. “The children,” he said. “The children first.”
“Yes,” Maglor said, and even through the pain, he desperately tried to plan for what must come after.
Sixteen.
It was years after it happened before they heard Elros had passed.
It was not the failure he had once imagined. There was no blood, no weapons, no pounding sense of too late, too late, like there had been for his brothers, again and again.
There was just a group of sailors from Numenor, cheerily roasting fish on the beach with two elves they could not begin to recognize and idly turning the conversation to politics and gossip about their new king.
He could not ask for more details. He dared not ask for more details.
(He had thought – he wanted – and he had hoped this would help. That people would help, people who were whole and cheerful and a reminder that all the world was not just the two of them, scarred and aching and haunted.)
(He had told himself the reminder was for Maedhros. That he was not just being unforgivably selfish once more.)
And now he was duly punished for his hope because even hearing that it had been Elros’s choice, even hearing of how much he had accomplished, how peaceful it was -
He still saw that little boy hanging from a dead tree branch and wondering why Maglor seemed so certain that a warg would spring from the bushes if he looked away for even a moment.
He still saw that stone monument that might even now be being built.
And when that peaceful death was described, he still saw the envy in his brother’s eyes.
Fourteen.
They had kept their hands clean when stealing the Silmarils.
They had kept their hands clean, even though the precious, pure hosts of Vanyar could not say the same.
(One arrow. After all this time and everything that had come within its tangled confines, one arrow, and his last little brother was stripped away.)
So it was not as hard as it could have been to slip inside the tent that hovered between the men’s camp and the elves’.
Elrond was on his feet at once when he saw them, and Maglor was not quite sure what to feel at the way that even now, Elrond’s hands went immediately for his medicines and not for his sword.
Elros’s hands did go to his sword, but they didn’t stay there. Instead, they were reaching out to support Maedhros’s other side.
Maedhros’s eyes were sweeping the tent, looking for the promised danger.
Maglor could see the moment he decided that the danger must have been a dissipated ripple, already defanged by their movements through time.
That, of course, was the moment Maglor struck with the single note of a lullaby so pure and strong that Maedhros’s mind, exhausted past bearing and vulnerable in just the right places to the one person he still dared to trust, had no choice but to collapse into instant slumber.
Elros’s hand, to his credit, had shot to his sword. He released it again to catch Maedhros before he fell.
“He probably would have done that on his own soon anyway,” Elrond said mildly after a moment.
“I know,” Maglor said, his own weariness beginning to catch up to him. “But I couldn’t risk it. He’s not . . . well.”
“Neither of you are well,” Elros said tartly, and something about his voice made Maglor frown just a little. It had shifted – not in audible register, but in the way it struck the world.
Elros caught this.
“Don’t look at me like that,” he said. “I’m mortal, not about to keel over any minute.”
“Mortal,” he breathed.
Elros froze. “Ah,” he said. “Yes. I’ve explained it so many times already I forgot you wouldn’t know.”
The pieces of a long ago begun puzzle at last clicked together.
“Mortal,” he repeated. “Ai, Elros. So I have not spared you after all.”
Then, thankfully, his own mind collapsed under exhaustion and spared him the trouble of explaining this to anyone.
Fifteen
He did not want to leave Elrond.
He knew too well what scars that leaving would cause; what cry he could already hear reaching out from Elrond’s soul as Elros prepared to set out.
But he also knew too well that they could not remain hidden so closely to an elvish army forever, and he knew even better how little Maedhros could bear to be chained. Gil-Galad would not remain distracted (or, perhaps ‘distracted’) forever; sooner or later they would be discovered, and the consequences would fall on them all. They could function once more; their hands were healed enough for that, and he almost trusted Maedhros out of his sight for longer than a moment. They could go now, and not have it be a death sentence.
And surely, surely Elrond could not actually want them to remain; surely it was only his own memories of what could have been clouding his perception of what was now.
So when Maedhros looked at him in the dead of night, tense with every unexpected noise outside the tent and said, “We should go,” Maglor didn’t argue.
He never argued with his brother. Not anymore.
But first he fixed the crooked blanket lying over the sleeping boy he had so failed, and he pretended that he was quite sure the half-elf was asleep, and that he hadn’t heard the Peredhel’s breath hitch as they left.
Eighteen.
The wilds were harsh and endless.
Again and again, he thought of saying, We could go back.
But where was there to go, now? To Elrond, who they had surely wounded enough? To Gil-Galad, who would at best confine them to a stone room where Maedhros would slowly go mad? To the sea, where they would surely be dragged to the depths by Ulmo and drowned?
There was nothing but the wilds now. Nothing but the wilds and the endless torment of thinking, With all my warnings, all my chances, this is what I made of it?
Had he really made anything better at all?
But then he would see Maedhros, still grimly moving forward, searching for some purpose in the endless stretches of slowly healing plains, and he knew that as selfish as it was, he wouldn’t give it up.
Not for anything.
Seventeen.
There was battle aplenty in the wilds. Meaningless blurs of violence against the remnants of Morgoth’s monsters that faded into meaningless blurs of violence against the rise of Sauron’s monsters.
It was not until a decade after the fact that they learned that Celebrimbor had died.
Failure, failure, failure, his mind whispered.
But his brother’s eyes still wandered to cliff edges and hopeless battles, so Maglor had no time to entertain the worst of his own thoughts.
Eighteen.
When they found the orcs attacking Galadriel’s daughter, there was no question of not interfering. The world was empty enough once more without letting more of their kin slip through their hands.
It was no worse a battle than any other they had seen in the long, meaningless days.
But it meant more, so it seemed almost natural that they should pay for it with Maedhros’s collapse afterward, blood matting his hair, and eyes refusing to open at all.
Nineteen.
There was no question after that of not staying with Elrond.
Celebrian had insisted Maglor travel with her for the sake of her own protection and Maedhros’s potential healing; Elrond had insisted that there was no better chance of Maedhros’s recovery than for them to stay in the safety of Rivendell.
It was not that he thought they were wrong.
It was only that sometimes he privately suspected that his agreement had less to do with that, and more to do with the desperate loneliness that crept into his soul at the idea of setting forth to wander the shores, at last truly alone.
Perhaps it really was his fate.
Or perhaps he was just truly hopeless at saying no to Elrond, which was at the very least a less doom-laden thought to admit to, so he clung to it when anyone else was around.
Twenty-one
It was a hard thing to stay, knowing what could have been. Knowing what should have been.
But he had nothing close to the strength needed to leave.
He made the mistake of mentioning that once, to Elrond.
“Rivendell is a home for all,” Elrond said firmly. And then, less firmly, “Is it really such a terrible place to stay?”
“No,” he said at once.
No.
But it haunted him, all the same.
Twenty.
When he came across Glorfindel in the garden, he truly thought he’d seen a ghost.
But the man looked real enough when he held up his hands and cried ruefully, “Peace. I’ve learned my lesson on duels.”
That the Valar should return Glorfindel to life was no great surprise. That they should send him back -
And then the reason came to him.
So the Valar would not let the world fall apart at the seams after all. Not at extremity. Not like this.
Not when they deemed it mattered.
“So you’ll still be joining me for our little adventure after all,” he said with a smile that would not look nearly as forced as it was. “What do you think that will be like, from this perspective?”
“Terrifying,” Glorfindel said cheerfully. “If we change different things this time, do you suppose some version of us will be looping through it forever?”
A song, endlessly echoing out through the void -
But he remembered nothing from his other self, so he shrugged and said, “We won’t,” and he ignored the sudden sharpness in Glorfindel’s eyes, and the slightly suspicious hovering from Elrond for a long time after.
It was Maedhros who had longed for endings, and Maedhros had one now, of a sort. It was Maedhros who needed protection from such thoughts.
He was merely . . . tired.
Twenty-two.
There was a golden bauble.
There was a golden bauble in the hand of Elrond’s daughter, and he was in a courtyard where he had once woken up to Glorfindel’s boot.
And then -
Memory returned, mixed and mingled and achingly slow.
Two songs, woven together.
The differences were not what he had thought.
(He is with Maedhros when he wakes up. He is holding his hand so tightly that he almost can’t feel Maedhros’s returning squeeze.)
(Maedhros wakes up, and he knows what questions must be forming, what alarm could so easily gather, so he is ready with reassurances.)
(“We’re safe,” he promises. “You’re in a place of healing,” and, oh, how those words echo now across the time. “Don’t leave me again,” he says, and those are not the words he meant to say, those are words broken and useless and burdensome, but Maedhros - )
(Maedhros reaches out, and there is – something refreshed in his eyes now. Something better.)
(“Never,” he says, and Maglor is not at all afraid to hold him to that vow.)
(Elrond knows, now. Knows more than he ever knew before.)
(“I really would have told you,” Maglor says helplessly. He knows it is not much, not when there is so little chance Elrond ever would have asked.)
(Elrond waves this away. “The world has changed,” he says, and it is not a question. “For the better, I think?”)
(Celebrian is here, and well, and known to him. His brother has woken and been convinced, very firmly, that this time he will take the actual time he needs to heal. There are more people with a subtle star sewn into their clothing or a Gondolindhrim accent in their voices lurking in the halls of Rivendell than there had been once in another version of the song.)
(He is starting to suspect that Glorfindel does not actually want to stab him at absolutely all times.)
(“Not enough,” he temporizes because Elros is still gone, and his other brothers are still gone, and Elrond’s childhood was still ruined, and so nothing Maglor has done ever could be good enough, ever will be.)
(“But better,” Elrond says, and his eyes crinkle a little as he smiles, daring Maglor to argue this point, and who is he to deny Elrond this happiness anyway, when he knows what additional griefs would have weighed on him in other iterations of the Great Song?)
(“But better,” he concedes, and the joy in his own heart at Elrond’s blinding smile is one part of the song that has remained very much the same.)