Chapter Text
He didn’t remember how he had gotten here. He remembered the messenger that had brought him the news, and then - Everything after that was a dark void.
His father was gone. Feanaro did not want to remember more.
He had been on his way to Tirion already when the news came. They had known the birth would be soon even if no one had expected it would be this soon; they had thought to have nearly another month. He had not wanted to be at the birth, but his father had asked him to be there, and -
His father.
Feanaro’s head fell forward into his hands. It wasn’t a dignified position; he had come back to himself from the void of memory slumped against one of the endless tapestries that lined the marble walls of the palace, knees drawn up nearly to his chest.
On the opposite wall was a door that gaped open to an empty room where his father had once slept.
Where his father had died.
So it did not matter if he was dignified. Anyone who dared to disturb him -
“What a tragedy.”
His head snapped up.
Melkor had taken the form of an elf today - a striking one who looked almost familiar - but there was no true disguise for any of the Valar. Their presence inevitably made itself felt.
“Another queen of the Noldor lost,” Melkor said, shaking his head. “And your father with her! I can only imagine how he must have loved her.”
“Get out.” His voice was a hollow echo of the rage he wanted to feel.
“Forgive me,” Melkor said hastily. “Forgive me, I did not mean to imply -'' He sat gingerly against the opposing wall instead of leaving.
Of course he did. What respect could he - could any of the Valar - truly have for grief?
“I cannot imagine what you are going through,'' the Vala said gently, almost as if he had plucked the thought from Feanaro’s face - or, more likely, from his glare at the place Melkor’s back rumpled the fabric of the closest tapestry.
“No. You can’t.”
The Vala’s smile flickered. “At least Ingwion will be here soon.”
“Ingwion,” he repeated, uncomprehending. What was it to him if Indis’s nephew came?
“To take the child,” Melkor elaborated. “I came to assure you that her family has agreed. You won’t have to deal with that . . . reminder.” His tone implied a much worse word than reminder had been bitten back.
“The child.” He hated how his words were mere echoes of Melkor’s own.
“Aracano,” Melkor said helpfully. “That’s what his mother wanted to call him.”
High Chieftain. So she had been scheming after all, despite all her protests.
And none of it mattered because here Feanaro was. Not heir to the Noldor, but king.
He would crown the infant himself if it would have brought his father back.
But nothing would. Nothing except the will of the Valar.
His father would return, Feanaro tried to assure himself. This was not like his mother’s case. Surely his father would want to return. And then -
Then, he would be proud of Feanaro and how he had handled things. Feanaro would make sure of it.
To his father, everything would most certainly include the child. Aracano. Or, as his father had preferred, Nolofinwe.
(Wise Finwe. Was that why he had wanted another child? Was it wisdom he had thought Feanaro had lacked? If his father had just told him what the deficiency was - )
(His father had not thought him deficient when he was small. He was sure of that. When he had been small, his father had taken Feanaro with him everywhere; he had not for a moment left him, terrified that with one parent gone, Feanaro’s spirit could all too easily have slipped away.)
(Finwe had been enough in the end. If only Feanaro had been enough in turn, his father might still - )
With his father gone, Feanaro was the closest thing the Noldor had to an expert on bringing children through the impossible. Who was he to cede that title to Ingwion?
No. It was not to be borne. The Vanyar had taken enough from him; he would not allow them to take this -
His mind stuttered over what word to choose. Burden? Honor? Responsibility?
This. He would not allow them to take this.
Uneasiness crept in through the cloud of grief and fury. The Vanyar would not; he could prevent it. But Namo . . . It had been three days already since - since the deaths; with Nolofinwe not only orphaned but early -
Feanaro shoved himself to his feet and stalked toward the end of the hallway, toward what had once been his nursery. It had been scarcely used - his father had not dared leave him there - but with his father’s room vacant, surely Nolofinwe must be there now.
He felt a flicker that on any other day would have been pleasure when Melkor was forced to scramble gracelessly to his feet to follow after.
“Surely you do not intend - “
“Surely you know my mind little.”
“Would you so dishonor your father by shielding that which killed him?”
Feanaro froze.
Fury licked through him like flame.
It was almost enough to warm the chill that lay heavy over his soul.
“We can be murderers together,” he said, eyes locked on the tapestry at the end of the corridor.
It had been one of Miriel’s, once.
He stalked off to find his charge.
Nolofinwe had his father’s eyes.
Feanaro’s own eyes burned as he stared down at them.
The baby was so small. Smaller than any other he had seen. Smaller than Nelyafinwe would be when he came -
Nelyafinwe. Nerdanel.
Thrice his line had sired children. Twice the mothers had died in the births. If Nerdanel -
“Fetch a messenger to send word to Mahtan’s house immediately,” he instructed the nursemaid trembling behind him. Nerdanel had agreed to stay there when they thought this was a mere birth, lest she strain herself with the travel, but Feanaro feared she had just been indulging him. If she came now that she’d heard of the catastrophe - “They must know what happened, but gently. There must be no stress, no strain of any kind.” If he lost her - If he lost her now-
He picked up Nolofinwe in a desperate need to hold to someone.
A tiny, flickering fea reached out to his, first tentatively, then with a desperate grip that mirrored Feanaro’s own.
The fea was starving. Weak.
And so, so stubborn.
The nursemaid found enough courage to say, “The healer fears his strength might - “
He wished her courage had remained lost. “He will be as strong as a forest fire. Stronger.”
He pushed some of his own fiery spirit around Nolofinwe in a protective blanket against the biting cold of the world. Despite everyone else’s assurances, he still could not quite believe the room was not too drafty; surely the whole of the chill was not in his mind alone.
It’s his fault, part of him whispered. Just like it was yours.
He shoved the thought away viciously.
Monsters together, another part of him whispered, and he pushed that down too.
His father would want Nolofinwe to be well when he returned. That was the important thing.
So Nolofinwe would be well and grow strong.
He would not be allowed to die.
No one here would be.
Nerdanel arrived not two days later.
She’s alive was his first desperate thought as she swept down on where he had laid out papers he could barely bear to read on his father’s desk, Nolofinwe bound to his chest just as his father had once carried Feanaro.
Her arms wrapped around the back of the chair, secured tight around his shoulders.
Alive.
He wanted to linger in the moment, but the choking fear wouldn’t let him.
“You should sit,” he said, struggling to stand. “Are you tired? Should I send for a healer?”
“I’m barely showing,” she said, laughing at him a little, “and I took a cart the whole way here! I’m fine.” She sat anyway and looked up at him in concern. “What happened? I set out as soon as I felt -” She gestured between them to indicate the bond.
So she didn’t know. She had missed the messenger entirely and knew only of the storm that had sucked up all the air in Feanaro’s chest.
He took a breath. Struggled. Tried to speak.
Nolofinwe’s spirit scrunched up as the protective swaddling around his fea turned to misery.
Nolofinwe spoke for both of them when he broke into wrenching sobs.
Despite Nerdanel insisting she felt fine, she still consented to let a healer look her over once she heard what had happened.
Her fingers, laced between Feanaro’s own and just a little too tight, betrayed her look of unconcern.
The healer did not bother to look unconcerned. The healer looked at her as if she were already dead.
“Get out,” she snapped at last, halfway through the examination when the healer’s looks grew too mournful. “Get out, get out, get out - “ She sprang to her feet as she said it, stepping forward furiously.
The healer fled.
“I am not going to die,” she said when the door had swung shut. “There is no reason for me to die. I feel fine.”
She had not stopped staring at the slammed door.
“You won’t,” he promised. His hands itched to do something to prove it, to ensure it, but they were painfully empty.
Literally, for once. One of the nursemaids had taken Nolofinwe away to feed him, and the absence was another itch in the back of his mind.
He reached out to recapture her hand, and he was the one clinging too tightly now.
She took deep breaths until calm had crept back over her. “I don’t want to see him again,” Nerdanel said.
“Of course not,” Feanaro agreed instantly. The healers in the palace were supposedly the best the Noldor had to offer, but what good had they done? Twice already they had failed and already they resigned themselves to thrice. “Who do you want?”
She was quiet for a long moment. “My mother,” she said at last. “And the midwife she used, Farande.”
“Perfect,” he said at once, meaning it fully. “I’ll send out messengers.”
Líriel, after all, had survived her own pregnancy, and he had heard her speaking of Farande to Nerdanel; she had successfully delivered children even on the long march to Aman.
She hasn’t had to contend with whatever’s cursing your line before, part of him whispered.
Feanaro shoved it down and clung ever more tightly to Nerdanel’s hand.
The day of the funeral came with the Vanyar still conspicuous by their absence.
The Noldor had filled the streets of the city. The Teleri had poured in from the coast.
But the delegation of Ingwe’s people still had not come to stake their claim on the child in his arms.
“We could wait another day,” Olwe suggested.
The sea king’s face was pale and drawn. There was a very familiar redness around his eyes.
“I’m surprised to hear you advocating we wait for Ingwe,” Feanaro said. “I had not thought waiting a virtue you valued.”
Olwe’s face went red.
Nerdanel squeezed his arm and recalled Feanaro to himself. He could not let his temper run away from him; he could not ask Nerdanel to play peacekeeper, not now, when there was already so much stress laid upon her.
“Forgive me,” he said through gritted teeth. “I only meant that for the good of all those that have gathered, surely we must move forward.”
He did not wait for Olwe’s agreement. He did not need it, after all; let Olwe hold this against him if he chose.
For his own part, all Feanaro could care about were the great piles of wood, heaped high in the center of the city, waiting to be set aflame.
There was a ceremony.
He didn’t register most of it. The endless press of bodies in the street parting to make way; the endless howl of the voices lifting in a mourning lament. The flames devouring the pyres.
It took him a long time to realize that the ceremony was over; that he was lying on a bed in near darkness and that the flames he could feel slowly turning his skin to ash weren’t real.
“Nerdanel,” he said. The word scraped its way out of his mouth.
The bed shifted. “I’m here,” she whispered as she tucked her head into his shoulder. Her arms were twisted strangely, and it took him a moment to realize Nolofinwe was cocooned in her arms. “It’s over.”
It did not feel over.
But Nolofinwe was twitching, threatening to wake, so he kept quiet and just pressed a kiss to the top of her head.
Ingwion showed up two days later.
If Feanaro had not taken over tending Nolofinwe’s fea, the child would have been long dead.
He did not think much of Ingwion’s timing.
Or, for that matter, Ingwe’s absence.
He did not sit in his father’s throne to receive him. That seat would remain unoccupied until his father returned. For now, a seat at the foot of the dais would do fine.
This had worked well enough for other visitors, but Ingwion’s presence did raise the disadvantages of the position. If Feanaro had been on the dais, there would have been more barriers to standing up and punching Ingwion in the face.
There were barriers below the dais too, of course - picturing the strain on Nerdanel’s face if he had to tell her what he’d done, the baby currently chewing on his collar - but every little bit helped when presented with the blank composure on Ingwion’s face.
“My father sends his deepest condolences and regrets that it was impossible for him to come in person.”
“Impossible,” Feanaro repeated flatly. “To come show honor to his oldest friend and his own sister.”
Ingwion’s jaw twitched.
Ingwion did not, he noticed with a dim flicker of interest, look particularly angry at Feanaro.
“His grief has been . . . debilitating,” Ingwion said after a long moment. “For my own part, I can only beg your forgiveness for my party’s lateness; I had begun to fear we would never arrive at all. Our path was twice interrupted by failed bridges and once by a landslide.”
The acerbic remark already on Feanaro’s tongue curdled.
“Two bridges,” he repeated flatly. ”Noldorin bridges?”
“One of them,” Ingwion said. Now that Feanaro was looking more closely, he was reluctantly forced to concede that Ingwion’s usual blank composure was . . . frayed. “The other was ours. I will, of course, be happy to provide more details to whoever might be appropriate so that your bridge may be more easily repaired.”
Two bridges and a landslide, not two weeks after Ingwion’s aunt had died.
It was an insane thought, but for a moment, Feanaro couldn’t help but wonder if the Valar had some sort of grudge against the Vanyar’s royal family.
“We will, of course, have the bridge mended as soon as possible,” he said. “I am sorry such shoddy craftsmanship cost you the chance to honor your aunt; a monument is being constructed in the square where the pyres were if you would like to pay your respects.”
Nerdanel was designing it. Feanaro had insisted the monument be metal; officially this was so he could contribute to its construction. Unofficially, this was to keep Nerdanel from hauling around blocks of marble to whatever extent he could.
Ingwion accepted with a shallow bow. “I thank you. I believe all that leaves is the child.” He hesitated. “I was told that you had refused to take charge of him, but it appears I was misinformed.”
Feanaro’s grip on Nolofinwe tightened. “You were.”
“Then I believe it would be less disruptive to his fea for him to remain here.”
It was exactly what he’d wanted, and he hadn’t even had to fight for it.
He didn’t trust it.
“King Ingwe will not object?”
Ingwion’s jaw tightened. “I am quite sure he will not.”
Ah.
Feanaro knew that look. He had seen it when Atar talked of some of Miriel’s old friends. Friends who had not been permitted to be alone with Feanaro.
“Then we are agreed,” he said. “But forgive my manners; I am sure you are wanting to rest.”
He had wanted to make the monument to his father, but time slid away from him in faster and faster increments; the crown consumed all it touched.
Mahtan quietly stepped up, and he could be nothing but grateful to his old teacher.
Nerdanel, for her part, insisted she was fine. Her mother said she was fine. Farande said she was fine.
Feanaro, for his part, would not - could not - believe it until Maitimo was safely born. He could not rest until then.
In the meantime, if he could do nothing else for Nerdanel, he could at least do this.
“You don’t have to drop everything every time I get hungry,” she said from her perch on the counter. “I have been told we employ very excellent cooks.” She smiled apologetically at one of them.
He forced himself to put down the knife with which he was, perhaps, over chopping the meat. On his back, Nolofinwe gurgled unhappily at the loss of the rhythmic sound. “If you would rather have what they make - “
She slid off the counter. He flinched a little at the slight drop. “No,” she admitted. “I’d miss cooking with you.”
“Then everything else can wait,” he said firmly.
Surprisingly, no one else had argued with him on this. Nor had he been alone in watching Nerdanel’s growing belly with anxious eyes.
There could not be another tragedy.
There could not.
He was not with her when the moment struck. He was meeting with his father’s advisors as they went around and around about whose fault it was their infrastructure had been unprepared for a bridge collapse and a landslide.
He was meeting with them right up until the messenger came bursting through the door white faced and said, “It’s time.”
He did not bother to properly dismiss the meeting.
He did pause to scoop up Nolofinwe from his specially modified official seat on the council.
His fea was still too fragile to risk being left alone, and Feanaro had already promised himself:
No one else died.
Mahtan was an unmoving rock in the corner of the corridor in which they waited.
Feanaro thought his own pacing might wear through the floor to the rooms below.
Every sound from behind the closed door made them both flinch.
Nolofinwe was the only one who was happy. He was always happy as long as he was moving, and Feanaro had never been less still.
Right up until the door at last creaked open and he froze where he stood.
Liriel’s hair was plastered to her head with sweat, but she was smiling.
She was smiling.
“She’s alright,” she said. “They’re both alright.”
Feanaro darted into the room.
Nerdanel was propped up on cushions in the bed. A small, perfect bundle was in her arms.
“Maitimo is here,” she told him.
Feanaro fell to his knees beside the bed.
Nerdanel was alive. Alive and smiling and looking not the slightest bit tired of life.
And Maitimo was blinking up at him from her arms.
“Swap?” she offered.
Slowly, carefully, he traded his half-brother for his son. Maitimo took this change calmly; Nolo blinked at it.
“That’s your new cousin,” Nerdanel said, gently bouncing him. “Maitimo.”
Nolo considered this. He considered the new baby.
“Mai?” he asked.
Nerdanel and Feanaro both blinked at him.
Feanaro let his head fall onto the bed before beginning hopelessly, hysterically, to laugh.