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Chapter Text

Satellite

The first snow of the year had just begun to fall when word came that Doriath had launched the world’s first artificial satellite.  Maedhros and Maglor ran home from school, burst in the front door, and yelled to their mother that they were going sledding.

There was no immediate response, which was not so unusual.  But when Maedhros stepped into the backyard, he found Celegorm, hatless and mittenless, alone with his plastic bow-and-arrow set.  The baby and Nerdanel were nowhere to be seen.  On the line, clothes hung forgotten, gathering snowflakes.

Maedhros saw that the shed door was ajar and figured Nerdanel had gotten caught up in another project.  He dashed over, calling out, “Mom, we need the sled.”  He yanked the door open.

Nerdanel and Fëanor stood, shoulders touching, over the shortwave radio on the workbench.  They did not acknowledge Maedhros.  Caranthir napped on a blanket in the corner.

It was unusual to see Fëanor before dinnertime.  Usually, he stopped by the house for a quick bite of tuna noodle or meatloaf and mashed potatoes, then returned to the campus observatory after sunset, not to be seen again until breakfast.  On the rare nights he stayed home, he and Nerdanel usually disappeared into his office or the shed, leaving the boys to their own devices.

On this particular afternoon, however, the shortwave was emitting an unusual sound.  A high-pitched, regular beep, beep, beep.

“They’ve done it,” Fëanor said, shaking his head in wonder.  “The clever devils have gotten there first.” 

Maedhros forgot about the sled.

That evening, the TV newsman said that the Iathrim called the satellite Randir, which meant “wanderer” in Sindarin. It orbited the world once every ninety-six minutes, far faster than the fastest airplanes in the world.  The newsman also said that in about fifteen minutes, it would be traveling across Aman again and would be visible to the naked eye.

The snow had stopped falling.  It was cold, clear, and dark.  They could see the cloudy river of the galaxy shimmering across the sky.  Maedhros stood in his front yard, his family with him.  The entire neighborhood, the entire city, the entire nation, it seemed, was outside, too, watching what the Iathrim had done.  Just at the time they said, a tiny light appeared at the western horizon and glided over their heads.

Some of the neighbors cried.  The mother next door let out a shriek and made her little boy go back inside.  Maedhros barely noticed.  He stood in awe next to his father.

Later, Maedhros was too excited to sleep, and he was reading space comics in the rec room.  The phone kept on ringing: other professors from the college, Grandpa Mahtan, a local newspaper asking for Fëanor’s commentary.  Everyone wanted to talk about the satellite.

The last time it rang, Nerdanel answered in a clipped voice, out of patience with the late-night calls.  As the person on the other end spoke, though, she softened.  Maedhros crept closer to listen in when Fëanor came down to take the phone.

“I suppose you’re not calling to congratulate me on the baby,” Fëanor said.

There was a tone in his voice that made Maedhros feel tight and sad inside.  He knew that if Fëanor didn’t want to talk to someone, he just wouldn’t come to the phone; he’d had Nerdanel deflect several callers already.  But he didn’t sound happy, either, with this person.

“I’m not sure what you think I can do for you, Nolvo.  Well, certainly not for them, either.  I haven’t taken orders from Valimar since the Darkening.  And neither should you, if you knew what was—” Fëanor abruptly stopped talking.  Someone on the other end had cut him off.  Maedhros was shocked.

“No, I wouldn’t call it an opportunity, I’d call it a chain.  I have no interest in Aman’s national security interests.  I can’t understand how, after what happened to Finwë, you’d feel any differently than I on the matter.  Actually, come to think of it, I’m more inclined to defect to Doriath at this point, at least they’ve got the foresight to….”  Fëanor paused again, listening to the person on the other side.

When Fëanor spoke again, he was softer.  “Did you see it, Nolvo?  Like a new star crossing the sky.  They’ve beaten us, and good.  Boy, I’d love to get my hands on the tech in their cosmodrome, wouldn’t you?  Maybe I’ll call up—”

This time, it was Nerdanel who interrupted, her voice a warning.  Maedhros couldn’t quite make out the words, but her meaning was clear: Shut up, smarty-pants!

“Of course,” Fëanor returned to the phone, reverting to his clear, didactic tone, “I’m exaggerating for effect, as I’m known to.  I would never defect or betray my country….  No, Professor, you won’t.  I’m afraid you’ll need to handle this one yourselves.  I will not be bought, and I’ll be much obliged if you don’t call with such offers again.”

After Fëanor hung up, Nerdanel started in on him.  “Did you have to be so flip with Nolvo?”

Fëanor sighed.  “Don’t start.  You know how he gets a rise out of me.”

“I should hope I’m the only one allowed to do that,” she said with affection.  Maedhros strained to hear as their voices lowered.

“I won’t work for the G-Men again,” Fëanor said.  “And he shouldn’t, either, but he’s long stopped listening to me.  Do you have a light?”

“Here.”

The sweet smell of pipe-smoke began to waft through the house.  “So, you just told him where to shove it,” Nerdanel said.  “You could stand to use a little diplomacy, is all I’m saying.  These days, you can’t just say whatever fool thing comes to mind around the wrong people.”

“You think Nolofinwë counts as the wrong people?” Fëanor asked.

“Of course not, just… you make yourself an easy target.  They’ll tear you down if you let them.”

“I thought you married me because I’m too easy,” Fëanor said, Nerdanel laughed, and their voices dropped too low for Maedhros to hear any more.

Their father took Maedhros and Maglor to the college the following evening, to look at the satellite through the giant telescope.

“You won’t see much detail,” Fëanor cautioned.  “Just a bright little traveler in the sky.”

It was so cold, Maedhros could see his breath.  The grad students were humming with excitement, swarming Fëanor like bees on a sunflower.  He waved them off, leading Maedhros and Maglor up a narrow metal staircase and across the catwalk to the observation cage, where the main eyepiece assembly was mounted.  Fëanor warned them not to touch anything else and trotted back down to the control panel.  Maedhros spun around on the stool in circles, watching his father flash through his field of view once a rotation, as he scribbled out some calculations on a notepad.

“Hey, Professor!” one of the students called out.  “Buzz here has been working on Randir calculations all night, let him do that for you.”

Fëanor shook his head, not looking up, pencil flying.  “No need!”  He punched some buttons on the control panel, and the telescope whirred, clicked, and hummed as it moved into position.  Fëanor checked his watch.  “Now, it’ll be in view in about two minutes,” he called up to the boys.  “I’ll give you a countdown!”

Maglor was pressing his face so hard to the eyepiece, he’d end up with rings around his eyes, Maedhros thought.  He let his little brother have ten seconds to look before shoving him aside.

The satellite, viewed through the telescope, looked like a fast-moving star.  It entered from the western sky, streaked across the field of view, glittering and bright, and then, all too quickly, it was gone.

Maglor sighed dramatically.  “All that for a few seconds?”

Maglor fell asleep in the station wagon on the way home.  In the front seat, Maedhros felt important and grown-up when Fëanor explained that the satellite itself was too small to see, even with a powerful telescope.  What they had seen instead was likely the rocket booster.

“You’d need something a lot more powerful to see something as small as Randir, with an optical telescope,” Fëanor said.  “Now, radio, that’s another story.  Why, with just our shortwave at home, we can hear her, clear as day,” he continued.  “The signal can’t travel much farther than Arda, though.  You’d need a stronger transmitter to send a signal to another world, like Carnil.”

“Would that really be possible?” Maedhros asked.

“Well, you could send a signal, with strong enough technology, sure.  But nobody’s there to receive it.  Out in the stars, though?  Who knows?”  Fëanor continued talking, mostly to himself, working through the technical challenges of interplanetary communication, throwing out frequency ranges and signal capabilities before answering himself, musing about cosmic interference and interstellar distances.

Maedhros didn’t understand half of it, not really, but he let himself pretend.  He imagined that one day, he would be the one who could answer Fëanor’s hypothetical questions and work with super-powerful radio telescopes, strong enough to hear from the stars.

After Randir, the world changed.  Maedhros was too small to understand most of it until later, but the Space Race had truly begun.  Though Doriath had a head start, the two superpowers remained nearly equally matched.  The Amanyarin government ramped up technological and scientific initiatives, and soon, were sending their own satellites into orbit.  The mood in Valimar was one of cautious optimism in the eventual reestablishment of Amanyarin supremacy. 

At the same time, a reactionary movement of religious traditionalists began to gain support.  Not everyone believed that the Eldar had any business launching rockets into Ilmen and beyond.  The Stars of Varda held sacred secrets meant for the Ainur alone.  Churches across the world, which had been in a long, slow decline ever since the age of reason, began to attract new members, as well as regaining attendance from among the lapsed.

At school, they started doing duck-and-cover drills.  If the sirens blared, you were meant to get inside, go to the shelter, and get under a table.  Be sure to stay away from windows and doors.

Maedhros tried to teach Celegorm about duck-and-cover, but he hated being made to go inside.  So, he taught him what to do if the flash came when you were outside.  You were supposed to drop down on the ground, wherever you were, find shelter if you could, and cover your head.  The film reel at school showed a child riding a bicycle home, diving off, cradling his head until a gentleman came to tell him it was safe to get up.

“What are you doing, boys?” Fëanor asked, watching them in the backyard.

“Duck-and-cover,” Maedhros said.  When Fëanor looked blank, Maedhros explained, inwardly quite pleased to know something his father didn’t.

“If you’re hearing the sirens, it’s already too late,” he said, then went into the shed without saying another word.

“What does that mean?” Maedhros asked his mother, who looked like she’d rather be ducking-and-covering herself.

“It means your father’s too lost in bad memories to think about anything else,” Nerdanel said.  Then she shook her head.  “I’m sorry, love, it didn’t mean anything at all.  Look after your brothers, darling,” she said, and followed Fëanor, shutting the door behind her. 

His parents were working on a new project in the shed.  It was unheated and poorly insulated, and as winter settled firmly upon them, Maedhros dreaded going out there to ask about dinner.  The cold didn’t bother him as much as his parents’ faraway stares.  Occasionally, Nerdanel would look guilty and come inside, which made Maedhros feel bad.  So, mostly, he made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or heated up a can of soup for himself and his brothers.  (His parents did, at least, usually remember to swaddle up Caranthir and take him out to the shed, which saved Maedhros from having to figure out bottles.)

Sometimes, after the little boys went to bed, Maedhros brought a couple of plates out and stayed to watch them work.  Ever since the first night after Randir rocketed into space, Nerdanel had started keeping a notebook.  Every ninety-six minutes, she turned on the shortwave, fiddled with some dials, and wrote down figures in tiny, neat columns.  Fëanor wasn’t allowed to write directly in the notebook, so if he was the only person awake to check the satellite’s progress, he wrote down his observations on looseleaf and Nerdanel transcribed the data the next day.

If Maedhros was very quiet, and the work was going well, one of them would eventually beckon him over and show him something.  That was how he learned that Randir was falling. 

Right now, the changes in its orbital period were tiny, just a few microseconds each orbit, hardly measurable.  But over time, eventually, the satellite would drop too low and hit the upper atmosphere.  It would drag, heat up, slow down, and burn all away long before it would ever reach the ground.

“If we’re lucky,” said Fëanor, “it might fall while we’re in range.  We’ll likely lose the signal as it enters the atmosphere, but we could see it consumed by flame.”

When they weren’t tracking satellite beeps, they were working on Fëanor’s latest invention.  The idea was, what if you could use satellites to relay signals from one place on the ground to another?  What if you could talk to someone who had crossed the Belegaer, from the other side of Aman?  You wouldn’t need wires to connect phone calls at all.  The invention would rely on electromagnetic waves, bouncing between antennae all over the world and in near-orbit, until they reached their destination.

Maedhros liked the idea of talking to friends all over the world.  So far, they had moved three times, every time Fëanor took a new job.  He didn’t even remember when they first moved out of Grandpa Mahtan’s house, it had been before Maglor was born.  But each time, they packed up and left his teachers and friends and the grad students who followed Fëanor around like puppy dogs.  They didn’t have any other family, it was just the six of them.  It was lonely, and he missed the people they left behind.  Maybe, if they could really build electromagnetic wave phones, it wouldn’t be so hard to stay in touch.

As predicted, Randir’s orbit decayed enough that it fell into the atmosphere.  It happened when Maedhros was at school.  It would have been too bright to see in daylight, anyway.  Maedhros was disappointed.

When Nerdanel told them, Maglor turned white and hid under the piano bench.

“What’s wrong?” Maedhros asked, crouching down.

“I’m afraid it’s going to fall on our house,” Maglor finally admitted.

“Don’t be stupid.  It’s all burned up, dummy,” Maedhros said reassuringly.

He was right.  Nothing fell on the house.

A few weeks later, Doriath launched a second satellite: Randir 2.  They said on the news that it carried an air conditioning system, research equipment, food supply, and an experimental animal (canine).

“Dog,” said Celegorm, and shot an arrow at Maedhros.  He missed by a few inches.

Maedhros would not learn the full details until much, much, later, as executor of the will, when it came time to sort Fëanor’s affairs.  Within a year of Randir’s launch, Fëanor had filed a patent application for the satellite phone.  The Amanyarin government immediately came calling, and offered, first politely, then with increasing sternness, to buy it.  Fëanor told them where they could go. 

Eventually, he sold the patent to an electromechanical firm and took the whole family on a three-week vacation to Alqualondë.  They stayed in a bubblegum-pink house on stilts right on the beach, swam in the warm sea every day, and learned how to crack crab-shells to get the sweet meat inside.  Everyone got sunburns.  A jellyfish stung Celegorm.  Maedhros and Maglor slept in a hammock on the porch, and every night, before bedtime, Fëanor named the stars.

It was the nicest vacation Maedhros ever had.  Long after the magic of the beach faded for Maedhros, he would unfold the memories, the smell of seaweed and zinc oxide, collecting shells in the sand, and falling asleep warm against his brother, swinging gently in the breeze.  His father’s voice, low against the background of crashing waves, speaking of white dwarfs, black holes, and supernovae, spinning in the void, hundreds of millions of light-years away.  

The fëar of chickens and Eldar

One day, Celegorm came home from school with three fluffy chicks snuggled into his jacket.

“Ta-da!”  He beamed as he unzipped and revealed them.  “The teacher said I could keep them!”

Nerdanel was startled.  But after she called the school to confirm that Celegorm had not, in fact, absconded with the class pets, but was rightly allowed to claim them after the egg unit ended, she smiled and said, “All right, let’s make them a warm bed.”

Maedhros and Maglor, sick with jealousy, helped Celegorm find a cardboard box and stuff it with old newspaper.  Nestled along headlines saying REVOLUTION IN RHÛN, THE DAY THE TREES DIED, and TREATY OF ENDÓRË, the three little chicks cheeped happily.

“You can help take care of them, if you like,” said Celegorm magnanimously.

Maglor cradled one to his chest, enraptured.  “I’ll be your mama,” he told it.

The chicks lived in the box under a lamp while Fëanor and Nerdanel built a coop in the backyard.

The boys took their job of tending the chickens very seriously.  Everywhere they went, their little birds were at their heels, peeping.

Every morning, Maedhros rose to the sound of his cartoon mouse alarm clock and let the chickens out of their coop to forage and play.  He made sure they had enough water, cleaned their coop, and gave them fresh straw.

Celegorm fed them by scattering cracked corn on the ground and even let them peck it from his hands.  He cheeped right back at them.  Sometimes, they—birds and boy together—found worms for dessert. 

Maglor nuzzled them and told them they were good chicks and sweet chicks, and he made up songs to sing them.

Caranthir stayed inside.  He did not care for the chickens, whose pecks scared him.

Before long, the chicks became pullets.  One silver-laced white, one red-brown, and one black with a flashy red comb.

“Soon, they may begin to lay,” said Nerdanel.

“Calcium,” said Fëanor.  “We should add eggshells to their feed, so they’ll lay strong eggs.”

One morning, Maedhros found a smooth, brown egg nestled in the silver-white hen’s straw bed.  He put the warm egg against his check, then rushed inside to show everyone.

Every night, Maedhros made sure that the chickens were tucked safely in their coop.  As they cooed and clucked themselves to sleep, Maedhros would latch the coop door and carefully shut the gate behind him before going inside.

Late one night, Maedhros woke to a clamor.  There were squawks and unsettling bumps from outside.  His heart beating, he pulled on his boots and crept outside to check on the birds.  The night sky was big, the moon was dark, and the stars were hidden by the clouds.  Maedhros wished he had woken his father to keep him safe from the things in the shadows.

Celegorm had arrived before him.  He stood in the open door of the coop, staring.

The floor was clouded with feathers, and Maedhros counted two frightened chickens cowering in the rafters, the red-brown and the black.  The silver-white was nowhere to be seen.

Maedhros burst into tears.  Before he knew it, strong arms scooped him up and he cried into his father’s shoulder like he had not done in years.

Inside the house, Fëanor sat on the kitchen linoleum, Maedhros curled next to him, tears still pouring down his face.  Celegorm crawled into Fëanor’s lap.  Maglor, rubbing sleep from his eyes, came and scrunched in with them.

“What took her?  A fox?  Did it kill her?” Celegorm asked.

“It’s not fair,” Maedhros sobbed.

“Shh, shh,” said Maedhros’s father.  “What might seem unfair to you might make sense to a fox.”

“What do you mean?” Maglor asked.

“The fox who took your chicken lives in the woods,” their father said.  “He works hard every day to bring food to his babies.  Some days he doesn’t find any, so he has to go home with nothing, and the babies are hungry.  Sometimes, they’re very, very hungry, and when that happens, he does everything he can to find something for them to eat.”

Maedhros sniffled and looked at his father.

“He didn’t know that it was our chicken he took,” Fëanor continued.  “He just saw a chance to feed his family.  I know you are sad, Nelyo, Káno, Turko,” he said, cupping a hand over each of their cheeks in turn as he spoke their names, “but you wouldn’t want the baby foxes to go hungry, would you?”

“No,” said Celegorm immediately.

“No,” agreed Maglor.

Maedhros thought about it for a long time.  “No,” he said finally.  “I guess not.”

“The fox does everything he can to take care of his babies, just like your mother and I do everything we can to take care of you.  We make sure you are happy, your bellies are full, you have a warm, safe place to sleep.  And you did everything you could to make sure your chicks were happy and their bellies were full and they had a warm, safe place to sleep.  Because you love your chicks like I love you.  Like the fox loves his babies.”

“But the chicken wasn’t safe,” Maedhros said, eyes filling again.

“Come, let’s go back to bed,” said Maedhros’s mother, and took Maglor and Celegorm each by a hand, leading them upstairs.

Maedhros’s father put his arm around him.  “You were very brave, do you know that?  To hear trouble and come running to help.  There was nothing you could have done differently to protect the chicken.  It was just her time,” he said.

Maedhros cried a while longer.  His father wiped his face and stroked his back. 

When he thought he was out of tears, he sighed and closed his eyes. 

“Now,” Fëanor said, “you are getting big and strong.  You take care of the others.  They look up to you in every way.  I’m proud of you.”

“Thanks,” Maedhros said.

“And that is why,” Fëanor said, “you cannot let them see you cry like that ever again.  No matter what happens.  Not if your heart is broken.  Not if every chicken gets taken.  You must be brave like you were when you first heard the noises.  If you have to cry,” Fëanor said, with great tenderness, “you can go hide in your closet and close the door.”

The next day, each of the boys, even Caranthir, picked out a stone and laid them out to mark a grave for the chicken in the corner of the backyard.  They remembered their hen who had been soft and silvery-white, who had loved worms, who had laid the first warm brown egg.

“A bird who was loved,” Nerdanel said, looking down at the bare ground.

Maedhros’s heart was heavy.  But as he mourned the chicken, he thought too of the happy baby foxes with full bellies, living in the woods.

Fëanor repaired the broken siding of the coop where the fox had gotten in.  Nerdanel added support beams and diagonal bracing.  “We should dig a trench and bury the fence a foot or so into the ground,” she said.

The boys remained vigilant in caring for the other two hens.  They made sure they had enough water.  They cleaned their coop and gave them fresh straw and scattered cracked corn for them to eat.

Something was bothering Maedhros.  He tried to let it go, but he couldn’t.

After a few days, he asked his parents.  “Where did the fëa of the chicken go, after its hröa was killed and eaten?”

Fëanor and Nerdanel exchanged looks.

“Well,” Fëanor said, “Chickens do not have fëar.” 

“Living things die,” Nerdanel said.  “Some creatures live for a long time, some for a short time.  But we loved her while she was here.”

“She had a body and a heart that pumped blood and a brain that could think, just like us,” Fëanor said.  “When she died, her brain stopped working.  So, she couldn’t think or hurt or be afraid.”

Maedhros thought for a moment.

“Is that what happened to Grandmother Míriel, before I was born?” he asked.

Maedhros’s father didn’t say anything.  He pulled Maedhros close, squeezed him tight, took a breath.  He swallowed twice, then looked to Maedhros’s mother.

“Probably,” Nerdanel said.  “She was very sick.  Her body stopped working, just like the chicken’s.  After we die, some Elves believe that our fëar go to the Halls of Mandos.  An imaginary place,” Nerdanel clarified.  “It makes some people feel better, after they lose someone they love, to think they might see them again.”

Fëanor would not meet their eyes.

“So, it’s not real,” Maedhros said.

“We have no way of knowing what happens to Elves after we die,” Fëanor finally said.  His voice was strange.  He looked up at the sky.  “No one has ever come back to tell the tale.”

Sunday School

When Maedhros was just beginning to turn the corner from childhood into early adolescence, it was time to move again.  He was unhappy to leave the chickens behind, but as instructed, did not cry about it in front of anybody. 

This time, Fëanor had taken a position at a university so remote, it had more telescopes than the town had traffic lights.  There was one five-and-dime, one shabby soda fountain, and one school, which all four boys attended.  There was no baseball field, just a dirt lot where the big kids played by day and smoked by night.  There was no library, no picture show, no candy store, and four churches.

After a few mind-numbing months, Nerdanel decided something had to change.  Out of sheer boredom, on Sunday mornings, she began taking them to church.  She would coax them into their button-up shirts, dress trousers, and shiny shoes, comb their hair with water, and load them into the station wagon.  Fëanor refused to have any part of it, even when Nerdanel insisted it was one of the more reasonable, mainline denominations.  His custom was to spend Sunday mornings sleeping in after staying out half the night at the observatory. 

Nerdanel would point the boys toward the Sunday school classroom and waddle her way to the ladies’ circle, desperate for anything that could pass for conversation and coffee, even if it was weak and bland.

Maedhros had never seriously encountered religion before.  For several weeks, he remained unimpressed.  Fëanor’s pronouncements on the subject had led him to believe the holy tales were essentially children’s stories—boring, but harmless.

He was, therefore, pleasantly surprised when the Sunday school teacher, the minister’s wife, began reading to them from the Book of the Akallabêth.  He knew the basic story, of course: the men of the mythical island of Númenor grew too proud and tried to sail into the lands of the Valar, and they were punished accordingly.

But he had never heard it told like this!  The evil king took Míriel to wife against her will, started worshipping the Lord of Darkness, and sacrificed people in the great temple.  The men of Númenor slew each other for little cause.  Listening to the tale, Maedhros’s eyes grew wider and wider.  His brothers, uncharacteristically silent, were just as eager. 

After the reading, the teacher instructed them to make models of the White Tree from toilet paper rolls and twigs.  Celegorm got white paint all over himself.  The models had to stay behind to dry before they could attach leaves, but the teacher said they could bring them home in a few weeks when they were completed.

Maedhros already felt embarrassed.  He wouldn’t mind showing his mother, who at least acted pleased about these kinds of things.  But he had long ago learned to show Fëanor only his best efforts.  He did not think cardboard arts and crafts qualified.

When they returned to Sunday school the following week, the minister’s wife continued the story of the Akallabêth, and Maedhros became concerned.

The gruesomeness of Númenor’s destruction began to upset him.  He understood that the tale was meant to frighten the children away from wickedness.  Don’t be like the men of Númenor, who broke the Ban of the Valar and sailed into the forbidden seas.

But he could not stomach Ilúvatar’s reaction.  To sink an entire continent into the abyss!  Even the children and maidens and ladies proud!  And his heart hurt to picture poor Queen Tar-Míriel, so beautiful and resigned, drowned beneath the cold green wave.  He could not understand why she deserved to be swept away.

He was very quiet for the rest of the morning.  The minister’s wife praised him for being such a good example for his brothers.

As they were leaving, she told Maedhros that his White Tree model was the best in the class.  He thanked her, took Caranthir by the hand, and threw his Tree into the trash as soon as she wasn’t looking.

When they got home, Maedhros went into the study and took an old volume off a high shelf.  His fingers made prints on the dusty burgundy cover.  He opened it, careful not to tear the onionskin pages. 

Within minutes, he had several questions. 

What was the Flame Imperishable?

What did “raiment” mean?

He found a dictionary, which helped a little, but it did not explain how two lamps could possibly illuminate the entire world.

As he read on, his distress grew.  He suspected that the world, according to this book, was supposedly flat.  The “walls of night” seemed to be some kind of enclosure.  The idea of a world that predated the Sun seemed preposterous.  How could plants and animals grow?  In fact, without the Sun, how could anyone even know what a year was?  If there was no Sun, then the meaning of a year was simply arbitrary.  He flipped ahead until he found the chapter where the Valar created the Sun.

And he started to laugh.

How could anyone believe that the Sun was made out of a fruit?  The actual Sun, he knew, was a star, a massive flaming sphere of gas, millions of miles away. 

This was simply a fairy tale for children, Maedhros decided.  It could not possibly be believed.

Yet the book was so terribly violent, too.  Maedhros did not quite understand what was meant by “all those of the Quendi who came into the hands of Melkor were corrupted and enslaved; and thus did Melkor breed the hideous race of the Orcs, for they had life and multiplied after the manner of the children of Ilúvatar,” but reading it, his stomach curled with a sick, shuddering feeling, a wrongness he could not explain.

He felt further unease at the origin story of the Dwarves, who were themselves blameless, yet were nearly struck down by their creator as they cowered, begging for mercy.

What kind of book was this?

Returning to Sunday school the following week, Maedhros was eager for clarification.  He raised his hand and waved it around before the teacher could begin the day’s reading.  He started with what he thought was a simple question.

“Did the people who wrote this book really believe the world was flat?”

The minister’s wife blinked at him before remembering to put on her smile.  “Well, the true author of this book is Eru Ilúvatar himself, my lamb.  And of course, the world is indeed flat.”

For a beat, nobody spoke.  Then Maedhros laughed out loud.  His brothers, who had been watching intently, joined in.

The minister’s wife stopped smiling.  Maedhros felt a pang of guilt.

Later, he realized that he probably should have stopped when it became clear that the minister’s wife believed the book was literally true.  But in the moment, the rest of his questions came pouring out.  He asked about the Flame Imperishable, how trees could survive without photosynthesis, the length of a year, the composition of the Sun, the origins of the Orcs and the Dwarves.

Once he got started, he couldn’t hold back.  The teacher grew increasingly impatient, answering his questions by simply reading back the passages he had already puzzled over.  He clenched his jaw in frustration.  He could read; he didn’t want to hear the same bits regurgitated over and over.  He wanted answers.

He looked at a poster on the wall, a colorful illustration of Varda creating the stars.  In the picture, Varda was luminous, gowned in deep blue and black, with radiant sparkles in her hair.  She loomed across the dark sky.  In a single moment, Maedhros realized something that he had perhaps always known in his heart but had never thought all the way through before: Varda Elentári was no more real than dragons, vampires, or the Big Bad Wolf.

“How the heck could someone make all the stars in the universe in a few days?” he demanded.  “The universe is billions and billions of years old!”

Well, the minister’s wife certainly wouldn’t stand for swearing in her classroom.

After he was kicked out of Sunday school, Maedhros dreaded going home and explaining what had happened, especially to his father.  But to his surprise, Fëanor only laughed and hugged him—a rare gesture affection since Maedhros had grown out of short pants.  He sat down at the breakfast nook, patted the vinyl seat next to him, and bade Maedhros tell the whole story from the beginning, every detail.

Fëanor’s silver eyes danced when Maedhros questioned the teacher about the Sun-fruit in the sky.

“And right you were to ask!” Fëanor said, his voice ringing like a hammer on steel.  “An astronomical absurdity!”

Nerdanel still made Maedhros go to church the following week, but, as it turned out, the adults had discussed the situation and agreed that he would either help out in the nursery or join the high-schoolers’ choir.  Maedhros chose choir.

Maglor, upon hearing this, briefly pouted, then formulated a plan.  He picked his own fight with the teacher about how big the dragon Ancalagon the Black was supposed to be, anyway.  And he was promptly hustled out to choir practice, too.

A few months after the Sunday school incident. Nerdanel deposited a bottle, a can of formula, and the screaming baby into Fëanor’s lap, and announced that she couldn’t take it anymore.  She was going on the Pill and going back to school.

To his credit, Fëanor only paused a moment before he nodded and began soothing-shushing-rocking-patting Curufin.  “Where would you like to go?”

As it turned out, it was easier for Nerdanel to get into the top graduate schools of aerospace engineering in the country, than it was for Fëanor to secure a tenured faculty position.  Nerdanel’s own academic background was studded with accomplishments, albeit over a decade past.  And with her famous spouse writing a letter of recommendation, giving his permission, every department eagerly offered her acceptance letters. 

Fëanor himself on faculty, though?  Well, that was a different story.  Certainly, he was welcome to guest lecture.  Everyone liked hearing him speak.  But by now, Fëanor’s reputation for disagreeableness, his frankly outlandish research interests, and his political contrarianism made him a tough sell for a permanent position.  He was a live wire, and it was too easy to set a campus on fire these days.  It was why he had taken increasingly remote and undesirable positions over the past several years, when he should have been the one running the whole program over at Tirion.  He was a genius, nobody denied that, but a genius who refused to take on any but the most promising graduate students, fought with colleagues over resources, failed to secure grant funding, and joked too freely about subjects that got other men blacklisted.  There was only so far that “prized student of Finwë, may he rest in peace” could take him.

But Nerdanel made it clear that, with or without him, she would be moving to the West Coast to finish her degree.  So Fëanor swallowed his pride, put on a charcoal gray suit, got a haircut, and flew out to Formenos to meet with the dean.  Turned out, the Dean of the Formenos Institute of Technology had a sweet, if a bit dull, nephew, who had been plodding through his dissertation for years.  A man in desperate need of a mentor—or at least, someone to hand-hold him through finishing the thing.  Fëanor agreed to supervise the kid (and teach three sections of freshman PHYS 101).

Come fall, they were moving to Formenos.

Chapter Text

The Calacirya Summer Science Program was founded a few years after Doriath’s launch of the world’s first artificial satellite sparked a national push for math and science education.  Each summer, smart boys from all over Aman, identified by test scores or personal recommendations, came to study at an idyllic boarding school in the Calacirya.  They attended classes at the sun-drenched, mountain-ringed campus, in red-roofed buildings with arched doorways and windows and decorative blue-and-white tilework.  Each boy shared a room in a two-story dormitory, where every door opened to a long colonnaded patio overlooking the mountain vistas. 

Every day at dawn, a large brass bell rang out the start of the day.  In the mornings and afternoons, students studied mathematics and physics, and at night, they stayed up to observe celestial bodies in space.  University professors from the best science departments in the nation, from Formtech, Tirion, and Alqualondë, taught the classes.  There were tree-climbing contests, scavenger hunts, and primitive camping overnights in the woods.  At least once a summer, a bus would take the campers out to the beach to swim in the ocean and bury one another in the diamond-white sand. 

Maedhros preferred the forest creeks, floating on his back in the summer-warm, rocky shallow waters, shaded by the pines and mighty, ancient redwoods. 

He liked the activities, appreciated the idyllic campus, and thrived in the rigorous academic classes.  But his favorite thing about camp was being just one in a crowd.  Not the oldest, not the most responsible, not anybody’s backup parent or driver.  He wasn’t even the smartest; everyone at camp was a brain. 

After three years as a camper, he and a handful of other boys were invited back for a fourth and final year.  The camp was under new leadership, a professor, recently returned to academia after years in the Space Administration.  The new Director wanted to meet all of the oldest boys in person, before camp officially began.

Nerdanel and Maedhros took turns driving the old station wagon from Formenos to the Calacirya.  The twins jibber-jabbered in the backseat the entire drive.  It would have only taken a few hours if she’d let him drive as fast as he wanted; as it was, by the time they arrived, he was almost late for the meet-and-greet. 

“Don’t forget to have fun,” Nerdanel said in lieu of good-bye.  “Have some adventures, all right?  The stars will wait for you.”  He had to bend down so she could reach his face for a kiss. 

Maedhros breathed in the fresh valley air, the sage and eucalyptus, pine and dry baked earth.  He felt his shoulders relax with every breath he took, as the sound of the station wagon’s engine faded, and turned to silence. 

At the meet-and-greet, Maedhros was pleased to see his friends Glorfindel and Ecthelion, reunited again at camp after the long school year apart.  He knew almost all of the professors, too, either from his previous summers at camp, or because they were Formtech colleagues of his father.

There was just one man he hadn’t met before, but he soon connected the dots.

Professor Fingolfin, the new Director, was set to rejoin the Physics and Astronomy Department at Tirion in the fall, but first, he would be teaching first-year physics here at camp.  And as a fourth-year, Maedhros was assigned to sit in on his classes, help grade papers, and assist the younger ones with their homework during tutorials. 

When Fingolfin introduced himself, he immediately recognized Maedhros, shaking his hand warmly.  “I knew your father at Tirion,” he told him.

Maedhros nodded, unsure of his standing.  It was no surprise to him, Fëanor and Fingolfin must have been friendly once.  They had both been proteges of Finwë, before the Darkening.  They had even published a paper together; Maedhros had found a copy of the journal where it appeared in Fëanor’s study.  It had been tucked away in a filing drawer that also contained several newspaper clippings and obituaries of Finwë, a puzzling, uncashed government check, and a photograph showing Fëanor as a startlingly young man, smiling in wire-rimmed glasses as he stood next to the famous fedora-wearing lead scientist of the Ezellohar Project.  Uneasy at his findings, and certainly unwilling to ask Fëanor directly, Maedhros had carefully returned the items to the drawer and never spoken of them to anyone, not even Maglor.  Fëanor’s life before Maedhros was born was a black box, opaque and unknowable, as far as Maedhros was concerned.  He had never heard Fëanor say a single a word about Fingolfin, not even on the rare occasions he spoke of Finwë, the greatest man Fëanor had ever known.

Maedhros was surprised that Fingolfin even knew who Maedhros was.

After the meeting, Maedhros waved off his friends and lingered to speak with Fingolfin one-on-one.

He was much like Maedhros’s father in appearance: tall, dark-haired, grey-eyed.  They were both fair-featured, and both held themselves with the easy confidence of men who knew they were in command of any room in which they stood.  Maedhros thought that Fingolfin was a year or two younger, but he seemed older somehow.  While Fëanor’s manner with sons and students was a touch impatient, mind always rushing twenty paces ahead of everyone else, Fingolfin instead carried himself with a stately air, as though saying with his posture and kind expression, Take your time.  I’m listening.

Maedhros had begun to realize that his name gave him away as Fëanor’s son, at least among scientists and the savvier students.  Returning to camp this year, he planned to introduce himself with an epessë instead of the family name.  It would be impossible to achieve anonymity—not without cutting all ties and fleeing to Rhûn—but he could buy a little more time to make a name for himself, and not as a Fëanorion.

“If you wouldn’t mind, sir,” Maedhros began.  “I’d like to try and be, well, just myself, here at camp.  I don’t mean—I’m very proud of my father, of course, he’s the reason I’m here at all—but I’d like for others to get to know me.  I’m not him.”  Maedhros felt his face burning.  Could he have put it any less eloquently?

Yet Fingolfin seemed to take his meaning, his expression softening into one of empathy.  “I understand completely,” Fingolfin said. 

And Maedhros remembered that Fingolfin wasn’t just Finwë’s student.  He was his eldest son. 

“And you have my word.  I won’t compare you to him.  Believe it or not, I’ve had my fair share of standing in the shadow of the great Curufinwë Fëanáro, and I’d hate to push you back under it when you’re just beginning to emerge.  I’ve got a sense you’ll have a destiny all your own,” he said, clapping a hand to Maedhros’s shoulder.  “I hope you get the chance to meet my son.  He’s here for the summer, too.”

All too soon, Fingolfin’s hopes came true.

His son crashed into Maedhros, quite literally, later that day.

Just before the opening banquet, Maedhros watched a brown-skinned boy with a mess of curly dark hair climb onto the roof of the main lodge, ostensibly to rescue a sweet little orange kitten.  Privately, Maedhros felt that the “rescue” was more of an effort to show off, as the kitten appeared perfectly content dozing away in its rooftop sunbeam.  Anyway, Fingon had more trouble climbing down than up, and ended up half-falling onto the porch.  Well, onto Maedhros himself.

“Oof,” Maedhros said, knocked flat on his back.

Fingon extended a hand to help him up, the other still cradling the kitten.  “I’m Fingon,” he said, flashing a brilliant smile.  The evening sun bathed his face in a rosy glow.

Maedhros was immediately certain that Fingon was the kind of boy who was accustomed to charming everyone he met, and resolved, internally, to resist him.  He did not accept his hand.  Maedhros pointedly brushed dirt off his clothing, which was now a lost cause for the opening dinner.  He glowered and walked away.  Who did Fingon think he was?

At night, the students had the charge of the telescope observatory.  First-years received a one-hour crash course from Professor Olwë, then were left to puzzle things out for themselves.  They studied asteroids.  Each night, they took turns using the telescope to record images on photographic plates, small panes of glass coated with a thin layer of light-sensitive silver halide emulsion.  They developed the plates, then measured their asteroid’s positions and calculated the orbital elements from the recorded data.

The entire procedure required not just proficiency with the telescope, but a deep understanding of the math and physics they were learning throughout the day.  There were two types of boys at camp.  One was the type who could follow a procedure, nod along in class, and solve problems handed to them ready-made.  The other was, everyone agreed, superior: the type who could actually apply the principles, intuit which equation was needed, and solve for variables without being spoon-fed every step.

For a cohort of boys who had each grown accustomed to being the brightest at their high schools back home, this was often a rude awakening to the truth of their mediocrity when put in direct competition with other brains.

From the start, Maedhros had worked hard to establish himself in the second category.  Once, after his group derived the unexpected result that an asteroid had moved at a fantastical speed overnight, then teleported back to near its original position the following day, they spent hours rewriting the equations and recalculating the results.  It was Maedhros who thought to examine the plates themselves.  Sure enough, upon closer inspection, he found a flaw: a white scratch that the group had mistaken for their asteroid, explaining the impossible result.  He was pleased with the result of this discovery, his value to the other boys clearly elevated, the same way a record-breaking race time would have, back home.

A point of correction: based on his previous summers, Maedhros had thought that the other boys fit into two types: the nod-along rule-followers, and the true intellects. 

He wasn’t prepared for the person who didn’t fit easily into either box.

You see, the photographic plates required careful handling, lest they be prematurely exposed to light and ruined.  They developed them in a darkroom under special red safelights.  One morning, early in the summer, Maedhros rose before dawn, hoping to find the darkroom to himself.  As a fourth-year, his independent project was to compare the brightness of the star Nénar to other stars of the same spectral classification.

At the precise moment Maedhros removed his plates from their protective shielding and was about to submerge the first set into the developer tray, the darkroom door swung open.  A figure entered, flipped on the overhead light, and exposed Maedhros’s entire night’s work.

“SON OF A BITCH,” Maedhros shouted, shielding his eyes against the sudden flood of light.  He instinctively hurled his body over the plates as though that could help.  It was no use.  They were ruined.

Maedhros felt anger surge through him like a cleansing fire.  At home, he restrained himself, especially around the little boys, from ranting and raving every time he might have wanted to.  But inside, he often felt like he was close to bursting.  It was such a relief to explode at someone.

“What the hell is wrong with you?  Why would you do that?” he demanded.

Maedhros looked up, toward the door, and was somehow unsurprised to find Fingon, frozen in place, his fingers still wrapped around the door handle.  His eyes were fixed on Maedhros, who stormed over and loomed at him.  Maedhros pointed at the DARKROOM IN USE sign clearly displayed.  “Can you read?  What does this say?  Does it say, open the door like an asshole who wants to destroy everything?”

“Er,” said Fingon, looking Maedhros with big, wide eyes.  His hair was wet from a morning shower.  Maedhros could smell his lemony shampoo.  At close range, Maedhros felt his height advantage keenly, and let himself tower over Fingon, breathing down his neck.

Fingon swallowed hard.  He was flushed and trembling.  Maedhros poked him in the chest, sharp and deliberate.

“Let me give you a bit of advice,” he said through his teeth.  “You’re new here.  If you want to make any friends at all, just do the exact opposite of whatever your instincts tell you.  Then you might have a chance of surviving.”

Maedhros stared down at Fingon for another long moment, feeling a hot stab of guilty pleasure at the panic in his eyes.

“I’m really sorry,” Fingon finally managed to sputter out.  His confidence was visibly shaken, though he still met Maedhros’s gaze.  “I’ll redo them for you, I’ll stay up with you tonight, whatever you want,” he said.

Maedhros let out a sharp, humorless laugh.  “What I want is for you to get out of my face,” he said, then stomped out, forcing himself not to look back.

Something was different about camp this year.  Someone had listened to the women’s libbers and decided it was about time to open up the camp to girls.

Maedhros could have told them it would be a hard sell.  Why would girls want to come to science camp?  The first year of this effort, they had managed to bring in six girls, compared to twenty boys.  Nevertheless, the girls had an immediate effect on the camp’s tone and camaraderie.

It wasn’t that Maedhros was against girls learning math and science.  On the contrary, he knew they could be just as capable if they put their minds to it.  His own mother was proof of that, after all, she’d finished her master’s in engineering with high honors.  And if it had taken her a couple of years longer than the normal students, well, that was because she’d taken a break when she had the twins. 

And in school, Maedhros honestly preferred girls over boys for lab partners, as they took the work more seriously.  When paired with a girl, he could focus on the task.  Boys distracted him, goofing off and peacocking.

But the problem was, the mere presence of the girls at camp made the other boys act unbelievably dumb.  Maedhros was assigned to help the first-years during afternoon homework time.  Instead of working on the problems, the boys just threw pencils at each other and pretended to be cleverer than they were.  More than once, Maedhros had to rescue a cornered girl from an overconfident boy giving an entirely wrong explanation of a solution.

Any sporty activity, even a casual game of touch football, became absurdly competitive.  Considering the poor athletic ability of the average boy attending science camp, Maedhros thought the football games were extremely hilarious.  He somehow always found himself dropping whatever he was doing to watch.  There were only a few boys who had any real athletic talent, and Maedhros reluctantly admitted to himself that Fingon, broad-shouldered and quick on his feet, was one of them.

As a protective mechanism, mostly, the girls stuck together.  The tables in the mess hall sat exactly six.  Before long, the six girls claimed a particular table as their own.  One could measure a boy’s status by how close to the girls’ table he sat at lunch or dinner.  Maedhros thought this could make an interesting math problem, and one day at lunch instead of eating his ham-and cheese, he mapped out the coordinates of each seat in the mess hall and made a coded chart in his notebook where he could track the daily movements of each of the boys as they rose and fell in standing.

In the evenings, while waiting for their turns for the telescope, the boys came up with ways to entertain themselves.  Different activities became popular in waves.  His first summer, table tennis had been the main craze; Maedhros, with his unusual wingspan, managed to win several tournaments, even beating Ecthelion and Glorfindel.  The next summer brought alternating phases of wrestling, card games, and stealing food from the mess hall.

This year, the theme for evening activities seemed to be “impressive things we can do around the campfire so we look dashing and irresistible in the firelight.”  It began simply, with ghost stories, then quickly deteriorated into knife-throwing and challenges to see who could hold their hand over the flames the longest.  (Glorfindel excelled at the latter.)  Once, Fingon and his sidekicks roused the others into a shirtless log-hurling competition.  Despite many attempts to drag him in, Maedhros did not participate, though he found the game oddly compelling.

Usually, after the bravado and the flames died down, most of the boys would wander off to bed, leaving a smaller core group that would stay and talk and smoke late into the night.  Maedhros typically stayed until the very last.

And, because Maedhros would never know peace in this lifetime, so did Fingon.

One night, sitting around the campfire, there was an open space to Maedhros’s side as the crowd began to peel away.  As the lingering group tightened, passing around a pack of cigarettes and coughing, Fingon cocked his head toward the open space and caught Maedhros’s eye, silently asking permission.  Maedhros shrugged and nodded.  Fingon could do as he pleased. 

He sat beside him.

The night had grown unusually chilly, the wind picking up the dying embers of the fire, cigarette and campfire smoke melding as sparks popped in the air.  With each drag, Maedhros’s shoulder brushed against Fingon’s.  He radiated warmth.

During the daytime, when the girls were within earshot, the boys talked about math and science.  But when the girls were elsewhere, as they always were this late at night, the topic of conversation turned to the girls themselves.

Each boy took his turn naming who he thought was the prettiest of the six.  All seemed to agree that there were two leading candidates.  Ecthelion, Fingon, and several of the other boys favored Elemmírë, the blonde bombshell with big blue eyes, while Glorfindel and a smaller but more passionate faction preferred the raven-haired girl with porcelain skin. 

Maedhros reflected on his options and found himself utterly lacking any partiality.

He must have been silent for too long.  When someone elbowed him and asked him to weigh in, he fumbled and picked a name at random.  The silent pause after he said it told him he’d made a mistake.  The other boys laughed, and then, thankfully, moved on. 

The conversation grew cruder and cruder, as the other boys discussed the girls’ breasts, their legs, what they had beneath their shorts, in increasingly lurid detail.  The talk became personal, explicit, boys bragging about what they had done with girls back home, what they would do with one of the girls here if they had the chance. 

Maedhros thought that nearly all of it had to be bravado.  Except for a couple of the oldest boys, Ecthelion maybe among them, none of them seemed to have any real idea what they were talking about.  The only firsthand experience that most of them had was likely with their own hands. 

Later, after showering off the smoke, Maedhros lay awake, staring at the ceiling.  The boy he roomed with was snoring away.  It was about as much privacy as he ever got. 

Systematically, he ran through the features of each of the six girls in his mind.  He thought about their narrow wrists, their soft-looking hair, their legs in the crisp cotton shorts each of them wore.  Who was he to question the wisdom of the crowds?  If the majority ruled, surely Elemmírë was the prettiest.

In his cramped twin bed, Maedhros tried to recall as detailed a mental picture of Elemmírë as he could.  He thought about her golden hair, which she habitually brushed into a neat ponytail.  He pictured her eyes, blue as a cloudless mountain sky.  She was short but well-proportioned, her hourglass figure surely the source of much of her appeal.  She did look very nice in a blouse and shorts, Maedhros thought.  He imagined drawing her close, as she looked up at him through long dark lashes, parting her pink lips in expectation.

He physically recoiled.

Maedhros rolled to his side and tried again, flipping mentally to the dark-haired porcelain doll.  He probably should have started with her in the first place.  He had, early on, identified her as the smartest of the girls, possibly the entire first-year class, and he admired her serious approach to camp.  Her arms were creamy white, and she took furious notes in class, hand flying across the paper.  She kept her fingernails trimmed short and painted cotton-candy pink.  She wore a gold chain around her neck, a heart-shaped pendant in the hollow of her clavicle.

Maedhros imagined gently reaching out to hold her hand.  That felt fine, though not particularly stirring.  He pictured himself putting an arm around her, pulling her to his side.

And his mind suddenly flashed back to earlier that night, sitting around the campfire.  Fingon’s strong shoulder against his, filling him with a drowsy warmth that slowly spread from their point of contact across his entire body, Fingon’s clean, cotton-sweat smell all around, Fingon’s thick, dark curls fluttering across his forehead in the night’s breeze, Fingon’s quick smile and his sunshine laugh, brighter than firelight, luminous like the stars.  He could imagine holding Fingon’s hand, lacing Fingon’s fingers in his own.  He could imagine putting his arm around Fingon’s warm body, drawing him close.  The smooth texture of Fingon’s skin, the strength of the muscles in his upper arms, his back.  Fingon looking up at him through his long dark lashes, looking at his mouth.  He could—

What?

Maedhros jerked upright, panic rising in his chest.  What was that?

It had been a long, weird day.

It took Maedhros a long time to fall asleep.

Glorfindel and Ecthelion were both headed off to Tirion in the fall, though they spoke eagerly about their dreams of Beleriand.  It was daring, risky to talk about leaving Aman, not for just a vacation or term abroad, but for good.  Defectors weren’t looked upon kindly.

“But Aman is just one small part of the wide world,” Glorfindel said.  “Just look at where the real cutting-edge research has been coming from lately: Menegroth, Gondolin, Nargothrond.  Someday, that’s where I’ll be.”

“How are you planning on getting into any of those places?” Maedhros asked.  Forget the notoriously competitive university systems of Beleriand.  Just getting a visa to study out of the country was known to be nearly impossible. 

Glorfindel shrugged and smiled.  “The world is on the brink of change.  Who knows what it will look like in four years?  Don’t you want to be where things are really happening?”

Maedhros didn’t answer, but the question had gotten to him.  It settled in his mind like a pebble in his sock.  He had never really considered any college other than Formtech; they still needed him at home, and he could save money by commuting, anyway.

Were the Sindar truly outpacing his people? 

In the past year, Glorfindel and Ecthelion had become environmentalists.  They smoked organic Amanyarin Spirits.  Ecthelion wouldn’t shut up about pesticides poisoning the rivers and lakes after reading some book that had gotten him really into the Clean Water movement.  On hikes, he always took along garbage bags, badgering the other boys to pick up their litter.  He made his own natural soap to avoid dumping harmful detergents into the waterways.  Glorfindel quickly adopted the practice, too.  They both now smelled alkaline and sweaty.  Maedhros found himself inexplicably distracted by it.

One Saturday, Glorfindel had gotten his hands on a watermelon and was holding court in the outdoor amphitheater, a crowd of younger students watching him toss it back and forth with Ecthelion, laughing at each close call.  Among them were Fingon, the blonde Elemmírë at his side.  She kept touching his shoulder. 

It was Ecthelion who slipped up.  He hefted the watermelon high.  His arms, tanned from the summer sun, flexed with effortless strength.  Maedhros’s mouth went dry for some reason.

The watermelon slid out of his hands, and nobody was close enough to catch it.  It crashed on the ground and broke into two pieces. 

Glorfindel, as ever, retained his trademark smile, shrugged, and picked up one of the watermelon halves, and began carving it up with a knife, handing out the chunks to the nearest boys.  “It’s still edible!” Glorfindel assured everyone.

“Still fruity!” said one of the boys after chomping down on a piece. 

“Just like Glorfindel,” said Ecthelion.  The boys all laughed, including Glorfindel, who was tall and confident and perfectly capable of taking teasing like this, the kind of teasing that sent a chill down Maedhros’s spine.  No, not now.  Not here.

Maedhros briefly caught Ecthelion’s eye, and must have shown a little too much fear, because Ecthelion opened his mouth, his eyes dancing.  Maedhros could tell he was about to repeat the joke.  He couldn’t allow that.

Maedhros had to say it first. 

“You would know!” Maedhros said, forcing a grin.  The crowd laughed, and Ecthelion smiled.  Everyone started clamoring for pieces of watermelon, and Maedhros released a sigh of relief. 

Elemmírë was still standing entirely too close to Fingon.

Maedhros hadn’t spent a lot of time in the sanctuary.  It was open at all hours for silent prayer and reflection held twice-daily chapel for those inclined.  Some boys, including Glorfindel and Fingon, went every day, but Maedhros usually declined.  He’d had enough religion for a lifetime.

The only other occasion the sanctuary saw regular use was the weekly colloquium.  Each Sunday, a different guest lecturer from one of the major universities or the Space Administration would give a talk about his current research.  In the last couple of years, Maedhros had learned about cosmic background radiation, the structure of DNA, plate tectonics, the race to the moon, and the theory of black holes.

In retrospect, Maedhros figured it was probably inevitable that Fëanor would show up eventually.  But in the moment, when Fingolfin announced that the upcoming Sunday’s guest speaker would be his father, he felt a surge of unpleasant shock.

The other students, though, bubbled with excitement for days.  In the past few years, Fëanor’s notoriety had only grown, sparked by an appearance at a congressional hearing where he made an impassioned speech against nuclear proliferation.  Nerdanel had fought with Fëanor about it for weeks beforehand.  Maedhros recalled her saying Fëanor was selfish beyond words, taking off for Valimar and leaving her alone with seven boys while she had exams just so he could stand up and humiliate congressmen on national television.  (Of course, Maedhros and Maglor were the ones who took care of the younger boys anyway, as usual, so he wasn’t sure what Nerdanel was so worked up about.)

Since the congressional hearing, Fëanor had made several follow-up appearances on talk shows and at college campuses.  As one of the few survivors of the Ezellohar Project, his presence carried an undeniable heft; his credibility on the subject was profound.  Fëanor rarely spoke of his personal experience of the disaster itself, but through the power of personality and symbolism, he had become a torch-bearer for the growing peace movement. 

Maedhros listened to the other campers chatter about Fëanor’s upcoming visit.  His plan to protect his anonymity had worked; the other boys his own age already knew who his father was, but the others had either forgotten his last name, if they ever knew it, or were blissfully unaware from the beginning.  So, nobody bothered to censor themselves around him.

Many thought Fëanor was a traitor, unpatriotic and disloyal.  How dare he question the faithful leaders of Aman?  He was obstructing national security efforts.  He must have Iathrim sympathies.  He couldn’t be trusted.  He might even defect.  How could he live with himself?  He was in the pocket of the enemy.  He was a pawn, a subversive, a fame whore, a bleeding-heart, egghead, liberal punk.  He was a known atheist!

On the other hand, some argued that Fëanor was a hero.  The arms race threatened the safety of all Arda.  The two great powers had nearly brought the world to the brink of nuclear war, and both sides had enough weapons in their arsenals to destroy every civilization of the Children of Ilúvatar ten times over.  Imagine the Darkening of Valinor write large, the entire world choked by ashes and radioactivity from countless explosions, atomic winter freezing and starving everyone on the planet.  Wouldn’t it be better to come to an accord with the people across the sea, to stop the madness of mass proliferation?

Maedhros thought that all of these children had missed his father’s point entirely.  Fëanor used the rhetoric of the peace movement, it was true.  But his real argument wasn’t that Doriath and Aman should join hands across the sea and sing the Music in perfect harmony.  Fëanor had little love for the Iathrim, and he was no less hawkish than the right-wing demagogues who funded the arsenal to begin with.

No, Fëanor just believed that nuclear weapons rightfully belonged to the scientists who had brought them into the world, and since most of them were all dead, after the Darkening, it would be safest to lock them up and give people like him the key.  His real argument, essentially, was that the President and Congress were just too stupid to possess nuclear weapons in the first place.

The afternoon of Fëanor’s guest lecture, Maedhros sat front and center.  The sanctuary was simple, rustic, with one extravagance: the stained-glass windows gleamed like captured starlight.  Each panel, set within a simple wooden frame, depicted a Vala in their domain: Ulmo in the deep blue sea, Aule in his hall of gems, Vana the Ever-young in her gardens of golden flowers, each one refracting colored light onto the stone floors and nearby pews.

At the front of the chapel, the largest window displayed Varda, the Star-queen, cobalt night sky behind her, twinkling with carefully inlaid silver.  Maedhros thought it was a clever touch, at this campus dedicated to science and astronomy, that the field of stars behind Varda appeared accurate to the real night sky.

The students buzzed with anticipation as Fingolfin took the stage.

“I’m pleased to introduce an old friend,” Fingolfin began, startling Maedhros.  “Our speaker is someone I’ve admired since before any of you were born.  A full recitation of his awards and honors would take longer than the time we’ve allotted for the talk itself, so I’ll be brief.  As an astrophysicist at the Formenos Institute of Technology, his research currently focuses on observational radio astronomy, and I’m excited to hear what he has to say.”

Fëanor stood in front of stained-glass Varda in all her celestial splendor.  His eyes, bright and keen, swept the room, pinning each boy and girl in their place.  Maedhros was no less affected than they.  His heart beat faster in anticipation.

“In every direction, the void is endless, the sensation of depth overwhelming,” Fëanor began.  “The darkness has been there long before us, and it will outlast us long after we have crumbled into dust.  Where light exists, it is pure, blazing, fierce—but the light exists almost nowhere, and the blackness itself is fiercer still.”

The talk was classic Fëanor: charismatic, arresting, leaping between topics by drawing connections that lesser men could never have imagined.  He talked about quantum mechanics and the black-body problem, radioactive isotopes in space, then reviewed the history of optical telescopes.  Finally, he landed on his main subject: the observational potential of massive radio interferometric arrays.  Fëanor proposed linking a thousand radio telescopes together to dramatically increase resolution, precision, and range.  With this technology, astronomers might observe celestial objects at a far greater distance and with far greater accuracy than even the most powerful optical telescopes of today.

It was the best camp guest lecture Maedhros had ever heard.  Fëanor converted most of the campers to his side without saying a word about nuclear weapons, simply through sheer force of will.  Maedhros saw it in the captivated gazes.

After the lecture, Fëanor remained in the sanctuary to answer a few questions from the boldest campers who hung back.  Maedhros lingered as well, eager to tell his father about his progress on the Nénar study. 

Fëanor nodded at Maedhros in greeting, then looked pointedly at his hair, which Maedhros had been intentionally growing out.  It now fell past his ears, approaching a stylish, modern shag. 

“Are there no clippers at this camp?  Surely the other boys aren’t going the whole summer without a trim.  You look sloppy,” Fëanor admonished.

Maedhros tried to ignore the whispers as the remaining boys all turned to look at him, putting it together.  The son of Fëanáro Curufinwë!  Greatest of the Noldor physicists!

After Fëanor’s talk, Maedhros and a handful of other students were invited to join the faculty for dinner in the formal dining room.  Maedhros had never been inside it before.  Set apart from the mess hall, it was lined with floor-to-ceiling windows, letting in the magenta-and-gold sunset, the jaw-dropping mountain view.  Instead of cafeteria trays, there were candles, white tablecloths, crystal goblets.

Maedhros wished he were anywhere else.  At home, they ate in front of the TV.  He knew no more about formal dining than girls, just the bare minimum he’d gleaned from books and movies. 

Fëanor took the head of the table, Fingolfin the other end.  Maedhros seated himself at his father’s right, and Glorfindel, Ecthelion, and Fingon took seats near him.

Nervous, Maedhros reached for his wine—when Fingon touched his forearm and shook his head.  “Wait for the toast,” he whispered.

Maedhros flushed.  Fingon had noticed.  He hated feeling exposed, but was glad, too, to have someone to watch.

He certainly couldn’t look to Fëanor, who ignored his napkin, reached across the table for a roll, and began eating before Fingolfin had even finished saying grace.  Maedhros, along with the others, bowed his head, not because he cared about giving thanks to Yavanna for the gifts of her fruits, but because he didn’t want to look a fool.

After giving the blessing, Fingolfin stood to speak.  He thanked Fëanor once more and invited the students to ask questions.  “This program is meant to launch the future leaders of the scientific community.  That isn’t just about classwork and problem sets, it’s about mentorship.  This is how you set yourselves apart,” he said, catching Maedhros’s eye. 

An awkward silence followed, until Glorfindel broke it: “What do you really think about the Aman-Doriath competition?  We’re behind in satellites, behind in sending men to space.  Aren’t we just fooling ourselves by saying we’re still the superpower?”

Fëanor snorted.

Fingolfin offered a reply: “Coming from the Space Administration myself, you’re right to notice our losses.  But the race is far from over.  The Moon awaits.”

“The Sindar, my kin, have the engineering advantage—for now,” Olwë said.  “But they’re behind in theory.  We’ll catch up.”

“We’ll catch up,” Fëanor echoed, “if we stop being distracted by this silly competition.  The government has no interest in truly understanding the mysteries of the universe, only in control.  Pure research is the only path to true discovery.”

“I agree,” said Fingolfin.  “Though the Space Administration is the only path to achieving some kinds of discovery.”

“Space telescopes,” said another faculty member.

“Exactly,” said Fingolfin.  “We’re in the unglamorous position of needing their help marshalling the resources needed.  Imagine a telescope in orbit, able to view the full electromagnetic spectrum—X-ray, infrared, ultraviolet.  Don’t you want to know what it might see?”

“Give me the resources,” Fëanor said, “and I’ll build you one in ten years.  Five, with this one’s help.”  He nodded toward Maedhros.

Maedhros straightened, pride swelling his chest.  The tips of his ears felt warm.

The conversation drifted to physics, astronomy, mathematics.  Maedhros half-listened; he’d get the best advice later, directly from his father.  Instead, he watched the others.  Glorfindel, starry-eyed, peppered the table with questions, glowing when Fëanor recognized his family name.  “Your father’s a mathematician, isn’t he?” Fëanor said approvingly.

Unusually quiet, Fingon pushed grilled mango salad around his plate.  When the talk turned to the importance of mathematics and passion for one’s work, his gaze dropped entirely.

Maedhros thought that he knew why.  Fingon wasn’t bad at math, far from it.  He grasped concepts quickly, when he cared to.  The trouble was, he rarely cared to.  At some point, that was bound to catch up with him.

Ecthelion, as usual, asked the toughest questions.  “What about the other sciences?” he asked.  “What would you suggest to someone interested in biology or ecology?”

The faculty scoffed.  “Biology is for premeds.  And ecology—not even a serious discipline.  It’s a fad.”

“Engineering, then,” Ecthelion tried.

“Very practical,” someone finally said.  “Good for a steady paycheck,” another added, a touch of condescension in his tone.

Maedhros frowned, puzzled.  Wasn’t that the point of a job?

“But I’ll take nights with the telescope searching for the secrets of the cosmos any day,” Olwë said, and the other professors murmured in agreement.

The waitress brought Maedhros a hot, damp napkin.  He nodded his thanks and, seeing Fëanor spread his over his lap, started to follow suit, then hesitated.  Fingon shook his head slightly, already using his napkin to clean his hands.

The heat made Maedhros’s fingers tingle as he mimicked him, glancing sideways, watching more than he meant to.  Something about Fingon’s confidence, even when he was quiet, left Maedhros feeling unmoored.

“I’m really making an idiot of myself, aren’t I?” Maedhros whispered. 

Fingon just shrugged and smiled.

The main course itself made clear the hand-washing: stacks of pale, paper-thin pancakes under covered dishes, flanked by bowls of roasted sweet potato and beet, shrimp and sliced lotus root, and strange mushrooms in glossy, spicy-smelling sauces.  It smelled delicious, though Maedhros had no clue what to call any of it.  After watching the others, he caught on: use the pancake to scoop, fold, and eat.

Fëanor spat a bite back onto his plate.  Maedhros burned with embarrassment, but no one else blinked.

Fingolfin continued offering advice between bites.  “I would say the single most important piece of advice I can give you is this: Don’t go to graduate school where you complete your undergraduate degree.  You’ll look provincial.  You need exposure to different approaches, different minds, all kinds of people.”

By then, the wine had been flowing freely.  Maedhros had only taken a few sips, reluctant to give up control, but the faculty had no such restraint.  Even Fëanor, rarely one to indulge, had partaken more than usual.

It had been a lovely evening, and Maedhros was beginning to relax.  That was when things took their first turn.

A professor offered a bit of advice, delivered with a wry smile: “Don’t get political.  Not at the departmental level, not nationally.  Be circumspect, even after tenure.  You start talking to reporters about policy or international affairs, and you’re asking to derail your career.”

Maedhros saw the spark in Fëanor’s eyes before anyone else did.

“I’ve never found that to be the case,” Fëanor said.  “What’s the use of knowing what’s best and being too afraid to speak up?  Real science doesn’t compromise for politeness.  Your talent should carry you beyond the need for petty political concerns.”

Maedhros knew Fëanor was obscuring the truth.  He remembered his father’s increasing desperation before the move to Formenos, the nights pacing the kitchen, cursing his old colleagues while drafting appeal letters.

Awkwardness pooled in the silence.

Then Fingolfin stepped in.  “Well, we can’t all be Fëanáro Curufinwë.”

Fëanor looked at Fingolfin with narrowed eyes, suspended between an apparent desire to continue arguing and curiosity as to where Fingolfin was going with this.

“You won the Lambengolmor three years out of school, didn’t you?” Fingolfin continued, smiling.  “My father would have been proud.  And you kept speaking out even when others advised you to quiet down.  The scientist who keeps quiet in the face of abuse of power, the misuse of knowledge, sacrifices his soul.  And I think Finwë would agree with me, if he were here today.”

Fëanor’s face relaxed.  The other professors did as well.  Glorfindel nodded along, reverently.  Even Fingon looked thoughtful.

Maedhros thought what Fingolfin had just done was remarkable.  He had soothed Fëanor’s ego without making it seem like he was taking a side.  He’d invoked the memory of Finwë like a shield, disarming and definitive.  There was no arguing after that.

And no mistaking who’d come out of it looking smooth and gracious.

Unfortunately, the calm was short-lived.  In a way, Fingolfin had brought it upon himself.  He’d brought up Finwë to begin with.

“He was your father, wasn’t he?” Ecthelion asked Fingolfin, who nodded.

“The greatest physicist of the era,” another professor added.  “It was the golden age of physics.  Fëanáro can tell you, he was there.”

Fëanor never needed more than a hint of encouragement to hold court.  “Truly incredible amount of productivity, when I started as a junior professor.  We were working on nuclear spectroscopy, gas theory, the quantum theory of radiation, beta decay emission.  We were just on the verge of discovering the first nuclear chain reaction.  Of course, we weren’t thinking of practical applications at the time, except in our wildest dreams.  Or nightmares, as it turned out.  But there was no chance anyone could gather the vast resources needed to develop a weapon.  It was impossible.

“The speed at which things were happening was remarkable,” Fëanor continued.  “Not just in our labs, but all over the world.  We heard that across the sea, the Sindar had achieved fission.  Nuclear fission!”

Someone elbowed Olwë, who jumped in.  “I tried to go meet with my brother right away.  But travel was already restricted.  If I left without a visa, there was a good chance I could never come home.  And my wife, my children—I couldn’t risk it,” he said.

“Well, it didn’t end up making a difference,” Fëanor continued.  “Four different Noldor laboratories, including ours, experimentally confirmed the fission process, using neutrons.  And Finwë—he was the greatest living expert on neutrons.  They were his old friends.”  The more Fëanor spoke of Finwë, the rougher his voice became.

“We got Valimar’s attention.  The General came up to check us out.  He wanted to know the dangers and prospects of fission.  I told him,” Fëanor’s voice cracked, and Maedhros felt like someone had reached into his own chest with ice-cold fingers.  “I told him the truth, that the dangers were significant, but the potential—well, it defied comprehension.  The potential for nuclear power, you understand.  Power.”  Fëanor’s throat worked.

“We had been working on chain reactions in the lab,” Fingolfin cut in, smoothly taking over where Fëanor had stopped.  “I was still just a doctoral student.  We would use moderators to slow the neutrons, gradually and carefully sustain an energy release over time, and capture it for power generation.  Fëanor thought of using graphite.  We wrote a paper on it,” said Fingolfin.  “It was my first publication.”

“The General flattered me,” Fëanor interrupted, as though Fingolfin hadn’t spoken.  “I’ll admit it!  I was susceptible to flattery at the time.  I was working on the cyclotron, deep in a pit in the basement, not a particularly glamorous place to work.  The General asked me if I had ever seen the fields of Ezellohar.”

“Oh, no,” Glorfindel said, his eyes round.

“I hadn’t.  I grew up in Tirion, you understand.  I had never been on an airplane before.  They flew us out in a private silver airliner.”

“I remember when you left,” Fingolfin said quietly.

“They were calling it the Ezellohar Project already.  I was naïve, I didn’t think about what it meant, the code names,” Fëanor said.

“They came and got the best and brightest from each of the universities,” Olwë confirmed.  “Thankfully, that left me out.”  He chuckled.

“And you had no idea it was a nuclear weapons project,” Ecthelion said, unbelieving.

“Not until it was too late,” Fëanor said curtly.

“So, what did you do when you found out?” Glorfindel asked.

Maedhros winced.  He could see in his father’s face, the emotion he was struggling to contain.

“It wasn’t—I didn’t learn all at once,” Fëanor said.  “They brought me out to Ezellohar, telling me to keep—certain things—quiet, or I’d be sent back.  And what I didn’t know—I was foolish not to see it at the time—of course, they were keeping secrets from me, too.  Of course, I didn’t have all the facts.”

Fëanor’s voice, which had thinned over the course of the conversation, had raised to a high, fragile pitch.  Maedhros had never heard his father make that sound before.

“Someone let something slip in the mess hall, and I put two and two together.  I knew we were producing enriched uranium and plutonium.  Where was it going?  It was meant to be for the nuclear reactor, but it wasn’t adding up.  I asked Finwë to confirm.

“He told me the truth,” said Fëanor, “and I was furious at being tricked.  I was so angry, I took the train home to Tirion that night.  I wrote my letter of resignation on the train.”

He named the date he arrived home, and there was an audible gasp around the table as everyone made the connection.

“And that’s why you weren’t there when the accident happened!  When everyone was killed,” said Glorfindel, leaning forward, his hair catching the light.

“Of course I wasn’t there!” Fëanor said.  “Do you think I’d be sitting here, telling you this awful story, had I been?  I’d be vaporized with the rest of them.” 

Maedhros knew what had happened.  He hadn’t heard it directly from his father.  He had seen photos in magazines and textbooks, and he had watched a few minutes of the TV movie The Day the Earth Went Dark before Nerdanel made him switch it off.  At home, if anybody mentioned Ezellohar, a cold shadow would fall upon Fëanor’s face and he wouldn’t speak for hours.

And so, they never spoke of it.

But they spoke of it in school.  His junior year Amanyarin History class spent a full week on it, the event that ushered in the Atomic Age.  How the government of Aman had collected the greatest physicists from around the world—Sindar excepted—and poured unimaginable resources into developing the technology to unleash the power of the atom.

And how, one sunny morning, on the day of the High Feast, no less, there was a criticality accident.  Later theorized to be a simple mistake, improper handling of the plutonium isotopes, perhaps, which instantly obliterated the weapons assembly lab, and the twenty-eight people within it.

Maedhros had seen the mushroom cloud in photos.  The image was burned into his mind, the rolling smoke, the towering dark column billowing outwards into a shadowy dome of destruction. 

The initial explosion had killed many, but more horrifying, the radiation burst affected anyone within several miles.  Hundreds of people suffered long-term effects, and those that survived carried terrible burn scars and cancers to this day.  And nothing, not even a blade of grass, could grow in Ezellohar.

Perhaps even worse, from a geopolitical perspective, the accident had broadcast Aman’s secret plans to the world.  Doriath, which had been on the path to developing their own nukes anyway, doubled their efforts and set off their own test bombs within a few years.

And so, the arms race had begun.

And ever since, Fëanor had been one of the most outspoken agitators against nuclear proliferation.  Maedhros was as convinced as ever: the problem wasn’t the weapons themselves, it was the government manipulation.  Fëanor hated nothing more than to be made the fool.

Dessert had not yet been served, but abruptly, Fëanor stood, tossed down his napkin, and stormed out without a word.

Fingolfin met Maedhros’s eye.  He had been considering going after his father, but Fingolfin shook his head and stood himself, following Fëanor out.

Maedhros felt a wash of warm relief and gratitude to Fingolfin, but his heart was still pounding, his stomach hurt, and he didn’t want dessert anymore.

Glorfindel bowed his head, whispered a few words of prayer, and said, “To Námo’s arms they are now delivered.”  The others echoed him.  Maedhros rolled his eyes.

“What a day that must have been in the Halls, huh?” Fingon said lightly.  “All the greatest physicists in the world show up at the exact same time.  Except for your father, of course,” he said, smiling at Maedhros.

Fingon’s eyes were kind, but Maedhros couldn’t take kindness from him right now.

And Glorfindel had to go ahead and say, “The Music is mysterious, yet all that comes to pass is ever Eru’s will.”

“Can you cut out the religious shit for once,” Maedhros said, his voice cold and hard.  “I’m fucking sick of it.  Do you really believe in the Halls of Mandos, like a child?  I thought you were smart.”

Glorfindel’s face crumpled.

“Whoa, whoa, hey,” Ecthelion jumped in.  “Don’t be like that.”

“I’ll be however I want,” Maedhros spat, feeling stupid even as he said it.  “Fuck, you’re all so gullible.”  He stood up so fast, he almost knocked over his chair.  Red-faced, he didn’t look back as he trotted off, heading in the direction he’d seen Fëanor and Fingolfin go.

He thought he had a good idea where his father might end up, anyway.  Night had fallen, the last gleams of purple sunset faded away.  It would be an excellent night to see the stars.

The amphitheatre was one of the most picturesque spots on campus.  Set on a cliffside, the stage was framed against the vista of the entire valley.  It was the best place to see the sunset.  As the sun had now dipped well under the horizon, it was also the best place to see the stars.

Fëanor and Fingolfin were stretched out on the grass, side by side, their heads close.  Fingolfin had his hands behind his head, flat on his back.  Fëanor was turned towards him, one arm pointing up at the cosmos.  They looked like intimates.  They looked like friends.

They didn’t seem to hear as Maedhros crept as close as he dared, stopping a few rows behind.  Close enough to hear.

“All my life, I can’t go a day without thinking about the man.  I’ve never met another like him.  I doubt I ever will,” Fëanor was saying.

“He was one of a kind,” Fingolfin agreed.  “I don’t think even you realize how much he loved you.”

Fëanor made a strange, desperate sound.  “There was a time that you would have been unable to speak such words to me,” he said finally.

Fingolfin sighed and stretched.  “Yes, I know.  When we were at Tirion—well, you’re a difficult man to compete with, you know that.”

“No one told you to try.”

“But of course they did.  We all were compared to you.  Even Arafinwë, just a kid—my goodness, you haven’t seen him in ages, have you?  You won’t come near Tirion.”

“No,” Fëanor said after a moment.  “I don’t think I ever will again.”

“You see, the older I grew, the more infuriating it became, trying to keep up with you.  The publications, the prizes.  The damned genius grant.  Like you needed a committee to confirm you’re a genius.  And it struck me one day, when I was with my sons.  I could tell Findekáno how bright he is, how special.  I could pump him full of all the praise in the world.  And he would take it in, hold it close, and let it fill him with light.  But he doesn’t need to.  Because he doesn’t have a hole inside him.  He makes his own light,” Fingolfin said.

Maedhros thought about Fingon, who had helped him throughout the dinner, even after Maedhros had been rude to him on several occasions.  Fingolfin knew his son quite well indeed.

“Perhaps you’re right,” Fëanor said, after a moment.  “But how else could I be, but what I am?”

“I wouldn’t dream of asking you to be otherwise,” Fingolfin said.  “But the hole, Fëanáro.  You should take care not to inflict it on your own sons.” 

“How dare you,” Fëanor snapped.

Maedhros tried not to breathe.

“I’ve given my sons everything I never had as a child,” Fëanor continued.  “Every advantage, every comfort a boy could want.  He’s here, isn’t he?  Tell me he’s not the brightest in the whole place.”

Maedhros felt it like a burst of white-hot light within his ribcage.  He was unused to hearing Fëanor speak about him like this.  If the light had been visible, it would have blinded him.  Instead, it filled him with an intense desire to repeat the sensation, to receive that pouring blaze of approval again.

But Fingolfin and Fëanor had moved on to a different topic. 

“If I had been there,” Fëanor said, almost too quiet to hear.  “I could have stopped it.  It would never have happened.”

“You’re giving yourself too much credit.  Your mind can’t stop a nuclear bomb, Fëanáro.  It was a terrible accident, the result of a foolish error, but not anything you could have prevented.  The World is too Marred.”

“Oh, what the fuck would you know about it, anyway?  You were a child.  Of course that’s what you think.  You’ve never known what it is to be burdened like this.”  Fëanor’s voice was raised.

In response, Fingolfin’s own voice dropped down low, soft, too low for Maedhros to hear any longer.

Maedhros waited as long as he could, desperate to see if they would return to the subject of Maedhros himself once more, but their heads were too close, their whispers too low, and as the night continued to darken, the wind picked up, whistling in the hollow of the valley in Maedhros’s ears, covering over the voices of the two men, until Maedhros stole away in the night, disappointed, the light in his chest already fading.   

A week or two later, Maedhros was, against his will, in a canoe with Fingon.

The hour was late, the sky was dark.

They were paddling upstream, slow and tedious work.  Ecthelion had awakened them, gleeful and grinning, for a camp tradition he had just invented.  A creature had come to camp, stolen an important object, and sneaked away up the mountain.  They had to retrieve it before dawn or face terrible consequences.  They were to race each other in pairs; the first to return with the recovered treasure would win.

Maedhros was not taking it very seriously.  He was sleepy and annoyed to be in a canoe in the middle of the night, wearing his flannel pajamas and tennis shoes with no socks.

Fingon, on the other hand, was treating it like an earnest rescue mission.  He paddled frantically, shouted orders, and was enjoying himself entirely too much.

Maedhros had not apologized for his behavior at the formal dinner, but after a few days, he sat down with Glorfindel and Ecthelion at lunch, offering his share of curly fries, and well, the other boys weren’t the type to hold grudges when there was food to be had.  Still, Maedhros couldn’t shake the feeling that he was paired up with Fingon as some form of retribution.

As they approached a low-hanging branch, Fingon made a snap decision.  Instead of ducking, he threw his weight sideways to avoid it.  Maedhros, caught off guard, instinctively leaned the other way.

They might have stayed afloat, had Fingon not corrected again at the last second.

The canoe teetered to one side, then flipped over in one swift, merciless motion.

The water was shallow and warm as a bath, and the current slow as a kiss.  Once he got his feet under him, Maedhros was more exasperated than frightened.

It was in that state that he yelled profanities at Fingon.  Then, wading out of the creek, he squeezed as much water as he could out of his pajama shirt, and told Fingon he could finish the race on his own.

Instead, Fingon followed him, and beached the canoe at the creek’s edge.

“I’m sorry,” he said quietly.  “Hey, don’t run off by yourself.  It’s not safe.  Let me come with you.”

“You’ll lose the race,” Maedhros said.  “And the canoe.”

“Yeah, well, the race is stupid anyway, right?” Fingon said, shrugging.  Water beaded down his face, down his neck, onto his clinging shirt.  “And I can find someone to come get the canoe with me later.  I don’t want you to get lost or hurt alone in the woods at night, come on.”

“I can’t stop you,” Maedhros said.

They started to hike back towards camp.  They couldn’t have been canoeing for more than an hour, and their progress had been slow.  But they were truly in the forest, with no clear paths.  They followed the creek, where they could, and threaded their way between the trees when the creekside was no longer passable by foot.

Maedhros’s anger began to cool.  He was soaked, wet flannel sticking to his skin, but the night was warm, the crickets were chirping, and the stars were beautiful and shining in the sky above.  The Moon was a tiny silver crescent.  The spicy scent of sagebrush, eucalyptus, and pine was thick, here in the dense forest, and it mixed with the clean mineral smell of the creek. 

Maedhros thought, for the first time in years, about the myth of Tilion, chasing his beloved across the sky, only to be scorched upon drawing too near.

Beside him, Fingon was calm and sure-footed.  He accepted Maedhros’s hand when they had to scramble up a steep, muddy bank.  He was decent company, honestly, when he wasn’t too busy showing off.

Maedhros felt bad for yelling.  He tried to make conversation.  He asked Fingon if he had a favorite star.  It was tricky to see the night sky from under the thick forest canopy.  Fingon tried to point out the constellation Soronúmë, the Eagle of the West.  Maedhros knew exactly where it was, but he stood close to Fingon, following the direction of his pointing finger.  He was so warm.  They looked skyward together for a little while before Maedhros said, “Oh, I see it now.”

They talked a little about Fëanor’s guest lecture and the disastrous dinner as they continued on their way.  Fingon was tactful.  He asked if Maedhros thought that Fëanor’s proposal, the interferometric radio array, could really work.  He asked Maedhros!  About an idea of Fëanor’s!  Well, Maedhros preened a little at that, and said that yes, it was sound theory, explained a little more of the background, how it would work.

“Wow,” Fingon said finally, “you really understand all of this.  You’re really smart, no wonder you’ll be going to Formtech in the fall, it’s the place for the brains, isn’t it?”

“How’d you know where I’m going?” Maedhros asked.

Fingon shrugged.  “Guess I heard it somewhere.  And I suppose it makes sense, that’s where your father works, so that’s where he’d want you to be.  My father’s the same way, now that we’re going back to Tirion, he’s hoping I’ll get excited about—the whole academic scene.  Ivy covered walls, all of that.”

“You grew up in Tirion, didn’t you?” Maedhros had heard him talking about it with some of his friends.

“Sure, and I’m happy to go back.  It feels like home.  I’m just not like the rest of you, though, and you know it.  I don’t have the brains to follow in those footsteps, you know?”

Maedhros was silent for a moment.  Something about Fingon’s words made Maedhros feel even worse than yelling at him had. 

Maedhros said, “What are you talking about?  You’re brainy, just careless.”

Fingon didn’t say anything in response.

Maedhros apologized.  He didn’t mean it like that.

“Yes, you did.  It’s okay.  I am careless, you’re right.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter.  Nobody minds.  Everybody likes you,” Maedhros said.  He paused, then continued, “Elemmírë really likes you.”

Fingon made an odd face.  Maedhros couldn’t quite read it.  “Yeah, I don’t really want to talk about her,” he said.

They came to a clearing in the forest, a hidden pocket of stillness between the pines.  The ground was soft with earth and dry grass.  The dark bowl of the night sky opened above them, light and high beauty all around.  Maedhros stopped and drew his gaze upward.  “There, see that cluster?  The seven stars?”

“Yeah, I know it.  The Remmirath.”

“That’s my favorite,” Maedhros said.

They looked up at it together, the seven jewels caught in a net, as they stood silently in the clearing.  Something was knocking at the door of Maedhros’s heart.  He and Fingon were awake and alive and all aglow in the sagebrush-scented summer starlight.  A piercing and unknowable longing was making a home inside Maedhros.

You could never see so many stars like this, in the city.  The lights of civilization clouded the view.  Only here, out in the wild, could you look up and get a sense of what was really out there.  Thousands of tiny points of light, all with their own potential worlds and people, trillions of miles away.  Perhaps one of those stars had a little blue-and-green planet in its orbit, and two alien boys were walking home together in the night, to their alien beds on their alien world, stopping to look up in their direction at that precise moment.

“How come?” Fingon asked.

“Well, I suppose it reminds me,” Maedhros said, “seven stars, seven brothers.”  He then told Fingon about his family.  He hadn’t thought about his brothers much all summer, but at that moment, he missed them terribly.  He wished he had tried harder to convince Maglor to join him, but no, he insisted on staying home to practice his trumpeting and surfing.  Maedhros missed the red-headed, chubby-cheeked babies, who had started walking the week before he left for the summer.  He even missed the middle boys, who argued with him the most and listened the least.  It was easiest to love them from far away.

They made their way back to camp together, and all was quiet when they returned to the dorms.  On the patio, they lined up their shoes in a neat row to dry.  “Good night,” Fingon said softly.

“Good night,” Maedhros replied.  He went into his dorm room quietly, trying not to disturb his roommate, stripped, and collapsed onto his bed.  Thoughts of starlight shining on warm brown skin kept him awake.  His dreams, when he finally drifted off, were slow-moving and sweet as a warm mountain creek.

About a week later, whispers crackled through the mess hall at breakfast.  One of the girls was conspicuously absent, reducing them to five.  Rumor was, someone had caught a boy alone with Elemmírë in her dorm room after lights-out.  Parents had been called in the middle of the night, trunks were packed, and they had both been sent home.  (This was the first that Maedhros had even heard of a lights-out curfew for the girls.  The boys had no such restriction, and Maedhros partially revised his understanding of the boys-only late-night fireside chats upon receiving this information.  It didn’t seem entirely fair that the girls couldn’t stay up and smoke and talk, if they wanted to.)

But as he pondered the thought of a boy and a girl alone, at night, Maedhros felt a sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach.  He had so often seen Elemmírë at Fingon’s side.  She was the prettiest girl at camp, after all.  She had only grown objectively prettier over the past weeks, as her skin tanned to a golden brown, her hair lightening to cornsilk in the summer sun.  On beach day, she had worn a two-piece orange-and-pink plaid bathing suit, with little bows at the shoulders.  Most of the boys were struck dumb.  She was game to get buried in the sand, she swam gracefully in the ocean, and she started up a chicken-fight tournament, which had nearly every boy scrambling for a turn to hold her on his shoulders.

Fingon was good-looking, fun to be around, and bold.  He was great as the anchor in chicken-fights.  He had irritated Maedhros at first, it was true.  But the more time he spent with him, Maedhros had to admit that Fingon wasn’t so bad after all.  He had a way of getting under a man’s skin, even if you were determined not to let him.  And although he was just a first-year, it was clear all the girls liked him.  Of course, he would be the type to try and sneak into someone’s dorm room, if he really liked them back.  Fingon wasn’t afraid of anything.

Maedhros looked around and couldn’t find him anywhere.  Not in the mess hall, and later, not among the first-year boys in physics class.  He must have gotten himself and Elemmírë kicked out of camp.  Careless, indeed.

Maedhros was offended on Elemmírë’s behalf, honestly.  Yes, that was why he was so preoccupied.  Sure, he didn’t feel the same way about her as the other boys seemed to.  But she was a nice enough girl, and she didn’t deserve to be treated like that.  To have some hormonal boy come crawling into her bed in the middle of the night!  Just imagine!

Well, maybe it had been her idea, Maedhros reconsidered.  Maybe she had wanted it.  She was bold, too.  Maybe she had whispered to Fingon, come to me after dark, I want you, I’ll leave the window open for you.  Who could say no to that?  Maybe she had waited for him in her twin bed, in pink flannel pajamas, hair down, lights off, so that they could only see each other in the starlight streaming through the open windows.  How could Fingon resist?  The idea made Maedhros’s skin twitch in a way he couldn’t allow, not in the middle of the day, not in front of other people.

When Fingon appeared at the doorway of the physics classroom, half an hour late and sheepish, Maedhros was so relieved.  He grinned at Fingon, who slipped into the seat next to him, head down, avoiding his father’s disapproving gaze.

“What happened?” Maedhros whispered, unable to stop himself.

Fingon shrugged.  “Overslept,” he replied.

Fingolfin cleared his throat, and both boys promptly looked down at their notes.

Maedhros scribbled in his notebook and slid it over to Fingon. I heard someone got kicked out—caught in a girl’s room.  Thought maybe it was you.

Fingon read the note and scribbled back a reply.  My roommate, it said.  He was the only one with a working alarm clock.

Maedhros couldn’t help laughing out loud.  He was giddy.  Poor Elemmírë.  Poor Fingon’s roommate.

One late summer evening, as the camp was drawing to a close, everyone, teachers and all, gathered on the log benches of the outdoor amphitheater for the annual talent show.  Each of the remaining five girls had been successfully paired off.  No longer clumped together in a protective squadron, they were instead spread throughout the crowd, sitting with their sweethearts, holding hands.  Glorfindel had won the pretty brunette, although judging by his awkward posture and the swiveling of his head to scan the crowd, he didn’t seem entirely sure what to do with her.  Maedhros caught his eye and gave him a thumbs-up in encouragement.

There were funny acts, musical acts, and acts that Maedhros hoped would end quickly.  The boys acting as emcees performed short skits between the acts, each impersonating a different professor, who chuckled good-naturedly from the audience.  For one skit, one boy had borrowed a cotton shirtdress, put a mop on his head, and used a high-pitched falsetto to play Fingolfin’s wife.  Maedhros’s eyes about popped out of his head when he saw the boy appear onstage like that, and he briefly worried, but it seemed everyone knew it was all in fun.  It was all right for a boy to wear a dress, as long as everyone knew it was just a big joke.

Three boys sang in doo-wop harmony, snapping along to the beat.  A girl danced an elegant ballet solo.  Ecthelion played his flute.  A boy performed an acrobatic routine, showing off dizzying backflips and no-hands forward aerials.  Maedhros thought, as the boy walked offstage on his hands, he was probably the best of the show.

The emcees said that there was just one more performance before the big camp singalong.  The daylight had hung on as long as it could, but the nights were coming faster, as the summer waned.  The valley was famous for its pink sunsets.  Every evening, as the Sun dropped low in the western sky, its light traveled through the atmosphere, refracting upon the bluffs that towered over the valley.  The rocky faces of the mountains were briefly illuminated with glorious pinks, oranges, golds, and reds, until the Sun disappeared under the horizon.

When Fingon approached the stage, guitar in hand, he was drenched in the light of that golden-pink sunset.  He sat, tuned his guitar, and beamed at his audience.  His eyes swept the crowd and caught Maedhros, who could not breathe. 

Fingon first sang a short funny song, accompanied by two friends on fiddle and hand drum.  The song, about a man who married his aunt so his children were his own cousins, had everyone laughing.  Fingon had a soulful voice and was naturally charming.

Maedhros thought the act was over.  Fingon’s friends took their bows and left the stage, but Fingon himself remained seated.  He said, “Folks, if you’ll allow me, I’d like to sing one more,” then began to strum a slow, steady chord progression.  Someone whistled their approval.

Fingon’s voice was warm honey, slow and sweet, sinking low in the melody.  The song itself was simple, hymnlike, with a chorus about crossing a wide river in a boat that could carry two.  The song wrapped around Maedhros like a blanket.  As he listened, his face burned, the achingly romantic lyrics filling his chest with longing.  Maedhros could not tear his eyes away.  He watched Fingon’s mouth as he sang about how he could not cross the water and desired a love as deep as the deep blue sea.  He was golden, he was beautiful, he was impossible.

Suddenly their eyes met again, and Maedhros was pinned like a liar.  Fingon’s lips turned up ever so slightly as he finished the last verse and returned to the chorus, singing one last time about his love, voice low and rasping, and then he strummed the final chords, fading into silence before the spell was broken by thunderous applause.

The last day.  Everyone was milling about, exchanging farewells.  The girls sobbed, hugging each other and promising to stay in touch.  No few of the boys looked on the verge of tears, too.  Some parents had driven out to collect their children.  Maedhros was taking the bus back west, leaving any minute now.  He had already stowed his trunk in the luggage bay and was wandering around saying final good-byes.  He promised to write Glorfindel and Ecthelion, who both gave him hugs and only hassled him a little for being a jerk all summer.

“So, this is it, then,” Maedhros said when Fingon approached.  Fingon and his father were driving back to Tirion together.  Fingolfin was somewhere nearby, thanking everyone for their hard work.  The day before, he had pulled Maedhros aside, after Maedhros had presented his project on the magnitude of Nénar.  He told Maedhros that he had done wonderful work, the best of the group, and he would happily help set him up with summer fellowships and eventually write him a letter of recommendation when he was ready to apply to graduate school.

“Or,” Fingolfin had said, “You can just come straight to Tirion, I’d take you as a student in a heartbeat.”  Maedhros took this compliment like the gift it was, folded it up in his mind, and set it aside to savor later.  He wanted to bask in the light of Fingolfin’s approval as long as he could.

On the last day, Fingon smiled at him, a little wistful, his eyes crinkling up at the corners.  “Well, I guess it’s good-bye.  It’s been real,” he said.

Maedhros just couldn’t stop looking at Fingon.  He could not find the right words, afraid of what would come out of his mouth if he started speaking openly.  Behind them, the bus driver closed the luggage bay doors.  Maedhros reached out for a handshake, and Fingon grasped his hand in his own, warmly.

“You know, your hair,” Fingon said, not quite meeting his eyes.  “It’s getting long.  It’s nice.  I like it.”  He ducked his head, the words lingering in the air.

Maedhros had been working on growing his hair out into a shag.  It curled over his ears and brushed the nape of his neck.  He reached up, awkwardly fluffing it, and smiled sheepishly.  “Almost long enough to braid in ribbons,” he joked.

Their hands were still clasped.

Fingon looked up quickly at that, a gleam in his eyes.  “Now there’s an idea,” he said.  “Oh—I almost forgot.  Um, this is for you,” he said, pulling out a small brown-paper-wrapped package.

“Er—thanks.  Hey, just try and stay out of trouble, all right?”  Maedhros said, his voice faltering, and he finally turned away.  He opened the package as he walked over to the waiting bus.  The other bus-riders had already boarded, waving and calling out through the open windows.

Maedhros unwrapped the brown paper, revealing its contents: a photographic plate.  One of the ones Fingon had ruined, back at the start of the summer, when he had turned on the overhead light and exposed Maedhros’s work.  For a moment, Maedhros froze, wondering if this was a cruel prank.  Then he took a closer look.

The original image, overexposed and ghostly, remained.  Over it, Fingon had etched the seven stars of the Remmirath, along with the word SORRY, his initials, and the year.  The etching caught the light, silvery in the sun.  The plate was cold and smooth in his hand, except for the carved lines, which he traced with his fingertips.

There was gentleness and intimacy in the gift.  Fingon must have saved the plate that day, after Maedhros lost his temper.  He had kept it for weeks, stored it somewhere safe, perhaps wrapped in soft cloth, like one of his own t-shirts, to protect it from damage.  After their canoe trip, he had carefully etched in the stars, the letters and numbers, his own initials.  He’d given Maedhros something that he could take back with him, a tangible, lasting memento not just of the summer, but of something else, too.

Maedhros’s heart beat like a drum in his chest.

Before he could even think about it, Maedhros turned back.  He heard the bus driver grumbling “Hey!” at him, but he didn’t stop.  He jogged back over to Fingon, who hadn’t moved.

“Hey, this is really—this is swell,” Maedhros told him, holding up the etched plate in his left hand.  “Thank you.  Wait—hang on,” he said, fumbling in his knapsack for a paper and pen.  He scribbled down his address and handed it to Fingon.  Their fingertips brushed against each other.  “You should write me.  I mean, if you want,” he said, his face flushing.

Fingon’s smile was brilliant and sincere.  “Of course, here, let me.”  He wrote down his address as well.  Maedhros clutched it alongside the plate.  He reached out to grasp Fingon’s hand again, one last time, and they were both slow to let go.  Maedhros finally pulled away when he saw Fingon’s father watching them.

After he finally boarded the bus, it started heading down the road, out of the sun-drenched valley, toward home.  Maedhros had to close his eyes to shut out the noise of the other boys and the outside world.  The thing knocking at his heart had become too persistent, too loud to ignore.  He had to let it out, lest it smother him from the inside.  His breathing had grown rapid, his heartbeat quickened, and he finally let down the walls that had been holding it back, the seismic wave pouring through him, knocking him over, breathless and longing and gasping.