Archive of Our Own ^beta

Our brother returns.

Maitimo limps from Angband wrapped in the arms of our cousin. Links of chain trail behind them for league upon league of barren land. Disappointment is sour on our tongues, underneath the surprise and relief. How could we ever have expected him? We had thought him dead. We had mourned him, wholeheartedly and terribly, and put him beside our father in our minds.

His face is pained and strange. He refuses to let go of Findekáno. Findekáno holds him near as well, like they are one creature in two bodies. His fingers are closed around Maitimo’s right wrist in a death grip, above where the metal cuff bites deeply into him. Curufinwë sees the glimmer of it and scampers for his tools while the rest of us watch their agonizingly slow approach. He tells Tyelperinquar to stay inside. He does not know better than the rest of us. He simply does not want Tyelperinquar to see.

Of course we let them in.

We feed them — it is the only way we can apologize, as we will be doing forever. We are unsurprised when it goes rebuffed; Maitimo looks through all of us. Familiarity he saves only for Findekáno, though he is harsh with him nevertheless.

“Go away from here,” he says, in a rasping and unfamiliar voice. “Go. I would not have mine uncle accuse me of keeping his son from him. I am sure he thinks thee dead also.”

Findekáno does not let go. Curufinwë tries again at the cuff, which resists the teeth of his tools.

“What knife didst thou break this with?” he asks, rattling the sheared end of the chain in demonstration. He is not being cruel. He simply does not think. Maitimo turns his face away.

“No knife,” Findekáno says. He wraps himself more tightly around Maitimo. Remembering how he might have killed him, more than one of us suspects later. We will learn how Maitimo pleads for it.

“An arrow,” Maitimo finishes for him. “The chain broke, by the will of—” We find nothing strange in how he cannot finish the sentence. We long for our gods too, who have turned away from us as surely as we have cursed them. “Go. Spare thy father this pain.”

We turn our faces away from his next action, so terribly gentle. He has returned to us. Of course it was not whole. We can be patient. We can learn to understand his strangeness.

He is afraid of the new light from the sun. He will not eat. He keeps guard throughout the night.

We manage to get the cuff off of him. In the process we break his wrist. Maitimo screams in wordless fury. He lashes out, slashing Curufinwë through the throat with nails we had not realized were so long and keen.

Both live. Both heal.

In the night one of us wakes to Maitimo over him. There is a sucking sound. Moonlight reflects strangely in Maitimo’s eyes.

We are afraid. We think Maitimo does not recognize us. We catch his wrist, feeling the thick scar. It heals slowly. He bites himself there if we do not stop him and his teeth are so sharp now. He will break the skin, over and over, gnawing until he strikes blood.

“Go to sleep,” Maitimo urges. We all feel it; our eyes droop. His tongue is wet against our neck. It flickers in a thin point as it pokes through the skin.

What a strange detail, we think in the morning. But that is the way of nightmares. Maitimo is huddled in his tent when we check on him. His eyes are glassy; he raises his face and does not know us.

We apologize. We leave. We try to ignore the sounds of weeping.

We have the dream often. Among each other we do not speak of it. When we check for marks, none remain. Our bodies work against us. We think ourselves paranoid. Afraid because he is different.

And Maitimo loves us still. He is careful.

But not enough.

Pityafinwë is taken from us next. Is this what our mother saw? Is this why she tried to hold on to him, tried to camouflage him among us? Never will we know. All of us are barred from the place we were born.

Little comfort: Minyarussa dies easily. He is asleep. That is what Maitimo will repeat later, when Atyarussa comes upon him, in the last moments the twins are divided from each other. Pityafinwë’s blood pours from him in a torrent, far too much for one mouth to contain and so it continues to spill, staining the furs of his bed and his nightclothes. A miscalculation.

We fracture.

Maitimo eats two of us and strains with the attempt to keep us inside of him. He cannot manage it. Like a cat, he coughs up wet clumps of our bodies. Miserably, he vomits little pieces of flesh which have nowhere to fit back into.

At the time, all the rest of us know is that Maitimo and the Ambarussa have disappeared into the woods. We fret, but for all that Maitimo is different he is still strong, and the Ambarussa are an effective team. They come back robust. Healthy. Unharmed. If their eyes glitter, it is only in the way that all ours do. The slaughter at Alqualondë affected us to a man; we do not think of it.

They take over his care. We worry, but we are busy. Food goes in, empty plates come out. At least he is eating. At least he accepts some company. He has mostly stopped hiding under the blankets and cringing from touch.

He just needs time, we all tell each other whenever we speak of him. So we give him time. And we give him us.

We keep dreaming.

We love Carnistir, our middle brother. He is older; we want to impress him, to earn his affection which is so rarely given, unlike the rest of our brothers. (We feel no need to win Curufinwë; he is only ten years older and that is hardly anything.) We are fragmented and so lonely. So it is him we take next.

Suspicion is not enough to save him.

We bring him to Maitimo, separating him from our other brothers in the dead of night by claiming an emergency. We will go for help, one of us says, then circles back around. We eat him tenderly. Maitimo crouches over him, petting his hair the way he had petted ours, when he realized what he had done. Despite our urging he eats only jerkily, one bite every so often when his willpower snaps.

“Thou’lt wake soon,” he tells Carnistir, who gurgles something which might be a protest. One of us has chewed through his throat; we can feel his breath on our tongues. We do not worry about this; we are too giddy. We do not mean to kill him, precisely, but it is much harder to take unnoticed when there are three of us and only four to sustain ourselves on. And Tyelperinquar, but we like to tease him. We know he is too small to change. He should have time to grow. We try to avoid him, though we have less success in doing so than Maitimo. “Thou’lt wake.”

This is not what he had told us. Over us he had cried as if we were his own children. He had welcomed Atyarussa’s attack even as he tore his stomach out like it was fragile as paper and nuzzled his face in the ruins. He had not meant to hurt us.

We know that now.

We do not want to hurt our brothers either.

And then we feel the urge to be whole again. It spreads through the camp; we make the others nervous. The ones who are not family.

Tyelkormo watches us with keen eyes. He knows us, this hunter. He catches our scent.

Things go quickly after that.

He tells Makalaurë. He is not believed. What harm is there, when we all breathe, when Maitimo is still so ill, when the Ambarussa are just the same as always? Dreams are only that. Only that, Tyelko.

And so Tyelkormo goes next to Curufinwë, who listens.

To Tyelperinquar they give Angrist, folding his little hands around the hilt. They tell him to run, to find Írissë and warn her of what has befallen us. She will listen and she can convince her father. She will save us.

This we learn later. After we have helped Makalaurë, as the dusk settles softly around, Findekáno returns Tyelperinquar to us. Tyelperinquar’s face is grey. The bite in his neck oozes slowly.

And yet he is only sleeping. Findekáno wipes his bright mouth and chin. He brings our son to Maitimo. He knows it is not his right to welcome Tyelperinquar into life.

We had meant to spread them out to help Makalaurë adjust, but Curufinwë acts rashly. This costs him.

So we take them together: Maitimo at Curufinwë’s throat and the rest of us at little Tyelperinquar’s, bite by bite, so shallow we are hardly doing more than nipping. How we love him! When he wakes he will be one of us. We know he has been lonely. He will be spared that now.

We curl them in Curufinwë’s tent to wake together. As Carnistir we had missed that closeness — and even now Maitimo will not tell us what it was like for him. He had not known what he was designed to do, only that it hurt and he wanted to come home. But as the Ambarussa, remade together, the change had not been so frightening. Whatever had been done to us, we knew we were the same.

Then it is all of us against Tyelkormo. He knows himself hunted prey; he runs anyway. It is Írissë who fells him, having followed her brother. She loves Tyelkormo despite the ice. Even once cornered, Tyelkormo fights us to the end. We hold him down as Maitimo drinks him, crowding against him as one. Tender boy, who does not know when to yield! We feel as he drives Angrist into Maitimo, all the way to the hilt, up under his rib cage. On anyone else it would be a clean kill.

Maitimo rears back; Makalaurë comes to him, steadied by the need. It is too late — Maitimo has started to weep again, lost in despair. He is shaken into states we can never reach. He does not see the gift he has given us. Never can we be driven from the land. Even the Moringotto himself cannot strike us down. We will fulfill our Oath and live on ever after, never parted.

We stumble after Tyelkormo, who is crawling away. Carnistir takes the knife from Tyelkormo’s hand, but not before Tyelkormo slits his own throat. The fragile column opens easily. He wishes to keep himself not ours.

The process accelerates. Our last brother dies choking in his own blood, but we have bitten him hard and well. He will wake. We make sure of that. Findekáno goes to Maitimo to clean him of blood and tug him away from needless sorrow. We wait by Curufinwë and Tyelperinquar; we bring Tyelkormo to them. We let Írissë taste us.

All of us will be together again. Too late to save our father, but not our cousins. We can bestow this mercy upon them. The means to save themselves from another Helcaraxë is a better apology than horses. No matter that it goes against prior decrees. We have left; the Valar hold no sway over us.

Better to live.

We sit by the last of our dead, dozing throughout the day. We clean and change them. We make them comfortable. Tyelperinquar wakes first. We soothe him. We give him to Maitimo to hold and pet; we turn his face away from the bodies. It is not difficult. Tyelperinquar clings. He weeps. He does not know what he is and will not be calmed by Maitimo’s apologies or our reassurances. We try anyway.

And then, as evening begins to fall, we become whole again.

Our brothers return.