#asdffghhjk so good
“They tell me you’re the king now,” Feanor said with bright eyed curiosity. “Is it always one of your responsibilities to welcome the newly re-embodied?”
The first sentence, Finarfin had to admit, was not wholly unexpected.
… Even if it was said with far more cheerful curiosity than he had heard from his half-brother in - a long time.
“Not always,” he admitted. “Time would not permit it. But I was eager to see you again.”
Anxious. Furious. Bewildered.
But eager.
Feanor’s face brightened. “Again? We knew each other?”
Finarfin’s cautious smile froze. He turned, very slowly, to face Namo where he sat on his throne of judgement.
Arafinwe had come in person to convey the Valar’s message the Feanaro would be returning.
She had declined to accompany him to Mandos. She had done so calmly and politely, and then, as soon as he had finished giving her helplessly concerned glances and left, she had fallen to her knees in front of her latest statue and heaved desperate empty breaths that refused of their own volition to turn into sobs.
(She had not cried for – so long now. She was no longer sure she could.)
She had thought she would not see him again until the breaking of the world.
Maybe this was the breaking. It certainly felt like it.
She had been resolved not to go to him. He could come to her instead.
Feanor learned three things very quickly.
Firstly, that he couldn’t stand to see Nerdanel cry.
He couldn’t quite manage to call her his wife, even in his head. It didn’t seem fair to claim her when he couldn’t remember any of the work that had gone into the relationship and when he was certainly not holding up his end of the bargain now.
He didn’t know her. He had no idea what she liked, what she wanted, what would help her. He knew only the scraps that Arafinwe had told him and they were painfully thin now that he was standing before her, watching her sway and bend under this latest blow until she was braced against the cold marble walls of the alcove she’d been examining, head bent beneath the cool stone brow of the stern bust enclosed within. Her whole body shook with the force of sobs that were twisted through with hysteric laughter.
It was the strongest emotion he had witnessed since he had awoken; not tucked away and suppressed like the intensity he kept glimpsing in his perhaps-brother’s eyes, but full and strong, and it called to him even as some deep chord within him rebelled at letting it stand.
Finarfin’s mother was not left in charge of Tirion.
Why Finarfin’s mother was not also his mother was a mystery no one had yet been willing to explain to him. Finarfin had cited the Valar’s prohibition of revealing too much of his history.
Feanor suspected the look of uttermost horror on Finarfin’s face when Feanor had first suggested she be left in charge was closer to the real reason. He was not sure why mention of her was horrifying.
Maybe she was terrible.
That felt right.
He accepted it as a working hypothesis and moved on.
