A Cold Thought, by Himring (Challenge: Cold be Hand and Heart and Bone)

[hhimring]

Title : A Cold Thought
Author : Himring
Fandom/Source : Silmarillion
Rating : PG13
Characters : Maeglin (reference to Aredhel and Eol)
Disclaimer : Tolkien's characters (no offence intended, no monetary recompense received).
Spoilers/Warnings : Canonical character death. Maeglin angst.
Summary: Maeglin after his mother's death, before his father's death. Double drabble.


Mother’s boy.
‘You shall be my guide and I shall be your guard,’ he had promised her but, in the end, it was she who had to guard him from attack, she who had intercepted the sudden javelin and the double death it bore—dead, for his sake, before she had even spoken long to those she had missed.
He tried to think only of her, not of the other, of him, but could not help knowing that before the hot anger and violence, there must have been another, colder moment, when the javelin’s point had been dipped in poison.

‘It is efficient,’ he had said, during one of their journeys, when Maeglin asked cautiously about the use of poison (because Mother had said only orcs…?).
What game needed hunting so efficiently, on the trail of his wife and his son? Not merely resentment flaring momentarily in the face of insult, then!
The poison of that knowledge entered deep into the bone, until Maeglin was cold, colder than his mother’s corpse before him.
‘If I had been able to say to Turgon, the next day: that is my father? But I could not nor fit my mouth around the words.’

A/N: I'll just blame the prompt for this. Maeglin is meant to be saying that last sentence to Salgant; that's why the quotation marks.

Comments

[liadt]

Excellent! Looking back on that moment makes something awful even awfuller!

[hhimring]

Thank you!
Eol may not have intended to kill Aredhel, but he certainly wasn't concealing a poisoned javelin under his cloak just by coincidence.

[curiouswombat.livejournal.com]

I have felt so sad for Maeglin, ever since I first read his story - it is a pleasure to see hime reborn in your stories.

[hhimring]

Thank you!
It's a terrible back story to have.
Of course, Maeglin also goes on to do terrible things, at the Fall of Gondolin, but I do think Morgoth messed with his head.

[fredbassett]

Very vivid, and equally painful.

[hhimring]

Thank you!