Work Text:
The realisation comes to him all at once, like how a project in the forge will reach a point where simple metal becomes, recognisably, something more.
He is laughing.
Melkor is recounting a recent conversation shared with his brother and Mairon finds himself laughing. It unspools from him in velvety ribbons of sound, on and on from all the way down in his belly. His shoulders shake with it. His cheeks, puffed up with smiling, begin to ache.
“He gave me a wretchedly wounded look,” Melkor is saying, “and, would you believe, he asked me why. Why we would not attend their midwinter festival. Imagine that! Us rubbing shoulders with the Valar, the Maiar, the Elves, the whole interminable lot of them.”
“We would be pelted with stones,” Mairon offers delightedly.
“At the very least! We would be run through with spears, clapped in irons, lynched in public spectacle. Their jewelled streets would be fouled with our blood.”
“We did harry them so,” Mairon says, with a prickle of pride for the immensity of the crimes they wrought upon Arda that is now gone, and Melkor nods his agreement.
“Yes. And so I told my witless brother, who stopped in his tracks, and his eyes grew wide and dark, and after some moments he uttered a curse so foul, so heartfelt, that I was impressed and I am not ashamed to admit it.”
“Had he—”
“Forgotten.”
“No…”
“Who we were. What we did. Slipped right through the holes in his memory.”
Mairon snorts, and shakes his head at Manwë’s folly, and where he shares the sofa with Melkor he tucks his legs underneath himself and settles more comfortably against the cushions.
“See,” he says, “I used to think you had no need of a crown. When you wrought your first and only, when you took that band of iron and set your jewels in it and wore it always till your spine bowed, I said to myself: he does this out of vanity, and it is a foolish thing.” He knew a Melkor, once, who would have struck him for such words, right across his brazen mouth he would have hit him and more, worse. This Melkor does nothing more than hum an acknowledging little note, sipping placidly from his hot cocoa as he waits for him to continue. “Yet,” Mairon declares and then pauses for a moment, two, gesturing expansively. “Yet. I am now forced to reconsider. A crown would have been mighty useful in enlivening your brother’s memory.”
“Perhaps,” Melkor suggests, all seriousness, except for the glitter in his eyes, “you should make me one.”
Mairon’s brazen mouth laughs for him. “Perhaps I should.”
Silence follows his words, a soft one, comfortable as goose down. For his part, Mairon amuses himself with the conceit of it: a crown crafted in his little forge, the most splendid thing to ever come out of it, glistering proudly on Melkor’s brow as they take their tea, or sweep the floors, or stir pots that bubble over the fire… Absurd beyond absurdity, of course, but then again, why shouldn’t they have their frivolities and indulgences? Who is there to care? To point a finger and say, You are doing wrong?
Not one single soul.
And there Mairon goes, chortling away to himself as he decides that yes, he will forge a crown and he will make Melkor kneel so he might place it on his head and he will look upon its radiance often and will be glad of the skill of his hands.
The realisation comes again: how easy this feels, how joy seems to hide just underneath the skin of his thoughts and he can grab for it whenever he wants, and draw it forth, and hold it close, hold it long, where before it was only a dim and distant thing, a bauble at the bottom of a well, a flicker on the other side of the Void.
He does not know exactly when his joy returned, cannot pinpoint the precise moment. Could not say if there even was one precise moment, a clear demarcation, and he finds, to some surprise, that he is not bothered by this.
What he can identify is the reason why.
He glances at him, his husband, who was once both lord and god to him in a life that is now dead. Melkor. His mighty one, who has a smudge of brown on his lower lip from his hot cocoa and who is gazing out the window in that way he has always, always had with things that he wants: so utterly transfixed that the rest of the world simply peels away, insignificant as fruit rind.
Mairon smiles. In his chest there is a fullness as of a sail in high winds. It’s these small things, these very tiny and very thoughtless things, that make him say, You. It’s really you. That make him feel like he has come home after a long journey—or after forever, perhaps.
“We never held a midwinter festival,” Melkor says suddenly, gazing still through the window at the landscape beyond: snow to the horizon, bright and hushed. “Isn’t that strange?”
Mairon considers this. “Not particularly. Our northern regions were in perpetual winter and so would not have celebrated that which was constant to them. As for our fortress, it was swaddled always in volcanic vapours and knew no seasons at all.”
“Mm.”
A brief glance from eyes as blue as the hidden, frozen heart of winter. Melkor’s brows twitch together, rucking the skin between them, and then he is returning to his contemplation of the snowy fields outside the window, and Mairon knows this for what it is: frustration from the thwarting of some desire.
“Shall we go out?”
That drags Melkor back to him sure as a lodestone. He peers at him suspiciously. “Out as in outside, in the snow?”
“Yes.”
The suspicion intensifies. “It will be cold.” When Mairon remains unmoved by this very reasonable deterrent, Melkor adds, “The cold displeases you.”
“It does,” Mairon concedes, smiling, “but being outdoors pleases you.”
He must be doing a certain something with his mouth, must have it tilted in just the right way, because Melkor’s face clears, shows fresh as a cloudless sky after rain. His smile is returned; they both seem to find it easy, so easy these days, this summoning of joy, the trading of it between them.
“We can,” Melkor says, “if you are so certain.”
Mairon is certain, has never not been certain of any of his deeds. It is inefficient to expend oneself on doubts and vicissitudes. A choice made is a choice made and will not, cannot be taken back. So he became betrayer, then lieutenant of legions, then lover to the greatest of the great beings to walk in long-ago Arda, then lord of his own vassals and king in his own lands. And so, too, he attempted to bleed himself dead on the floor of his forge not too long ago, not too long when counted against this life of his spanning all the millennia of the world—worlds, now—back to the timeless beginning.
He lets out a small sound, and breathes into the bottom of his lungs, and waits for this moment to pass. He still has it in him, some days: that hot ache of disillusionment that makes his fingers itch for a blade. But it does not root quite so deeply into him as it used to, not quite so infectiously.
“Hey,” Melkor says, in his deepest, softest voice, like wool made sound. “What happened?”
He’s grown so perceptive in these last—however long they have had together as they are now: companions, lovers, spouses. Mairon thrills with it, a feeling that would be lovely if it weren’t so sharp with peril: to be seen, truly, to the core inside of him, when he has spent most of his long life wearing guises and masks and making them fit so snugly none would suspect there was another person hiding underneath.
“Nothing,” he tells Melkor, because it is unsettling to feel so naked. He untwists himself and puts both feet on the rug that covers most of the living area from the hearth nearly to the front door, a relatively new addition that depicts in silken thread a dragon of yore. For good measure, he slaps his palms against his thighs: I’m ready to go.
“You disappeared somewhere just now,” Melkor persists, still in his gentle voice of wool. “Where?”
And—damn him—he reaches out a hand, finds Mairon’s own and holds it, so lovingly that Mairon, despite his unshakeable certainty, is left with no idea what to do with himself.
“Somewhere dark,” he answers haltingly; the words stick a little in his throat, but Melkor’s thumb traces reassuringly over his knuckles and his eyes are on him, on his face, blue and endless. Mairon speaks on: “It was only in passing—like traversing a bridge that spans a deep chasm. Do not fret over me. I am perfectly well.”
“I shall fret over you till I expire,” Melkor declares, “which will be never.”
Extricating his hand from Melkor’s hold—slowly, because Melkor is loath to let go—Mairon rises to his feet. He plants his hands on his hips, and looks down upon his erstwhile lord with a glare that is, in truth, more fondness than anything else. “I am not an invalid, to need eternal fretting over.”
Melkor blinks placidly up at him, then not so placidly. “I could make you an invalid,” he smirks, and shows his teeth, looking like he’s getting ready to use those teeth for rending. “It wouldn’t take much, just a broken bone or two, your femur perhaps, or even your spine if we are scrupulously careful not to damage the cord inside.”
Ah, there he is, the dark lord of legend, dreadful in his passions. Mairon is struck with a sudden urge to kiss him and he does, does kiss him when Melkor follows him in arising. His fingers crimp into his shirt, yanking him close. Then: a stagger from Melkor. It is broken only when Mairon catches him into his chest.
They kiss softly, for all the talk of broken bones. A meeting of lips, a teasing brush of tongue. Richly sweet from Melkor’s hot cocoa.
“Why?” Melkor asks once they part, sounding dazed. He lingers close, breath mingling with Mairon’s, one hand on his jaw; the thumb traces its outline in a way that Melkor has perfected over the millennia, long and slow and deliberate, melting the edges off all the jagged things that live inside of Mairon.
“Why not?” Mairon asks right back, with a lopsided shrug. His own fingers find Melkor’s face, slip shamelessly down to his mouth, rubbing away the smudged cocoa.
And then he’s stepping away, leading Melkor by the hand towards the front door, pausing only so they can slip on their boots and shrug on their woollen cloaks.
Melkor was right: it is cold, and Mairon is not best pleased.
He shivers, somewhat violently, as he draws a frozen breath into his lungs. The snow fluffs up around his ankles. It seems to have taken over the whole world, blanketing it in the purest white. He thinks, Melkor made this, when he was young; and somehow, by some thaumaturgy, or perhaps someone else’s voice singing it into being, it has been transposed into this new-minted Arda.
As he walks, Mairon watches it kick up in crystalline little flakes about his boots, watches it crunch down under his soles and give way an inch or two, beautiful yet fragile. He marvels: Melkor, at the zenith of his power, was a god of vast and terrible things, dragons with fire in their bellies, mountains tall enough to shred the skies. And Mairon has largely forgotten, as has the rest of the world, that that is not all Melkor turned his mind to. The snowflake was his, crafted at the narrow interface between his power and that of his brethren, Manwë responsible for clouds and Ulmo for the water vapour inside of them, which Melkor drenched in bitterest cold till it froze. The small, flesh-soft things on forest floors were his also, the mosses and fungi, as were the little creatures supping on decay, detritivorous worms and flies and millipedes and much else besides.
Delicate things. Peculiar things.
Mairon, who still has him by the hand, lets go only to link their arms together, pulling him close so that their shoulders jostle and the animal heat of their bodies pools together.
He loves him, he thinks. Has always loved him for this ability of his, noticing and nurturing the potential in things scorned by others, deemed too ugly, too deadly, too hungry, too intense. Too much. Too different.
He does not tell him this, exactly, but he does say, “We could have a midwinter festival of our very own.”
The idea seems to amuse Melkor. Lost in his imaginings, he for a moment turns his face to the sky, bright with daylight from behind massed clouds, like freshly laundered linen; and he grins. “One so grand it will be seen and heard for miles in every direction, and when the Valar and the Elves and whoever else come looking, we will tell them they are not invited.”
That grin is infectious. Mairon feels his face rearranging itself to match it, and he shakes his head at his own self, and at his visionary husband. “Somewhat impractical, that,” he admonishes. “I was picturing something rather more intimate.”
He can almost see Melkor’s thoughts change direction. There they are, in the darkening of his eyes to the midnight blue of sodalite, the curving of his mouth like a scimitar-blade. “Tell me, then,” he croons, “of these intimacies you desire.”
“Not like that,” Mairon says, bumping his shoulder into him in reproof.
“Oh.”
“I have seen beasts in rut less preoccupied with carnal matters than you are.”
“Perhaps these beasts had less irresistible mates than I do.”
Melkor used to say such things often when time was young and Mairon was still wide-eyed in his presence: compliments like hot coals dropped onto the skin, stealing breath from lungs and leaving behind indelible marks. It was effective then, and has continued to be effective through all the long years since. Mairon’s cheeks colour, red as heart’s blood, and all of a sudden he is aware of the cold not at all.
“Hush,” he says, unintelligently. And then, once he’s managed to scramble together some coherence: “You cannot find me irresistible. You have known me for longer than a mind can comprehend. You have had me in your bed often enough that, put together, the hours would amount to several mortal lifetimes.”
“Our bed, now,” Melkor corrects. “And you speak rightly, but not conclusively. These things you raise only mean that I am familiar with you, and with your pleasures. There is no reason why familiarity should stop me from finding you irresistible.” His voice grows sly. What little power is left to him, he infuses it into his words so that they weave about Mairon, through him, like a spell. “I could prove it to you, if you like. Push you to your hands and knees right here, spread you open and put my tongue on you till the snow’s cold and the heat of your need wage a war inside you. And then I would leave you wet as a cunt, and make you take me down to the root, and I would fuck you hard, little one, I would make you scream loud enough to echo all across these empty fields of ours, and beyond.”
He pauses, breathes out a sultry little laugh. “That would be a midwinter festival worthy of an audience.”
In the pit of Mairon’s stomach, there is a gnashing as of razored teeth. He has half a mind to let it happen because why not, why not? They have no one but each other, heed no one but each other. Melkor speaks of pleasures like madness, all-consuming: what possible reason could they have to deny themselves?
The other half of his mind makes him say, “I have never known you to be willing to share me.”
“Right yet again,” Melkor agrees. He proffers a decadent smile. “As I said, you are too irresistible for me not to keep you all to myself.”
Mairon burns. From his toes to the tips of his ears. From the surface of his skin down to his blood, and the marrow in his bones. Beyond thought, beyond even breath, it has always been easiest of all for him to burn.
“Are you done?” he asks, not because he wants Melkor to stop, necessarily, but because—oh, let damnation swallow this world whole. He’s happy, he feels so happy and so painstakingly alive and he doesn’t want it to end never ever but fears that it will, must, that he will go the way of all burning things and fizzle out and be stranded in the dark again, in the cold, in that endless fucking gnawing emptiness. “Is your point made?”
If Melkor has any hint of the turmoil in his head, he does not show it, and Mairon is grateful.
“I don’t know,” Melkor quips. “Do you believe me yet?”
Mairon ponders this. The snow crunches under his boots, softly, softly. Above, the sky stretches like an embrace. And Melkor waits, and strolls beside him, and pressures him not a whit.
“No,” Mairon answers eventually. Whispers it, because it feels like an ugly thing to say. He sees the truth of it, he hears it, in every touch and every word pouring between them like honey, sticky-sweet. But there is something mulish inside him that refuses to heed it. “I should, I am keenly aware that I should, but I… I can’t, I just—I’m sorry.”
“Hey, no.”
Melkor stops them, then, in the middle of nowhere, nothing around but the crumbly white snow, their cottage just far enough away that it seems tiny, fit only for dolls.
“You do not say sorry to me.”
There is a flicker of a smile on Mairon’s face. “So you keep telling me.”
“I mean it.” Hands on his face: the palms cradle his jaw; the thumbs find his cheekbones, trace the swell of his skeleton, make him feel like maybe—maybe—something precious could be found deep down inside him, if only he were hewn apart thoroughly enough. “I have no need of your apologies. There is nothing—and I want you to hear this, little one—nothing you have done or not done that requires an apology.”
Melkor has it wrong, all wrong. Absolution demands wet cheeks and bloodied knees; a whip cracked over one’s own spine; the purging of sin through pain.
Mairon shudders, burns and shudders. If this is not absolution, then why does it feel like it? There’s that gushing heat behind his eyes that he knows too well. His throat is tight. Under the dome of his ribcage, his heart is a hot, bubbling sun.
A little croakily, he says, “I do not deserve you.”
And Melkor laughs, startled and huge and so loud that from somewhere far away a flock of birds flees into the sky.
“Mairon,” he says, quite seriously, once the echoes of that laugh have faded, “I love you ceaselessly, but you are speaking utter aberrations. You not deserving me? Worse than my brother, you are.”
At that, Mairon finds it in himself to bridle. “Hey, now—”
“Worse than him and that is a truth, else I was never numbered among the great.”
“You still are—”
“No,” Melkor cuts in, “I know that I am not. My peace is made. Your peace is staring you in the face, yet again and again you feign blindness to it.”
Mairon is not yet ready to give up his bridling. Smoothly, he steps back from Melkor’s cradling hands. “It sounds to me like you are calling me stubborn.”
His eyes narrow to a hard gleam of gold, arms crossing over his chest, and he waits for Melkor to placate him, as he has been doing for months now: every grievance from Mairon listened to, every possible comfort speedily offered.
No such thing happens.
“I am indeed,” Melkor has the gall to say. “Admirably stubborn, my admirable one. Put this notion of deservingness from your mind, please. Do you remember when I was your lord? Do you remember what I did to you?”
“Of course,” Mairon answers, frowns, thinks of all the sundry ways in which the meat of him was made to hurt and he feels—nothing. The smooth blankness of scar tissue; “but that was then, and—”
“It is past and forgiven?”
“Yes.”
“Good. So you understand.” Melkor tips his head up slightly. In the clean brightness of winter, his eyes show luminously blue. “Howsoever you deem to have failed me when you were my sworn servant—I do not care.”
And it is odd, Mairon thinks, to feel so thoroughly on fire amid an ocean of snow. Yet here he is, burning as though he wore a skin of naked flame, as he did when he first climbed down to Arda. He does not feel the cold. He thinks: I will curl up on the ground and it will melt away beneath me until I am deep in the earth’s belly and I can stay there, entombed, forever.
Yet again, Melkor was right: the words have been spoken, what he’s always wanted to hear—that he’s loved and wanted and forgiven—yet he finds now that he doesn’t want them, he’s frightened by them, frightened by the enormity of the question they pose: who are you if you do not have to hate yourself anymore?
He shakes his head at Melkor, and he tells him, “Yet those failures are part of me still. We are each of us the sum of all we have done, whether in this Arda beneath our feet or the one that is now lost.”
And Melkor looks at him long; looks at him with something that could be exasperation if only it weren’t so soft around the edges.
“All we have done,” he tells him, gently, under that boundless winter sky, amid the boundless powdery snow. “I do not see failure when I look at you.”
Sometimes words dry up. Sometimes thought falters, and there is only feeling, running deep like an underground river. Mairon is transported. He feels unmade, remade.
The corner of his mouth quirks up. Shivers, as though it might dissolve into a sob, or is trying very hard to stifle a laugh. He feels—lighter, somehow. Something inside has shifted; a brokenness has been swept away, and the not-quite-so-broken bits have been put back together, and in this new configuration their weight is a little easier to bear.
“That still does not adequately explain my apparent irresistibility,” he says, because it is the only thing he can say.
Yet Melkor is not perturbed by the return to more pedestrian topics. He meets him right where he is, step for step, as though they were locked together in a dance which, oh, they have not done since time beyond recounting, in Utumno when life was ripe with hope. Maybe they should dance again; maybe they will.
“Well now,” Melkor says, “if we are speaking of parts, that would have to do with certain ones of the most succulent physical variety—”
Loudly, Mairon groans. He sinks to his backside in the snow, then even further, onto his back.
Their dance stutters. Its cadence slows.
“You are unwell?” Melkor asks him, concerned.
“Tired,” Mairon answers. The snow is wetting his cloak, soothing some of the burn in his veins, between his organs. He fans out his hands, feels the crispness of the snow against his skin and gathers it into his fists so it makes a satisfying sound of crunching, looking up at Melkor who stands above him as a giant holding the sky upon his shoulders.
“I could carry you,” the giant offers.
Mairon lifts a snowy hand and waves it in dismissal. “Later. Have you ever made a snow Balrog?”
Melkor stops being a giant and drops down onto his haunches. He answers with a head-shake, peering at him curiously. “A snow… Balrog?”
“I used to see the children make them a long, long time ago. Utumno, I believe, if memory serves. I would ride out sometimes through the woods, when my duties allowed, or don my wolf-shape and join my pack far into the mountains. And I would see them as I left, the little Orclings, a small battalion of them playing among the evergreens within sight of our gates. Some would pelt each other with balls of snow, others would bring tiny sleighs of wood and careen down the nearest hillock, and others still would do this…”
Mairon has never done it before, but he remembers it well enough: the motion simple, the memory sticking firm in his mind when so many others have not, perhaps due to unassumingness of it. Nothing but snow and limbs and joy.
He slides his arms across the snow till they’re perpendicular to the rest of him, widens his legs a little. And then he moves, arms up through the snow carving a shallow furrow, legs out to the sides doing the same, and then reverse: arms down, legs in. He keeps going until the furrows are well defined, neat as a drawing on a square of parchment.
The process of getting up is somewhat trickier than the coming down. He does not want to mar his handiwork, so he unpeels one arm from the snow—tingling with cold, now—and flings it in Melkor’s direction, beseechingly wiggling his fingers.
Melkor accepts the proffered fingers. He starts hauling him up into a sitting position, but he is still crouched on his haunches, lacking the leverage and stability necessary for what he is attempting. Down he goes, falling backwards in a slow and entirely preventable arc of unbalancing, and Mairon is tugged to his hands and knees with him, over him: palms braced either side of one thigh, hair straggling over his shoulders.
A moment of stasis: they look at each other, upon the ground in the snow, they who used to be lords of dark and formidable power.
They start laughing. Mairon first as it punches up from his belly, explosive. And Melkor laughs at his laughter, and so they go, on and on until they would be deemed strange, if any chanced upon them.
His laughter spent, Mairon lets himself crumple into Melkor, head pillowed on his belly. Melkor lets out a breathless oof at the intrusion; but his touch is tender when he sinks his fingers into Mairon’s hair and starts combing them through, a slight tug and slide, deeply soothing.
Mairon shuts his eyes. Through the barrier of cloth and skin, he can hear the rumblings of Melkor’s inner world, the workings of his gut, the beat of his heart like thunder among far-off mountains. He wants to be inside him sometimes. Not necessarily in the way of cocks breaching bodies, but inside, part of the architecture, pulse and bone, thought and heart. He has always wanted to belong to something greater than himself. To be subsumed in the sum of someone else’s parts.
“It is cold down here,” Melkor muses. His voice travels strangely. It is whisper-quiet, but made loud in the clear air, as though lifted in holy song in the Timeless Halls.
Mairon tries to think of Melkor as he was back then. Only fragments come up, a voice that was everywhere, rising above them all yet also running right through theirs like an undercurrent, pulling them astray; a figure apart from the rest, conversing with their sacrosanct Father, so bright one could not regard it for long. Melkor shone brightest of them all, before he fell.
“Indeed it is,” Mairon agrees, meaning the snow’s coldness. “You made it so.”
It is a strange thought, that that brilliant, blinding figure is now beneath him, sprawled in the snow, plagued by the cold because he lacks the power for so mundane a thing as warming his own flesh. It is an even stranger thought that he would ever choose this for himself over glory, crowns, sole ownership of a world entire. Yet it is a sweet thought also, coming with slow pleasure, like a green thing stretching up towards the sun.
“It is wet too,” grumbles Melkor who now has no glory, no crown, no world. Just sodden clothes on his back, and an equally sodden husband hovering between his thighs.
“That is what you created,” Mairon confirms.
“What was I thinking?”
“The act of creation does not always have thought behind it. That aside,” Mairon adds, “I do happen to know how to warm you back up.”
Melkor arches an eyebrow at him. His hair is fanned out around him, a corona of pure darkness against the pure whiteness below. “Do enlighten me.”
Mairon pushes himself to his feet; his turn to be the giant holding up the sky. “Make a snow Balrog of your very own.”
“Not what I was hoping you were going to suggest.”
The toe-tip of a boot nudges into Melkor’s shin. “Come on.”
“Anything for you,” is the reply he gets, along with a dazzling smile.
Mairon nudges harder.
“Ow—”
“Open your legs.”
“I thought—”
“That is the correct position to make a snow Balrog. See? You sweep your legs outwards then back inwards—very good—to make the Balrog’s legs—one and two, hence the separation in the middle, each of them immense in girth.”
“And the arms go up and down”—just like that, yes, Mairon murmurs as Melkor completes the motion—“to make the wings?”
“Precisely right.”
“Fancy that.”
Melkor sits up and, with a delicacy belied by the breadth of him, pushes himself to his feet without disturbing one single snowflake of the snow Balrog’s.
“It is missing its horns,” he points out.
“Some chose not to manifest horns,” Mairon says, unthinkingly brushing the offending snow off Melkor’s cloak.
“I would, nonetheless, like mine to have a pair.”
“Very well then.” Light of foot, Mairon inches around to the snow Balrog’s head, and with his finger he reaches down and carves out two spiralled horns. “Pleased?”
“Thoroughly, yes.” That dazzling grin again, huge with teeth, a little bit roguish. “This has turned into a most delightful midwinter festival.”
“Hardly a festival,” Mairon scoffs as together, shoulder to shoulder, they resume their meandering, this time in the direction of home.
“Oh, I think so. Do you not?”
“Not quite. Perhaps…” Mairon pauses, lets his mind wander, and what it alights on surprises him: a plain hall, a rhythmic pulsing in his muscles that spoke of a good day of hard smith-work, other bodies jostling about him in search of drink or food, an evening stretching into a dark winter’s night as the fires dimmed and still they huddled together and told stories. “It is an Elven custom, so you may not wish to bring it into our home”—Melkor makes a dismissive noise; he is past such hatreds, now—“but it would involve pine needles scattered among coals that have lost their flame but not their heat, so that they might smoulder gently and release their fragrance.”
“That should be simple enough to do,” Melkor says. “Pine trees are plentiful in these parts.”
Mairon has not seen a single one in all his years in this Arda made anew. “You have found them on your travels with your brother, I take it?”
“That I have.”
“Perhaps you could gather some of their needles for us next time you journey out.”
“Or,” Melkor suggests, and his voice is woollen again, soft and deep enough to cushion any fall, “you could gather them yourself. This has been pleasant, hasn’t it, our little excursion? We could go further afield, just us two, walking till our feet get sore. There is so much to see out there.”
Mairon does not look at him. Only straight ahead across the great expanse of snow, broken by nothing save their earlier footprints. “Always you have hungered for the world.”
Fingers find his own, slip through the gaps between them and squeeze. Cold skin to cold skin. Melkor’s single ring clinking against the several that Mairon wears.
A voice, Melkor’s, filtering in through the crunch of their boot-steps. “And you have not?”
“Oh, never the world,” Mairon explains, because this is something Melkor has never understood: how one can love something without possessing it. “I loved it, as it used to be, I loved to see my song reflected in its form and I loved to take its raw materials in my hands and make of them new and wondrous things. But hunger… no. My hunger was—is—less grand than yours.”
What he does not say is this: I know your aching, that black and churning pit in your stomach, I know it because I, too, have held on to it all these years, like a prayer; I hunger for you.
There are secrets inside him that he cannot ever share. They would cut him on their way out. Would leave him skinned, scalped, broken-boned.
So it has ever been with him, and so it will continue to be. Some things change. Others do not. And life always, always carries on.
“Even so, it is good to hunger,” Melkor says, and he holds his hand a little tighter, and the glance he gives him is furtive, heavy; there’s an apprehensiveness to him that he has never fully shaken since he learned what Mairon did with his dagger, on the floor of his forge. “It is only the dead who do not know its bite.”
“You are mightily astute, my mighty one. I am, in fact, not dead, seeing as I am currently conversing with you.”
Melkor does not dignify this with an answer. From above, snowflakes start to appear: thick, white things, drifting silently through the sky. They get caught on Mairon’s eyelashes. They leave chilly little kisses on his cheeks.
He watches them, their slow and weightless journeys, the way they spangle the air like stars. A certain quietude is spreading through him. And as it spreads, it seems to cleanse him; seems to set him aglow, illuminating all the chasms inside him and proving them far shallower than they seemed. Another realisation—
“I do not wish I were dead, today.”
And if he is glowing internally, then Melkor is doing the same on the outside. He lights up. He becomes a beacon, so radiant it almost hurts to look at him, like he’s sloughed off all the millennia since his birth.
“What do you wish for?” he asks from behind his incandescence.
“To remove this damp cloak from my person.”
“And after?”
“After?” Mairon blinks. He lets out a breath that turns into a puff of white in the cold. After seems such a strange concept when, for a long time, the pattern of his life has been: survive till evening; sink into unconsciousness; repeat. There is no room for wanting in survival; there is only doing, repeatedly, mechanically. “I… I don’t quite know. What do you want?”
Melkor is so beautiful in this lustrous half-light, with snowflakes glimmering in his raven hair, eddying about him like a halo. He smiles, beatifically.
“Not much more than what I already have.”
“Truly?”
“Of course.” The smile is there still, like eternity. “What else is there to want?”
“Power,” Mairon breathes. The word comes from somewhere deep down, somewhere dark, somewhere with thick roots. “Kingship. Lands to rule and subjects to order. By rights the world should be yours.”
“Perchance it should. Yet I chose to abdicate any such rights,” Melkor says, “to be here with you.”
Chose. He did choose. On a silver platter it was offered to him by their holiest Father, a world for him and only him to make and shape and govern and own, incontrovertibly, in perpetuity. His heart’s fiercest desire, and he chose to spurn it. Yet… perhaps it is only Mairon who deems it his heart’s fiercest desire. Certainly it was so long ago when their lives were new to them and their passions burned white-hot and greedy; but millennia have come and gone since then, seasons have turned, wars have been lost, hearts have been shattered in grief. Melkor’s innermost desires might have changed. Some things do. Some things do.
“I forget, sometimes,” Mairon admits.
“I know you do,” Melkor murmurs to him and somehow he makes it sound not like an accusation, but like—love. “It snarls up your neat little story of being undeserving, does it not?”
“Rather.”
Melkor knows much, these days. Mairon forgets this, too: how unclouded his mind is, how clear his eyes, how open his ears. He forgets, and ever he is taken aback when Melkor tells him something about himself he assumed he had kept carefully concealed. And yet—what does a deceiver want most? To be peeled back to the quick of them, and judged to still be worthy.
So it is that Mairon, peeled back, comes to say, “We are free, are we not? A crown is such a burden.”
“It drags at you,” Melkor agrees, with feeling, “like a thousand grasping hands.”
“Yours especially.” A beat passes. Filled with snowfall and memory. Eventually, Mairon continues, “Why did you make it so heavy?”
“It was not done purposefully. The Silmarils resented being constrained, and they punished me for it.”
“You speak of them as though they had sentience.”
“At times it seemed that they did. Perhaps they held within them a ghost of their creator. Beautiful, but hateful.”
Mairon takes his eyes off the path ahead, flicks them over to Melkor, narrows them. “Beautiful?”
“They were.”
“And their creator?”
It does not rankle as much as it once did, that Melkor chose the work of another’s hands over his own, over his happiness too, and his peace; but it has not stopped rankling completely.
“Not more so than you,” Melkor answers, slowing his pace so he might press close and put his mouth on him, lips hot against his snow-chilled cheek.
When he tries to pull him to a complete stop and steal a proper kiss from him, Mairon turns his face away and tugs him roughly on.
“I am not a youth still unused to living in my own skin,” he bites out, through teeth that would have been rather keen for that kiss, “to need constant reassurance of my appeal.”
“Of course,” Melkor says smoothly, yet not smoothly enough for one who turned deception into an exact science; Mairon knows that Melkor doubts his protestations, and lets it slide. “Why would perfection have need of reassurance?”
“There you go again.”
“I hope you might one day come to believe it if I say it often enough.”
“Not this,” Mairon tells him softly, solemnly. “I am not perfect. I know it. It grieves me, but I know it.”
It takes Melkor a long time to reply. Their cottage draws nearer, grows bigger, a doll house no longer. Up above, the light starts to leach away. Greyness settles in, soft with clouds, like the inside of a moth’s cocoon. It makes the world seem just that little bit less vast, less dizzying.
“No,” Melkor says at length, “I suppose you are not.” He raises a hand, the one not entangled with Mairon’s own, forestalling the protest—dread—heartbreak—in Mairon’s throat. “I would not want you to be.”
“Explain yourself,” Mairon pleads.
And Melkor, though god no longer, hearkens to his prayer. “Perfection can never be anything other than what it already is. It does not know spontaneity. It does not know how to try new things. It would never laugh too loudly, or awaken in deepest night to dash to the forge because it’s had an idea that cannot wait another moment, or throw its head back and scream as it finds pleasure at the hands of a lover, or even lie down in the cold and wet to make a snow Balrog. No, Mairon. I do not want you to be perfect. I would have to try really rather hard to love you if you were.”
And with that, Melkor halts them in their tracks; he forgoes his hand and plucks him off his feet, one arm supporting his back, the other his thighs.
Mairon yelps. Seeing as his face is suddenly so incredibly close to Melkor’s, he probably leaves him half-deaf in one ear, but does not quite have it in him to feel absurd about it. As fast as his muscles will let him, he throws his arms about Melkor’s shoulders and clings on.
“Melkor—!”
“You said you were tired before,” the fiend says, “and you seem overcome now. Let me help you.”
Before Mairon can point out that help is not usually foisted upon someone like this, Melkor walks on and takes him, perforce, along.
It is not so bad, truth be told, to be cradled so closely and so gingerly. Once the immediate fright of being airborne dwindles, Mairon starts to appreciate it. He hovers there secure in Melkor’s arms, and he feels—too many things. They all flow together, like the confluence of many rivers, and he the sand on the bottom, the pebbles, the secret treasures, sometimes planted there immovably, other times wrenched free in the current and taken far away.
“I must weigh so much with my boots and my sodden cloak,” he says, instead of anything else he might or should have said.
Melkor shows no discomfiture at the change in subject. Their little dance, again.
“I am not Vala for nothing,” he grins. “I have rescinded much, but not all. Enough strength remains to me to carry you comfortably, and far if need be.”
“Well then, if I am offered a flesh-and-blood palanquin, I might even agree to go with you in search of pine needles.”
“That would be pushing your luck, little one.”
“Oh, do not be uncharitable. I am giving you exactly what you wanted. Earlier you were talking about turning me into an invalid, were you not? Part of that would be you carrying me everywhere.”
Melkor’s lovely face scrunches up into an unlovely frown. “Perhaps that particular want can remain unfulfilled. The practicalities did not concern me so much as the more… salacious implications.”
In his vast wisdom, Mairon chooses not to pursue this any further. Instead, he says, “You asked me what I wanted, earlier.”
“So I did.”
“I wonder…”
“Tell me.”
Mairon bites his lip. Does not quite manage to talk himself out of it. “Horses, if Manwë would grant such a thing. Two of them, one for you and another for me. We could ride out together, explore this world that is now our home. Eternity is a long time to be confined to a cottage and the fields that border it.”
Melkor’s long steps have carried them back to their front door. Mairon finds himself set down, more gently than breath. At his side, Melkor is glowing still, resplendent as a beacon-fire lit to banish midwinter’s gloom.
“I will ask him as soon as I might,” he says, beams, opening the door and motioning him through. “Doubtless he will agree. I can be extremely persuasive.”
Mairon opens his mouth, cluttered as it is with all the rejoinders he could throw at Melkor. You can be, to be sure, though the effect is rather ruined when you don’t wield a blade in your hands. Or: Do not mistake brute force for persuasion. The former you excel at, the latter you tend to outsource to me, and rightly so.
What comes out is quite different; for he feels, feels, feels, the river overflowing its banks, leaving him damp-soft so that all his secrets start floating up into the open.
“I know,” he acknowledges over his shoulder, stepping across the threshold into the warmth of their cottage. He stops just short of the rug, mindful of his soggy boots; and then he turns, and meets Melkor’s eyes, and offers him a smile like an outstretched hand. “You persuaded me to give this”—gesturing widely, towards himself and Melkor and all the paraphernalia of living—“another chance.”
Those blue eyes sheen over, glister bright as glacier pools. Mairon feels his breath cut short. A moment later, Melkor is with him, in his space, and somehow they are both standing on the rug in their boots treading the winter into its silken pile, which means he will need to grab a cloth and blot out all the wetness and do it quickly—but oh, there are more important things than rugs in this world.
Their lips meet, not for the first time, nor the last; and Mairon thinks, with a familiar flush of certainty: no one gave me a choice whether or not to be here in this Arda that is strange and new to me; but I do have a choice now, and I choose to make a home out of it, with you.