Chapter Text
The first thing Maedhros did when he heard that Luthien and Beren had died and Dior was now King of Doriath was put his head in his hands. He stayed like that for a moment, mind whirling, considering the implications. Then he swore, stopped considering political implications and started considering brotherly ones.
“Fuck,” he said aloud, “fuck.”
For a split second he thought of writing to Fingon, pouring all the inevitable catastrophes into words. In the next second, he remembered that Fingon was dead, trampled beneath Balrogs until his body was almost unrecognisable when they finally found it. If he were alive, they wouldn’t be having this problem anyway because Morgoth would be gone, the Oath would be gone, and Fingon would be here, with him, and letters would not be needed.
But this was useless. Stop this, he told himself firmly. What is the next step?
Find Maglor. Maglor would have a plan. Probably.
Maglor did not have a plan.
“Really, Nelyo, I haven’t the slightest idea why you thought I would. You’re the Head of this House. Dealing with this is your job.”
He restrained himself from punching his dearly beloved brother in the face. “Because,” he gritted out, “you swore it too.”
His brother was very still at that, setting down the papers he had been working on. After a beat of silence he stood, and came over to where Maedhros was standing, staring out of the window.
“Do you think I want more death, Maedhros? Do you think I want to try and fail to stop Celegorm and Curufin from doing what they have wanted to do since Luthien retrieved a Silmaril? There is no point. They will do it, unless someone comes up with a better plan, which I find unlikely.”
“You think I want more Elves to die? I’ve already been responsible for enough. I will not be a Kinslayer again, Makalaure. I will not.”
By the end of his little speech his voice was shaking, and salty tears thread through his words. Maglor looked slightly stricken, like cracks had started to form on his perfect mask. He turned on his heel and left Maedhros’ room, and returned a minute later with two large bottles of wine. Hefting both of them into the air, his lips spread in a wicked grin. “Well then, Nelyo. Let’s think of a plan.”
The wine splashed into the two glasses Maglor laid out on the table. His brother poured a frankly alarming amount into each slim-necked wine glass, and thrust one across the table, lifted his own, and took a large gulp. Maedhros decided to mimic him.
It was surprisingly strong. He eyed the remaining bottle, and the other full one, and felt a headache coming on at the thought that they weren’t leaving until they’d come up with a plan.
Maedhros took another swig of the wine glass, opened his mouth, and began to talk.
“Dresses are the answer! We will wear such wonderful dresses that all of Doriath will be so dazzled they shall give us the Silmaril!”
“No, no,” Maedhros said, haphazardly gesturing with a swooping wave of his arm to indicate how wrong this idea was. “Cake. Curvo can—can- “he took another draught and jabbed at his brother. “Make cake! Put us in it!”
Nodding sagely, Maglor pursed his lips. “With,” he said importantly, “icing.”
“Well, obsv’sly icing, I thought that went wi’out saying.”
“Yes, but coloured icing. And sprinkles. We need sprinkles.”
“We need more wine.”
Maglor reached for the bottle and upended it over his glass. A dribble of wine came out. He licked at it, then tried to get up, bracing his hands on the side of his chair.
He failed.
“What’re you doing?”
Giving him a filthy look, Maglor said “Getting more wine, idiot.”
“Oh. You’re not doing a very good job.”
A torrent of cursing came from the other seat as Maglor finally managed to stagger over to the cupboard, which he rifled through in an attempt to find more wine. No bottle immediately seemed to present itself. Maedhros sighed, thought about getting up to show him where, exactly, he kept his secret stash of bottles, mimicked Maglor in his attempt to get up, again, like Maglor, failed miserably. He decided to go the shouting route instead.
“OI! It’s in the second box to the left underneath the spare boots!”
“Thank you, that’s- that’s so UNHELPFUL, wherezit, wherezit- oh thank Eru it’s here.” Raising the bottle triumphally to the ceiling, Maglor stumbled back over to the table, thunked it down, and collapsed into a chair.
Not as soon as he had sat down did he sit up again, eyes blazing with fervour. He had the look in his eyes of a person who had just had a revelation. “We’ll sneak in! Cause distractions! It will be perfect, Maitimo!”
Silence.
“Maitimo? Neylo? Russandol? Maedhros?”
Only the soft sound of Maedhros’ snores as he laid his head on the table responded to Maglor’s words. Oh well. Maglor thought helplessly. We’ll have a full meeting in the morning and plan.
*
The dawn broke harshly through the windows of Lord Maedhros Feanorion’s study upon a scene of mild devastation. The lord in question was slumped on the large wooden table, head in his hands. A tangle of red hair with remnants of braids in it covered his face. Beside him stood several empty wine bottles, and long necked wine glasses with some traces of a deep red wine staining the bottom of each.
On the other side of the table, Lord Maglor Feanorion was collapsed in his chair, eyes shut and long dark hair hanging down the back of it, nearly going to the floor. His eyes were shut, his braids were half pulled out, as though he’d been tugging at his hair in frustration. One of his boots stood on the table next to the wine bottle. The other, smooth, shining leather perfectly cut to fit him exactly, he cradled in his lap, the almost dried mud on the bottom having clearly got onto his clothes.
Neither of them looked particularly ready to wake up that morning. In fact, had you, dear reader not been sure of their current status of ALIVE, you might have thought them to be dead, which wouldn’t really be too far from the truth. So far the sole sign of wakefulness had been the fluttering of Maglor’s eyelashes. This gradually morphed into his eyes being partially open, propped up with a stick open, and, finally open, vaguely alert or at least likely to react if Morgoth turned up, barged in and began to sing bawdy songs wearing a tutu. A low bar, but one must start somewhere.
He pronounced a single word.
“Fuck.”
Maedhros stirred slightly, a mass of hair shifting slightly to reveal his face, which slowly woke, his eyes cracking open with only a sliver to be seen. He sat up abruptly and said "What in the name of sweet Eru are we going to do about the plan? I mean, it's barely a plan, really, and you know Curvo will be spilling for a fight."
He looked like he was about to cry, although that may have been due to the sad lack of sleep he was suffering from.
Rausing his eyes to the ceiling in a desperate bid for sanity and patience, Maglor said, very slowly, as if speaking to a small child,"Neylo. Our plan is to sneak into Doriath, steal the Silmaril back, and be gone before they know we're there. The rest of it is just-" he waved a breezy hand "-ironing out the small details!"
Maedhros refrained from pointing out that the small details were, in fact, the entire plan apart from the basic GET IN, GET OUT HOPEFULLY WITH SILMARIL structure that would be utterly hopeless. With a valiant effort he heaved himself out of his chair, and went on a quest to find clean clothes, a hairbrush, someone to fetch all his brothers and get them to come to the meeting, and a large bucket of freezing cold water into which he dunked his head. This kicked him awake once and for all, shaking his hair like a shaggy dog in an attempt to get some of the icy water off him, especially where it was dripping and soaking the back of his tunic.
When he returned to his study, Maedhros found Maglor vanished. He went over some supply lines as swiftly as he could, then,hoping desperately that the messenger he had chosen would be able to find all of his notoriously slippery brothers. In ten minutes they would all be in the same room, the war room, with maps, statistics and everything they would need to make this drunken plan into a reality. He braced himself, turned on his heel, and, setting his face like stone, marched off to the war room.
Before he even went in, Maedhros could hear the sound of arguing. At the moment he thought it was Caranthir and Curufin who were the loudest and most outraged, although Celegorm's shouts were also slightly discouraging.
Well, nothing for it. He banged open the door, and, reveling in the sudden silence, made his way to the head of the table where he sat, and enquired "I presume Maglor has already told you of the news, and of our plan to retrieve the Silmaril from the boy King?
"Yes, he has, and a bloody stupid sort of plan it is! No details! Nothing helpful considered such as, how the fuck are we going to get into the strongroom of Doriath, how are are we not going to be caught and immediately killed because we're the dread Feanorions!"
Hello, migraine."Thank you, Caranthir. I was hoping that we would work out the details of the plan today, at this meeting. There have already been… some ideas."
Caranthir huffed, but said nothing more.
Celegorm, next.
"Why don't we simply attack Doriath?"
"Because we are trying not to be Kinslayers, Celegorm."
"I want to know how in Eru's name we're going to get into Doriath, let alone their most guarded strongroom. It's all very well you you to say that we'll work out the details later, but if it doesn't happen this plan of yours is never going to work."
Maedhros sighed."Distractions, disguise-there are many options open to us, Curvo."
Amras opened his mouth and internally Maedhros sighed. It was going to be a long meeting.
**
"So first we have to get to Doriath. How are we doing that, horses? And do we have a disguise?"
"We could pretend to be very rustic Laiquendi who get hopelessly lost and somehow stumble across Dior's strongroom!"
"There's a glaring issue with that and it's our eyes, our height and our general appearance. We look nothing like Laiquendi, even with artfully applied leaves or whatever you were dreaming of. I think we should be a party from Nargothrond, hoping for a little adventure, but getting lost because we're sad city - dwelling folk."
"You've forgotten that Nargothrond has fallen. All the prissy city dwellers are on Balar."
"Well,fine. We can be refugees. I think that Maglor should be pregnant."
"What the fuck, Caranthir? I will not be dressed as a woman and I will definitely not be pregnant!"
*
The party of bedraggled Nargothrond refugees that wandered into Doriath caused much sadness among the sentries who saw them and went to report their presence to Dior, the King. There were seven of them- two maidens, one dark and the other fair, and five others, two of whom had the inky black hair of one of the maidens. The others possessed muddy brown locks, and the sentries felt slightly sorry for them, that they should have such normal hair when their friends had such marvelous colour.
*
"Are you sure we really have to dye our hair?"
"Yes, I am. It will be suspicious if you three have red hair, and if you dye it black we won't have enough variety. Also, I think it would be funny to see you with brown hair."
"Oh yes, hilarious. But if I'm dyeing my hair for variety, then Celegorm should be a maiden as well, otherwise the split will be horribly uneven."
"..."
"No objections, Tyelko? That's not like you. Do you think you might possibly have a temperature?"
"Shove off, Moryo. I don't have a problem with it."
"I suppose practice does make perfect. Just think, using your makeup skills for goodmmmmmphh-"
"Get off Amras now, Celegorm. Thank you."
*
The party reached the Halls of Menegroth fairly quickly, perhaps helped by the sentries, who had a slight crush on both the beautiful fair haired maiden and the Elf with hair like an ink spill whom, when he got angry, blushed in a way that made the sentries compose many frankly unflattering odes to 'Myrthen'.
There was also a camp in favour of the tall muddy haired one. Their philosophy was that his eyes were gorgeous, his face was art, and why all you close minded fools couldn't look behind his admittedly ordinary hair was beyond them. His name was definitely known, as he seemed to be the leader of the group. 'Russandol', copper-top, was a strange name for him but perhaps he had been different when he was born.
When this interesting party reached Menegroth, the sentries personally escorted them inside. There were many converts to the faith of Russandol Is Beautiful And You're All So Wrong that bright summer morning that the sworn sentries of Dior Eluchil, Dior the son of Luthien, Dior the King, escorted the Sons of Feanor into the stronghold of the Sindar with joy in their hearts.
*
"Once we're inside, there should be a distraction."
"You have an unhealthy obsession with distractions but in this rare case I think you might be right. I think Maglor should faint."
"Fuck off."
"Think of the family, Kano! You can seduce some Sinda when you're recovering from your fate, kiss them, become engaged, and we'll nab the Silmaril in the inevitable subsequent uproar/celebration."
"..."
"I don't think Kano likes your plan, Amras. That's a worrying shade of purple. I didn't know faces could turn that colour. Are you alright, Kano?"
"!!!!"
"He'll be fine. Lie back and think of Silmarils, Kano."
"I despise all of you with every fibre of my hroa, and more with all the power in my fea. What should I wear?"
"Something seductive. Celegorm can do your makeup."
*
Maglor sighed, adjusting the neckline of his gown again so it wouldn't be quite so plunging and liable to expose the fake breasts Curvo had put on both him and Celegorm with wicked glee. He thought wistfully about pushing Curufin into a lake, the fucker. How would he like wearing all this makeup, which itched like nothing else, and have his hair curled within an inch of its life? Curlers were not a joke. Celegorm had had to conceal the prominent dark circles under his eyes before he'd even started on some complex eye design that seemed to involve a lot of gold and black paint. Maglor supposed it matched his dress. Celegorm, however, was in a floaty white gown. He attempted to not look at it enviously, and failed miserably.
Oh, well. What one does for family, Maglor thought bitterly, and he stepped into the King's great hall.