Chapter Text
Satellite
The first snow of the year had just begun to fall when word came that Doriath had launched the world’s first artificial satellite. Maedhros and Maglor ran home from school, burst in the front door, and yelled to their mother that they were going sledding.
There was no immediate response, which was not so unusual. But when Maedhros stepped into the backyard, he found Celegorm, hatless and mittenless, alone with his plastic bow-and-arrow set. The baby and Nerdanel were nowhere to be seen. On the line, clothes hung forgotten, gathering snowflakes.
Maedhros saw that the shed door was ajar and figured Nerdanel had gotten caught up in another project. He dashed over, calling out, “Mom, we need the sled.” He yanked the door open.
Nerdanel and Fëanor stood, shoulders touching, over the shortwave radio on the workbench. They did not acknowledge Maedhros. Caranthir napped on a blanket in the corner.
It was unusual to see Fëanor before dinnertime. Usually, he stopped by the house for a quick bite of tuna noodle or meatloaf and mashed potatoes, then returned to the campus observatory after sunset, not to be seen again until breakfast. On the rare nights he stayed home, he and Nerdanel usually disappeared into his office or the shed, leaving the boys to their own devices.
On this particular afternoon, however, the shortwave was emitting an unusual sound. A high-pitched, regular beep, beep, beep.
“They’ve done it,” Fëanor said, shaking his head in wonder. “The clever devils have gotten there first.”
Maedhros forgot about the sled.
That evening, the TV newsman said that the Iathrim called the satellite Randir, which meant “wanderer” in Sindarin. It orbited the world once every ninety-six minutes, far faster than the fastest airplanes in the world. The newsman also said that in about fifteen minutes, it would be traveling across Aman again and would be visible to the naked eye.
The snow had stopped falling. It was cold, clear, and dark. They could see the cloudy river of the galaxy shimmering across the sky. Maedhros stood in his front yard, his family with him. The entire neighborhood, the entire city, the entire nation, it seemed, was outside, too, watching what the Iathrim had done. Just at the time they said, a tiny light appeared at the western horizon and glided over their heads.
Some of the neighbors cried. The mother next door let out a shriek and made her little boy go back inside. Maedhros barely noticed. He stood in awe next to his father.
Later, Maedhros was too excited to sleep, and he was reading space comics in the rec room. The phone kept on ringing: other professors from the college, Grandpa Mahtan, a local newspaper asking for Fëanor’s commentary. Everyone wanted to talk about the satellite.
The last time it rang, Nerdanel answered in a clipped voice, out of patience with the late-night calls. As the person on the other end spoke, though, she softened. Maedhros crept closer to listen in when Fëanor came down to take the phone.
“I suppose you’re not calling to congratulate me on the baby,” Fëanor said.
There was a tone in his voice that made Maedhros feel tight and sad inside. He knew that if Fëanor didn’t want to talk to someone, he just wouldn’t come to the phone; he’d had Nerdanel deflect several callers already. But he didn’t sound happy, either, with this person.
“I’m not sure what you think I can do for you, Nolvo. Well, certainly not for them, either. I haven’t taken orders from Valimar since the Darkening. And neither should you, if you knew what was—” Fëanor abruptly stopped talking. Someone on the other end had cut him off. Maedhros was shocked.
“No, I wouldn’t call it an opportunity, I’d call it a chain. I have no interest in Aman’s national security interests. I can’t understand how, after what happened to Finwë, you’d feel any differently than I on the matter. Actually, come to think of it, I’m more inclined to defect to Doriath at this point, at least they’ve got the foresight to….” Fëanor paused again, listening to the person on the other side.
When Fëanor spoke again, he was softer. “Did you see it, Nolvo? Like a new star crossing the sky. They’ve beaten us, and good. Boy, I’d love to get my hands on the tech in their cosmodrome, wouldn’t you? Maybe I’ll call up—”
This time, it was Nerdanel who interrupted, her voice a warning. Maedhros couldn’t quite make out the words, but her meaning was clear: Shut up, smarty-pants!
“Of course,” Fëanor returned to the phone, reverting to his clear, didactic tone, “I’m exaggerating for effect, as I’m known to. I would never defect or betray my country…. No, Professor, you won’t. I’m afraid you’ll need to handle this one yourselves. I will not be bought, and I’ll be much obliged if you don’t call with such offers again.”
After Fëanor hung up, Nerdanel started in on him. “Did you have to be so flip with Nolvo?”
Fëanor sighed. “Don’t start. You know how he gets a rise out of me.”
“I should hope I’m the only one allowed to do that,” she said with affection. Maedhros strained to hear as their voices lowered.
“I won’t work for the G-Men again,” Fëanor said. “And he shouldn’t, either, but he’s long stopped listening to me. Do you have a light?”
“Here.”
The sweet smell of pipe-smoke began to waft through the house. “So, you just told him where to shove it,” Nerdanel said. “You could stand to use a little diplomacy, is all I’m saying. These days, you can’t just say whatever fool thing comes to mind around the wrong people.”
“You think Nolofinwë counts as the wrong people?” Fëanor asked.
“Of course not, just… you make yourself an easy target. They’ll tear you down if you let them.”
“I thought you married me because I’m too easy,” Fëanor said, Nerdanel laughed, and their voices dropped too low for Maedhros to hear any more.
Their father took Maedhros and Maglor to the college the following evening, to look at the satellite through the giant telescope.
“You won’t see much detail,” Fëanor cautioned. “Just a bright little traveler in the sky.”
It was so cold, Maedhros could see his breath. The grad students were humming with excitement, swarming Fëanor like bees on a sunflower. He waved them off, leading Maedhros and Maglor up a narrow metal staircase and across the catwalk to the observation cage, where the main eyepiece assembly was mounted. Fëanor warned them not to touch anything else and trotted back down to the control panel. Maedhros spun around on the stool in circles, watching his father flash through his field of view once a rotation, as he scribbled out some calculations on a notepad.
“Hey, Professor!” one of the students called out. “Buzz here has been working on Randir calculations all night, let him do that for you.”
Fëanor shook his head, not looking up, pencil flying. “No need!” He punched some buttons on the control panel, and the telescope whirred, clicked, and hummed as it moved into position. Fëanor checked his watch. “Now, it’ll be in view in about two minutes,” he called up to the boys. “I’ll give you a countdown!”
Maglor was pressing his face so hard to the eyepiece, he’d end up with rings around his eyes, Maedhros thought. He let his little brother have ten seconds to look before shoving him aside.
The satellite, viewed through the telescope, looked like a fast-moving star. It entered from the western sky, streaked across the field of view, glittering and bright, and then, all too quickly, it was gone.
Maglor sighed dramatically. “All that for a few seconds?”
Maglor fell asleep in the station wagon on the way home. In the front seat, Maedhros felt important and grown-up when Fëanor explained that the satellite itself was too small to see, even with a powerful telescope. What they had seen instead was likely the rocket booster.
“You’d need something a lot more powerful to see something as small as Randir, with an optical telescope,” Fëanor said. “Now, radio, that’s another story. Why, with just our shortwave at home, we can hear her, clear as day,” he continued. “The signal can’t travel much farther than Arda, though. You’d need a stronger transmitter to send a signal to another world, like Carnil.”
“Would that really be possible?” Maedhros asked.
“Well, you could send a signal, with strong enough technology, sure. But nobody’s there to receive it. Out in the stars, though? Who knows?” Fëanor continued talking, mostly to himself, working through the technical challenges of interplanetary communication, throwing out frequency ranges and signal capabilities before answering himself, musing about cosmic interference and interstellar distances.
Maedhros didn’t understand half of it, not really, but he let himself pretend. He imagined that one day, he would be the one who could answer Fëanor’s hypothetical questions and work with super-powerful radio telescopes, strong enough to hear from the stars.
After Randir, the world changed. Maedhros was too small to understand most of it until later, but the Space Race had truly begun. Though Doriath had a head start, the two superpowers remained nearly equally matched. The Amanyarin government ramped up technological and scientific initiatives, and soon, were sending their own satellites into orbit. The mood in Valimar was one of cautious optimism in the eventual reestablishment of Amanyarin supremacy.
At the same time, a reactionary movement of religious traditionalists began to gain support. Not everyone believed that the Eldar had any business launching rockets into Ilmen and beyond. The Stars of Varda held sacred secrets meant for the Ainur alone. Churches across the world, which had been in a long, slow decline ever since the age of reason, began to attract new members, as well as regaining attendance from among the lapsed.
At school, they started doing duck-and-cover drills. If the sirens blared, you were meant to get inside, go to the shelter, and get under a table. Be sure to stay away from windows and doors.
Maedhros tried to teach Celegorm about duck-and-cover, but he hated being made to go inside. So, he taught him what to do if the flash came when you were outside. You were supposed to drop down on the ground, wherever you were, find shelter if you could, and cover your head. The film reel at school showed a child riding a bicycle home, diving off, cradling his head until a gentleman came to tell him it was safe to get up.
“What are you doing, boys?” Fëanor asked, watching them in the backyard.
“Duck-and-cover,” Maedhros said. When Fëanor looked blank, Maedhros explained, inwardly quite pleased to know something his father didn’t.
“If you’re hearing the sirens, it’s already too late,” he said, then went into the shed without saying another word.
“What does that mean?” Maedhros asked his mother, who looked like she’d rather be ducking-and-covering herself.
“It means your father’s too lost in bad memories to think about anything else,” Nerdanel said. Then she shook her head. “I’m sorry, love, it didn’t mean anything at all. Look after your brothers, darling,” she said, and followed Fëanor, shutting the door behind her.
His parents were working on a new project in the shed. It was unheated and poorly insulated, and as winter settled firmly upon them, Maedhros dreaded going out there to ask about dinner. The cold didn’t bother him as much as his parents’ faraway stares. Occasionally, Nerdanel would look guilty and come inside, which made Maedhros feel bad. So, mostly, he made peanut butter and jelly sandwiches or heated up a can of soup for himself and his brothers. (His parents did, at least, usually remember to swaddle up Caranthir and take him out to the shed, which saved Maedhros from having to figure out bottles.)
Sometimes, after the little boys went to bed, Maedhros brought a couple of plates out and stayed to watch them work. Ever since the first night after Randir rocketed into space, Nerdanel had started keeping a notebook. Every ninety-six minutes, she turned on the shortwave, fiddled with some dials, and wrote down figures in tiny, neat columns. Fëanor wasn’t allowed to write directly in the notebook, so if he was the only person awake to check the satellite’s progress, he wrote down his observations on looseleaf and Nerdanel transcribed the data the next day.
If Maedhros was very quiet, and the work was going well, one of them would eventually beckon him over and show him something. That was how he learned that Randir was falling.
Right now, the changes in its orbital period were tiny, just a few microseconds each orbit, hardly measurable. But over time, eventually, the satellite would drop too low and hit the upper atmosphere. It would drag, heat up, slow down, and burn all away long before it would ever reach the ground.
“If we’re lucky,” said Fëanor, “it might fall while we’re in range. We’ll likely lose the signal as it enters the atmosphere, but we could see it consumed by flame.”
When they weren’t tracking satellite beeps, they were working on Fëanor’s latest invention. The idea was, what if you could use satellites to relay signals from one place on the ground to another? What if you could talk to someone who had crossed the Belegaer, from the other side of Aman? You wouldn’t need wires to connect phone calls at all. The invention would rely on electromagnetic waves, bouncing between antennae all over the world and in near-orbit, until they reached their destination.
Maedhros liked the idea of talking to friends all over the world. So far, they had moved three times, every time Fëanor took a new job. He didn’t even remember when they first moved out of Grandpa Mahtan’s house, it had been before Maglor was born. But each time, they packed up and left his teachers and friends and the grad students who followed Fëanor around like puppy dogs. They didn’t have any other family, it was just the six of them. It was lonely, and he missed the people they left behind. Maybe, if they could really build electromagnetic wave phones, it wouldn’t be so hard to stay in touch.
As predicted, Randir’s orbit decayed enough that it fell into the atmosphere. It happened when Maedhros was at school. It would have been too bright to see in daylight, anyway. Maedhros was disappointed.
When Nerdanel told them, Maglor turned white and hid under the piano bench.
“What’s wrong?” Maedhros asked, crouching down.
“I’m afraid it’s going to fall on our house,” Maglor finally admitted.
“Don’t be stupid. It’s all burned up, dummy,” Maedhros said reassuringly.
He was right. Nothing fell on the house.
A few weeks later, Doriath launched a second satellite: Randir 2. They said on the news that it carried an air conditioning system, research equipment, food supply, and an experimental animal (canine).
“Dog,” said Celegorm, and shot an arrow at Maedhros. He missed by a few inches.
Maedhros would not learn the full details until much, much, later, as executor of the will, when it came time to sort Fëanor’s affairs. Within a year of Randir’s launch, Fëanor had filed a patent application for the satellite phone. The Amanyarin government immediately came calling, and offered, first politely, then with increasing sternness, to buy it. Fëanor told them where they could go.
Eventually, he sold the patent to an electromechanical firm and took the whole family on a three-week vacation to Alqualondë. They stayed in a bubblegum-pink house on stilts right on the beach, swam in the warm sea every day, and learned how to crack crab-shells to get the sweet meat inside. Everyone got sunburns. A jellyfish stung Celegorm. Maedhros and Maglor slept in a hammock on the porch, and every night, before bedtime, Fëanor named the stars.
It was the nicest vacation Maedhros ever had. Long after the magic of the beach faded for Maedhros, he would unfold the memories, the smell of seaweed and zinc oxide, collecting shells in the sand, and falling asleep warm against his brother, swinging gently in the breeze. His father’s voice, low against the background of crashing waves, speaking of white dwarfs, black holes, and supernovae, spinning in the void, hundreds of millions of light-years away.
The fëar of chickens and Eldar
One day, Celegorm came home from school with three fluffy chicks snuggled into his jacket.
“Ta-da!” He beamed as he unzipped and revealed them. “The teacher said I could keep them!”
Nerdanel was startled. But after she called the school to confirm that Celegorm had not, in fact, absconded with the class pets, but was rightly allowed to claim them after the egg unit ended, she smiled and said, “All right, let’s make them a warm bed.”
Maedhros and Maglor, sick with jealousy, helped Celegorm find a cardboard box and stuff it with old newspaper. Nestled along headlines saying REVOLUTION IN RHÛN, THE DAY THE TREES DIED, and TREATY OF ENDÓRË, the three little chicks cheeped happily.
“You can help take care of them, if you like,” said Celegorm magnanimously.
Maglor cradled one to his chest, enraptured. “I’ll be your mama,” he told it.
The chicks lived in the box under a lamp while Fëanor and Nerdanel built a coop in the backyard.
The boys took their job of tending the chickens very seriously. Everywhere they went, their little birds were at their heels, peeping.
Every morning, Maedhros rose to the sound of his cartoon mouse alarm clock and let the chickens out of their coop to forage and play. He made sure they had enough water, cleaned their coop, and gave them fresh straw.
Celegorm fed them by scattering cracked corn on the ground and even let them peck it from his hands. He cheeped right back at them. Sometimes, they—birds and boy together—found worms for dessert.
Maglor nuzzled them and told them they were good chicks and sweet chicks, and he made up songs to sing them.
Caranthir stayed inside. He did not care for the chickens, whose pecks scared him.
Before long, the chicks became pullets. One silver-laced white, one red-brown, and one black with a flashy red comb.
“Soon, they may begin to lay,” said Nerdanel.
“Calcium,” said Fëanor. “We should add eggshells to their feed, so they’ll lay strong eggs.”
One morning, Maedhros found a smooth, brown egg nestled in the silver-white hen’s straw bed. He put the warm egg against his cheek, then rushed inside to show everyone.
Every night, Maedhros made sure that the chickens were tucked safely in their coop. As they cooed and clucked themselves to sleep, Maedhros would latch the coop door and carefully shut the gate behind him before going inside.
Late one night, Maedhros woke to a clamor. There were squawks and unsettling bumps from outside. His heart beating, he pulled on his boots and crept outside to check on the birds. The night sky was big, the moon was dark, and the stars were hidden by the clouds. Maedhros wished he had woken his father to keep him safe from the things in the shadows.
Celegorm had arrived before him. He stood in the open door of the coop, staring.
The floor was clouded with feathers, and Maedhros counted two frightened chickens cowering in the rafters, the red-brown and the black. The silver-white was nowhere to be seen.
Maedhros burst into tears. Before he knew it, strong arms scooped him up and he cried into his father’s shoulder like he had not done in years.
Inside the house, Fëanor sat on the kitchen linoleum, Maedhros curled next to him, tears still pouring down his face. Celegorm crawled into Fëanor’s lap. Maglor, rubbing sleep from his eyes, came and scrunched in with them.
“What took her? A fox? Did it kill her?” Celegorm asked.
“It’s not fair,” Maedhros sobbed.
“Shh, shh,” said Maedhros’s father. “What might seem unfair to you might make sense to a fox.”
“What do you mean?” Maglor asked.
“The fox who took your chicken lives in the woods,” their father said. “He works hard every day to bring food to his babies. Some days he doesn’t find any, so he has to go home with nothing, and the babies are hungry. Sometimes, they’re very, very hungry, and when that happens, he does everything he can to find something for them to eat.”
Maedhros sniffled and looked at his father.
“He didn’t know that it was our chicken he took,” Fëanor continued. “He just saw a chance to feed his family. I know you are sad, Nelyo, Káno, Turko,” he said, cupping a hand over each of their cheeks in turn as he spoke their names, “but you wouldn’t want the baby foxes to go hungry, would you?”
“No,” said Celegorm immediately.
“No,” agreed Maglor.
Maedhros thought about it for a long time. “No,” he said finally. “I guess not.”
“The fox does everything he can to take care of his babies, just like your mother and I do everything we can to take care of you. We make sure you are happy, your bellies are full, you have a warm, safe place to sleep. And you did everything you could to make sure your chicks were happy and their bellies were full and they had a warm, safe place to sleep. Because you love your chicks like I love you. Like the fox loves his babies.”
“But the chicken wasn’t safe,” Maedhros said, eyes filling again.
“Come, let’s go back to bed,” said Maedhros’s mother, and took Maglor and Celegorm each by a hand, leading them upstairs.
Maedhros’s father put his arm around him. “You were very brave, do you know that? To hear trouble and come running to help. There was nothing you could have done differently to protect the chicken. It was just her time,” he said.
Maedhros cried a while longer. His father wiped his face and stroked his back.
When he thought he was out of tears, he sighed and closed his eyes.
“Now,” Fëanor said, “you are getting big and strong. You take care of the others. They look up to you in every way. I’m proud of you.”
“Thanks,” Maedhros said.
“And that is why,” Fëanor said, “you cannot let them see you cry like that ever again. No matter what happens. Not if your heart is broken. Not if every chicken gets taken. You must be brave like you were when you first heard the noises. If you have to cry,” Fëanor said, with great tenderness, “you can go hide in your closet and close the door.”
The next day, each of the boys, even Caranthir, picked out a stone and laid them out to mark a grave for the chicken in the corner of the backyard. They remembered their hen who had been soft and silvery-white, who had loved worms, who had laid the first warm brown egg.
“A bird who was loved,” Nerdanel said, looking down at the bare ground.
Maedhros’s heart was heavy. But as he mourned the chicken, he thought too of the happy baby foxes with full bellies, living in the woods.
Fëanor repaired the broken siding of the coop where the fox had gotten in. Nerdanel added support beams and diagonal bracing. “We should dig a trench and bury the fence a foot or so into the ground,” she said.
The boys remained vigilant in caring for the other two hens. They made sure they had enough water. They cleaned their coop and gave them fresh straw and scattered cracked corn for them to eat.
Something was bothering Maedhros. He tried to let it go, but he couldn’t.
After a few days, he asked his parents. “Where did the fëa of the chicken go, after its hröa was killed and eaten?”
Fëanor and Nerdanel exchanged looks.
“Well,” Fëanor said, “Chickens do not have fëar.”
“Living things die,” Nerdanel said. “Some creatures live for a long time, some for a short time. But we loved her while she was here.”
“She had a body and a heart that pumped blood and a brain that could think, just like us,” Fëanor said. “When she died, her brain stopped working. So, she couldn’t think or hurt or be afraid.”
Maedhros thought for a moment.
“Is that what happened to Grandmother Míriel, before I was born?” he asked.
Maedhros’s father didn’t say anything. He pulled Maedhros close, squeezed him tight, took a breath. He swallowed twice, then looked to Maedhros’s mother.
“Probably,” Nerdanel said. “She was very sick. Her body stopped working, just like the chicken’s. After we die, some Elves believe that our fëar go to the Halls of Mandos. An imaginary place,” Nerdanel clarified. “It makes some people feel better, after they lose someone they love, to think they might see them again.”
Fëanor would not meet their eyes.
“So, it’s not real,” Maedhros said.
“We have no way of knowing what happens to Elves after we die,” Fëanor finally said. His voice was strange. He looked up at the sky. “No one has ever come back to tell the tale.”
Sunday School
When Maedhros was just beginning to turn the corner from childhood into early adolescence, it was time to move again. He was unhappy to leave the chickens behind, but as instructed, did not cry about it in front of anybody.
This time, Fëanor had taken a position at a university so remote, it had more telescopes than the town had traffic lights. There was one five-and-dime, one shabby soda fountain, and one school, which all four boys attended. There was no baseball field, just a dirt lot where the big kids played by day and smoked by night. There was no library, no picture show, no candy store, and four churches.
After a few mind-numbing months, Nerdanel decided something had to change. Out of sheer boredom, on Sunday mornings, she began taking them to church. She would coax them into their button-up shirts, dress trousers, and shiny shoes, comb their hair with water, and load them into the station wagon. Fëanor refused to have any part of it, even when Nerdanel insisted it was one of the more reasonable, mainline denominations. His custom was to spend Sunday mornings sleeping in after staying out half the night at the observatory.
Nerdanel would point the boys toward the Sunday school classroom and waddle her way to the ladies’ circle, desperate for anything that could pass for conversation and coffee, even if it was weak and bland.
Maedhros had never seriously encountered religion before. For several weeks, he remained unimpressed. Fëanor’s pronouncements on the subject had led him to believe the holy tales were essentially children’s stories—boring, but harmless.
He was, therefore, pleasantly surprised when the Sunday school teacher, the minister’s wife, began reading to them from the Book of the Akallabêth. He knew the basic story, of course: the men of the mythical island of Númenor grew too proud and tried to sail into the lands of the Valar, and they were punished accordingly.
But he had never heard it told like this! The evil king took Míriel to wife against her will, started worshipping the Lord of Darkness, and sacrificed people in the great temple. The men of Númenor slew each other for little cause. Listening to the tale, Maedhros’s eyes grew wider and wider. His brothers, uncharacteristically silent, were just as eager.
After the reading, the teacher instructed them to make models of the White Tree from toilet paper rolls and twigs. Celegorm got white paint all over himself. The models had to stay behind to dry before they could attach leaves, but the teacher said they could bring them home in a few weeks when they were completed.
Maedhros already felt embarrassed. He wouldn’t mind showing his mother, who at least acted pleased about these kinds of things. But he had long ago learned to show Fëanor only his best efforts. He did not think cardboard arts and crafts qualified.
When they returned to Sunday school the following week, the minister’s wife continued the story of the Akallabêth, and Maedhros became concerned.
The gruesomeness of Númenor’s destruction began to upset him. He understood that the tale was meant to frighten the children away from wickedness. Don’t be like the men of Númenor, who broke the Ban of the Valar and sailed into the forbidden seas.
But he could not stomach Ilúvatar’s reaction. To sink an entire continent into the abyss! Even the children and maidens and ladies proud! And his heart hurt to picture poor Queen Tar-Míriel, so beautiful and resigned, drowned beneath the cold green wave. He could not understand why she deserved to be swept away.
He was very quiet for the rest of the morning. The minister’s wife praised him for being such a good example for his brothers.
As they were leaving, she told Maedhros that his White Tree model was the best in the class. He thanked her, took Caranthir by the hand, and threw his Tree into the trash as soon as she wasn’t looking.
When they got home, Maedhros went into the study and took an old volume off a high shelf. His fingers made prints on the dusty burgundy cover. He opened it, careful not to tear the onionskin pages.
Within minutes, he had several questions.
What was the Flame Imperishable?
What did “raiment” mean?
He found a dictionary, which helped a little, but it did not explain how two lamps could possibly illuminate the entire world.
As he read on, his distress grew. He suspected that the world, according to this book, was supposedly flat. The “walls of night” seemed to be some kind of enclosure. The idea of a world that predated the Sun seemed preposterous. How could plants and animals grow? In fact, without the Sun, how could anyone even know what a year was? If there was no Sun, then the meaning of a year was simply arbitrary. He flipped ahead until he found the chapter where the Valar created the Sun.
And he started to laugh.
How could anyone believe that the Sun was made out of a fruit? The actual Sun, he knew, was a star, a massive flaming sphere of gas, millions of miles away.
This was simply a fairy tale for children, Maedhros decided. It could not possibly be believed.
Yet the book was so terribly violent, too. Maedhros did not quite understand what was meant by “all those of the Quendi who came into the hands of Melkor were corrupted and enslaved; and thus did Melkor breed the hideous race of the Orcs, for they had life and multiplied after the manner of the children of Ilúvatar,” but reading it, his stomach curled with a sick, shuddering feeling, a wrongness he could not explain.
He felt further unease at the origin story of the Dwarves, who were themselves blameless, yet were nearly struck down by their creator as they cowered, begging for mercy.
What kind of book was this?
Returning to Sunday school the following week, Maedhros was eager for clarification. He raised his hand and waved it around before the teacher could begin the day’s reading. He started with what he thought was a simple question.
“Did the people who wrote this book really believe the world was flat?”
The minister’s wife blinked at him before remembering to put on her smile. “Well, the true author of this book is Eru Ilúvatar himself, my lamb. And of course, the world is indeed flat.”
For a beat, nobody spoke. Then Maedhros laughed out loud. His brothers, who had been watching intently, joined in.
The minister’s wife stopped smiling. Maedhros felt a pang of guilt.
Later, he realized that he probably should have stopped when it became clear that the minister’s wife believed the book was literally true. But in the moment, the rest of his questions came pouring out. He asked about the Flame Imperishable, how trees could survive without photosynthesis, the length of a year, the composition of the Sun, the origins of the Orcs and the Dwarves.
Once he got started, he couldn’t hold back. The teacher grew increasingly impatient, answering his questions by simply reading back the passages he had already puzzled over. He clenched his jaw in frustration. He could read; he didn’t want to hear the same bits regurgitated over and over. He wanted answers.
He looked at a poster on the wall, a colorful illustration of Varda creating the stars. In the picture, Varda was luminous, gowned in deep blue and black, with radiant sparkles in her hair. She loomed across the dark sky. In a single moment, Maedhros realized something that he had perhaps always known in his heart but had never thought all the way through before: Varda Elentári was no more real than dragons, vampires, or the Big Bad Wolf.
“How the heck could someone make all the stars in the universe in a few days?” he demanded. “The universe is billions and billions of years old!”
Well, the minister’s wife certainly wouldn’t stand for swearing in her classroom.
After he was kicked out of Sunday school, Maedhros dreaded going home and explaining what had happened, especially to his father. But to his surprise, Fëanor only laughed and hugged him—a rare gesture affection since Maedhros had grown out of short pants. He sat down at the breakfast nook, patted the vinyl seat next to him, and bade Maedhros tell the whole story from the beginning, every detail.
Fëanor’s silver eyes danced when Maedhros questioned the teacher about the Sun-fruit in the sky.
“And right you were to ask!” Fëanor said, his voice ringing like a hammer on steel. “An astronomical absurdity!”
Nerdanel still made Maedhros go to church the following week, but, as it turned out, the adults had discussed the situation and agreed that he would either help out in the nursery or join the high-schoolers’ choir. Maedhros chose choir.
Maglor, upon hearing this, briefly pouted, then formulated a plan. He picked his own fight with the teacher about how big the dragon Ancalagon the Black was supposed to be, anyway. And he was promptly hustled out to choir practice, too.
A few months after the Sunday school incident. Nerdanel deposited a bottle, a can of formula, and the screaming baby into Fëanor’s lap, and announced that she couldn’t take it anymore. She was going on the Pill and going back to school.
To his credit, Fëanor only paused a moment before he nodded and began soothing-shushing-rocking-patting Curufin. “Where would you like to go?”
As it turned out, it was easier for Nerdanel to get into the top graduate schools of aerospace engineering in the country, than it was for Fëanor to secure a tenured faculty position. Nerdanel’s own academic background was studded with accomplishments, albeit over a decade past. And with her famous spouse writing a letter of recommendation, giving his permission, every department eagerly offered her acceptance letters.
Fëanor himself on faculty, though? Well, that was a different story. Certainly, he was welcome to guest lecture. Everyone liked hearing him speak. But by now, Fëanor’s reputation for disagreeableness, his frankly outlandish research interests, and his political contrarianism made him a tough sell for a permanent position. He was a live wire, and it was too easy to set a campus on fire these days. It was why he had taken increasingly remote and undesirable positions over the past several years, when he should have been the one running the whole program over at Tirion. He was a genius, nobody denied that, but a genius who refused to take on any but the most promising graduate students, fought with colleagues over resources, failed to secure grant funding, and joked too freely about subjects that got other men blacklisted. There was only so far that “prized student of Finwë, may he rest in peace” could take him.
But Nerdanel made it clear that, with or without him, she would be moving to the West Coast to finish her degree. So Fëanor swallowed his pride, put on a charcoal gray suit, got a haircut, and flew out to Formenos to meet with the dean. Turned out, the Dean of the Formenos Institute of Technology had a sweet, if a bit dull, nephew, who had been plodding through his dissertation for years. A man in desperate need of a mentor—or at least, someone to hand-hold him through finishing the thing. Fëanor agreed to supervise the kid (and teach three sections of freshman PHYS 101).
Come fall, they were moving to Formenos.
Notes:
The title "The Limits of Your Longing" comes from the Rainer Maria Rilke poem, tr. Joanna Gacy, first published in the original German in 1905. Source
"Go to the Limits of Your Longing"
God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.These are the words we dimly hear:
You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move in.Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.
Don’t let yourself lose me.Nearby is the country they call life.
You will know it by its seriousness.Give me your hand.
Book of Hours, I 59
Randir is analogous to the satellite Sputnik 1, the world’s first artificial satellite, launched by the Soviet Union in 1957. Details and firsthand accounts of Sputnik were taken from the 2007 documentary feature Sputnik Mania (alternate title Sputnik Fever), dir. David Hoffman.
“Buzz” is short for, uh, Bregolas.
Maedhros has watched an Eldar version of Duck and Cover, a 1952 American educational film that taught children how to survive nuclear attacks. It was shown widely in United States elementary schools from 1952 until 1991. You can watch part of it here.
Chicken plot inspired by (and in some cases directly quoting) children’s book Sonya’s Chickens, by Phoebe Wahl (2015).
The term “astronomical absurdity” comes from Tolkien, who struggled with his own flat-earth cosmology, as discussed in various places including Morgoth’s Ring.
Applying one-to-one Real-World Analogies to the locations in this AU will inevitably result in failure and distress (I know, because I initially tried to). Some settings are more directly based on real-world places than others. The Formenos Institute of Technology (Formtech) is modeled after the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in the United States, which has a reputation for being elite, particularly in the fields of science and engineering, small, extremely nerdy, and is directly affiliated with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). You should imagine Fëanor and family heading off to Pasadena.
Many thanks to Shadow (daughterofshadows) for their encouragement, support, and science betaing; their early enthusiasm for this project is what kept me going working on it even when I was very doubtful that anyone in the world would be interested in a Silmarillion Astrophysicist AU. I could not imagine having gotten anywhere all without them.
Thanks to 0ur_Ouroboros and Azh for early beta reads, Anna (IdleLeaves) for reading & encouraging, and the rest of the SWG and TRSB25 writing sprints groups.
Chapter 2: Exposure
Summary:
Maedhros, just out of high school, goes to summer science camp in the Calacirya Valley. He meets some people who will change the trajectory of his life. Fingon, Fingolfin, Glorfindel, and Ecthelion all make appearances. The Darkening of Valinor casts a shadow.
Notes:
When you arrive at the section about the end-of-summer camp talent show, if you like, pull up the 1997 rendition of “Water Is Wide,” as sung by the Indigo Girls, Jewel, and Sarah McLachlan at Lilith Fair. It can be found on YouTube or Spotify.
As in the first chapter, you will find more details on cultural and historical references in the endnotes. The notes aren't necessary to fully understand and appreciate the story, and I offer them only as a guide to those who may enjoy them.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
The Calacirya Summer Science Program was founded a few years after Doriath’s launch of the world’s first artificial satellite sparked a national push for math and science education. Each summer, smart boys from all over Aman, identified by test scores or personal recommendations, came to study at an idyllic boarding school in the Calacirya. They attended classes at the sun-drenched, mountain-ringed campus, in red-roofed buildings with arched doorways and windows and decorative blue-and-white tilework. Each boy shared a room in a two-story dormitory, where every door opened to a long colonnaded patio overlooking the mountain vistas.
Every day at dawn, a large brass bell rang out the start of the day. In the mornings and afternoons, students studied mathematics and physics, and at night, they stayed up to observe celestial bodies in space. University professors from the best science departments in the nation, from Formtech, Tirion, and Alqualondë, taught the classes. There were tree-climbing contests, scavenger hunts, and primitive camping overnights in the woods. At least once a summer, a bus would take the campers out to the beach to swim in the ocean and bury one another in the diamond-white sand.
Maedhros preferred the forest creeks, floating on his back in the summer-warm, rocky shallow waters, shaded by the pines and mighty, ancient redwoods.
He liked the activities, appreciated the idyllic campus, and thrived in the rigorous academic classes. But his favorite thing about camp was being just one in a crowd. Not the oldest, not the most responsible, not anybody’s backup parent or driver. He wasn’t even the smartest; everyone at camp was a brain.
After three years as a camper, he and a handful of other boys were invited back for a fourth and final year. The camp was under new leadership, a professor, recently returned to academia after years in the Space Administration. The new Director wanted to meet all of the oldest boys in person, before camp officially began.
Nerdanel and Maedhros took turns driving the old station wagon from Formenos to the Calacirya. The twins jibber-jabbered in the backseat the entire drive. It would have only taken a few hours if she’d let him drive as fast as he wanted; as it was, by the time they arrived, he was almost late for the meet-and-greet.
“Don’t forget to have fun,” Nerdanel said in lieu of good-bye. “Have some adventures, all right? The stars will wait for you.” He had to bend down so she could reach his face for a kiss.
Maedhros breathed in the fresh valley air, the sage and eucalyptus, pine and dry baked earth. He felt his shoulders relax with every breath he took, as the sound of the station wagon’s engine faded, and turned to silence.
At the meet-and-greet, Maedhros was pleased to see his friends Glorfindel and Ecthelion, reunited again at camp after the long school year apart. He knew almost all of the professors, too, either from his previous summers at camp, or because they were Formtech colleagues of his father.
There was just one man he hadn’t met before, but he soon connected the dots.
Professor Fingolfin, the new Director, was set to rejoin the Physics and Astronomy Department at Tirion in the fall, but first, he would be teaching first-year physics here at camp. And as a fourth-year, Maedhros was assigned to sit in on his classes, help grade papers, and assist the younger ones with their homework during tutorials.
When Fingolfin introduced himself, he immediately recognized Maedhros, shaking his hand warmly. “I knew your father at Tirion,” he told him.
Maedhros nodded, unsure of his standing. It was no surprise to him, Fëanor and Fingolfin must have been friendly once. They had both been proteges of Finwë, before the Darkening. They had even published a paper together; Maedhros had found a copy of the journal where it appeared in Fëanor’s study. It had been tucked away in a filing drawer that also contained several newspaper clippings and obituaries of Finwë, a puzzling, uncashed government check, and a photograph showing Fëanor as a startlingly young man, smiling in wire-rimmed glasses as he stood next to the famous fedora-wearing lead scientist of the Ezellohar Project. Uneasy at his findings, and certainly unwilling to ask Fëanor directly, Maedhros had carefully returned the items to the drawer and never spoken of them to anyone, not even Maglor. Fëanor’s life before Maedhros was born was a black box, opaque and unknowable, as far as Maedhros was concerned. He had never heard Fëanor say a single a word about Fingolfin, not even on the rare occasions he spoke of Finwë, the greatest man Fëanor had ever known.
Maedhros was surprised that Fingolfin even knew who Maedhros was.
After the meeting, Maedhros waved off his friends and lingered to speak with Fingolfin one-on-one.
He was much like Maedhros’s father in appearance: tall, dark-haired, grey-eyed. They were both fair-featured, and both held themselves with the easy confidence of men who knew they were in command of any room in which they stood. Maedhros thought that Fingolfin was a year or two younger, but he seemed older somehow. While Fëanor’s manner with sons and students was a touch impatient, mind always rushing twenty paces ahead of everyone else, Fingolfin instead carried himself with a stately air, as though saying with his posture and kind expression, Take your time. I’m listening.
Maedhros had begun to realize that his name gave him away as Fëanor’s son, at least among scientists and the savvier students. Returning to camp this year, he planned to introduce himself with an epessë instead of the family name. It would be impossible to achieve anonymity—not without cutting all ties and fleeing to Rhûn—but he could buy a little more time to make a name for himself, and not as a Fëanorion.
“If you wouldn’t mind, sir,” Maedhros began. “I’d like to try and be, well, just myself, here at camp. I don’t mean—I’m very proud of my father, of course, he’s the reason I’m here at all—but I’d like for others to get to know me. I’m not him.” Maedhros felt his face burning. Could he have put it any less eloquently?
Yet Fingolfin seemed to take his meaning, his expression softening into one of empathy. “I understand completely,” Fingolfin said.
And Maedhros remembered that Fingolfin wasn’t just Finwë’s student. He was his eldest son.
“And you have my word. I won’t compare you to him. Believe it or not, I’ve had my fair share of standing in the shadow of the great Curufinwë Fëanáro, and I’d hate to push you back under it when you’re just beginning to emerge. I’ve got a sense you’ll have a destiny all your own,” he said, clapping a hand to Maedhros’s shoulder. “I hope you get the chance to meet my son. He’s here for the summer, too.”
All too soon, Fingolfin’s hopes came true.
His son crashed into Maedhros, quite literally, later that day.
Just before the opening banquet, Maedhros watched a brown-skinned boy with a mess of curly dark hair climb onto the roof of the main lodge, ostensibly to rescue a sweet little orange kitten. Privately, Maedhros felt that the “rescue” was more of an effort to show off, as the kitten appeared perfectly content dozing away in its rooftop sunbeam. Anyway, Fingon had more trouble climbing down than up, and ended up half-falling onto the porch. Well, onto Maedhros himself.
“Oof,” Maedhros said, knocked flat on his back.
Fingon extended a hand to help him up, the other still cradling the kitten. “I’m Fingon,” he said, flashing a brilliant smile. The evening sun bathed his face in a rosy glow.
Maedhros was immediately certain that Fingon was the kind of boy who was accustomed to charming everyone he met, and resolved, internally, to resist him. He did not accept his hand. Maedhros pointedly brushed dirt off his clothing, which was now a lost cause for the opening dinner. He glowered and walked away. Who did Fingon think he was?
At night, the students had the charge of the telescope observatory. First-years received a one-hour crash course from Professor Olwë, then were left to puzzle things out for themselves. They studied asteroids. Each night, they took turns using the telescope to record images on photographic plates, small panes of glass coated with a thin layer of light-sensitive silver halide emulsion. They developed the plates, then measured their asteroid’s positions and calculated the orbital elements from the recorded data.
The entire procedure required not just proficiency with the telescope, but a deep understanding of the math and physics they were learning throughout the day. There were two types of boys at camp. One was the type who could follow a procedure, nod along in class, and solve problems handed to them ready-made. The other was, everyone agreed, superior: the type who could actually apply the principles, intuit which equation was needed, and solve for variables without being spoon-fed every step.
For a cohort of boys who had each grown accustomed to being the brightest at their high schools back home, this was often a rude awakening to the truth of their mediocrity when put in direct competition with other brains.
From the start, Maedhros had worked hard to establish himself in the second category. Once, after his group derived the unexpected result that an asteroid had moved at a fantastical speed overnight, then teleported back to near its original position the following day, they spent hours rewriting the equations and recalculating the results. It was Maedhros who thought to examine the plates themselves. Sure enough, upon closer inspection, he found a flaw: a white scratch that the group had mistaken for their asteroid, explaining the impossible result. He was pleased with the result of this discovery, his value to the other boys clearly elevated, the same way a record-breaking race time would have, back home.
A point of correction: based on his previous summers, Maedhros had thought that the other boys fit into two types: the nod-along rule-followers, and the true intellects.
He wasn’t prepared for the person who didn’t fit easily into either box.
You see, the photographic plates required careful handling, lest they be prematurely exposed to light and ruined. They developed them in a darkroom under special red safelights. One morning, early in the summer, Maedhros rose before dawn, hoping to find the darkroom to himself. As a fourth-year, his independent project was to compare the brightness of the star Nénar to other stars of the same spectral classification.
At the precise moment Maedhros removed his plates from their protective shielding and was about to submerge the first set into the developer tray, the darkroom door swung open. A figure entered, flipped on the overhead light, and exposed Maedhros’s entire night’s work.
“SON OF A BITCH,” Maedhros shouted, shielding his eyes against the sudden flood of light. He instinctively hurled his body over the plates as though that could help. It was no use. They were ruined.
Maedhros felt anger surge through him like a cleansing fire. At home, he restrained himself, especially around the little boys, from ranting and raving every time he might have wanted to. But inside, he often felt like he was close to bursting. It was such a relief to explode at someone.
“What the hell is wrong with you? Why would you do that?” he demanded.
Maedhros looked up, toward the door, and was somehow unsurprised to find Fingon, frozen in place, his fingers still wrapped around the door handle. His eyes were fixed on Maedhros, who stormed over and loomed at him. Maedhros pointed at the DARKROOM IN USE sign clearly displayed. “Can you read? What does this say? Does it say, open the door like an asshole who wants to destroy everything?”
“Er,” said Fingon, looking Maedhros with big, wide eyes. His hair was wet from a morning shower. Maedhros could smell his lemony shampoo. At close range, Maedhros felt his height advantage keenly, and let himself tower over Fingon, breathing down his neck.
Fingon swallowed hard. He was flushed and trembling. Maedhros poked him in the chest, sharp and deliberate.
“Let me give you a bit of advice,” he said through his teeth. “You’re new here. If you want to make any friends at all, just do the exact opposite of whatever your instincts tell you. Then you might have a chance of surviving.”
Maedhros stared down at Fingon for another long moment, feeling a hot stab of guilty pleasure at the panic in his eyes.
“I’m really sorry,” Fingon finally managed to sputter out. His confidence was visibly shaken, though he still met Maedhros’s gaze. “I’ll redo them for you, I’ll stay up with you tonight, whatever you want,” he said.
Maedhros let out a sharp, humorless laugh. “What I want is for you to get out of my face,” he said, then stomped out, forcing himself not to look back.
Something was different about camp this year. Someone had listened to the women’s libbers and decided it was about time to open up the camp to girls.
Maedhros could have told them it would be a hard sell. Why would girls want to come to science camp? The first year of this effort, they had managed to bring in six girls, compared to twenty boys. Nevertheless, the girls had an immediate effect on the camp’s tone and camaraderie.
It wasn’t that Maedhros was against girls learning math and science. On the contrary, he knew they could be just as capable if they put their minds to it. His own mother was proof of that, after all, she’d finished her master’s in engineering with high honors. And if it had taken her a couple of years longer than the normal students, well, that was because she’d taken a break when she had the twins.
And in school, Maedhros honestly preferred girls over boys for lab partners, as they took the work more seriously. When paired with a girl, he could focus on the task. Boys distracted him, goofing off and peacocking.
But the problem was, the mere presence of the girls at camp made the other boys act unbelievably dumb. Maedhros was assigned to help the first-years during afternoon homework time. Instead of working on the problems, the boys just threw pencils at each other and pretended to be cleverer than they were. More than once, Maedhros had to rescue a cornered girl from an overconfident boy giving an entirely wrong explanation of a solution.
Any sporty activity, even a casual game of touch football, became absurdly competitive. Considering the poor athletic ability of the average boy attending science camp, Maedhros thought the football games were extremely hilarious. He somehow always found himself dropping whatever he was doing to watch. There were only a few boys who had any real athletic talent, and Maedhros reluctantly admitted to himself that Fingon, broad-shouldered and quick on his feet, was one of them.
As a protective mechanism, mostly, the girls stuck together. The tables in the mess hall sat exactly six. Before long, the six girls claimed a particular table as their own. One could measure a boy’s status by how close to the girls’ table he sat at lunch or dinner. Maedhros thought this could make an interesting math problem, and one day at lunch instead of eating his ham-and cheese, he mapped out the coordinates of each seat in the mess hall and made a coded chart in his notebook where he could track the daily movements of each of the boys as they rose and fell in standing.
In the evenings, while waiting for their turns for the telescope, the boys came up with ways to entertain themselves. Different activities became popular in waves. His first summer, table tennis had been the main craze; Maedhros, with his unusual wingspan, managed to win several tournaments, even beating Ecthelion and Glorfindel. The next summer brought alternating phases of wrestling, card games, and stealing food from the mess hall.
This year, the theme for evening activities seemed to be “impressive things we can do around the campfire so we look dashing and irresistible in the firelight.” It began simply, with ghost stories, then quickly deteriorated into knife-throwing and challenges to see who could hold their hand over the flames the longest. (Glorfindel excelled at the latter.) Once, Fingon and his sidekicks roused the others into a shirtless log-hurling competition. Despite many attempts to drag him in, Maedhros did not participate, though he found the game oddly compelling.
Usually, after the bravado and the flames died down, most of the boys would wander off to bed, leaving a smaller core group that would stay and talk and smoke late into the night. Maedhros typically stayed until the very last.
And, because Maedhros would never know peace in this lifetime, so did Fingon.
One night, sitting around the campfire, there was an open space to Maedhros’s side as the crowd began to peel away. As the lingering group tightened, passing around a pack of cigarettes and coughing, Fingon cocked his head toward the open space and caught Maedhros’s eye, silently asking permission. Maedhros shrugged and nodded. Fingon could do as he pleased.
He sat beside him.
The night had grown unusually chilly, the wind picking up the dying embers of the fire, cigarette and campfire smoke melding as sparks popped in the air. With each drag, Maedhros’s shoulder brushed against Fingon’s. He radiated warmth.
During the daytime, when the girls were within earshot, the boys talked about math and science. But when the girls were elsewhere, as they always were this late at night, the topic of conversation turned to the girls themselves.
Each boy took his turn naming who he thought was the prettiest of the six. All seemed to agree that there were two leading candidates. Ecthelion, Fingon, and several of the other boys favored Elemmírë, the blonde bombshell with big blue eyes, while Glorfindel and a smaller but more passionate faction preferred the raven-haired girl with porcelain skin.
Maedhros reflected on his options and found himself utterly lacking any partiality.
He must have been silent for too long. When someone elbowed him and asked him to weigh in, he fumbled and picked a name at random. The silent pause after he said it told him he’d made a mistake. The other boys laughed, and then, thankfully, moved on.
The conversation grew cruder and cruder, as the other boys discussed the girls’ breasts, their legs, what they had beneath their shorts, in increasingly lurid detail. The talk became personal, explicit, boys bragging about what they had done with girls back home, what they would do with one of the girls here if they had the chance.
Maedhros thought that nearly all of it had to be bravado. Except for a couple of the oldest boys, Ecthelion maybe among them, none of them seemed to have any real idea what they were talking about. The only firsthand experience that most of them had was likely with their own hands.
Later, after showering off the smoke, Maedhros lay awake, staring at the ceiling. The boy he roomed with was snoring away. It was about as much privacy as he ever got.
Systematically, he ran through the features of each of the six girls in his mind. He thought about their narrow wrists, their soft-looking hair, their legs in the crisp cotton shorts each of them wore. Who was he to question the wisdom of the crowds? If the majority ruled, surely Elemmírë was the prettiest.
In his cramped twin bed, Maedhros tried to recall as detailed a mental picture of Elemmírë as he could. He thought about her golden hair, which she habitually brushed into a neat ponytail. He pictured her eyes, blue as a cloudless mountain sky. She was short but well-proportioned, her hourglass figure surely the source of much of her appeal. She did look very nice in a blouse and shorts, Maedhros thought. He imagined drawing her close, as she looked up at him through long dark lashes, parting her pink lips in expectation.
He physically recoiled.
Maedhros rolled to his side and tried again, flipping mentally to the dark-haired porcelain doll. He probably should have started with her in the first place. He had, early on, identified her as the smartest of the girls, possibly the entire first-year class, and he admired her serious approach to camp. Her arms were creamy white, and she took furious notes in class, hand flying across the paper. She kept her fingernails trimmed short and painted cotton-candy pink. She wore a gold chain around her neck, a heart-shaped pendant in the hollow of her clavicle.
Maedhros imagined gently reaching out to hold her hand. That felt fine, though not particularly stirring. He pictured himself putting an arm around her, pulling her to his side.
And his mind suddenly flashed back to earlier that night, sitting around the campfire. Fingon’s strong shoulder against his, filling him with a drowsy warmth that slowly spread from their point of contact across his entire body, Fingon’s clean, cotton-sweat smell all around, Fingon’s thick, dark curls fluttering across his forehead in the night’s breeze, Fingon’s quick smile and his sunshine laugh, brighter than firelight, luminous like the stars. He could imagine holding Fingon’s hand, lacing Fingon’s fingers in his own. He could imagine putting his arm around Fingon’s warm body, drawing him close. The smooth texture of Fingon’s skin, the strength of the muscles in his upper arms, his back. Fingon looking up at him through his long dark lashes, looking at his mouth. He could—
What?
Maedhros jerked upright, panic rising in his chest. What was that?
It had been a long, weird day.
It took Maedhros a long time to fall asleep.
Glorfindel and Ecthelion were both headed off to Tirion in the fall, though they spoke eagerly about their dreams of Beleriand. It was daring, risky to talk about leaving Aman, not for just a vacation or term abroad, but for good. Defectors weren’t looked upon kindly.
“But Aman is just one small part of the wide world,” Glorfindel said. “Just look at where the real cutting-edge research has been coming from lately: Menegroth, Gondolin, Nargothrond. Someday, that’s where I’ll be.”
“How are you planning on getting into any of those places?” Maedhros asked. Forget the notoriously competitive university systems of Beleriand. Just getting a visa to study out of the country was known to be nearly impossible.
Glorfindel shrugged and smiled. “The world is on the brink of change. Who knows what it will look like in four years? Don’t you want to be where things are really happening?”
Maedhros didn’t answer, but the question had gotten to him. It settled in his mind like a pebble in his sock. He had never really considered any college other than Formtech; they still needed him at home, and he could save money by commuting, anyway.
Were the Sindar truly outpacing his people?
In the past year, Glorfindel and Ecthelion had become environmentalists. They smoked organic Amanyarin Spirits. Ecthelion wouldn’t shut up about pesticides poisoning the rivers and lakes after reading some book that had gotten him really into the Clean Water movement. On hikes, he always took along garbage bags, badgering the other boys to pick up their litter. He made his own natural soap to avoid dumping harmful detergents into the waterways. Glorfindel quickly adopted the practice, too. They both now smelled alkaline and sweaty. Maedhros found himself inexplicably distracted by it.
One Saturday, Glorfindel had gotten his hands on a watermelon and was holding court in the outdoor amphitheater, a crowd of younger students watching him toss it back and forth with Ecthelion, laughing at each close call. Among them were Fingon, the blonde Elemmírë at his side. She kept touching his shoulder.
It was Ecthelion who slipped up. He hefted the watermelon high. His arms, tanned from the summer sun, flexed with effortless strength. Maedhros’s mouth went dry for some reason.
The watermelon slid out of his hands, and nobody was close enough to catch it. It crashed on the ground and broke into two pieces.
Glorfindel, as ever, retained his trademark smile, shrugged, and picked up one of the watermelon halves, and began carving it up with a knife, handing out the chunks to the nearest boys. “It’s still edible!” Glorfindel assured everyone.
“Still fruity!” said one of the boys after chomping down on a piece.
“Just like Glorfindel,” said Ecthelion. The boys all laughed, including Glorfindel, who was tall and confident and perfectly capable of taking teasing like this, the kind of teasing that sent a chill down Maedhros’s spine. No, not now. Not here.
Maedhros briefly caught Ecthelion’s eye, and must have shown a little too much fear, because Ecthelion opened his mouth, his eyes dancing. Maedhros could tell he was about to repeat the joke. He couldn’t allow that.
Maedhros had to say it first.
“You would know!” Maedhros said, forcing a grin. The crowd laughed, and Ecthelion smiled. Everyone started clamoring for pieces of watermelon, and Maedhros released a sigh of relief.
Elemmírë was still standing entirely too close to Fingon.
Maedhros hadn’t spent a lot of time in the sanctuary. It was open at all hours for silent prayer and reflection held twice-daily chapel for those inclined. Some boys, including Glorfindel and Fingon, went every day, but Maedhros usually declined. He’d had enough religion for a lifetime.
The only other occasion the sanctuary saw regular use was the weekly colloquium. Each Sunday, a different guest lecturer from one of the major universities or the Space Administration would give a talk about his current research. In the last couple of years, Maedhros had learned about cosmic background radiation, the structure of DNA, plate tectonics, the race to the moon, and the theory of black holes.
In retrospect, Maedhros figured it was probably inevitable that Fëanor would show up eventually. But in the moment, when Fingolfin announced that the upcoming Sunday’s guest speaker would be his father, he felt a surge of unpleasant shock.
The other students, though, bubbled with excitement for days. In the past few years, Fëanor’s notoriety had only grown, sparked by an appearance at a congressional hearing where he made an impassioned speech against nuclear proliferation. Nerdanel had fought with Fëanor about it for weeks beforehand. Maedhros recalled her saying Fëanor was selfish beyond words, taking off for Valimar and leaving her alone with seven boys while she had exams just so he could stand up and humiliate congressmen on national television. (Of course, Maedhros and Maglor were the ones who took care of the younger boys anyway, as usual, so he wasn’t sure what Nerdanel was so worked up about.)
Since the congressional hearing, Fëanor had made several follow-up appearances on talk shows and at college campuses. As one of the few survivors of the Ezellohar Project, his presence carried an undeniable heft; his credibility on the subject was profound. Fëanor rarely spoke of his personal experience of the disaster itself, but through the power of personality and symbolism, he had become a torch-bearer for the growing peace movement.
Maedhros listened to the other campers chatter about Fëanor’s upcoming visit. His plan to protect his anonymity had worked; the other boys his own age already knew who his father was, but the others had either forgotten his last name, if they ever knew it, or were blissfully unaware from the beginning. So, nobody bothered to censor themselves around him.
Many thought Fëanor was a traitor, unpatriotic and disloyal. How dare he question the faithful leaders of Aman? He was obstructing national security efforts. He must have Iathrim sympathies. He couldn’t be trusted. He might even defect. How could he live with himself? He was in the pocket of the enemy. He was a pawn, a subversive, a fame whore, a bleeding-heart, egghead, liberal punk. He was a known atheist!
On the other hand, some argued that Fëanor was a hero. The arms race threatened the safety of all Arda. The two great powers had nearly brought the world to the brink of nuclear war, and both sides had enough weapons in their arsenals to destroy every civilization of the Children of Ilúvatar ten times over. Imagine the Darkening of Valinor write large, the entire world choked by ashes and radioactivity from countless explosions, atomic winter freezing and starving everyone on the planet. Wouldn’t it be better to come to an accord with the people across the sea, to stop the madness of mass proliferation?
Maedhros thought that all of these children had missed his father’s point entirely. Fëanor used the rhetoric of the peace movement, it was true. But his real argument wasn’t that Doriath and Aman should join hands across the sea and sing the Music in perfect harmony. Fëanor had little love for the Iathrim, and he was no less hawkish than the right-wing demagogues who funded the arsenal to begin with.
No, Fëanor just believed that nuclear weapons rightfully belonged to the scientists who had brought them into the world, and since most of them were all dead, after the Darkening, it would be safest to lock them up and give people like him the key. His real argument, essentially, was that the President and Congress were just too stupid to possess nuclear weapons in the first place.
The afternoon of Fëanor’s guest lecture, Maedhros sat front and center. The sanctuary was simple, rustic, with one extravagance: the stained-glass windows gleamed like captured starlight. Each panel, set within a simple wooden frame, depicted a Vala in their domain: Ulmo in the deep blue sea, Aule in his hall of gems, Vana the Ever-young in her gardens of golden flowers, each one refracting colored light onto the stone floors and nearby pews.
At the front of the chapel, the largest window displayed Varda, the Star-queen, cobalt night sky behind her, twinkling with carefully inlaid silver. Maedhros thought it was a clever touch, at this campus dedicated to science and astronomy, that the field of stars behind Varda appeared accurate to the real night sky.
The students buzzed with anticipation as Fingolfin took the stage.
“I’m pleased to introduce an old friend,” Fingolfin began, startling Maedhros. “Our speaker is someone I’ve admired since before any of you were born. A full recitation of his awards and honors would take longer than the time we’ve allotted for the talk itself, so I’ll be brief. As an astrophysicist at the Formenos Institute of Technology, his research currently focuses on observational radio astronomy, and I’m excited to hear what he has to say.”
Fëanor stood in front of stained-glass Varda in all her celestial splendor. His eyes, bright and keen, swept the room, pinning each boy and girl in their place. Maedhros was no less affected than they. His heart beat faster in anticipation.
“In every direction, the void is endless, the sensation of depth overwhelming,” Fëanor began. “The darkness has been there long before us, and it will outlast us long after we have crumbled into dust. Where light exists, it is pure, blazing, fierce—but the light exists almost nowhere, and the blackness itself is fiercer still.”
The talk was classic Fëanor: charismatic, arresting, leaping between topics by drawing connections that lesser men could never have imagined. He talked about quantum mechanics and the black-body problem, radioactive isotopes in space, then reviewed the history of optical telescopes. Finally, he landed on his main subject: the observational potential of massive radio interferometric arrays. Fëanor proposed linking a thousand radio telescopes together to dramatically increase resolution, precision, and range. With this technology, astronomers might observe celestial objects at a far greater distance and with far greater accuracy than even the most powerful optical telescopes of today.
It was the best camp guest lecture Maedhros had ever heard. Fëanor converted most of the campers to his side without saying a word about nuclear weapons, simply through sheer force of will. Maedhros saw it in the captivated gazes.
After the lecture, Fëanor remained in the sanctuary to answer a few questions from the boldest campers who hung back. Maedhros lingered as well, eager to tell his father about his progress on the Nénar study.
Fëanor nodded at Maedhros in greeting, then looked pointedly at his hair, which Maedhros had been intentionally growing out. It now fell past his ears, approaching a stylish, modern shag.
“Are there no clippers at this camp? Surely the other boys aren’t going the whole summer without a trim. You look sloppy,” Fëanor admonished.
Maedhros tried to ignore the whispers as the remaining boys all turned to look at him, putting it together. The son of Fëanáro Curufinwë! Greatest of the Noldor physicists!
After Fëanor’s talk, Maedhros and a handful of other students were invited to join the faculty for dinner in the formal dining room. Maedhros had never been inside it before. Set apart from the mess hall, it was lined with floor-to-ceiling windows, letting in the magenta-and-gold sunset, the jaw-dropping mountain view. Instead of cafeteria trays, there were candles, white tablecloths, crystal goblets.
Maedhros wished he were anywhere else. At home, they ate in front of the TV. He knew no more about formal dining than girls, just the bare minimum he’d gleaned from books and movies.
Fëanor took the head of the table, Fingolfin the other end. Maedhros seated himself at his father’s right, and Glorfindel, Ecthelion, and Fingon took seats near him.
Nervous, Maedhros reached for his wine—when Fingon touched his forearm and shook his head. “Wait for the toast,” he whispered.
Maedhros flushed. Fingon had noticed. He hated feeling exposed, but was glad, too, to have someone to watch.
He certainly couldn’t look to Fëanor, who ignored his napkin, reached across the table for a roll, and began eating before Fingolfin had even finished saying grace. Maedhros, along with the others, bowed his head, not because he cared about giving thanks to Yavanna for the gifts of her fruits, but because he didn’t want to look a fool.
After giving the blessing, Fingolfin stood to speak. He thanked Fëanor once more and invited the students to ask questions. “This program is meant to launch the future leaders of the scientific community. That isn’t just about classwork and problem sets, it’s about mentorship. This is how you set yourselves apart,” he said, catching Maedhros’s eye.
An awkward silence followed, until Glorfindel broke it: “What do you really think about the Aman-Doriath competition? We’re behind in satellites, behind in sending men to space. Aren’t we just fooling ourselves by saying we’re still the superpower?”
Fëanor snorted.
Fingolfin offered a reply: “Coming from the Space Administration myself, you’re right to notice our losses. But the race is far from over. The Moon awaits.”
“The Sindar, my kin, have the engineering advantage—for now,” Olwë said. “But they’re behind in theory. We’ll catch up.”
“We’ll catch up,” Fëanor echoed, “if we stop being distracted by this silly competition. The government has no interest in truly understanding the mysteries of the universe, only in control. Pure research is the only path to true discovery.”
“I agree,” said Fingolfin. “Though the Space Administration is the only path to achieving some kinds of discovery.”
“Space telescopes,” said another faculty member.
“Exactly,” said Fingolfin. “We’re in the unglamorous position of needing their help marshalling the resources needed. Imagine a telescope in orbit, able to view the full electromagnetic spectrum—X-ray, infrared, ultraviolet. Don’t you want to know what it might see?”
“Give me the resources,” Fëanor said, “and I’ll build you one in ten years. Five, with this one’s help.” He nodded toward Maedhros.
Maedhros straightened, pride swelling his chest. The tips of his ears felt warm.
The conversation drifted to physics, astronomy, mathematics. Maedhros half-listened; he’d get the best advice later, directly from his father. Instead, he watched the others. Glorfindel, starry-eyed, peppered the table with questions, glowing when Fëanor recognized his family name. “Your father’s a mathematician, isn’t he?” Fëanor said approvingly.
Unusually quiet, Fingon pushed grilled mango salad around his plate. When the talk turned to the importance of mathematics and passion for one’s work, his gaze dropped entirely.
Maedhros thought that he knew why. Fingon wasn’t bad at math, far from it. He grasped concepts quickly, when he cared to. The trouble was, he rarely cared to. At some point, that was bound to catch up with him.
Ecthelion, as usual, asked the toughest questions. “What about the other sciences?” he asked. “What would you suggest to someone interested in biology or ecology?”
The faculty scoffed. “Biology is for premeds. And ecology—not even a serious discipline. It’s a fad.”
“Engineering, then,” Ecthelion tried.
“Very practical,” someone finally said. “Good for a steady paycheck,” another added, a touch of condescension in his tone.
Maedhros frowned, puzzled. Wasn’t that the point of a job?
“But I’ll take nights with the telescope searching for the secrets of the cosmos any day,” Olwë said, and the other professors murmured in agreement.
The waitress brought Maedhros a hot, damp napkin. He nodded his thanks and, seeing Fëanor spread his over his lap, started to follow suit, then hesitated. Fingon shook his head slightly, already using his napkin to clean his hands.
The heat made Maedhros’s fingers tingle as he mimicked him, glancing sideways, watching more than he meant to. Something about Fingon’s confidence, even when he was quiet, left Maedhros feeling unmoored.
“I’m really making an idiot of myself, aren’t I?” Maedhros whispered.
Fingon just shrugged and smiled.
The main course itself made clear the hand-washing: stacks of pale, paper-thin pancakes under covered dishes, flanked by bowls of roasted sweet potato and beet, shrimp and sliced lotus root, and strange mushrooms in glossy, spicy-smelling sauces. It smelled delicious, though Maedhros had no clue what to call any of it. After watching the others, he caught on: use the pancake to scoop, fold, and eat.
Fëanor spat a bite back onto his plate. Maedhros burned with embarrassment, but no one else blinked.
Fingolfin continued offering advice between bites. “I would say the single most important piece of advice I can give you is this: Don’t go to graduate school where you complete your undergraduate degree. You’ll look provincial. You need exposure to different approaches, different minds, all kinds of people.”
By then, the wine had been flowing freely. Maedhros had only taken a few sips, reluctant to give up control, but the faculty had no such restraint. Even Fëanor, rarely one to indulge, had partaken more than usual.
It had been a lovely evening, and Maedhros was beginning to relax. That was when things took their first turn.
A professor offered a bit of advice, delivered with a wry smile: “Don’t get political. Not at the departmental level, not nationally. Be circumspect, even after tenure. You start talking to reporters about policy or international affairs, and you’re asking to derail your career.”
Maedhros saw the spark in Fëanor’s eyes before anyone else did.
“I’ve never found that to be the case,” Fëanor said. “What’s the use of knowing what’s best and being too afraid to speak up? Real science doesn’t compromise for politeness. Your talent should carry you beyond the need for petty political concerns.”
Maedhros knew Fëanor was obscuring the truth. He remembered his father’s increasing desperation before the move to Formenos, the nights pacing the kitchen, cursing his old colleagues while drafting appeal letters.
Awkwardness pooled in the silence.
Then Fingolfin stepped in. “Well, we can’t all be Fëanáro Curufinwë.”
Fëanor looked at Fingolfin with narrowed eyes, suspended between an apparent desire to continue arguing and curiosity as to where Fingolfin was going with this.
“You won the Lambengolmor three years out of school, didn’t you?” Fingolfin continued, smiling. “My father would have been proud. And you kept speaking out even when others advised you to quiet down. The scientist who keeps quiet in the face of abuse of power, the misuse of knowledge, sacrifices his soul. And I think Finwë would agree with me, if he were here today.”
Fëanor’s face relaxed. The other professors did as well. Glorfindel nodded along, reverently. Even Fingon looked thoughtful.
Maedhros thought what Fingolfin had just done was remarkable. He had soothed Fëanor’s ego without making it seem like he was taking a side. He’d invoked the memory of Finwë like a shield, disarming and definitive. There was no arguing after that.
And no mistaking who’d come out of it looking smooth and gracious.
Unfortunately, the calm was short-lived. In a way, Fingolfin had brought it upon himself. He’d brought up Finwë to begin with.
“He was your father, wasn’t he?” Ecthelion asked Fingolfin, who nodded.
“The greatest physicist of the era,” another professor added. “It was the golden age of physics. Fëanáro can tell you, he was there.”
Fëanor never needed more than a hint of encouragement to hold court. “Truly incredible amount of productivity, when I started as a junior professor. We were working on nuclear spectroscopy, gas theory, the quantum theory of radiation, beta decay emission. We were just on the verge of discovering the first nuclear chain reaction. Of course, we weren’t thinking of practical applications at the time, except in our wildest dreams. Or nightmares, as it turned out. But there was no chance anyone could gather the vast resources needed to develop a weapon. It was impossible.
“The speed at which things were happening was remarkable,” Fëanor continued. “Not just in our labs, but all over the world. We heard that across the sea, the Sindar had achieved fission. Nuclear fission!”
Someone elbowed Olwë, who jumped in. “I tried to go meet with my brother right away. But travel was already restricted. If I left without a visa, there was a good chance I could never come home. And my wife, my children—I couldn’t risk it,” he said.
“Well, it didn’t end up making a difference,” Fëanor continued. “Four different Noldor laboratories, including ours, experimentally confirmed the fission process, using neutrons. And Finwë—he was the greatest living expert on neutrons. They were his old friends.” The more Fëanor spoke of Finwë, the rougher his voice became.
“We got Valimar’s attention. The General came up to check us out. He wanted to know the dangers and prospects of fission. I told him,” Fëanor’s voice cracked, and Maedhros felt like someone had reached into his own chest with ice-cold fingers. “I told him the truth, that the dangers were significant, but the potential—well, it defied comprehension. The potential for nuclear power, you understand. Power.” Fëanor’s throat worked.
“We had been working on chain reactions in the lab,” Fingolfin cut in, smoothly taking over where Fëanor had stopped. “I was still just a doctoral student. We would use moderators to slow the neutrons, gradually and carefully sustain an energy release over time, and capture it for power generation. Fëanor thought of using graphite. We wrote a paper on it,” said Fingolfin. “It was my first publication.”
“The General flattered me,” Fëanor interrupted, as though Fingolfin hadn’t spoken. “I’ll admit it! I was susceptible to flattery at the time. I was working on the cyclotron, deep in a pit in the basement, not a particularly glamorous place to work. The General asked me if I had ever seen the fields of Ezellohar.”
“Oh, no,” Glorfindel said, his eyes round.
“I hadn’t. I grew up in Tirion, you understand. I had never been on an airplane before. They flew us out in a private silver airliner.”
“I remember when you left,” Fingolfin said quietly.
“They were calling it the Ezellohar Project already. I was naïve, I didn’t think about what it meant, the code names,” Fëanor said.
“They came and got the best and brightest from each of the universities,” Olwë confirmed. “Thankfully, that left me out.” He chuckled.
“And you had no idea it was a nuclear weapons project,” Ecthelion said, unbelieving.
“Not until it was too late,” Fëanor said curtly.
“So, what did you do when you found out?” Glorfindel asked.
Maedhros winced. He could see in his father’s face, the emotion he was struggling to contain.
“It wasn’t—I didn’t learn all at once,” Fëanor said. “They brought me out to Ezellohar, telling me to keep—certain things—quiet, or I’d be sent back. And what I didn’t know—I was foolish not to see it at the time—of course, they were keeping secrets from me, too. Of course, I didn’t have all the facts.”
Fëanor’s voice, which had thinned over the course of the conversation, had raised to a high, fragile pitch. Maedhros had never heard his father make that sound before.
“Someone let something slip in the mess hall, and I put two and two together. I knew we were producing enriched uranium and plutonium. Where was it going? It was meant to be for the nuclear reactor, but it wasn’t adding up. I asked Finwë to confirm.
“He told me the truth,” said Fëanor, “and I was furious at being tricked. I was so angry, I took the train home to Tirion that night. I wrote my letter of resignation on the train.”
He named the date he arrived home, and there was an audible gasp around the table as everyone made the connection.
“And that’s why you weren’t there when the accident happened! When everyone was killed,” said Glorfindel, leaning forward, his hair catching the light.
“Of course I wasn’t there!” Fëanor said. “Do you think I’d be sitting here, telling you this awful story, had I been? I’d be vaporized with the rest of them.”
Maedhros knew what had happened. He hadn’t heard it directly from his father. He had seen photos in magazines and textbooks, and he had watched a few minutes of the TV movie The Day the Earth Went Dark before Nerdanel made him switch it off. At home, if anybody mentioned Ezellohar, a cold shadow would fall upon Fëanor’s face and he wouldn’t speak for hours.
And so, they never spoke of it.
But they spoke of it in school. His junior year Amanyarin History class spent a full week on it, the event that ushered in the Atomic Age. How the government of Aman had collected the greatest physicists from around the world—Sindar excepted—and poured unimaginable resources into developing the technology to unleash the power of the atom.
And how, one sunny morning, on the day of the High Feast, no less, there was a criticality accident. Later theorized to be a simple mistake, improper handling of the plutonium isotopes, perhaps, which instantly obliterated the weapons assembly lab, and the twenty-eight people within it.
Maedhros had seen the mushroom cloud in photos. The image was burned into his mind, the rolling smoke, the towering dark column billowing outwards into a shadowy dome of destruction.
The initial explosion had killed many, but more horrifying, the radiation burst affected anyone within several miles. Hundreds of people suffered long-term effects, and those that survived carried terrible burn scars and cancers to this day. And nothing, not even a blade of grass, could grow in Ezellohar.
Perhaps even worse, from a geopolitical perspective, the accident had broadcast Aman’s secret plans to the world. Doriath, which had been on the path to developing their own nukes anyway, doubled their efforts and set off their own test bombs within a few years.
And so, the arms race had begun.
And ever since, Fëanor had been one of the most outspoken agitators against nuclear proliferation. Maedhros was as convinced as ever: the problem wasn’t the weapons themselves, it was the government manipulation. Fëanor hated nothing more than to be made the fool.
Dessert had not yet been served, but abruptly, Fëanor stood, tossed down his napkin, and stormed out without a word.
Fingolfin met Maedhros’s eye. He had been considering going after his father, but Fingolfin shook his head and stood himself, following Fëanor out.
Maedhros felt a wash of warm relief and gratitude to Fingolfin, but his heart was still pounding, his stomach hurt, and he didn’t want dessert anymore.
Glorfindel bowed his head, whispered a few words of prayer, and said, “To Námo’s arms they are now delivered.” The others echoed him. Maedhros rolled his eyes.
“What a day that must have been in the Halls, huh?” Fingon said lightly. “All the greatest physicists in the world show up at the exact same time. Except for your father, of course,” he said, smiling at Maedhros.
Fingon’s eyes were kind, but Maedhros couldn’t take kindness from him right now.
And Glorfindel had to go ahead and say, “The Music is mysterious, yet all that comes to pass is ever Eru’s will.”
“Can you cut out the religious shit for once,” Maedhros said, his voice cold and hard. “I’m fucking sick of it. Do you really believe in the Halls of Mandos, like a child? I thought you were smart.”
Glorfindel’s face crumpled.
“Whoa, whoa, hey,” Ecthelion jumped in. “Don’t be like that.”
“I’ll be however I want,” Maedhros spat, feeling stupid even as he said it. “Fuck, you’re all so gullible.” He stood up so fast, he almost knocked over his chair. Red-faced, he didn’t look back as he trotted off, heading in the direction he’d seen Fëanor and Fingolfin go.
He thought he had a good idea where his father might end up, anyway. Night had fallen, the last gleams of purple sunset faded away. It would be an excellent night to see the stars.
The amphitheatre was one of the most picturesque spots on campus. Set on a cliffside, the stage was framed against the vista of the entire valley. It was the best place to see the sunset. As the sun had now dipped well under the horizon, it was also the best place to see the stars.
Fëanor and Fingolfin were stretched out on the grass, side by side, their heads close. Fingolfin had his hands behind his head, flat on his back. Fëanor was turned towards him, one arm pointing up at the cosmos. They looked like intimates. They looked like friends.
They didn’t seem to hear as Maedhros crept as close as he dared, stopping a few rows behind. Close enough to hear.
“All my life, I can’t go a day without thinking about the man. I’ve never met another like him. I doubt I ever will,” Fëanor was saying.
“He was one of a kind,” Fingolfin agreed. “I don’t think even you realize how much he loved you.”
Fëanor made a strange, desperate sound. “There was a time that you would have been unable to speak such words to me,” he said finally.
Fingolfin sighed and stretched. “Yes, I know. When we were at Tirion—well, you’re a difficult man to compete with, you know that.”
“No one told you to try.”
“But of course they did. We all were compared to you. Even Arafinwë, just a kid—my goodness, you haven’t seen him in ages, have you? You won’t come near Tirion.”
“No,” Fëanor said after a moment. “I don’t think I ever will again.”
“You see, the older I grew, the more infuriating it became, trying to keep up with you. The publications, the prizes. The damned genius grant. Like you needed a committee to confirm you’re a genius. And it struck me one day, when I was with my sons. I could tell Findekáno how bright he is, how special. I could pump him full of all the praise in the world. And he would take it in, hold it close, and let it fill him with light. But he doesn’t need to. Because he doesn’t have a hole inside him. He makes his own light,” Fingolfin said.
Maedhros thought about Fingon, who had helped him throughout the dinner, even after Maedhros had been rude to him on several occasions. Fingolfin knew his son quite well indeed.
“Perhaps you’re right,” Fëanor said, after a moment. “But how else could I be, but what I am?”
“I wouldn’t dream of asking you to be otherwise,” Fingolfin said. “But the hole, Fëanáro. You should take care not to inflict it on your own sons.”
“How dare you,” Fëanor snapped.
Maedhros tried not to breathe.
“I’ve given my sons everything I never had as a child,” Fëanor continued. “Every advantage, every comfort a boy could want. He’s here, isn’t he? Tell me he’s not the brightest in the whole place.”
Maedhros felt it like a burst of white-hot light within his ribcage. He was unused to hearing Fëanor speak about him like this. If the light had been visible, it would have blinded him. Instead, it filled him with an intense desire to repeat the sensation, to receive that pouring blaze of approval again.
But Fingolfin and Fëanor had moved on to a different topic.
“If I had been there,” Fëanor said, almost too quiet to hear. “I could have stopped it. It would never have happened.”
“You’re giving yourself too much credit. Your mind can’t stop a nuclear bomb, Fëanáro. It was a terrible accident, the result of a foolish error, but not anything you could have prevented. The World is too Marred.”
“Oh, what the fuck would you know about it, anyway? You were a child. Of course that’s what you think. You’ve never known what it is to be burdened like this.” Fëanor’s voice was raised.
In response, Fingolfin’s own voice dropped down low, soft, too low for Maedhros to hear any longer.
Maedhros waited as long as he could, desperate to see if they would return to the subject of Maedhros himself once more, but their heads were too close, their whispers too low, and as the night continued to darken, the wind picked up, whistling in the hollow of the valley in Maedhros’s ears, covering over the voices of the two men, until Maedhros stole away in the night, disappointed, the light in his chest already fading.
A week or two later, Maedhros was, against his will, in a canoe with Fingon.
The hour was late, the sky was dark.
They were paddling upstream, slow and tedious work. Ecthelion had awakened them, gleeful and grinning, for a camp tradition he had just invented. A creature had come to camp, stolen an important object, and sneaked away up the mountain. They had to retrieve it before dawn or face terrible consequences. They were to race each other in pairs; the first to return with the recovered treasure would win.
Maedhros was not taking it very seriously. He was sleepy and annoyed to be in a canoe in the middle of the night, wearing his flannel pajamas and tennis shoes with no socks.
Fingon, on the other hand, was treating it like an earnest rescue mission. He paddled frantically, shouted orders, and was enjoying himself entirely too much.
Maedhros had not apologized for his behavior at the formal dinner, but after a few days, he sat down with Glorfindel and Ecthelion at lunch, offering his share of curly fries, and well, the other boys weren’t the type to hold grudges when there was food to be had. Still, Maedhros couldn’t shake the feeling that he was paired up with Fingon as some form of retribution.
As they approached a low-hanging branch, Fingon made a snap decision. Instead of ducking, he threw his weight sideways to avoid it. Maedhros, caught off guard, instinctively leaned the other way.
They might have stayed afloat, had Fingon not corrected again at the last second.
The canoe teetered to one side, then flipped over in one swift, merciless motion.
The water was shallow and warm as a bath, and the current slow as a kiss. Once he got his feet under him, Maedhros was more exasperated than frightened.
It was in that state that he yelled profanities at Fingon. Then, wading out of the creek, he squeezed as much water as he could out of his pajama shirt, and told Fingon he could finish the race on his own.
Instead, Fingon followed him, and beached the canoe at the creek’s edge.
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “Hey, don’t run off by yourself. It’s not safe. Let me come with you.”
“You’ll lose the race,” Maedhros said. “And the canoe.”
“Yeah, well, the race is stupid anyway, right?” Fingon said, shrugging. Water beaded down his face, down his neck, onto his clinging shirt. “And I can find someone to come get the canoe with me later. I don’t want you to get lost or hurt alone in the woods at night, come on.”
“I can’t stop you,” Maedhros said.
They started to hike back towards camp. They couldn’t have been canoeing for more than an hour, and their progress had been slow. But they were truly in the forest, with no clear paths. They followed the creek, where they could, and threaded their way between the trees when the creekside was no longer passable by foot.
Maedhros’s anger began to cool. He was soaked, wet flannel sticking to his skin, but the night was warm, the crickets were chirping, and the stars were beautiful and shining in the sky above. The Moon was a tiny silver crescent. The spicy scent of sagebrush, eucalyptus, and pine was thick, here in the dense forest, and it mixed with the clean mineral smell of the creek.
Maedhros thought, for the first time in years, about the myth of Tilion, chasing his beloved across the sky, only to be scorched upon drawing too near.
Beside him, Fingon was calm and sure-footed. He accepted Maedhros’s hand when they had to scramble up a steep, muddy bank. He was decent company, honestly, when he wasn’t too busy showing off.
Maedhros felt bad for yelling. He tried to make conversation. He asked Fingon if he had a favorite star. It was tricky to see the night sky from under the thick forest canopy. Fingon tried to point out the constellation Soronúmë, the Eagle of the West. Maedhros knew exactly where it was, but he stood close to Fingon, following the direction of his pointing finger. He was so warm. They looked skyward together for a little while before Maedhros said, “Oh, I see it now.”
They talked a little about Fëanor’s guest lecture and the disastrous dinner as they continued on their way. Fingon was tactful. He asked if Maedhros thought that Fëanor’s proposal, the interferometric radio array, could really work. He asked Maedhros! About an idea of Fëanor’s! Well, Maedhros preened a little at that, and said that yes, it was sound theory, explained a little more of the background, how it would work.
“Wow,” Fingon said finally, “you really understand all of this. You’re really smart, no wonder you’ll be going to Formtech in the fall, it’s the place for the brains, isn’t it?”
“How’d you know where I’m going?” Maedhros asked.
Fingon shrugged. “Guess I heard it somewhere. And I suppose it makes sense, that’s where your father works, so that’s where he’d want you to be. My father’s the same way, now that we’re going back to Tirion, he’s hoping I’ll get excited about—the whole academic scene. Ivy covered walls, all of that.”
“You grew up in Tirion, didn’t you?” Maedhros had heard him talking about it with some of his friends.
“Sure, and I’m happy to go back. It feels like home. I’m just not like the rest of you, though, and you know it. I don’t have the brains to follow in those footsteps, you know?”
Maedhros was silent for a moment. Something about Fingon’s words made Maedhros feel even worse than yelling at him had.
Maedhros said, “What are you talking about? You’re brainy, just careless.”
Fingon didn’t say anything in response.
Maedhros apologized. He didn’t mean it like that.
“Yes, you did. It’s okay. I am careless, you’re right.”
“Well, it doesn’t matter. Nobody minds. Everybody likes you,” Maedhros said. He paused, then continued, “Elemmírë really likes you.”
Fingon made an odd face. Maedhros couldn’t quite read it. “Yeah, I don’t really want to talk about her,” he said.
They came to a clearing in the forest, a hidden pocket of stillness between the pines. The ground was soft with earth and dry grass. The dark bowl of the night sky opened above them, light and high beauty all around. Maedhros stopped and drew his gaze upward. “There, see that cluster? The seven stars?”
“Yeah, I know it. The Remmirath.”
“That’s my favorite,” Maedhros said.
They looked up at it together, the seven jewels caught in a net, as they stood silently in the clearing. Something was knocking at the door of Maedhros’s heart. He and Fingon were awake and alive and all aglow in the sagebrush-scented summer starlight. A piercing and unknowable longing was making a home inside Maedhros.
You could never see so many stars like this, in the city. The lights of civilization clouded the view. Only here, out in the wild, could you look up and get a sense of what was really out there. Thousands of tiny points of light, all with their own potential worlds and people, trillions of miles away. Perhaps one of those stars had a little blue-and-green planet in its orbit, and two alien boys were walking home together in the night, to their alien beds on their alien world, stopping to look up in their direction at that precise moment.
“How come?” Fingon asked.
“Well, I suppose it reminds me,” Maedhros said, “seven stars, seven brothers.” He then told Fingon about his family. He hadn’t thought about his brothers much all summer, but at that moment, he missed them terribly. He wished he had tried harder to convince Maglor to join him, but no, he insisted on staying home to practice his trumpeting and surfing. Maedhros missed the red-headed, chubby-cheeked babies, who had started walking the week before he left for the summer. He even missed the middle boys, who argued with him the most and listened the least. It was easiest to love them from far away.
They made their way back to camp together, and all was quiet when they returned to the dorms. On the patio, they lined up their shoes in a neat row to dry. “Good night,” Fingon said softly.
“Good night,” Maedhros replied. He went into his dorm room quietly, trying not to disturb his roommate, stripped, and collapsed onto his bed. Thoughts of starlight shining on warm brown skin kept him awake. His dreams, when he finally drifted off, were slow-moving and sweet as a warm mountain creek.
About a week later, whispers crackled through the mess hall at breakfast. One of the girls was conspicuously absent, reducing them to five. Rumor was, someone had caught a boy alone with Elemmírë in her dorm room after lights-out. Parents had been called in the middle of the night, trunks were packed, and they had both been sent home. (This was the first that Maedhros had even heard of a lights-out curfew for the girls. The boys had no such restriction, and Maedhros partially revised his understanding of the boys-only late-night fireside chats upon receiving this information. It didn’t seem entirely fair that the girls couldn’t stay up and smoke and talk, if they wanted to.)
But as he pondered the thought of a boy and a girl alone, at night, Maedhros felt a sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach. He had so often seen Elemmírë at Fingon’s side. She was the prettiest girl at camp, after all. She had only grown objectively prettier over the past weeks, as her skin tanned to a golden brown, her hair lightening to cornsilk in the summer sun. On beach day, she had worn a two-piece orange-and-pink plaid bathing suit, with little bows at the shoulders. Most of the boys were struck dumb. She was game to get buried in the sand, she swam gracefully in the ocean, and she started up a chicken-fight tournament, which had nearly every boy scrambling for a turn to hold her on his shoulders.
Fingon was good-looking, fun to be around, and bold. He was great as the anchor in chicken-fights. He had irritated Maedhros at first, it was true. But the more time he spent with him, Maedhros had to admit that Fingon wasn’t so bad after all. He had a way of getting under a man’s skin, even if you were determined not to let him. And although he was just a first-year, it was clear all the girls liked him. Of course, he would be the type to try and sneak into someone’s dorm room, if he really liked them back. Fingon wasn’t afraid of anything.
Maedhros looked around and couldn’t find him anywhere. Not in the mess hall, and later, not among the first-year boys in physics class. He must have gotten himself and Elemmírë kicked out of camp. Careless, indeed.
Maedhros was offended on Elemmírë’s behalf, honestly. Yes, that was why he was so preoccupied. Sure, he didn’t feel the same way about her as the other boys seemed to. But she was a nice enough girl, and she didn’t deserve to be treated like that. To have some hormonal boy come crawling into her bed in the middle of the night! Just imagine!
Well, maybe it had been her idea, Maedhros reconsidered. Maybe she had wanted it. She was bold, too. Maybe she had whispered to Fingon, come to me after dark, I want you, I’ll leave the window open for you. Who could say no to that? Maybe she had waited for him in her twin bed, in pink flannel pajamas, hair down, lights off, so that they could only see each other in the starlight streaming through the open windows. How could Fingon resist? The idea made Maedhros’s skin twitch in a way he couldn’t allow, not in the middle of the day, not in front of other people.
When Fingon appeared at the doorway of the physics classroom, half an hour late and sheepish, Maedhros was so relieved. He grinned at Fingon, who slipped into the seat next to him, head down, avoiding his father’s disapproving gaze.
“What happened?” Maedhros whispered, unable to stop himself.
Fingon shrugged. “Overslept,” he replied.
Fingolfin cleared his throat, and both boys promptly looked down at their notes.
Maedhros scribbled in his notebook and slid it over to Fingon. I heard someone got kicked out—caught in a girl’s room. Thought maybe it was you.
Fingon read the note and scribbled back a reply. My roommate, it said. He was the only one with a working alarm clock.
Maedhros couldn’t help laughing out loud. He was giddy. Poor Elemmírë. Poor Fingon’s roommate.
One late summer evening, as the camp was drawing to a close, everyone, teachers and all, gathered on the log benches of the outdoor amphitheater for the annual talent show. Each of the remaining five girls had been successfully paired off. No longer clumped together in a protective squadron, they were instead spread throughout the crowd, sitting with their sweethearts, holding hands. Glorfindel had won the pretty brunette, although judging by his awkward posture and the swiveling of his head to scan the crowd, he didn’t seem entirely sure what to do with her. Maedhros caught his eye and gave him a thumbs-up in encouragement.
There were funny acts, musical acts, and acts that Maedhros hoped would end quickly. The boys acting as emcees performed short skits between the acts, each impersonating a different professor, who chuckled good-naturedly from the audience. For one skit, one boy had borrowed a cotton shirtdress, put a mop on his head, and used a high-pitched falsetto to play Fingolfin’s wife. Maedhros’s eyes about popped out of his head when he saw the boy appear onstage like that, and he briefly worried, but it seemed everyone knew it was all in fun. It was all right for a boy to wear a dress, as long as everyone knew it was just a big joke.
Three boys sang in doo-wop harmony, snapping along to the beat. A girl danced an elegant ballet solo. Ecthelion played his flute. A boy performed an acrobatic routine, showing off dizzying backflips and no-hands forward aerials. Maedhros thought, as the boy walked offstage on his hands, he was probably the best of the show.
The emcees said that there was just one more performance before the big camp singalong. The daylight had hung on as long as it could, but the nights were coming faster, as the summer waned. The valley was famous for its pink sunsets. Every evening, as the Sun dropped low in the western sky, its light traveled through the atmosphere, refracting upon the bluffs that towered over the valley. The rocky faces of the mountains were briefly illuminated with glorious pinks, oranges, golds, and reds, until the Sun disappeared under the horizon.
When Fingon approached the stage, guitar in hand, he was drenched in the light of that golden-pink sunset. He sat, tuned his guitar, and beamed at his audience. His eyes swept the crowd and caught Maedhros, who could not breathe.
Fingon first sang a short funny song, accompanied by two friends on fiddle and hand drum. The song, about a man who married his aunt so his children were his own cousins, had everyone laughing. Fingon had a soulful voice and was naturally charming.
Maedhros thought the act was over. Fingon’s friends took their bows and left the stage, but Fingon himself remained seated. He said, “Folks, if you’ll allow me, I’d like to sing one more,” then began to strum a slow, steady chord progression. Someone whistled their approval.
Fingon’s voice was warm honey, slow and sweet, sinking low in the melody. The song itself was simple, hymnlike, with a chorus about crossing a wide river in a boat that could carry two. The song wrapped around Maedhros like a blanket. As he listened, his face burned, the achingly romantic lyrics filling his chest with longing. Maedhros could not tear his eyes away. He watched Fingon’s mouth as he sang about how he could not cross the water and desired a love as deep as the deep blue sea. He was golden, he was beautiful, he was impossible.
Suddenly their eyes met again, and Maedhros was pinned like a liar. Fingon’s lips turned up ever so slightly as he finished the last verse and returned to the chorus, singing one last time about his love, voice low and rasping, and then he strummed the final chords, fading into silence before the spell was broken by thunderous applause.
The last day. Everyone was milling about, exchanging farewells. The girls sobbed, hugging each other and promising to stay in touch. No few of the boys looked on the verge of tears, too. Some parents had driven out to collect their children. Maedhros was taking the bus back west, leaving any minute now. He had already stowed his trunk in the luggage bay and was wandering around saying final good-byes. He promised to write Glorfindel and Ecthelion, who both gave him hugs and only hassled him a little for being a jerk all summer.
“So, this is it, then,” Maedhros said when Fingon approached. Fingon and his father were driving back to Tirion together. Fingolfin was somewhere nearby, thanking everyone for their hard work. The day before, he had pulled Maedhros aside, after Maedhros had presented his project on the magnitude of Nénar. He told Maedhros that he had done wonderful work, the best of the group, and he would happily help set him up with summer fellowships and eventually write him a letter of recommendation when he was ready to apply to graduate school.
“Or,” Fingolfin had said, “You can just come straight to Tirion, I’d take you as a student in a heartbeat.” Maedhros took this compliment like the gift it was, folded it up in his mind, and set it aside to savor later. He wanted to bask in the light of Fingolfin’s approval as long as he could.
On the last day, Fingon smiled at him, a little wistful, his eyes crinkling up at the corners. “Well, I guess it’s good-bye. It’s been real,” he said.
Maedhros just couldn’t stop looking at Fingon. He could not find the right words, afraid of what would come out of his mouth if he started speaking openly. Behind them, the bus driver closed the luggage bay doors. Maedhros reached out for a handshake, and Fingon grasped his hand in his own, warmly.
“You know, your hair,” Fingon said, not quite meeting his eyes. “It’s getting long. It’s nice. I like it.” He ducked his head, the words lingering in the air.
Maedhros had been working on growing his hair out into a shag. It curled over his ears and brushed the nape of his neck. He reached up, awkwardly fluffing it, and smiled sheepishly. “Almost long enough to braid in ribbons,” he joked.
Their hands were still clasped.
Fingon looked up quickly at that, a gleam in his eyes. “Now there’s an idea,” he said. “Oh—I almost forgot. Um, this is for you,” he said, pulling out a small brown-paper-wrapped package.
“Er—thanks. Hey, just try and stay out of trouble, all right?” Maedhros said, his voice faltering, and he finally turned away. He opened the package as he walked over to the waiting bus. The other bus-riders had already boarded, waving and calling out through the open windows.
Maedhros unwrapped the brown paper, revealing its contents: a photographic plate. One of the ones Fingon had ruined, back at the start of the summer, when he had turned on the overhead light and exposed Maedhros’s work. For a moment, Maedhros froze, wondering if this was a cruel prank. Then he took a closer look.
The original image, overexposed and ghostly, remained. Over it, Fingon had etched the seven stars of the Remmirath, along with the word SORRY, his initials, and the year. The etching caught the light, silvery in the sun. The plate was cold and smooth in his hand, except for the carved lines, which he traced with his fingertips.
There was gentleness and intimacy in the gift. Fingon must have saved the plate that day, after Maedhros lost his temper. He had kept it for weeks, stored it somewhere safe, perhaps wrapped in soft cloth, like one of his own t-shirts, to protect it from damage. After their canoe trip, he had carefully etched in the stars, the letters and numbers, his own initials. He’d given Maedhros something that he could take back with him, a tangible, lasting memento not just of the summer, but of something else, too.
Maedhros’s heart beat like a drum in his chest.
Before he could even think about it, Maedhros turned back. He heard the bus driver grumbling “Hey!” at him, but he didn’t stop. He jogged back over to Fingon, who hadn’t moved.
“Hey, this is really—this is swell,” Maedhros told him, holding up the etched plate in his left hand. “Thank you. Wait—hang on,” he said, fumbling in his knapsack for a paper and pen. He scribbled down his address and handed it to Fingon. Their fingertips brushed against each other. “You should write me. I mean, if you want,” he said, his face flushing.
Fingon’s smile was brilliant and sincere. “Of course, here, let me.” He wrote down his address as well. Maedhros clutched it alongside the plate. He reached out to grasp Fingon’s hand again, one last time, and they were both slow to let go. Maedhros finally pulled away when he saw Fingon’s father watching them.
After he finally boarded the bus, it started heading down the road, out of the sun-drenched valley, toward home. Maedhros had to close his eyes to shut out the noise of the other boys and the outside world. The thing knocking at his heart had become too persistent, too loud to ignore. He had to let it out, lest it smother him from the inside. His breathing had grown rapid, his heartbeat quickened, and he finally let down the walls that had been holding it back, the seismic wave pouring through him, knocking him over, breathless and longing and gasping.
Notes:
Acknowledgments and thanks: Shadow (daughterofshadows) for endless support and beta reading, Anna (IdleLeaves), and the rest of the TRSB25 and SWG writing sprints regulars.
The science camp is based on a real-world Summer Science Program based in the Ojai Valley, California, in the late 1950s. Many details including the asteroid project, photographic plate exposure disaster, and the confusing consequences of going co-ed, come directly from alumni accounts.
The setting of this story is geographically nonsensical. The Calacirya is based on the Ojai Valley but is not where Tirion is located. Do not fret about it.
Speaking of Tirion: though it isn’t an exact copy, Tirion, the city, is meant to be roughly analogous to Boston, Massachusetts, and Tirion, the university, is meant to be an amalgamation of Harvard and MIT.
A good source for historical astronomy is The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars, Dava Sobel, 2016.
Ecthelion has read the Arda version of the 1962 environmental exposé Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson, which is said to have launched the modern-day environmental movement in the United States.
Cosmic background radiation, the structure of DNA, plate tectonics, the race to the moon, and the theory of black holes: all of these camp lectures were major real-world discoveries or subjects of great interest in the 1950s and 1960s.
Interferometric radio telescope arrays were first developed in the 1940s. No one has ever built a thousand-dish array.
Much of Fëanor’s dialogue on the “golden age of physics” is directly quoted from the Atomic Heritage Foundation’s “Voices of the Manhattan Project,” specifically the oral histories about Enrico Fermi. Neither Finwë nor Fëanor is meant to be a direct analogue to Fermi, but some of his characteristics are relevant.
So, there are obviously parallels between the “Ezellohar Project” as I’ve written it here, and the real-world Manhattan Project. This is not the main point of this story. Suffice it to say that, for the purposes of this story specifically, you have enough information from this chapter to understand the circumstances.
Many of my astronomical terms are taken from Kitt Otter’s The Stars That Varda Made.
Fingon's first talent show performance is lightly based on the novelty song "I'm My Own Grandpa." Though even in the Silmarillion, I was unable to find consanguineous marriages quite like that one.
Fingon’s second song is a one-man rendition of “Water is Wide” from the 1997 Lilith Fair. This next note is critically important for understanding my character interpretations for this fic. I took a long time to consider the matter very seriously, and Fingon is, spiritually speaking, Jewel.
Chapter 3: Spectrum
Summary:
Maedhros reads poetry, studies abroad in Beleriand, and learns about pulsars. He also meets Finrod and Andreth. Fëanor develops a new and unusual obsession.
Notes:
This chapter earns the Mature rating. Content warnings: Drunk, otherwise consensual, sex. Some might find Maedhros to be a little (period-typical, non-maliciously) biphobic.
As usual, cultural and historical references are explained in endnotes for those who enjoy that kind of thing.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
The Formenos Institute of Technology
Maedhros was surprised to learn that college wasn’t actually hard after all. Everyone had said he would be sweating through his entire first year: the teachers at Formenos High, the admissions counselor on the campus tour, even the Dean, speaking to the whole student body at Convocation on the first day of fall term. Everyone warned that he wasn’t as smart as he thought he was, just wait, he’d see.
By the third or fourth week, Maedhros had decided all those warnings were simply artifacts of well-placed Formtech propaganda. If they got the freshmen worked up about how hard everything is, then they’d feel better about themselves when they realize they can actually handle it.
Every freshman at Formtech took the same prescribed courses: a full year each of calculus, physics, chemistry, and computer science. Nobody declared a major until the end of the year, at the earliest. They were allowed one elective per quarter, which most students used to knock out the social science and humanities requirements. Get those out of the way early, so you could focus on the real courses later.
Maedhros expected to hate his first-quarter humanities course. He’d misread the registration instructions, shown up late, and had to choose between the only two remaining options: feminist theory and something called “The Literature of Initiation.” The course catalog described it as “the passage in an individual’s life from innocence to experience, and the consequent emergence of a new identity during a critical period of confrontation, testing, and conversion.”
Maedhros didn’t know what any of that meant, but it had to be better than feminist theory.
It ended up being his favorite class.
Professor Palacendo was a poet by calling. On the first day of class, he entered the room without ceremony, turned off half the fluorescent overhead lights, and began reciting, from memory, a poem about paths untrodden and manly attachment. His voice was what arrested Maedhros right there, in his seat—low and melodious, the very sound an enchantment. It felt to Maedhros that the words themselves mattered less than the power put into them, the rolling free verse a delight to hear, not lofty or unreachable, but conversational, equally drawing him in to its cadence and reassuring him that all was well, he belonged here, this was a place where he could be seen and heard, outside of the clamor of conformity and competition in the college halls outside the room.
Over the course of the term, Dr. Palacendo introduced his students to a dizzying array of poetic forms, written on topics that Maedhros blushed to see spoken of openly anywhere—let alone in a classroom! In high school, poetry had bored Maedhros to tears. He’d dutifully memorized the long, rhyming stanzas in archaic primitive Elvish, recited them upon request, then promptly forgotten them.
Not so in this class. They read poetry that celebrated “comradeship,” “the new husband’s kiss,” phrases that Maedhros read with his heart in his throat. They studied beat poetry that had led to a bookstore owner’s arrest and imprisonment for obscenity. They read lyric poetry, surviving only in fragments, written by a Minyarin woman of antiquity, vivid and intimate with desire.
When the quarter ended, Maedhros finally gathered the nerve to visit the professor during office hours. Dr. Palacendo closed the door behind him with a click and offered a cup of tea. The office was dim, as the blinds were drawn shut against the beating sun, the room lit by a couple of amber lamps. Books lined the shelves, shoved in every which way, some new, some old, titles faded and hardly readable; books on poetry, philosophy, literary criticism; books in languages and scripts Maedhros didn’t recognize at all. The air smelled of bergamot and old paper, and it was quiet enough to hear the clink of their ceramic teacups, the soft creak of wood as they settled into their chairs.
They sat facing each other, the professor patient, waiting for Maedhros to speak.
He wasn’t entirely sure why he was there. The silence stretched, suspended on a string. The space between them was narrow, the arms of the chair boxing him in. He was aware of everything: the spicy scent of the professor’s cologne, the way his long, elegant fingers curled around the teacup, the proximity of his knees to Maedhros’s own.
“I loved your class,” Maedhros admitted, sitting up straight, the cup warm in his hands. “I wish I could take it again next term.”
The professor smiled kindly. “I do teach other literature seminars, you know! There’s one on the Amanyarin literary tradition, and another on the great poets of Beleriand, if you read Sindarin.”
Maedhros hesitated. “Well, I’m afraid I’ve already met my humanities distribution requirement.”
Dr. Palacendo sat back and sighed. “Ah, so that’s all the poetry you need, then? I half-expected a more broad-minded attitude from you, though I suppose I shouldn’t have. It is Formenos, after all.”
“I still need to take my social science,” Maedhros explained, feeling a flicker of defensiveness. “And my parents want me to take electrical engineering for my last elective.”
“Yes, parents are very wise,” the professor agreed. “And who would dare champion poetry over the utilitarianism of engineering?”
Maedhros wasn’t sure how to respond. If he didn’t know better, he might have thought the professor was gently mocking him. The smile was still there, but it no longer seemed entirely kind, containing a hint of—pity, perhaps? Or something else.
“Well, if you aren’t here to discuss next term, and if you aren’t here to argue about your grade—which I would find hard to believe, you’re the only one in the class with an A-plus—then I must wonder what you’re here for. You’ve piqued my interest. What can I do for you?”
Maedhros swallowed and set down his tea. His stomach churned, but when he spoke, his voice came out clear and steady.
“I was wondering if you had any suggestions on… how to find more poems like the ones we read in class?”
The professor leaned back in his chair, and looked Maedhros over from head to toe, slowly. A tingle crept up Maedhros’s spine. It was a leisurely gaze, neither clinical nor paternal. Maedhros let it slide over him, his loose hair, the line of his shoulders, the long stretch of his legs where they crossed at the ankle. Yes. This was why he had come.
It hadn’t been as obvious in class, but Maedhros had sensed the professor’s eyes on him before. He couldn’t remember anyone ever looking at him that way, like he was an object of consumption, ready to be plated up and cut into bites. Not just admired, but set out for the professor’s private, perilous appetite. Maedhros felt the rush of adrenaline in his mouth, the hair on the back of his neck, the molten alertness flooding his veins. There was a part of him that wanted to flee, remain whole, unspeared; there was a part of him that wanted to know what it would feel like to be devoured.
“I suppose I could recommend some literary journals,” Dr. Palacendo said. He maintained eye contact a measure too long before turning to rifle through his desk. “As we learned when we studied the Beats, there’s a certain danger in being found with some types of literature. Obscenity is no small matter in Aman, we’re a bit behind the rest of the world on that front.”
“We are?” Maedhros asked, genuinely puzzled. Were there places where obscenity was perfectly fine?
The professor turned back and placed a magazine—no, a literary journal, he’d called it—into Maedhros’s hands.
“You’ll take care to use discretion where you read this,” he said. “And—you’ll not tell anyone where it came from.”
Maedhros looked down at the title and cover art.
Well. The professor hadn’t exaggerated about the need for discretion. If anyone was about to be arrested for obscenity, it was the two of them.
Heat rose in Maedhros’s face, as he flushed from the tips of his ears to his collarbones.
“I believe this is what you’re asking for, isn’t it?” Dr. Palacendo asked, lifting one gray, distinguished eyebrow.
A hot, dreadful thrill bloomed in Maedhros’s belly.
“Of course,” the professor continued, as if Maedhros had already confirmed it, “even here, in a place like, oh, downtown Formenos, one can find, if one knows where to look, certain havens. Specialty bars. Private clubs, for—bohemians, let’s say. Appreciators of poetry.”
He leaned forward, rolling his chair ever so slowly closer to Maedhros, until their knees were nearly touching. “It can be difficult for a young person to find such places,” he said softly, “without someone to show them the way.”
Maedhros’s mouth was dry. He was fairly sure they weren’t talking about poetry anymore. His breath was shallow, and he could feel his pulse throbbing throughout his body. The professor wasn’t being terribly subtle: the suggestion in his voice, the closeness, the steady eye contact, all pointed in one direction. Maedhros was being chosen. He imagined, for a second, what it might feel like to choose back, and felt a dizzying swoop in his stomach. What if he leaned forward and closed the space? What if he let their knees brush? He could return the intensity of the professor’s gaze with his own youth and virility—that was the point, wasn’t it? To serve in the role of the disciple, to learn the body of another man in the same manner he had learned the rhythm and thrust of poetry.
“Of course, as an educator, I’ve always considered it to be one of the profession’s deeper pleasures. Serving as a guide, helping navigate unfamiliar territory. It’s a joy, truly, to accompany someone on the road to self-discovery. The experience of initiation, one might say.” He winked.
Maedhros glanced, almost involuntarily, toward the closed door.
He was caught between curiosity, arousal, and a slow, rising panic. The professor was his father’s age—at least!—and yet was compelling in his very maturity, his elegance. He carried himself with the self-assuredness of a man who was at the top of his field and knew it. There was nothing sloppy or desperate about him, only commanding calm. He knew exactly what he was doing, circling Maedhros like a hawk.
Maedhros had fantasized before, of course. But the images he’d conjured had been safely abstracted: blurred figures in shadow, faceless men in dark hallways, rough touches behind closed doors. They were sensations, not people. This was different, a clear invitation, veiled only thinly in metaphor. He didn’t know whether he wanted to run, or to lean in and accept the professor’s flirtation, to let himself be claimed. Some reckless part of him wanted to see how far he could take it. What would happen if Maedhros said yes? And that uncertainty, more than anything, was what frightened him.
He looked down again at the magazine cover, his blush deepening. When he glanced back up, the professor’s eyes were still on his body, roving, unapologetic.
“I won’t speak about this to anyone. Thank you, sir,” Maedhros said, voice rough, as he zipped the illicit material into his bookbag and stood to leave.
In the next few months, he read and re-read the magazine until the pages began to loosen, then fell out entirely. And each time he spotted Dr. Palacendo on campus—on the quad, or outside the library—Maedhros turned and walked the other way, too afraid of what he might allow, how he might let himself turn into an object of prey, if he weren’t careful, if he didn’t hold himself at a distance from the thing that wanted him spread bare.
When Nerdanel was finally hired full-time at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Fëanor took the whole family out to celebrate at the new island-themed restaurant, the one with fake jungle vines, bamboo walls, and waiters in flowered shirts and seashell necklaces.
In practice, “taking the whole family out to celebrate” meant that Maedhros and Maglor each held a wriggling twin on their laps in the vinyl booth, trying to keep them from grabbing at the coconut-shell drinks and lit torches on the table. Maedhros silently cursed his menu choice of sticky pork ribs in pineapple glaze.
“A toast,” Fëanor began, raising his coconut. “To my brilliant wife. I always knew you could do it. To be the newest and brightest engineer at JPL is no small feat, but to be the first woman in history to claim that honor—you will illuminate a path to greatness for others to follow.”
They all raised their coconuts and toasted.
Maedhros, arms sore from restraining a toddler while picking at his dinner, rolled his eyes and muttered to Maglor, “Who cares about that, anyway? Isn’t she doing the same exact job as everybody else?”
He should have known Fëanor would hear him over the plink-plink of the waiter playing a ukelele.
His father set down his coconut with a clatter; it nearly rolled over.
“Who cares?” Fëanor repeated.
Maedhros winced. “I didn’t mean it like that. I’m glad she got the job, obviously. I just don’t see why it matters, being the first woman to do this or that.”
Maglor kicked him under the table. Even Celegorm and Caranthir—neither known for their manners—looked shocked at Maedhros’s backtalk and delighted by the spectacle to come.
Fëanor’s eyes glittered. Nerdanel, a girlish smile on her face, had eyes only for him.
“Let me tell you a story,” he began.
Curufin, seated beside him, straight-backed and wide-eyed, nodded, already eager.
Maedhros resigned himself to the ritual humiliation about to unfold.
“The story begins with a young woman—a girl, really,” Fëanor said. Ah, lecture time. “She arrived at the shores of our country alone, with nothing but what she carried in her pockets and the baby in her belly. Her husband had died on the journey. There was no way back. Forward was the only option.
“So, she walked from the docks of Tirion Harbor, through the streets of the city, hoping for a friendly face, someone who could help her. There was no one. It wasn’t a kind time to be a newcomer, let alone a single woman in trouble.
“After nightfall, she found herself at the university. Of course, she didn’t know what it was at the time. She had never seen a university in her life. She had never even seen a city like Tirion before. So, when she walked up to the front door of the only building whose lights were still on, knocked, and asked if they needed a maid, she had no way of knowing she was at the door of the Tirion Observatory.”
Maedhros had heard bits and pieces of this story before, but never in such detail. He was, despite himself, rapt with attention. He didn’t need to look to know that his brothers were, too.
“She was in luck, or perhaps more accurately, well pitied. The people of Tirion do love their charity cases. They put her to work the next day. She scrubbed the floors, wiped the windows, made tea for the astronomers and their students.”
Fëanor took a sip of his drink, pausing just long enough to make sure he had everyone’s attention, then went on. “Before long, the numbers on the ledgers caught her eye. She asked for one of the professors to explain them, and he did—logarithmic and trigonometric calculations, conversions between equatorial and ecliptic coordinates—assuming that of course, she wouldn’t understand a word.
“But Míriel Þerindë had always had an eye for detail, and a brain for numbers. She was sharp as a needle. Yes, that’s right! Míriel! Your grandmother,” he said, nodding at Curufin.
“And it wasn’t long before they realized she was wasted as a maid. They brought her on as a computer, which, at the time, meant a person who performed calculations by hand. And just like that, she was able to support herself, and the baby, when he came.”
“You!” Curufin said, hanging on to every word.
“Yes, that baby was me. And she, my mother, was the smartest woman I’ve ever known.” He paused, catching Nerdanel’s raised eyebrow and returning it with a wink. “Oh, all right, second smartest,” he corrected himself.
“Now, what do you think Míriel did next? After conquering the glass plates of the observatory, mapping the universe on behalf of the great astronomers of Tirion, who generously allowed her to solve their problems for them? Do you think she got to attend classes with the children of the elite? Write a thesis? See her name printed in the journals when they published their findings, the great discoveries of the age?”
Fëanor fixed Maedhros with a hard stare. “Well?”
Maedhros fidgeted in his seat. “No, she didn’t.”
“She did not! And why not?”
Because she was a poor single mother from the wrong side of the sea, and Tirion doesn’t let just anybody through their doors! Maedhros wanted to shout.
But he knew better than to talk back any more than he already had.
“Because she was a woman,” he said.
Fëanor sat back, his point nearly made. “Because she was a woman,” he agreed. “She was allowed to do the grunt work, of course. And serve their tea. But that was as far as they let her go. And when she died—”
Fëanor’s voice shook. He swallowed, and then he regained control. “And when she died, sick and alone, the sorry sons of bitches at the observatory didn’t even bother coming to her funeral. If it hadn’t been for Finwë, who remembered Míriel’s boy, and made sure I had the means to finish my education—” he paused, the weight of the hypothetical pressing on all of them, “who knows what might have become of me?”
The table was silent, except for Amrod, still giggling as he reached toward the flame of the tiki torch.
Fëanor knew how to pause for dramatic effect. He held the silence as long as he could, catching each of his boys’ eyes before turning back to Maedhros for the final blow.
“And that’s why it matters that your mother is the first female engineer at JPL, you ungrateful, spoiled brat.”
Nerdanel was soon consumed with work. The Space Race had entered its most fevered round yet. Doriath had beaten Aman by launching the first satellite, a humiliation the Calaquendi had yet to live down. Adding insult to injury, they had sent the first Elf into space, a silver-haired cosmonaut named Elu Thingol, who became an international celebrity. (His wife, Melian, was so beautiful, even Maedhros did a double take when he saw her photo in the papers.)
The next milestone was the Moon. Aman was determined not to suffer another disgrace. Under the President’s directive, the Amanyarin Space Administration launched test flights, dispatched probes, and endured setbacks—some of them fatal.
Fëanor had never shown enthusiasm for any government program, not in Maedhros’s memory. His time in the nuclear research program had shattered any trust he might have once had.
But when a fire during a ground test killed the entire crew of the first Tilion mission, Fëanor’s outrage at the Space Administration reached new heights. He was more than critical, he was livid, horrified that the astronauts had died so needlessly.
“What did they die for? Discovery? Science? No,” he told Maedhros. “They were pawns of the administration, caught up in their petty little game.”
Nerdanel listened calmly. “I thought that they were very brave.”
Fëanor scoffed. “Brave! What’s brave about it? Putting on a uniform and pretending to fly a little rocket just because some bureaucrat ordered you? Is it brave to get trapped behind a malfunctioning hatch and choke to death on the smoke because nobody thought that an inward-opening door might be a hazard in an emergency?”
“The design was flawed, yes,” Nerdanel agreed, “but that doesn’t make the astronauts any less brave. I think they were heroes. Doesn’t someone have to be the first to venture into the unknown, no matter how risky, no matter how unprepared?”
“For what? What’s the point? Don’t say scientific inquiry. Does anybody really believe that the Space Administration, or this President, cares about the wonder of space? Let me explain it to you again. It’s just about showing the rest of the world who’s got the biggest rocket.”
“Oh, and that’s you, right, Mister Big Rocket?” Nerdanel teased. (Maedhros cringed. Couldn’t they save it for when he wasn’t in the same damn room?)
Fëanor didn’t pick up what Nerdanel was putting down. “They were victims, not heroes,” he insisted.
“Well, I’m sorry you see it that way. Must be easy from your ivory tower, where if you make a mistake, the worst thing that happens is you have to publish a retraction!” Nerdanel’s volume rose, and Maedhros grew concerned.
“Calm down, you’re not working on doors,” Fëanor said.
“My friends are!” Nerdanel cried. “They’ll have to bear it for the rest of their lives, the knowledge that they built something that killed someone. I could easily make the same kind of mistake, Fëanáro. What would you say then? I’m just a pawn of the Man, too?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. You’re taking this too personally. And now you’re inventing scenarios and blaming me for things I never said!” Fëanor snapped.
Maedhros quietly got up and slipped away. At some point, the argument had stopped being about the astronauts who died in the Tilion fire. He wasn’t sure what it was about anymore, and he didn’t care to stick around and find out.
As Maedhros’s first year drew to a close, Fëanor refused to allow him to declare astronomy as his major.
“I don’t understand,” argued Maedhros. “You’re an astronomer. What’s the problem?”
“You aren’t ready. Few are, at your age, aside from the truly genius,” Fëanor said. His tone wasn’t unkind, but Maedhros felt the sting of the implication. “Astronomy is a soft major. You’ll have plenty of time to learn the constellations and the phases of the moon once you’ve completed your real education. Physics! That’s what you need. It will hammer your mind into shape like steel on an anvil. You’ll come out sharp as a sword’s edge in the end.
“Or shatter,” Fëanor added, as if it were an afterthought, but Maedhros knew better.
So, in his second year, Maedhros declared physics as his major and registered for quantum mechanics, electromagnetism and waves, atomic structure, sophomore mathematics, and another year of computer science. He still got to choose one elective each term.
Partly to provoke his father, he enrolled in a seminar on galaxies and radio sources.
His advisor told him that he didn’t have the proper prerequisites. Maedhros explained that he’d studied astronomy for three summers at the Calacirya and didn’t need the freshman intro course. His advisor looked annoyed, and began to argue that summer camp didn’t count, he still needed to meet the requirements.
Then Maedhros showed him his student ID, which carried Fëanor’s name.
Well, everyone knew Fëanor was a genius. Surely his son could be exempted from a few silly prerequisites.
Radio astronomy was still a new field. For thousands of years, the Eldar had loved the starlight, ever since they first awakened on the shores of Cuiviénen, as myth held. The stars that Varda made shone down on Arda, lighting the sky with their familiar glow. Yet beyond the visible sky, countless other celestial bodies, hidden in wavelengths beyond sight, had only recently begun to be revealed.
It was a common misconception that the Eldar could see light across the range of the electromagnetic spectrum. In truth, Eldarin eyesight was bound to the same narrow band of optical radiation as all other speaking peoples, the wavelengths between infrared and ultraviolet.
But there were ways to see beyond eyes.
While optical telescopes collected visible light, radio telescopes gathered invisible signals, static from the sky that opened a whole new way of seeing the universe.
Formtech owned one of the most advanced radio telescopes on the planet, an 85-foot dish nestled deep in the countryside to avoid interference from civilization.
One Saturday, a van took the class on a field trip out to see the radio telescope. It was unlike any of the large optical telescopes Maedhros had seen before, not like the one where he’d once viewed the remnants of the Doriath satellite’s rocket booster as a child, nor the one in the Calacirya Valley that he’d used to study the brightness of Nénar. The radio telescope was a huge, bright white bowl, isolated and remote, with a small control building where the equipment hummed.
The technician greeted them with a nod and a brief explanation of the equipment: receivers, amplifiers, control boards, long cables running everywhere. There was no eyepiece to look through, no elegant dome or polished lens. A central console held a simple set of speakers, crackling faintly.
The professor nodded to the technician, who adjusted a dial. The static shifted, then deepened.
A low, irregular thrum filled the room. Maedhros could feel it in his bones.
“This is the remnant of Wilwarin A,” the professor said. “A supernova that exploded over eleven thousand years ago—the brightest extrasolar radio source in the universe.”
“You’re hearing what the telescope hears, essentially,” the technician said. “Just static, to most ears. But over time, we develop an ear for celestial patterns.”
Maedhros stood very still, closed his eyes, and listened. A thrill passed through him, vibrating as though in tune with the supernova remnant. He imagined he could perceive something in that sound, the celestial pattern, the echo of a massive star tearing itself apart thousands upon thousands of years ago. He knew that only a tiny fraction of stars could end as supernovae—but with hundreds of billions of stars, who knew how many other remnants were still waiting to be discovered? Wilwarin A was thousands of years dead, but here it was, the brightest radio source in the sky.
The Fëanorian Equation
A year later, Fëanor refused to watch Tilion 11 land on the moon.
“Jingoistic theater,” he scoffed, and slammed his basement office door, disappearing into the dark.
A new flame of desire was burning in Fëanor’s restless heart. He had cast his gaze beyond the Sun and Moon, toward the farther reaches of the heavens.
Why, he began to wonder aloud, should we assume life is limited to our own planet? What of other worlds, far beyond the solar system, that might hold new and unimagined people? Why limit ourselves to the confines of Arda, or the dry, lifeless Moon?
Maedhros loved this line of thinking for one main reason: it really, really pissed off the religious fanatics. People who believed that Eru Ilúvatar had magically breathed the world into existence with a song and a word, then awakened the Elves, naked and conveniently partnered off, at the shores of Cuiviénen, did not care for scientists reminding them of several things: the fact that the world was, indeed, round and always had been; the evolution of species by natural selection; the fact that Elves, Men, and Dwarves were not each metaphysically distinct creations, but all of a kind, their differences cosmetic at most; and the Big Bang theory of the creation of the Universe.
They hated the idea that there might be intelligent life out there, on potentially countless planets, each having evolved under circumstances stranger than the creatures of Arda could ever imagine.
Fëanor wasn’t the only astrophysicist thinking about these questions. It was certainly a hot topic of the age; the Space Race had ignited imaginations to turn toward the skies, and alien invasions, interstellar confederations, and UFOs were all popular subjects of television shows and movies. Alien life had gone from being a child’s fantasy, the subject of comic books and Saturday morning cartoons, to a subject that serious people might talk about over drinks and cards.
But Fëanor was, almost certainly, the most eminent and distinguished figure in the field of astrophysics who spoke about aliens freely and openly.
His current obsession was the Fëanorian equation: a means to estimate N, the number of potential intelligent civilizations beyond Arda, civilizations one might be able to contact using radio communication. He had explained it to his sons, his fervor bright in his face, the pitch of his voice. Maedhros could not remember any project that had fascinated Fëanor so. Not since the summer of the Silmarils.
“Just think,” he had said, a terrible gleam in his eyes, “there could be hundreds of millions of worlds out there, waiting for us to make contact!”
To determine N, one first must estimate: the number of stars in the galaxy, the average number of planets orbiting each star, the fraction that could support life, the fraction that could evolve intelligence, and the lifespan of advanced civilizations. None of these figures could be calculated with any real precision; the methods ranged from scientifically grounded to pure speculation. Multiply the figures together, and the result is the total number of possible civilizations.
At first, Maedhros thought this was simply a theoretical exercise. A mathematical game, if you will, the kind that Fëanor had always liked to play with his sons, set them competing with each other, see who could come up with the best, most cleverly argued answer.
(For the curious: Maglor usually won a plurality of these games, outperforming his brothers on the metrics of creativity and cleverness. When the games were particularly mathematically diabolical, Caranthir was always the quickest to solve them. Curufin, though still years away from adolescence, was already catching up to his brothers, and, Maedhros expected, would be winning all the games in another few years. Maedhros himself hadn’t won since he was a child. He was graded on a different scale than the others, held to a different standard than all except, perhaps, Curvo, and Fëanor had never let Maedhros think, not once, that he was meeting that standard.)
But as time passed, and Fëanor locked himself deeper and deeper into his own mind, teasing out each variable in the equation, Maedhros realized: he was quite serious. He wasn’t entirely sure why Fëanor had become so enamored of the idea of communicating with extraterrestrials. He remembered Fëanor’s talk at the Calacirya, where he proposed the creation of a colossal interferometric radio array that could reach farther into the universe than anyone had ever thought possible.
Who was he trying to talk to, really?
Fëanor refused to admit the contradiction between his interest in extraterrestrial civilizations and his disdain for the Moon landing. Maedhros knew there was no purpose in trying to change Fëanor’s mind. His father’s apathy at Nerdanel’s accomplishments, however, had become a critical sore point. What had once been a partnership of minds was slowly straining, becoming distant.
Four days before the launch of the Tilion 11 rocket, Nerdanel packed up her bags. She was leaving Fëanor (therefore Maedhros, actually) in charge, and going to the Space Center to see it take off from Launch Pad A. “If this thing crashes, it won’t be my legs’ fault!” Nerdanel said brightly. She kissed Maedhros on both cheeks. As part of her work at the Jet Propulsion Lab, Nerdanel had designed shock-absorbing legs for the landing module, preparing it for rough, unknown terrain. After several successful practice missions, the landing module was ready for the real thing.
The three bravest astronauts of Aman were on their way to the moon, and Nerdanel would help them land.
The day Tilion 11 landed, the boys gathered around the television set and watched the historic moment live.
Nerdanel called home late that evening, after spending the day and half the night celebrating with the rest of the team and families at the Space Center. Maedhros and his brothers all congratulated her. Fëanor didn’t come out of the basement.
A part of Nerdanel had gone to the moon. Not her body, of course, but the sweat and time she had put into the landing legs, which carried the astronauts safely to their destination.
Maedhros wasn’t sure all of her would be coming home to Formenos.
That night, Maglor wrote a song about the moon landing. He called it “Magnificent Desolation,” and performed it live at the high school’s Battle of the Bands. He sang the lyrics over a backwards recording of the Tilion astronauts’ radio transmissions. The kids loved it.
A few months later, Maedhros found Celegorm reading a mimeographed pamphlet proclaiming WE NEVER WENT TO THE MOON, Caranthir hovering over his shoulder. He grabbed the pamphlet out of Celegorm’s hands.
“Hey!”
“Where did you even get this trash?” Maedhros asked, skimming the text.
Why didn’t the astronauts send visible messages from the Moon? It would of been easy to build a message in black sand or beam a lazer to Arda to prove they were there. Why are we supposed to believe they could only send radio signals?
“Dunno,” Celegorm said, folding his arms. Caranthir would not meet Maedhros’s gaze.
“You have to know, you can’t write a sand message on the Moon!” Maedhros said. “Please tell me you know that. They used a VHF band radio—short-range but strong, minimal distortion. It’s really simple.”
Celegorm shrugged, but Caranthir, at least, began to look embarrassed. Maedhros fixed him with a look.
“Moryo, I really, really need you to say you know that the Moon landing wasn’t faked,” Maedhros said. Caranthir gave a small, reluctant nod.
Celegorm sucker-punched Maedhros and lunged for the pamphlet. Maedhros barely flinched, and held it out of reach. Then he shoved Celegorm to the ground, kicked him in the ribs, and took the pamphlet to his bedroom.
The truth was, Maedhros found the conspiracy pamphlet quite funny. Someday, he thought, it might be considered a historical artifact. From a high shelf in his closet, he took out an old shoebox, where he stored keepsakes, including crayon drawings from the twins, movie ticket stubs, a matchbook from a downtown bar he’d fled after fifteen minutes, when his courage failed him, and Fingon’s letters. The pamphlet nestled in beside the other treasures.
Maedhros knew that his keepsake box’s contents were thin, insubstantial, like his life so far: neat, orderly, and terribly predictable. What had he ever done that was truly his own? Maedhros was dutiful, responsible, accomplished. Just as everyone had always expected. And he was sick of it.
What was the point of being such a role model for his brothers, when they hardly cared? Curufin had never needed Maedhros; he was so close to Fëanor, he might as well have been an artificial limb. Celegorm was and always would be a screwup no matter what anyone else did. But a part of Maedhros felt a stab of sickening envy: for Celegorm’s ability to rebel, to see the reasonable, measured path and say No, thank you!
And who decided that Maedhros was such a great role model in the first place? It hadn’t escaped him that even Maglor, dreaming and adventurous in his songs, was in the process of stifling his own ambitions, folding them up to meet Fëanor’s expectations. Maglor was talking about applying to Formtech, of all places, somewhere with no student life, no music classes, not even fraternities he could make fun of. Maedhros would be glad not to be alone, but he knew in his heart that Maglor was only considering Formtech to join him. And it might destroy him.
Well, at least Maglor had a passion. And it wasn’t too late for him. He could still run off to join a rock band. He still had time to apply to the state college, where he could play in the student union between classes. He could write lyrics in the margins of his course notes.
Maedhros, on the other hand, had no imagination. There was no alternate vision of his life he turned over in the dark, when everything else faded away. A dreamy summer almost-romance felt like the distant past now. Maedhros and Fingon exchanged letters, but Tirion was impossibly far, and it was equally impossible for Maedhros to imagine writing down the things he truly wanted to say.
The problem was, Maedhros couldn’t even picture it. What could he possibly hope for? How could things ever be different?
There had to be something else. A man had gotten on a rocket-ship and flown it to the Moon. How could Maedhros live with himself, if he couldn’t bring himself to step outside the confines of a place like Formenos?
He closed the lid and put the box back on the shelf. And he promised himself that next time he took it down, he would have something real to put inside.
Brithombar
While Maedhros pursued his studies, he was distantly aware of a spirit of radical upheaval rippling around the world. At other universities, students occupied administrative buildings to protest Amanyarin interventionism abroad. They organized boycotts in solidarity with farm workers and labor unions. Environmentalists joined forces with counterculturalists, feminists, and peaceniks to march in the streets, wearing hemp sandals held together by duct tape and hope, all for a better Arda.
The revolutionary spirit was even catching on at Formtech, although to nowhere near the extent it was blazing through other campuses. Formtech activists were earnest but mild, and mostly organized letter-writing campaigns with polite requests like vegetarian options in the cafeteria and recycling bins in the dorms.
The sexual liberation movement had overlooked them completely.
Nevertheless, Maedhros had never forgotten the conversation with Professor Palacendo, nor the sense of longing and desire it had imprinted upon him. He’d figured out where to get quarterly issues of that magazine, and he thought, more and more often, about what it might be like to leave Aman. The magazine printed shockingly graphic letters from readers, reviews of films he would never get to see in Formenos, and—most consequentially, for Maedhros—travel guides.
It seemed, if the magazine could be trusted, Dr. Palacendo was right about one thing. There were places that did not criminalize “obscenity” to the extent Aman did. Maedhros read about them, places men could go, pockets of freedom and hedonism tucked away all over Endórë, and particularly, in the most modern city of Beleriand.
Yes, Brithombar might offer just what he was looking for.
So, after winter break, Maedhros went to the student affairs office to inquire about studying abroad. He was given a flyer advertising the Brithombar language immersion program at University College, which also happened to be home to the best physics department in the Falas. Maedhros filled out an application right then and there. The flyer promised to broaden his horizons and expand his cultural literacy, but Maedhros had his own agenda.
Convincing his family proved easier than expected. Nerdanel blanched for a split second, likely aware of the burden that would fall upon her if Maedhros left. Her lips tightened before she put on an agreeable face and said, “But of course, darling.” His brothers’ reactions ranged from indifferent to desperately jealous. And Fëanor, well, he could hardly argue against Maedhros wanting to improve his Sindarin, could he? Besides, Fëanor was hardly even present these days. His body might still live in their house, but his mind drifted farther each day, consumed by the Fëanorian equation and the promises of faraway stars.
Maedhros wrote Fingon about his plans to go across the sea, promising to write again from his Brithombar address. Fingon wrote back with another one of his funny stories about his job. He was working as a driver for the fire department on the weekends. He hoped to get trained up as a full firefighter soon, but it was tricky, since Fingolfin wouldn’t let him work more than a few hours a week.
But wouldn’t you know it—in a grand twist of fate, Fingon’s cousin was headed to the exact same college in Brithombar as Maedhros this fall.
Finrod was a physics student, like Maedhros, but he was a philosopher at heart. Of greater urgency, he was, by the time he and Maedhros met at the Brithombar airport, on the cusp of his own sexual awakening.
Finrod clocked Maedhros immediately. He looked him up and down, winked, and said, “Oh, darling, we are going to have quite a year!”
Maedhros flushed, not expecting to be so easily sized up by a stranger. What exactly had Fingon told his cousin? But then again, Finrod had a way of making a friend out of a stranger within moments. Effortlessly confident, he delighted in new people. He set Maedhros at ease with his warmth.
As soon as they reached the University College gates, Finrod went to work. He went up the gruffest, sportiest, most heterosexual-looking man he could locate, affected the most rustic Amanyarin twang he could muster, and said: “Howdy! You’ve got to help me out. I’m new here, fresh out of the West. Me and my buddy wandered into a bar last week, and you wouldn’t believe the type of place it was. It was one of those—” he paused and looked around, as though worried someone would overhear, “—queer bars! Well, I never! I don’t remember the name, or where it was, though. I sure don’t want to end up there again." Finrod put on the most innocent-looking expression he could manage. "Do you reckon you might know what it was called?”
Finrod repeated the scheme a couple more times and before long, he had tracked down the exact neighborhood, street, and handful of pubs and nightclubs that promised anonymity and intimacy in equal measure.
The first night, though, he practically had to drag Maedhros along with him. Finrod wore a green velvet jacket over a paisley shirt, unbuttoned halfway down his chest, tight trousers, and patent platform shoes; he wore gold studs in each ear, and a long rope of gold and pearls glittered around his neck. At first, he grumbled at Maedhros’s understated head-to-toe black. Then he reconsidered and grinned, smoothing Maedhros’s shoulder-length hair out of his face. Finrod said, “Actually, I think I prefer you not trying too hard. I don’t think I could compete if you put in effort.”
The club terrified and electrified Maedhros. They had to sign up as members to get in, a legal formality, protecting the club from police raids. (Brithombar was progressive—but not that progressive.) Maedhros briefly despaired at writing his true name, then figured, who could find out, here, across the sea from everyone he knew? Unfamiliar, glittering rock music pulsed in the air, bass vibrating in his bones. The lights were dim and concealing, smoke swirling in a dreamlike haze. And the men were beautiful and self-assured. Maedhros couldn’t believe his eyes when he saw what some of them were doing with each other. Right there in the middle of the club!
Finrod didn’t hesitate. He abandoned Maedhros with a smirk and a twirl, swaying to the center of the dance floor. Within moments, he found a partner, a beefy, bearded Man who wrapped his arms around Finrod and drew him close, pressing in from thigh to chest. Finrod’s expression was rapturous. Maedhros blushed furiously and had to look away.
Later that night, Maedhros walked home alone.
The streets were quiet, empty. Maedhros could hear the river lapping gently at its banks. But inside Maedhros’s head, voices were screaming. Turn back, turn back, demanded one. Too much, too much, cried another. Try again, try again? offered a third.
The next morning, Finrod strode in the university gates in the same clothes from the night before, rumpled and pink with satisfaction. He grabbed Maedhros by the arm, sat him down, and launched into an explicit account of his evening. He spared no detail.
Finrod made it all sound so easy. Maedhros didn’t have to say a word, but Finrod understood. Like a lab instructor, he broke down the procedure, leaving little to imagination or chance. You can do this, here are the steps, it’s out there for the taking, if you want it.
Maedhros wanted.
The following Friday night, when Finrod announced they were going out again, Maedhros knew what to expect. He fortified himself with three shots of whiskey. And Finrod was absolutely right about one thing.
It was terribly easy.
The next several hours were a whirlwind. Maedhros followed Finrod to the dance floor, careful to keep just enough distance between them to avoid sending the wrong message, and within moments, had his pick of admirers.
Maedhros gave in to it, the pull of being wanted, the touch of large hands on his arms, his waist, humid breath and stubble against his neck. He was spun about, passed from one man to another, and, when he paused for breath, sweating and euphoric, drinks were handed to him like offerings, cold glass pressed into his hand. His intoxication was perfect, loosening the hold of sensible, intellectual Maedhros, dissolving him in pure sensation. He had the feeling of floating, as though gravity no longer held him. Every part of him that had been starved was feasting, his lust multiplying with the promise of reciprocation.
After he’d had enough of the preliminaries, Maedhros made a selection and kissed a soft pair of lips in a corner of the club. Then a sweet, silver-haired Sinda, whose name he would never know, took Maedhros home, clasped his hands, and begged him to fuck him in adorably bad Quenya.
The first time was over almost before it began, so they did it again. Maedhros made himself slow down and pay attention. The Sinda moaned his appreciation and whispered soft words in his language Maedhros couldn’t understand.
Maedhros lay there after, feeling dazed and invincible. Was it really this simple?
Within months, Finrod and Maedhros proceeded to fuck their way through every interested Elf, Man, and Dwarf in the Village.
Maedhros fucked a dark-haired Grey-elf with the voice of an angel, a freckled Man whose mustache tickled, and a Noldo who looked angry the entire time and kicked him out as soon as he came. He knelt in the alleyway behind the club to suck off a Man who then drew him up and kissed him deeply. Just like that, teasing Maedhros’s tongue with his own, as though Maedhros’s mouth hadn’t just been—well!
He danced obscenely, rubbed someone off with his body right there on the dance floor, and exchanged mutual alleyway hand jobs with Elves who had fear and guilt in their eyes, one of whom begged the Valar for forgiveness. He let a shockingly hairy Dwarf in head-to-toe leather bend him over the bathroom sink and take him, which made him finish embarrassingly fast and call out the name of Eru Ilúvatar, atheism be damned.
Maedhros discovered that if he stood tall, letting prospective partners see his full height, the men who approached wouldn’t top him. So, when he was in the mood for that particular act, he learned to slouch beguilingly in a barstool, eyes downcast, legs spread. He perfected a shy smile. He could catch anyone.
In support of expanding their horizons, Finrod and Maedhros decided to expand their wardrobes. Finrod had brought a sizeable collection of attire from home, including a jewelry box whose contents made Maedhros salivate, but the streetwear in Brithombar was far more daring than even the most fashion-forward parts of Aman. They found little boutiques that sold men’s clothing in dazzling colors, with details that would have been called sissy in Aman: ruffles and elaborate embroidery, jewel-toned velvets and silks, rhinestones and frills, creamy blouses with lace jabots. Maedhros began his own jewelry collection, favoring copper bracelets and necklaces, medallions on long chains, rings of carnelian, tiger’s eye, onyx, and at his most daring, a copper filigree circlet he perched atop his hair. At a shoe store, Finrod insisted that no, Maedhros was not too tall for the emerald-green boot with a blocky heel that he couldn’t stop eyeing every time they passed.
One weekday evening, after a brutal physics study session, Maedhros convinced Finrod to pierce his ears with a needle. After the bleeding stopped, he couldn’t stop admiring the sparkling studs against his red hair.
Finrod established early on that he preferred men who were unfeeling rogues, hairy brutes, or older than his father, and ideally, all three. The kind of men who would call him “chicken” affectionately and delight in his flamboyant loveliness, then leave him in pieces. Finrod had no reservations about casual encounters, mind, but he simply fell in love far too easily. He kept his paramours’ phone numbers in a little black book, pressed gifts of flowers between the pages of a heavy dictionary, wrote and sent ardent poems. He suffered heartbreak after heartbreak as a kind of ecstasy in itself and went back hungry for more.
Maedhros, on the other hand, found most of his trysts pleasant enough. But he drew the line at repeat performances. After completing the act, his interest in a man faded entirely, curiosity and lust sated. Over time, he developed an instinct for the kind of fellow who might demand too much. If someone kissed him too gently, asked him to spend the night, or tried to hold his hand, he shook them off and made his exit. His Sindarin improved rapidly, but he pretended otherwise, so he could act as though he didn’t understand if someone asked him for a phone number.
Just once, he made the mistake of telling a man, after they fucked, that he was only in town for the weekend. The guilt was hard to swallow when Maedhros saw the same man at the club the very next Saturday. His face was shattered.
That was when Maedhros suggested to Finrod that they check out the bathhouses.
At a certain point, it seemed inevitable that Maedhros would attempt to seduce Finrod himself. The idea came upon him in a flash; he hadn’t planned or schemed about it.
One weekday afternoon, in the reading room, empty but for the two of them, they were smoking and arguing convivially about the relative merits of acoustic versus electric guitar. They sat close on the sofa, sharing the joint and touching casually, as they often did. A cozy fire snapped and popped in the fireplace.
Finrod theatrically flipped his shining hair behind his shoulder, exposing a long column of throat. Maedhros’s brain short-circuited. He had noticed Finrod, of course. Anyone could see he was special, all golden hair and long legs. Maedhros had never before felt the desire to touch him, yet now, it was all he could think about. He could not stop staring at Finrod’s mouth, wondering what he tasted like, whether he would be sweet and light or turn rough and demanding in bed. Finrod had the hands of a musician, precise and strong, and Maedhros could imagine what they might feel like on his own bare skin, slipping under his shirt to stroke his back, gripping him in the throes of passion. He would want to be held after, Maedhros knew. Finrod was soft and smelled like ink and velvet; Maedhros wouldn’t mind holding him.
Maedhros was just merry enough from the pot and the heady feeling of freedom to kiss him.
Finrod blinked and laughed, and drew him in for another kiss, and then another and another. They kissed and laughed and kissed and laughed some more, until Maedhros tried to unbutton Finrod’s trousers, and Finrod covered his hand, gently pulled it away, and said, “Let’s not spoil it.” Then he kissed him again to laughing.
Later, an apologetic Finrod explained that he wished it were otherwise, but Maedhros just wasn’t his type. This was, as far as Maedhros could tell, true; he was neither hairy nor elderly. He did not take it personally. In fact, he admired Finrod’s ability to reject him without making it awkward.
Much, much later, Maedhros came to understand the depth of the bond between the sons of Fingolfin and Finarfin, cousins who had grown up like brothers. And it hit him: even if he had sported a beard as thick as shag carpet, Finrod would have stayed true to the principle of brotherly loyalty, and stayed Maedhros’s hand.
Laws and Customs
After a few months, the thrill of going out every weekend began to dull. Maedhros didn’t give up the bathhouses entirely, but he more often chose to socialize with all his clothing on. There was always something to do at the college: lectures, demonstrations, game nights in the common rooms. He went to avant-garde, genderbent student performances of the classic Falathrim plays, he got lost in a hedge-garden maze, he rowed down the river in the drizzling rain. He was, he realized, getting the Sindarin cultural immersion he had promised his parents.
He became a regular at the dodgy college pub. Located at the bottom of Staircase Nine in the dorms, the place offered exactly three drinks: a light lager, a dark ale, and a cider. It smelled of damp, every table wobbled, and the leather of the chairs was worn and split. It was a fine place to sit with a book or a couple of friends at the end of a long day.
Maedhros now found it funny, looking back, at how overwhelmed he had been by the Falas, especially the constant din of native Sindarin speakers. He’d wondered if he’d learned anything at all in high school. But now, halfway through the year, he had grown used to it. Sometimes, he felt like he could even think in Sindarin.
Of course, it helped to be a few pints deep.
It was at the college pub that Finrod introduced Maedhros to Andreth, a friend from his philosophy class. Like Maedhros and Finrod, Andreth was studying in Brithombar for the year, far from her home in Dorthonion. She could out-drink Finrod any night of the week and loved to wait until he was lightly pickled before lobbing him a hot-button philosophical or political question, but on this particular night, everyone was talking about the Iathrim cosmonauts stranded in space, awaiting their deaths. Captain Mablung and Beleg Cúthalion had quickly become household names. Two days after the launch of their rocket-ship, an oxygen tank exploded, venting its contents into the void. Now, not only would they never reach the moon, but their immediate survival was in doubt, let alone any hope of safe return to Arda.
Finrod ordered them another round. He’d brought a copy of the Evening Standard and was updating his friends on the front-page news.
“They’ve shut down all non-essential systems,” Finrod said, shaking his head in sympathetic horror. “Can you imagine? Up there all alone, in the dark.”
Maedhros could not fathom it. “I’d rather just end it,” he said. He tried to picture the scene, the crushing shroud of despair. How could the cosmonauts bear it? The news reported that they had taken refuge in the lunar module, using it as a lifeboat, but they were low on oxygen, heat, and room to move. How could you force yourself to keep fighting, try different solutions, knowing that with every passing second, your resources depleted further? And your own mind, dizzy with oxygen deprivation, would begin to fail you? One could understand becoming weary and yearning for release from the labor of living. Well. There were a good many reasons Maedhros never wanted to become an astronaut.
While Maedhros drifted, Finrod and Andreth had moved on to a different subject, which seemed to be the vast spectrum of sexual identity. Maedhros’s attention snapped back when he heard Finrod call himself bisexual. “Now hold on,” Maedhros said, sitting up straight. “What was that word?”
Finrod explained, repeating himself in Quenya, for good measure.
Maedhros frowned, unconvinced. “I’ve never seen you look at a woman twice,” he said.
Finrod shook his head in exasperation. “That’s because I’m loyal to my girlfriend,” he said with a straight face.
Maedhros, now rounding the corner from tipsy into unwisely inebriated, choked on his ale. “Your what?”
Andreth rolled her eyes. “I’ve heard this one before. Your girlfriend, who lives in Valinor?”
“Oh, I had one of those for a while,” Maedhros said. “Very convenient!”
“She does, though,” Finrod said.
Maedhros and Andreth exchanged looks.
“Her name is Amarië, and I am ever faithful. I only sleep with men,” Finrod explained.
Andreth cackled. “Oh, that’s fine, then!”
Maedhros tried to wrap his mind around it. “So, you like men and women equally—”
“Maybe not equally, but yes, that’s the idea,” Finrod said.
“—and you’re faithful to your girlfriend,” Maedhros continued, “because she knows you fuck men and she says, all right, my love, just don’t stick it in another woman?”
Finrod shifted, visibly uncomfortable.
“And what do your Laws and Customs say about—this arrangement?” Andreth asked through giggles. She loved to catch Finrod, and by extension, all Eldar, in a hypocrisy.
“There are many commentaries, disputations, and exegeses on the Laws and Customs,” Finrod began, “which offer different views of the meaning of the act of bodily union. The most widely known is the orthodox tradition, which holds that bodily union always creates the bond of marriage.”
Most people became their truest selves when they drank, Maedhros believed. In Finrod’s case, this meant his “man of the people” mask slipped. His intellectual snobbery came out in full and glorious form. Maedhros could hold his own in ordinary Sindarin conversation, but Finrod’s command of technical philosophy strained the limits of his vocabulary.
Finrod leaned forward, the glint in his eye foreshadowing a dramatic twist. “But if you compare the most recent translations of the historical texts, they suggest the original meaning may have been that bodily union was sufficient for marriage. This might have been introduced as a reform to older laws, which required a civil authority to certify a marriage’s legitimacy,” Finrod said.
Maedhros blinked. “You lost me around exegeses.”
“Everyone worries about bodily union! But it isn’t about sex at all!” Finrod exclaimed. “It’s about the freedom for two people to declare their marriage without state intervention! It’s about natural rights of the individual!”
Andreth and Maedhros groaned in unison. No matter the subject, no matter the debate, Finrod always managed to steer it back to natural rights. He was utterly predictable. Honestly, Maedhros found it endearing. Finrod truly believed that all incarnate beings were made in Eru’s image, possessing inherent dignity and worth, and he was genuinely inflamed by violations of that dignity. He had even started calling himself a “secular humanist,” until Andreth told him to stop, it was embarrassing for an Elf.
It wasn’t until Maedhros dragged himself up to bed that he realized Finrod hadn’t really answered the question. He hardly ever did. He just wanted the argument. It was Finrod’s highest form of praise, to find you worthy of debate.
But what did the old Laws and Customs say about men fucking other men? It had seemed so unheard of, so taboo in Aman, Maedhros wondered if anyone had bothered to look into the matter at all.
Maedhros’s favorite class was practical astronomy, taught by a Sindarin physicist, a woman not so much older than her students. The module covered astronomical coordinate systems, telescope and detector procedures, spectroscopic data interpretation, and statistical methods. Most exciting to Maedhros, they got the chance to use the university’s powerful radio telescope, on which the professor herself had discovered a new class of celestial object, called pulsars.
Pulsars were a type of neutron star, long theorized but never directly observed until her discovery. On campus, she was known simply as “Dr. LGM.” On the first day of class, she explained why: “Radio telescopes pick up human interference: arc welders, sparking thermostats, badly suppressed cars,” said Dr. LGM to the roomful of wide-eyed students. “I got good at identifying those patterns. But every so often, there’d be something I couldn’t explain. I’d record it, as a joke, LGM for Little Green Men. It was easier than saying ‘funny pulsing source at right ascension 1919, declination plus 20.’”
Pulsars were tiny, as celestial objects went, less than half as far across as the greater Brithombar metropolitan area. But they were unimaginably dense, the remnants of massive stars that had catastrophically exploded. If you jammed the population of the globe into a sewing needle, Dr. LGM said, that would be about the same density as a pulsar. They were like cosmic lighthouses, emitting electromagnetic pulses at uncanny regularity. Maedhros could understand how anyone might think they came from extraterrestrials.
Maedhros remembered when pulsars were first discovered, a few years before. Fëanor’s disappointment that it was not, in fact, created by intelligence, was palpable.
“If you were trying to send a signal to other worlds, why, it might look like exactly that! A regular, pulsing beam every 1.3 seconds, what else could it have been?” Fëanor had shaken his head, his dark hair unkempt, cigarette smoke clinging to him. The signs of obsession were as visible as the brightest star. “Well. The universe is full of phenomena beyond the ordinary man’s comprehension. A spinning corpse of a dead star, beating out the rhythm of its magnetic field across the galaxy. If such a thing could exist… we must keep searching on,” Fëanor concluded.
Dr. LGM’s appearance was plain and down-to-earth: mousy brown hair, simple clothing, cat’s-eye glasses. Nevertheless, when the press interviewed her about the momentous discovery, they asked almost nothing about the pulsars. Instead, reporters asked Dr. LGM about her boyfriends, whether she colored her hair, and if she wouldn’t mind undoing her top buttons for a photograph.
The discovery earned the principal investigators the Lambengolmor Prize in Physics. Dr. LGM, who had helped build the telescope that made the discovery, observed the anomaly, hand-checked the data, and wrote the paper, was not among the joint recipients.
The Lambengolmor committee issued a written statement, explaining that it was not appropriate to award the prize to postgraduates.
The crisis of the Iathrim spaceflight captured international attention beyond even that of the moon landing. Hundreds of thousands of people gathered in prayer for the cosmonauts at a religious festival in Rhûn. Amateur radio operators sent up audio messages of hope, knowing the cosmonauts would never hear them, but wanting to provide a sliver of comfort all the same. The story was front-page news on every paper in every nation.
Even the recently inaugurated President of Aman offered assistance. The Space Race was essentially over, the Eldar of Aman having scored the definitive victory in being first to reach the Moon, so he had room to be magnanimous. He ordered the Space Administration to move up its next launch, but it was no use; by the time the Amanyarin rocket could reach orbit, the cosmonauts would be long dead. Instead, the Space Administration offered their technical assistance to Doriath’s mission control, in hopes of engineering a plan for their safe return.
And at last, a plan they made. The original mission of landing on the moon had been lost the moment the tanks exploded. But there could still be a way to bring them home. To conserve fuel, the spacecraft would loop around the far side of the moon, using its gravity to slingshot back to Arda. The cosmonauts were shivering in the dark, but in one more day, they would power up the command module to correct course and begin the return journey. Assuming nothing else exploded.
“How come you know so much about the Laws and Customs, anyway?” Maedhros asked. They had missed breakfast hours and were eating dry baguettes left out in a basket for latecomers, standing in the antechamber outside the locked dining hall. It was winter, too damp and cold for boys used to the comforts of warm Aman to stand outside for long.
Finrod cocked his head. “Why do you want to know?”
“I mean. I don’t think you believe in any of that holy baloney,” Maedhros said. They slipped into Quenya when it was just the two of them, comfortable and intimate. He didn’t want to be rude, but—“Why bother arguing about some ancient commandments written down by men who died hundreds of years ago?”
“Ah, Maitimo the scornful atheist emerges,” Finrod said fondly. He paused for a moment. “Let’s set aside, for the moment, the growing body of evidence suggesting that the commandments date from a far more recent period than is commonly believed. So, according to your premise, if they are ancient, sacred texts, they have no value of any kind? Not even as history or literature?”
“Well. I suppose if you wanted to know what ancient cultures believed, or if you’re into moral bedtime stories about fantasy creatures, that’s all right. I just don’t see the point in taking them seriously.”
“But don’t you see how they influence how we live today? It was only a few years ago, after all, that the Falas reformed the morality codes. And—as you well know—Aman is still dragging their feet on that matter.”
They were both keenly aware of the riots that had erupted in Aman last summer. Police had raided an underground gay bar, under the auspices of the country’s own morality codes, sparking an outburst of violent resistance lasting five days. Maedhros had watched the news footage with a bewildering mix of pride and terror, feelings he still wasn’t ready to examine too closely at the time.
“Well, of course the laws are bullshit,” Maedhros said, “and they shouldn’t have existed in the first place. I think we’d all be a lot better off if we shoved it all in a dusty old library for—well, you philosophers and historians.”
Finrod nodded. “Build laws and society on rational conclusions drawn from observed evidence, not ancient customs.”
“Exactly. I can’t comprehend it—believing such silly things just because an old book says so. It’s always baffled me. I trust what I can see, what others have observed through scientific methods. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence, and all that.”
“But let me ask you this, my dear, how does the scientific method answer questions like: what happens after we die? Why do bad things happen to good people? What is consciousness? And the greatest question of all—what is love?”
Maedhros rolled his eyes. “Answers, in order: we go back to wherever we were before we were born, which is to say, nothingness; bad things happen because the Universe has no sense of moral reciprocity; consciousness is the sum total of brain processes, electrical activity, neurons firing in response to sensory inputs; and, as for that last question, well,” he scoffed, “I won’t dignify that with a response.”
“Are you so cynical, even about love?” Finrod cried. “I know you have yet to experience it—” Maedhros had a sudden flash of memory, brown arms under the starlight in a lush mountain forest, and his stomach tightened—“but even you can understand it’s real to the people involved.”
Maedhros had long finished his baguette, and, still hungry, he took Finrod’s half-eaten loaf. “You’re really getting on my nerves, you know that? Come on, we’d better head to class.”
On the way, Maedhros was quiet, thinking about Finrod’s unanswerable questions. Then, with a sudden realization: “You did it again! You never answered me. Why do you know so much about the Laws and Customs?”
“Oh,” Finrod said with an air of forced casualness, “growing up, we went to church every week. The usual: Varda this, Manwë that, trust in the sacred texts, go to the Halls of Mandos when you die, and if you’re really, really good, the Valar will give you a new body, and you shall walk again beneath the trees.”
“And you never really bought it,” Maedhros guessed.
“On the contrary,” Finrod said, “I carried the liturgical banners every Sunday for six years. Lit the candles on the altar, went to youth group on Wednesdays, sang in the choir. I read a verse every night and said my prayers before bedtime.”
Maedhros turned and faced him directly. “I can’t quite picture you as a choirboy.”
Finrod struck a pose, drawing himself up in the erect posture of a seasoned church-choir tenor. “I loved church. Families, music, all the ritual and tradition. I loved church,” he said, “until they caught me in the sacristy with my hands down another boy’s pants—”
Maedhros was speechless. “At church? Ingoldo, you—”
Finrod laughed. “Of course that’s what you’re stuck on. You know, for an atheist libertine, you’re a damn prude. Anyway, they told my parents, suspended me from youth group, and made me write a ten-page report on the ‘natural course of life for the Eldar.’”
“And then?”
Finrod shrugged. “Years of inner turmoil, shame, festering longing. My father was terribly understanding. It was unbearable. I spent years trying to pray it all away. Then something occurred to me. Why would the One, be He so all-powerful and benevolent, fill me with such evil desires? Could it be, He's just a great pervert who loves the little evil things that crawl around in the dark, like spiders and queers? Or is He not so powerful after all? How could He let me suffer in such a wretched state, if He loved me so?”
Maedhros felt a pang of intense grief for Finrod. “Well,” he said, his voice softer. “I’m sorry you went through all that. I don’t think it was the same for me. I mean, turmoil, I suppose. At first, I didn’t understand what it was—what I was feeling,” Maedhros said, feeling a blush coming on, but determined to finish the conversation. “But I never thought it was evil. I just—I don’t want to be made a fool of,” he said. “But I never felt ashamed of myself.”
There was a long silence as Finrod stared at Maedhros, first with an investigative air, as though he did not know whether to believe him, then with newfound admiration. “Good for you, Finrod said with sincerity. “It took me a while to get there. I prayed for so long.
“And finally, the answer came to me: if this is part of my nature, it can’t be so evil after all, can it? I am created in the perfect image that the One envisaged, just like everyone else.”
Another memory, from Maedhros’s poetry class: Not an inch nor a particle of inch is vile, and none shall be less familiar than the rest.
“I could no more go against the nature of my own heart than regenerate a lost limb,” Fingon continued. “And once I realized that, I started seeing it differently. The problem isn’t religion, or even the sacred texts themselves, but the flawed interpretations that we apply to them.
“So, to answer your question, that’s the reason I know so much about the Laws. Not because I still believe in them, but because I had to walk through them, to find my way out of the dark.”
And that was why Maedhros loved Finrod. He didn't convince him of anything about the great omnipotent love of the One. Maedhros still thought it was all baloney. But as pretentious and overwrought as Finrod might be, he uttered such things with such sincerity, he struck at Maedhros’s guarded, walled-off heart.
The battered spacecraft holding cosmonauts Mablung and Beleg splashed down in the southern Belegaer Ocean on a Friday afternoon. Recovery ships from Doriath and Far Harad bobbed in the warm waters awaiting their arrival; it was an Amanyarin amphibious assault vessel that reached the life raft first.
The college pub had a radio, usually tuned to football matches, but that afternoon, none thought to complain that it was set to the live broadcast of the rescue. Maedhros and the rest of the patrons listened in suspended silence, only static snapping in the air, for the full minute after the craft entered the atmosphere, awaiting further news. The patrons erupted into a deafening cheer when the newscaster reported that the cosmonauts were spotted safe and whole, and the ship from Aman was on its way to the rescue.
Andreth raised her glass. “To the living.”
They clinked. “And to improbable returns,” said Finrod.
Notes:
“The Literature of Initiation” was a real course offered at Caltech in 1976 (the earliest year for which I could find the university bulletin in the online archives .
The poets Maedhros studied include the Elf versions of Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsburg, and Sappho.
I invented a rule for myself, which is: no OCs with made-up names. Technically Palacendo complies with this rule, though it’s a stretch. (He’s apparently one of the possible names of a Blue Wizard, according to The Nature of Middle-earth.)
The island-themed restaurant isn’t based on a single specific place but is meant to reflect the cringingly popular tiki trend of the mid-century.
Fëanor’s story of Miriel working at the Observatory is heavily drawn from Dava Sobel’s The Glass Universe, mentioned in the previous chapter notes.
The Tilion accident that killed the entire crew is heavily based on the real Apollo 1 disaster.
As usual, the real-world analogues to the stars are drawn from The Stars That Varda Made. Wilwarin the butterfly is almost universally accepted as the queen, Cassiopeia, which really does contain one of the brightest supernovae in the sky.
The Fëanorian Equation is based on the Drake Equation, created by astronomer Frank Drake in 1961 as a probabilistic tool for estimating the total number of potential alien civilizations that could be detectable by humans.
It’s honestly a bit too early for grand moon landing conspiracies, but because I thought it was very funny, Celegorm is reading “We Never Landed on the Moon” pamphlet based on similar extant conspiracy texts (which I will not cite here due to well. They are very dumb).
Brithombar is very loosely based on an idealized version of a UK university town, drawing from various elements of London, Cambridge, and Oxford; but don’t think about it too hard, because I certainly didn’t.
The space disaster ft. Mablung and Beleg is entirely ripped from the real-world Apollo 13 incident.
Dr. LGM is very directly based on Jocelyn Bell, and most of her dialog and biography is directly ripped from life.
“Not an inch nor a particle of inch is vile, and none shall be less familiar than the rest.”—From Whitman’s “Song of Myself”
Please rest assured that I know that Finrod is, in the original material, the same age as Turgon and therefore younger than Fingon by quite a few decades. Here, Finrod is close to Maedhros’s age. Artistic license.
Chapter 4: Tirion
Summary:
Fëanor’s obsession deepens, and Maedhros has to get out of Formenos. He begins his doctoral work in Tirion. After a few missteps, he reconnects with Fingon and Fingolfin, who takes Maedhros under his wing as they look for black holes. Maedhros tries to interpret signals.
Notes:
As usual, please check out the endnotes if you'd like more info on some of the scientific and historical references.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
After a year in cold, rainy Brithombar, the return to sunny Formenos felt, to Maedhros, like going back to prison. The time away had changed something. Like a hermit crab, he could not return to the shell he had outgrown. Wherever he went, he scraped against the walls, knocked his head on doorjambs. The din of fighting, needy brothers grated on his ears until he wanted to scream. The shadow of Fëanor, locked away in his office, tobacco smoke wafting up from the basement, haunted them all.
Maedhros looked at his mother’s lined face and for once felt not guilt, but fear. What would Maedhros look like after twenty more years?
With heavy hands, he put his new clothes away into storage; they were too foreign, too daring for Formenos. But he kept the jewelry. He wore it when he felt bold, shooting eye daggers at the first brother who dared mock him for it.
Maedhros missed his tiny dorm room at the top of the winding narrow staircase. He missed the thrill of the night life and the coziness of the college pub. Mostly, he missed Finrod, and the other friends he’d left behind.
Finrod, for his part, had fallen so deeply in love with Beleriand that it took all Maedhros’s pleading to get him on the plane home. He swore to return as soon as he could. He was already corresponding with potential thesis supervisors, applying to graduate programs in the Falas and Nargothrond. He had even made contact with a university in Doriath, though as they both well knew, taking a spot at such a place would all but guarantee he could never return to Aman.
Maedhros had never before seriously considered leaving Formenos for good. But one week into his senior year, he walked into the physics building and felt the walls closing in around him. Surely it wasn’t this small before, was it?
He saw his father across the way, surrounded by a crowd of students, holding court as he shepherded them through the hall. Maedhros was ashamed of himself, but he felt a jolt of pure resentment so powerful, he turned around and walked right back out.
The Formenos sun blazed down on him. He shaded his eyes. He was so sick of the relentless sunshine.
What had Fingolfin said, three years ago, at the end of the summer? “You can just come straight to Tirion, I’d take you as a student in a heartbeat.”
Maedhros wrote the letter that night.
Fëanor’s obsession was beginning to pay off. He had long petitioned the university for time on the radio telescope and was finally granted approval to point it toward two Sun-like stars in the galactic neighborhood, in search of the first direct evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. He tuned the receiver to the emission frequency of hydrogen, the universe’s most prevalent element, and, he hoped, a universal meeting place.
He dubbed the experiment Project VAIRË (Vigilant Attunement to Incoming Radio Emissions). He found nothing of note. The experiment did not confirm the existence of alien life.
But it sparked something: the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI). Astronomers with imaginations and radio telescopes around the world were inspired to launch their own SETI projects. In response to Fëanor’s writeup of VAIRË in The Astrophysical Journal, he received more mail from inspired fans—professional scientists and laypeople alike—than ever, even more than when he’d made fools of congressmen on live television.
Fëanor saw his opportunity. He ramped up his public appearances. He agreed to every interview, appeared on every radio show, and traveled to the most remote backwater observatories, if it meant inspiring even one more person to join his project. He was as captivating as ever onstage and on air. And in one-on-one conversation, if he turned his blinding charisma on you, there was nothing you could do to resist.
The SETI consortium was formed, a voluntary association of astronomers, physicists, and passionate amateurs from every nation. They elected Fëanor as the chairman, divided up the skies, and listened.
But with limited radio telescope time, the search was glacially slow, even as new confederates from across the globe joined in. Fëanor could not tolerate the thought that the SETI project might only succeed after his death. He needed more telescopes, more time, more people on his side. He wrote a detailed proposal of the thousand-dish interferometric array, which could pick up signals from a wider and deeper swath of the sky all at once. It was the lecture he had given at science camp, preposterous, insane, wildly unrealistic. It would require far more capital than Fëanor could yet muster. Which meant that all he had to do was prove the worthiness of the cause.
The acceptance letter was full of breathless praise of Maedhros’s accomplishments, a fellowship award, promises of research assistantships and travel funds, too. When he showed it to his father, Fëanor was stone-faced, staring. Maedhros knew it couldn’t take him more than a few minutes to skim the entire thing. He waited, silent and sweating, for Fëanor’s response.
He finally looked up. “You’ll hate Tirion,” Fëanor said, “but you can work on gathering support for our cause.” He turned back to his work, and that was that.
Fëanor said nothing about the fact that the letter was signed by Fingolfin, or that it was addressed to someone with the last name Russandol.
Maedhros walked into his freshman mechanics lab on the first day of fall term feeling competent, confident, in charge. He had this. Totally under control.
He felt a surge of premature satisfaction when the students called him Doctor, although he demurred, telling them, oh no, just a student, like you. Call me Russo. He was young and relatable, the lab instructor with a suede jacket, double-buckle cork sandals, and a ponytail. As he passed out the syllabus, the kids hung onto his every word.
It was going fantastically. He was a natural. It was going so well, in fact, he forgot to watch his feet, caught his sandal on the step of the demonstration platform, overbalanced, and landed flat on his back.
“Where did he go?” he heard a student ask in not quite a whisper.
Maedhros pulled himself up to a seated position. “I’m right here!” he called, hand in the air. “Now, as I was saying. Lab reports!”
He felt his face burn as hot and red as his hair. Adrenaline surged through his body, heart pounding. He tried to mellow out, slowing his breath. He gathered his papers, still playing it cool, sat on the top step like he’d planned it all along, and kept talking.
It wasn’t until he tried standing, about to hand out stopwatches for the first experiment, that he realized something might actually be wrong. His ankle felt a little sore. Well, a lot sore. Throbbing, actually. And… was that swelling? He looked down. Hmm, that doesn’t look quite right, does it? Well. Surely, it could bear weight, after all, it’s not as though—
Maedhros screamed when he tried to walk. Lightning shot up his leg, and he buckled. He grabbed the edge of the demo table, barely managing to stay upright, then lowered himself back to the ground as gracefully as he could, given the circumstances. He even managed to not throw up in front of the entire class, though it was a near thing, once he really looked and realized that his foot should absolutely not be pointing in that direction.
“Russo, you’re white,” said a kind student, who had come close to check on him, kneeling at his side.
Maedhros closed his eyes. The room was spinning.
The class buzzed in horrified excitement, unsure what to do about their fallen teacher. A few disastrous attempts confirmed that Maedhros could not, in fact, walk. The pain was so intense, he struggled to sit up or even speak. The room spun and nausea threatened to overtake him. The kind student held his hand while another went to call for help.
They did not get to the first experiment that day.
However, Maedhros did make a discovery of great significance. When the rescue workers showed up, Maedhros was lying supine, his eyes closed. He heard, but did not see them approach. He felt one of them begin to work on stabilizing his ankle, fitting rigid boards to either side in a splint. He was not ungentle, but Maedhros still hissed at every touch.
The other rescue worker placed a cuff around his arm and took his wrist, his fingers warm and soft. “Hey,” said a familiar voice. “Your pulse is going crazy. Try not to faint.”
Maedhros opened his eyes. He saw institutional beige ceiling tiles. And then he saw Fingon’s face, smiling broadly in recognition, curly black hair haloed around him under the fluorescent lights.
Maedhros couldn’t help but beam in return. The agony in his ankle suddenly felt less important. Everything went light and hazy.
“It’s all right,” Maedhros said, “if I faint, you can save me.”
Fingon not only took him to the hospital in the ambulance, he called out for the rest of his shift and stayed while Maedhros received treatment. He ducked out once to go get his car and returned with snacks. The rest of the time, he kept Maedhros distracted, asking about his graduate classes, his research aspirations, and how he was finding Tirion.
Fingon had always been good at asking about other people, Maedhros remembered. His letters had been the same, just a paragraph or two about his own life, followed by a flurry of questions and commentary on whatever Maedhros had written last. It never failed to warm Maedhros. And even after these years, even after reuniting under such embarrassing circumstances, Fingon still seemed to have the idea that Maedhros was someone to look up to. He liked how he saw himself reflected in Fingon’s eyes.
The ankle was, indeed, broken, but thankfully didn’t require surgery. The doctor wrapped it in a temporary soft splint, prescribed some painkillers, and sent Maedhros home with a pair of crutches. He was to return in a few days, once the swelling was down, for a full cast.
Fingon drove him own. Only when they pulled up to his building did Maedhros realize the problem. His studio apartment was on the fifth floor. And there was no elevator.
He stood at the base of the stairs, looking up. His ankle felt fantastic—the codeine must have kicked in—but he was still barely competent with the crutches. It had taken several minutes just to hobble from the car to the door, and he had no idea how he could possibly manage stairs.
“How many floors, did you say?” asked Fingon.
“Five,” answered Maedhros.
Fingon sucked his teeth and shook his head. “No way, man. I mean, I can help you up, but how will you get down again? I guess I could move in,” he said, grinning.
A sensation of mild euphoria floated up in Maedhros. It was probably the codeine.
“Tell you what. Why don’t you give me your key? I’ll go up and pack some essentials, and then you can stay at my house for a few days,” Fingon offered. “At least until you’re better at getting yourself around. If you fall again, you could really hurt yourself.”
Maedhros swiveled to look at him. “Oh, I couldn’t,” he said, but he must have sounded unconvincing. Fingon just held out his hand and waited, like he already knew Maedhros would eventually cave anyway. With a sigh, Maedhros dug in his pocket for the key.
Fingon’s house looked like a picture from a storybook: a warm brown three-story structure, with gingerbread trim, a turret, and a wide front porch with a wooden swing. Fingon helped Maedhros into the parlor and set him up on the couch. “Keep the leg elevated to get the swelling down,” Fingon said, stacking up cushions for Maedhros to rest his ankle on.
Each family member popped their head into the parlor to say hello as they came home: a teenage sister, a kid brother, a whirlwind of a mother, who told him to call her Anairë in a tone that suggested he’d be wiser to stick with ma’am or Mrs. F. Even Turgon, the brother Fingon rarely mentioned, offered Maedhros a polite welcome.
Fingon stayed by Maedhros’s side, talking nonstop. He’d run out of questions about grad school and moved on to asking Maedhros what he liked to do in his free time.
That stumped Maedhros. He really only had one hobby. He couldn’t very well say, “Well, when I’m really gagging for it, I’ll go down to the park and fuck a stranger,” to Fingon.
“I like going on walks,” Maedhros finally said.
They both looked at his bandaged ankle.
“Well,” Fingon said, “once you get better, I’ll show you around town.”
By dinnertime, Maedhros had almost stopped feeling like an intruder. The chatter at the table was loud, the homemade food delicious, and Maedhros tried not to feel too self-conscious, with his leg stretched out beside him like a drawbridge. Fingon told him to shut up and stop worrying, so he did.
And then Fingolfin came home. He and Maedhros locked eyes.
“He’s staying with us for a few days,” Fingon explained. “He had a bit of a wipeout in the lab.”
Then Fingolfin smiled, warm as pie.
“Great,” Fingolfin said, “I’ve got some datasets from the new orbital X-ray satellite. After dinner, you’ll help me go through them.”
The X-ray universe had remained invisible until the Space Age. The problem was that the atmosphere blocked interstellar X-rays, making ground-based observation impossible. A few researchers had launched parabolic mirror detectors on suborbital rockets, but they could only collect data for a few brief moments before gravity pulled them back down. High-altitude balloons stayed aloft longer, but they still could only detect the most powerful X-ray sources. It took eleven years to complete a full solar X-ray study.
It took the launch of Randir, and the other artificial satellites that followed, to make X-ray astronomy a real field.
SAS-1, or to those who were friendly with it, Ilmarë, was the first satellite devoted entirely to X-ray detection. Launched by Aman’s Space Administration, it transmitted its data to the ground station several times a day. This was no small achievement, either in engineering, or in the more mundane field of bureaucratic management. Most astronomers were fiercely independent romantics, though they’d hardly admit it, attached to the idea of standing alone beneath the stars with their optical telescopes. Collaboration, especially in large teams, made everyone uneasy.
Maedhros was well familiar with this type of lone-wolf astronomer. Fëanor could lead a team of graduate students or junior researchers, really, anyone who never questioned him too deeply, but he chafed against other seasoned scientists who might challenge his authority. His current endeavor, the SETI Consortium, was run from the top down: Fëanor gave directives, and everyone either obeyed or found themselves shut out.
Fingolfin was cut from a different cloth. It would have never been possible to launch Ilmarë without collaboration between many parties: the federal legislature, the ground center, the Space Administration, the military, private contractors, and universities—not to mention, the individual research astronomers vying to advance their agendas. Fingolfin had a knack for smoothing ruffled feathers and weaving together disparate interests. He explained he had learned it while working at the Space Administration, before his return to academia.
“This is the future,” Fingolfin told Maedhros. “Orbital satellites will be able to detect cosmic phenomena we’ve only theorized until this point, I’m sure of it. We just have to keep everyone working together long enough to prove it.”
Fall in Tirion meant football season. While Tirion wasn’t the college football powerhouse it had once been, every game still filled the autumn air with excitement. Maedhros had never seen anything like it. Back home, Formtech sold T-shirts that commemorated “100 Years Undefeated,” the joke being, of course, the school never had a team at all.
Tirion’s home games weren’t just about the sport, they were a citywide party. Streets around campus were closed to traffic, and tailgating started early and ended long after kickoff. It felt like everyone, even those who didn’t really care about the game itself, came together for Tirion pride and fellowship.
Well, most people came together for Tirion pride, and a few people came to protest against it. Just outside the main campus gates, a small group of women chanted and marched, holding cardboard signs with slogans like TIRION FOR ALL, ERU GAVE US MINDS TOO. A few of the women were completely topless and had painted their upper halves in Tirion gold and blue.
Passing the protestors on the way to the stadium, Fingon’s brother Turgon turned bright red but couldn’t bring himself to turn his gaze away.
Anairë covered Argon’s eyes, looking back at the women reproachfully. “They might gain support with a more dignified approach,” she said.
“And bras!” Aredhel added.
“Oh, let them have their say,” Fingolfin said. “I should think the two of you—of all people!—could see their point.”
“I hate to break it to you,” Aredhel said, “but I’m never coming to this uptight old college, even if they start letting in girls, if that’s what you’re thinking.” She laughed and skipped ahead.
Tirion had been subjected to increasing pressure, both internal and external, on this issue. The undergraduate college, the oldest and most renowned in Aman, had never admitted a single woman in the several hundred years since its founding. Women from one of the tiny “sister colleges” could take classes alongside Tirion men, if they got a special form signed by the dean and were willing to ride the bus thirty minutes both ways, but they couldn’t claim the prestige of a true Tirion degree. The medical school and music conservatory had recently loosened their standards, as even the stuffiest conservative voices on the board couldn’t argue the place of women in those fields, but they were holding firm on the other divisions.
Maedhros was starting to grasp the culture of these centuries-old, ivy-covered Eastern colleges, which didn’t quite line up with either his West Coast life experience, or the stereotypes he had absorbed from books and films. He was prepared for privilege and condescension, and yes, there was some of that, but Tirion—and, especially, Fingon’s family’s place within it—still surprised him. Take cheerleading, for example. In his mind, cheerleaders were peppy girls in short skirts, but at Tirion, cheerleading was a proud male tradition passed down through generations. Fingolfin had been a cheerleader. Even Finwë had, in his day, been the head cheerleader, known back then as the yell king.
In the present, Fingon was the most enthusiastic cheerleader Maedhros had ever met.
Maedhros couldn’t quite square the image of his own heretical, contrarian father, who never met a tradition he wouldn’t mock, with this town he had grown up in, the constant waving of Tirion banners, prestige and stateliness, and unquestioning loyalty to the past. Fëanor so rarely spoke of his upbringing. He must have hated it here. No wonder he never returned.
When Fingon tried to teach Maedhros the cheers before the game, he couldn’t help but laugh. The whole thing was so absurd, especially watching Fingon carrying around a giant megaphone, shouting at everybody. But there was something infectious about it, silly as it was.
By the time the game started, Maedhros was on his feet with the rest of the crowd. It felt like something larger than just him, or even the thousands of people gathered in the stadium. There was electricity in the air, the hum of excitement from the fans, the smell of popcorn and peanuts, blue and gold everywhere. The cannon fired, its roar vibrating through the ground, and the crowd erupted into cheers, their voices shaking the very air. Maedhros felt it in his chest, and while he didn’t know all the words, he could feel their rhythm, his pulse speeding up to match it.
And when Fingon ran up and down the field, waving a banner in his white sweater and smart blue trousers, Maedhros couldn’t help but feel the pull of something else. He couldn’t look away. It wasn’t just attraction. Nor was it school spirit, exactly. But inside, Maedhros felt warm, like he belonged.
He might have even joined in a cheer.
After he got his real cast and got better at hauling himself around on crutches, Maedhros dove headfirst into his graduate school life. He’d missed a few classes during the first week and scrambled to catch up, staying late at the library and getting up early to finish problem sets. Fingon’s house was close enough to campus, he could walk there just fine. Most days, he and Fingon walked to and from campus together. Maedhros worried at first about disturbing the family when they returned so late, but he soon discovered they were all night owls. Someone was always still up, usually at least Fingolfin, though Anairë or one of the younger children were often up, too.
Unlike Maedhros’s father, Fingolfin never shut himself into his home office, disappearing for days. Maedhros wasn’t sure Fingolfin ever used the office at all; it felt more like a shared library, where anyone could curl up with a book on the big leather chair by the heirloom desk. Fingolfin himself preferred to spread his work out on the dining room table after clearing the table and doing the dishes, something that shocked Maedhros to his bones the first time he saw it. He told Maedhros, in no uncertain terms, that his room and board at Hotel Fingolfin would be paid in full by helping him comb through the tedious pages of X-ray satellite data. “You’re the only one who won’t fall asleep two rows in,” he said, handing Maedhros a stack of pristine printouts with a grin.
Evenings at the table turned into cozy work sessions, with Fingolfin explaining astrophysical models, Anairë bringing them mugs of steaming tea, and one or more of the kids doing homework nearby. Maedhros found himself learning as much at that table as he did in his seminars.
After a couple of weeks, Maedhros asked Fingolfin why he went over the datasets by hand instead of feeding them into the mainframe. He’d taken enough programming at Formtech to know how to bin data into grids, interpolate where needed, and use contour-plotting to produce simple maps. He was confident he could cut their data processing time in half.
Fingolfin put down his stack of papers and stared at Maedhros. “Well, what are you doing here? Get down to the mainframe and get to work!”
Fingon’s birthday came in the fall, and though he had long been getting into Tirion bars with nothing more than a mediocre fake ID and a smile, his friends from the eating club insisted on taking him out for a proper pub crawl. Maedhros was invited, but begged off, still on crutches, and not especially eager to follow around a bunch of drunk preppies.
Well past midnight, Maedhros was still awake, lying under the covers on the couch he used as a bed. He was reading through the most recent issue of The Astrophysical Journal, when Fingon stumbled through the front door and into Maedhros’s parlor.
“You’re up!” said Fingon, too loudly.
Maedhros shushed him, laughing, and Fingon shushed him right back, then collapsed on the couch, somewhere in the vicinity of Maedhros’s knees. He missed landing on Maedhros’s cast, though not by much.
“Hey, clumsy,” said Maedhros, halfheartedly kicking at him with his good leg.
“We went to so many bars,” Fingon sighed. “The Spilled Inkwell, the Bird and Baby, the Brass Lantern. Or was it the Golden Lanterns? Maybe there are two lanterns. I lost track,” he admitted.
Fingon’s body was warm against Maedhros’s legs, but Maedhros could feel the cold autumn air on him, along with the malty, hoppy scent of beer. He took a deep breath, letting the smell of Fingon fill him.
Maedhros closed the journal and set it aside. “Sounds like a fun night,” he said.
Fingon nodded, then shrugged. “You were right to stay home,” he said. “All of those college bars start to feel the same after a while. I don’t think you would’ve had a nice time. It’s just… not a very you scene.”
Maedhros raised his eyebrows, amused. “What’s the me scene, then? Squatting in the parlor in someone’s parents’ house?”
“No, just… you know. Someplace different. Not like everyone in Tirion with their,” Fingon yawned, “boat shoes and monogrammed handkerchiefs.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Maedhros said. “I’d love a nice monogrammed handkerchief. Tricky picking out which names to use, though.”
“I’m saying,” said Fingon with mild irritation, “I know you’re different.”
A shiver ran through Maedhros. He shifted, pulling himself upright. Fingon couldn’t mean—well, even if he did, that was all right, wasn’t it? Maedhros had always intended to tell him. Eventually. He just hadn’t figured out a way to say it without making things awkward.
“It’s not just because you’re not from around here,” Fingon continued, “though that’s part of it. Or the way you keep all your real opinions to yourself. You’re not fooling me, you know. And it’s not like you act like you’re better than anyone. It’s just… there’s something about you that wants more. Something beyond all this.” Fingon waved his arms vaguely around the room. Maedhros couldn’t tell if “all this” meant lovely old houses or Tirion itself or a wife, children, a normal family life.
Now Fingon turned, twisting around so he was fully facing Maedhros. Their eyes were level, Maedhros propped against the arm of the couch, Fingon leaning in. Maedhros’s legs, bent at the knee, lay between them under the faded quilt Fingon had brought down.
Maedhros realized his own breathing had quickened as he held Fingon’s gaze. Say whatever it is you’re trying to say, he thought at him.
But Fingon seemed to have run out of words. He smiled, a little sheepish, and shook his head, brow furrowing, as if still trying to work something out in his mind. When the grandfather clock chimed, he yawned, wide and sudden, and said he’d better get up to bed.
“Good night, Dad,” Fingon said as he stepped out of Maedhros’s parlor. Maedhros startled. He hadn’t realized Fingolfin was still up. He must have been just outside the parlor entrance, perhaps waiting on Fingon’s safe return home.
There was a strange moment in the library, one that got Maedhros thinking afterward—perhaps this thing, whatever the thread was, pulling between him and Fingon, perhaps it wasn’t just anchored on his side.
It began, as such things often did, with Maedhros losing his temper.
“You could at least pretend you’re interested, and stop wasting my time,” Maedhros snapped, not even trying to hide his frustration. Fingon wasn’t stupid, far from it. He was trying to pay attention, or at least he was looking at Maedhros and nodding at the appropriate intervals. But Maedhros could tell his mind was elsewhere. For the last half hour, Maedhros had walked through the problem three different ways, and each time, when he wrote a new example for Fingon to solve himself, he just tapped his pencil on the paper for a few moments before giving up and flashing Maedhros a blinding smile.
“I’m sorry, I just can’t focus,” admitted Fingon, after the third attempt.
“You know what, let’s try something different,” Maedhros said. As usual, he felt bad for snapping at Fingon. It was just getting difficult, keeping everything bottled up all the time. “There’s a book of lectures that could explain this better than me. Here, this is the author’s name,” he said, scribbling it on a piece of paper. “It should be on this floor somewhere. Can you go find it?”
Fingon took the slip and bounded off to find the card catalog. As soon as he was gone, Maedhros closed his eyes and tried not to think about how smooth and touchable Fingon’s skin looked. He failed.
There was only so much a man could take. What had once been an adolescent preoccupation had turned into a full-grown, adult hunger. It had become nearly uncontrollable. Fingon haunted Maedhros’s dreams at night and dominated his thoughts during the day. He gave in and let himself slip into one of his favorite fantasies. In it, Fingon was bare and begging in the parlor Maedhros had stayed in for several weeks, before his ankle had healed enough for him to return to his apartment. In this fantasy, Fingon made it devastatingly clear, he wanted Maedhros the same way Maedhros wanted him.
But after a while, Maedhros began to wonder if Fingon had gotten lost. Did he even know how to use the card catalog, or had he just always let others handle it while he batted his long eyelashes?
It didn’t take too long for Maedhros to spot him. At least he was in the right section. Fingon was climbing a ladder to reach a high shelf, scanning the titles and muttering under his breath. His fingers skimmed along the spines of the books as he searched.
“Having trouble?” Maedhros asked, moving closer.
Fingon shot him a mildly embarrassed look. “I think it should be here, but I can’t see it.”
Maedhros stood behind Fingon, who was a little off balance, one foot on a higher rung than the other. Maedhros could steady the ladder with his hands, if he wanted. He could point out the book, which he now saw was right in front of Fingon’s eyes.
He climbed up behind him, one rung, then two.
Fingon stilled.
Maedhros braced his left hand on the side of the ladder, reaching up with his right, just above Fingon’s head. To grab the book, he had to press close, chest to back. Fingon’s hair tickled his nose. He could have waited for him to get down. Instead, he gripped the physics book with his fingers and lingered, not moving.
He reminded himself to breathe.
Without a word, Fingon turned within the space of Maedhros’s body. He pivoted smoothly, despite the tight fit, Maedhros’s arms caging him in.
Maedhros could step down any moment now.
Their faces were inches apart, Fingon just a little higher than Maedhros. He could feel Fingon’s breath on his lips.
“You were taking too long,” Maedhros said softly, eyes locked on Fingon’s.
Fingon’s back was pressed against the books, Maedhros’s body nearly flush against him. Just a little shift, and—
“It was right there in front of me,” Fingon murmured.
Maedhros’s heart slammed against his ribs, thrumming in his throat, his stomach, heating up with the close proximity, a gathering urgency in his body, building low and deep inside. He was so close.
Fingon tilted his chin down, his lashes falling, then rising again as he held Maedhros’s gaze. His mouth was open. Maedhros realized that Fingon was struggling to control his breath too, a shaky inhale with a hint of voice, followed by a long exhale.
Maedhros couldn’t move. There was no sound but the sound of their breathing and the rush of blood pulsing in his ears. He should say something, laugh, look away, explain himself. But there was no smell but the smell of Fingon’s body, soapy clean and just a little bit of sweat and—
He swayed involuntarily, his grip on the ladder tightening. His body flushed, wound tight, waiting. Every nerve screamed at him to do something, move, move, now, now, don’t you see, this is the chance, take it—
His body sparked when he felt Fingon’s own hand settling against Maedhros’s ribs, his eyes never leaving his. For balance? Or—no, this wasn’t balance, Fingon’s fingers splayed out, his palm grazing him. Now Maedhros closed his eyes, unable to bear it, but he leaned fractionally forward, into Fingon’s touch, yes, good, this. Fingon’s hand pressed in, undeniably deliberate, as though learning the shape of him. The warmth of him spreading out from his hand to Maedhros’s belly, and lower. Maedhros took in a shuddering breath, and opened his mouth to say something, maybe “Please” or ”Don’t stop,” and then—
There was a sharp, sudden cough, close by. Someone was in the next stack over.
Maedhros jerked back, his eyes flying open. He swallowed.
Fingon removed his hand from Maedhros’s body, more slowly.
The moment shattered.
But later, Maedhros thought about it as he lay in his bed, unable to sleep, unsure if the look in Fingon’s eyes was really an attraction whose intensity matched his own, or if it was just Maedhros’s overeager mind, latching onto what it wanted to see. It was all too easy to see patterns where none existed, in the stars, and here on the ground. That was why it was so important to observe a target over several points in time. Any kind of anomaly might appear once, and never again. You had to look again, and again, and rule out any alternative explanations for mysterious signals. That was the difference between little green men and pulsars.
Maedhros took pride in his studio apartment. It was just one room, with a small kitchen on one side and a bathroom on the other. But he decorated with care, as much as he could afford on his stipend. He stacked up milk crates for bookshelves, which divided the studio into a living area and a sleeping area. He found a street market that sold inexpensive fabric by the yard, and tacked up paisley, tie-dye, and block prints as makeshift tapestries. He’d asked Maglor to ship him some of the geometric light globes his father had made ages ago; they had been gathering dust in the garage, and now they cast an amber glow around his space. A few fake ferns in the corners gave the place a green, ecological touch.
He invited some people over. He wasn’t sure if he could call most of them friends yet. A few Noldor classmates from his cohort, one of whom had a girlfriend he brought along, too. A tall, thin Grey-elf Maedhros often chatted with in the computer center, as they both stayed up feeding punch cards into the mainframe late into the night. A couple people from his building who seemed broad-minded and friendly enough.
And, after some thought, Maedhros decided to invite Fingon.
The gathering was going well. Maedhros had stocked the fridge with cheap beer, and one of his neighbors brought some grass to share. Maedhros put on a record, the one from the folk singer that had been nearly booed off the stage at the big folk festival a few years before, for going electric. The vibes were good, everyone was getting along as they sat on the floor and sprawled out on beanbag chairs.
Fingon had gamely joined in the conversation at first, but he faded into the background when the subject shifted to stellar atmospheres and interiors. Maedhros wasn’t worried, he looked happy and engaged regardless.
At one point, Fingon wandered over to the bookshelves. Maedhros watched him from across the room. Fingon looked over the shelves, mostly filled with textbooks. Maedhros had brought some books from home, too: old favorites from childhood, classics he’d enjoyed in high school, and his growing poetry collection. Maedhros wasn’t sure if Fingon knew poetry at all, but if he did, he might realize Maedhros’s collection leaned toward a particular Love That Dare Not Speak Its Name. He watched as Fingon traced his fingers along the spines, then stopped at a small stack of photographs balanced on top.
Maedhros knew exactly what Fingon was about to see. He didn’t stop him.
Fingon picked up the photos. They were instants, square with white borders, washed-out colors already starting to fade after a couple of years. Fingon flipped through the photos, smiling to himself.
Then he came to one that made him pause. He studied it for a long time.
Maedhros, who had been inching closer, now stood beside him. They looked at the photo together.
It was a picture he had taken with Finrod back in Brithombar. Just before their year abroad ended, they had gotten drunk and wild, and dressed up outrageously before heading out for one last night at their favorite club. Maedhros remembered the night itself only in hazy flashes: Finrod, dancing with Balan, his lover at the time; the music, pulsing and frantic; Maedhros, dancing with several men at once; someone handing him a little vial to inhale, making his head spin and inhibitions fall away.
The photo, taken at the very beginning of the night, was fading, but Maedhros knew only one conclusion could be drawn from it. Maedhros and Finrod were all shimmer and sass: Maedhros in an unbuttoned satin shirt, Finrod a transparent fluttery wrap. Maedhros’s shiny black trousers were so tight they left nothing to the imagination; Finrod, ever more daring, wore lime green hot pants. Finrod had thick eyeliner and lip gloss on, while Maedhros wore a collection of jewels and bangles from ear-tips to fingertips, and his copper circlet. Their arms were around each other, Finrod’s free hand hovering suggestively over Maedhros’s nipple, Maedhros kissing Finrod open-mouthed on the cheek.
It was, in short, the biggest giveaway Maedhros could possibly imagine, short of Fingon catching him sucking dick in the park. He kept these parts of himself carefully packed away in Tirion, taking them out only when he needed to scratch a particular itch.
Fingon didn’t speak for a long time, just tilted the photo slightly under the amber lamplight, taking it in. A small smile played on his lips, not in mockery, more like recognition.
He wondered if Fingon could see in the picture the ease, the confidence, the fact that they weren’t just playing dress-up but truly being themselves. And if, in that moment, he was measuring the distance between who Maedhros had been then and who he seemed to be now.
“You look really happy,” Fingon said, handing the stack of photos to him. Their fingers brushed against each other, lingering long enough to make Maedhros’s pulse quicken. Long enough to be deliberate.
Then, with a casual grin, Fingon added, “You should dress like that more.”
One of the first objects the Ilmarë satellite studied was the mysterious Alqua X-1. Early X-ray detectors had located it in the Alqua constellation, where it remained a consistently powerful X-ray source. Yet it could not be matched to any known star in the visible sky. Its signals resembled that of a nebula, but no nebula had been observed in the region. Was it a pulsar? Unlikely, no radio wave emissions had been detected, either.
The satellite looked and looked, and discovered that strangely, the intensity of Alqua X-1’s X-rays fluctuated. Even under close, consistent observation, the periodicity of its pulse remained inexplicable; at times it pulsed regularly, at others, irregularly, and sometimes, most mysteriously, not at all.
One member of the team suggested that the source might be pulsing faster than the satellite’s instruments could detect, given their data-accumulation time of one-tenth of a second. A rapidly pulsing neutron star could be the source of such X-rays.
But a more intriguing possibility, the one that Fingolfin was circling, was that Alqua X-1 was a black hole: the remnant of a collapsed star at least three times the mass of the Sun. Professor Finwë had published the foundational theory of black holes in a classic paper, a decade before his death at Ezellohar. He showed that the gravitational field near a black hole would be so intense that nothing, not even light, could escape.
The problem was, in the decades since, nobody had ever been able to prove that a black hole actually existed. The theory was sound, but without light, how could you observe one?
A black hole had no “surface” in the usual sense. Matter that fell into a black hole could never escape. Yet Fingolfin and his collaborators now theorized that a black hole could still produce detectable X-rays. As matter spiraled into the gravitational vortex, it would accelerate to extreme velocities, generating immense heat through friction. At those temperatures, X-rays and gamma radiation would be emitted. And that X-ray behavior might show no consistent pattern, only erratic, variable pulses.
After months of observation, the team was no closer to a consensus on Alqua X-1’s behavior or nature. The satellite, expected to survive no more than six months, had already exceeded its projected lifespan, with no noticeable decline in data quality. The question was asked: what should be done with it now?
The black hole theory was intriguing, but there were so many other tempting areas of potential discovery. Supernova remnants, galaxy clusters, nebulas—astronomers were itching to get their hands on more telescope time to study these bodies.
An associate professor at Alqualondë who was a part of the SETI Consortium even submitted a proposal to use the X-ray detector in search of exoplanets. A transiting planet orbiting a known X-ray source could temporarily block most or all of its X-rays as it crossed along Arda’s line of sight, and looking for brief, temporary blocks like this could be a way to identify potential exoplanets. They were, after all, key to unlocking the Fëanorian equation; the entire proposition of finding intelligent life in the universe relied on the assumption that exoplanets existed, but they, like black holes, had never been empirically proven.
Maedhros read the proposal and could detect Fëanor all over it. Though Fëanor would never lower himself to directly petition anything so closely affiliated with the Space Administration, he apparently had no qualms doing so through an intermediary.
To consider the options and hear out the different ideas, Fingolfin called a formal meeting of the chief investigators.
“Come with me,” Fingolfin told Maedhros, “you’ve spent more time with the datasets than any of us, you can help keep me honest about what they’re truly saying.”
Early one Monday morning, they drove to Máhanaxar, the ground center where the satellite data was transmitted daily. The main topic of debate was to determine the research agenda for the next six months: continue exploring Alqua X-1, or shift focus to other mysteries of the sky?
Maedhros had never seen anything like it. The clash of personalities was intense, but more often, the disagreements were intellectual. Proposals, however wild, were floated with abandon and shot down remorselessly. Participants stormed out, only to return moments later with datasets to support their arguments. Ideas collided, but not at random; there was structure to the debate, an underlying framework of shared purpose. Maedhros had expected ego, competition, posturing, and sure, there was some of that. But more than anything, there was dedication to the cause. People fought hard for their ideas, then dropped them as soon as the data convinced them. The exoplanet study fell apart quickly; there was no empirical support for it. Maedhros felt a little guilty—should he have spoken up in its favor?
The whole time, Fingolfin was at the center of everything. He did not dominate the room with volume or force. Indeed, he spent most of his time silently watching and listening. But Maedhros noticed that whenever the conversation began to spiral, Fingolfin would ask a question that brought it back to the core issue. He never told anyone that they were wrong, but he wove together disparate datasets that spoke for themselves. The listened. They trusted him, and they listened.
Maedhros had thought astrophysics was about finding answers in the sky. He now realized that it was also about process, about building a team from individuals who didn’t always agree. He was learning how to test theories, but he was also learning how to listen, how to hold a room, and how to keep the work moving forward. And, by watching Fingolfin, he was learning how a person could subtly, without most of the others even consciously realizing it, influence a discussion to turn the way that he wanted it to, until, at last, as the meeting came to a conclusion, the attendees were nearly all in agreement, to point the detector back towards the Swan and try to get Alqua X-1 to unlock its secrets.
After finals, Fingon invited Maedhros to the midwinter service at his family’s church, followed by a festival in the square. “It’s really corny,” Fingon said, a little pink in the cheeks, “there’ll be carnival games, a train for the little kids, cider and Teleri carolers and all that stuff. But it’s fun, we go every year.”
“The festival sounds great,” Maedhros said. “Of course I’ll come. Church, though…”
“I know, I know, it’s not your thing. It’s okay. You can meet us in the square after.”
Maedhros pictured Fingon at church, illuminated by candlelight and framed by stained glass, and then he thought about the upcoming winter break. The family was heading to the big old house in the country, an annual tradition, all the aunts, uncles, and cousins getting together for the holidays.
Fingolfin had told Maedhros to relax, take a break. They had even invited him to join them at the country house. A part of him did want to go. It sounded cozy, in a tweedy, horse-and-hound kind of way. He also would have loved to see Finrod, not to mention his siblings. By now, Maedhros had heard several stories about Finrod’s brothers and sister that could not possibly all be true, and he was curious to meet them in the flesh.
But to refuse to go home to his own family, and then spend Midwinter with someone else’s, felt like a betrayal. And he couldn’t predict what might come out if he, Finrod, and Fingon were all in the same place at the same time. Finrod knew Maedhros too well, and besides, he had a sixth sense for sexual tension. But Maedhros himself couldn’t even say what he and Fingon were to each other. He had to figure it out before letting anyone else in. No, better to avoid the awkwardness entirely. Besides, he really did have work to do.
Still. It dispirited him to think Fingon was leaving for three weeks.
So, what better time than now, to get a clear answer? Was Maedhros imagining things, or was Fingon really looking back at him with more than friendly interest? And if so, was he ready to act upon it?
“I’ll go with you to church,” Maedhros said, “I don’t mind.”
Well. He’d make the most of the opportunity. He had some ideas. If a year in Brithombar had taught him one thing, it was conversational Sindarin. But if it had taught him two things, it was how to dress and move to inflame a man. His Brithombar wardrobe translated well to Tirion winter; finally, he could bring some things out of the back of the closet. Nothing too flamboyant, just a touch of elegance. Tonight, he wore a cashmere sweater, dark wool trousers, and heeled, lace-up vintage boots. His coat, a knee-length, black swallow-tail style, hugged his chest, then flared out from the waist, revealing a flash of emerald satin lining when it swung open. And he had foregone a hat in favor of leaving his long, copper hair loose, so he could toss it in the wind.
He met Fingon at his house, and they fell into step behind Fingon’s family, as they walked to the First Church of Tirion on the square.
Maedhros kept stealing looks, trying not to let them linger too long. He wasn’t sure if Fingon hadn’t noticed, or if he had, and was letting it happen.
“Nice coat,” Maedhros said. Fingon wore a new navy peacoat with gold buttons, a striped blue-and-gold scarf, and a matching knit hat atop his messy curls. Maedhros wanted to take a bite out of him.
Fingon slowed his step and beamed. “Thanks, I thought you might like it. I saw it this weekend and realized I needed a real winter coat. Something to replace my dumb high school letter jacket.”
“It looks really good on you,” Maedhros said, “but your scarf—here.” He reached out.
Fingon stopped walking, letting Maedhros adjust the scarf, fingers sliding up to the messy loop at his throat.
“Blue and gold are your colors. Let me—” He undid the loop, then lifted the scarf over Fingon’s head and coiled it more artfully, tucking it beneath the collar, and well, if his fingers brushed the bare skin of Fingon’s neck, that was justifiable.
Throughout, Fingon stood unmoving, watching Maedhros’s face.
When Maedhros was done, he stepped back and nodded.
Fingon stayed still, making no jokes or efforts to break the tension. The corners of his mouth twitched into a small smile, the one that made Maedhros feel breathless and foggy. He floated all the way to the church.
Maedhros could hardly remember the last time he had been at a church service. It must have been not long after he got kicked out of Sunday school for asking questions, all those years ago. He had avoided such places ever since, and now, stepping inside, he was struck by unexpected anxiety. He held back, watching Fingon and each family member dip their fingers into a small bowl, then trace a swift pattern across their faces, too quickly for him to follow. Was he supposed to do that? Surely no one expected it. This hadn’t come up during his brief stint at Sunday school.
Fingon came to his rescue. He noticed Maedhros hanging back and nodded him over, whispering, “Just do what I do.” He showed him the pattern more slowly, so that Maedhros could repeat it back.
“I don’t believe in any of this,” Maedhros whispered nervously, “but I’m not calling on Melkor to bless me, am I?”
Fingon laughed, then covered his mouth when Anairë turned back and gave him a look. “Shh, don’t be cute. Let’s go.” He led Maedhros into the nave and to a pew.
The sanctuary was dark, lit only by a few candles in iron sconces, the flames flickering with each draft. At the front, a great altar, woven with stars and branches, stood before a single, unlit brazier.
When the organ music began, everyone stood. Maedhros followed stiffly, half a second behind the others, while music swelled from somewhere behind them, a choir, clear and rich, blending in harmony with the low, resonant organ. The words were in Primitive Elvish, and Maedhros didn’t know the tune.
He felt a tap on his hand before he looked down, Fingon handing him a hymnal, opened to the proper page. Fingon knew the words. His voice was low, steady, and Maedhros kept reminding himself to follow along in the song, though his eyes kept straying. The way Fingon’s lips moved over the soft syllables, the way the candlelight kissed his brown skin all golden, the peaceful expression on his face, which shifted to a faint crease between his brows when he realized Maedhros still wasn’t singing. Fingon bumped him with his shoulder.
Maedhros shrugged, bumped him back, and stayed there—leaning in just enough to feel the warmth of Fingon’s arm through the layers of sweaters and coats, just enough to pull back quickly if he needed to.
They eventually sat back down as the minister began the service, and Maedhros focused on nothing but Fingon’s presence beside him. He placed his hand on the seat of the pew.
A moment later, he felt Fingon’s hand searching for its own resting place.
Their hands brushed.
Fingon went still. Then he nudged closer, slowly, until the back of his hand pressed against Maedhros’s, not holding, just touching. Fingon’s pinkie finger hooked onto his for a moment, then unhooked. Maedhros swallowed.
The minister droned on, a soloist sang of the Long Dark after the Lamps Fell, and the Flame Imperishable was lit in the brazier, reminding the congregation that just as light follows dark, so would spring come again.
But Maedhros was aware of nothing but the beat-beat of his own heart, the sweet ache of longing in his belly, the press of Fingon’s hand against his, solid and warm, an offering.
He turned slightly toward him, just enough to see his face, if he was looking, too.
And oh, he was. Maedhros saw a flicker of nervousness in Fingon’s eyes and thought so he does fear something. Maedhros could not be coy. He could not imagine being anything but sincere. He met Fingon’s anxiety with hunger, looking back, relentless, unable and unwilling to drop his gaze.
When the service ended, they filed back outside with the crowd. Fingon’s siblings ran off toward the square, following the cheery sounds and sights of the festival: an a cappella group singing carols, the whistle of a train, the jingle of bells, colorful lights everywhere. The air was rich with the smell of spruce and woodsmoke, peppermint and roasted chestnuts.
Every few steps, Fingolfin or Anairë stopped to chat, shaking hands, kissing cheeks. Their friends gushed over Anairë’s jewelry, wanted Fingolfin’s take on the latest faculty senate drama. After a few of these, Fingolfin waved Fingon and Maedhros off. “Go have a good time. You’ll never see anything if you’re stuck with the two of us,” he said.
Maedhros smiled. Well, if he insisted. And then—
He looked at Fingon.
And Fingon stared back at him with such clear desire that Maedhros suddenly wanted to be anywhere but here, out on the sidewalk, where everyone could read his face and see into his heart. He nodded toward a narrow path of glowing lanterns leading down the side of the church, and set off. Fingon followed him until they came to a cluster of great, dark pines encircling a small courtyard against the red-brick building.
It was quiet here, except for the crunch of their boots on the dry leaves and the distant hum of the crowd. No one could see them.
Inside the circle of trees, snowflakes began to fall.
Maedhros stopped and turned and was struck speechless. Fingon, snowflakes falling on his scarf and hat, his cheeks flushed, shivering from—was it the cold?
“You have snow on your eyelashes,” Fingon said softly, stepping closer.
“I do?” Maedhros blinked.
“Yeah.” Fingon’s hand came up, light and careful, brushing a thumb across his cheekbone. “Right here.”
Maedhros’s breath caught, Fingon’s hand lingered. Maedhros reached up and covered the hand with his own.
For a moment, nothing passed between them but their breath, pluming white in the cold air, and the snowflakes, and the inevitable realization.
Then, as though pulled by the same invisible force, they both leaned in.
The kiss, when it happened, was uncertain and soft. Maedhros, heart beating like a caged animal against its bars, had no thoughts other than careful, easy, as though taming the wild thing inside him, something hungry and fierce. Fingon’s mouth was tender, pliant, and Maedhros held back, resisting the urge to take more than he should.
When they drew apart, neither spoke for a long moment.
Then Fingon made a sound like a mouse, and Maedhros could not hold back the animal inside him any longer.
He pounced.
Their second kiss, Maedhros crowding into Fingon, hard and demanding, was far from uncertain. He ducked his head, gathered Fingon in his arms, and kissed him with full intent. Their bodies pressed together, the wind whipping up Maedhros’s coattails. After a moment of stunned hesitation, Fingon gave back just as good as he got, finding the seam of Maedhros’s lips with his tongue and slipping inside. Maedhros moaned, opening to Fingon as he tightened their embrace, enveloping him in warmth and want.
They kissed and kissed and kissed. They were unable to stop. Maedhros could not think of why he should ever stop. He only paused for breath, gasping as though felled by a hunter’s arrow when Fingon’s lips found his neck. Fingon’s hands roamed his body, across the lapels of his coat, down his waist, up his back, gripping his arms, then to his face.
“You’re freezing,” Maedhros squeaked when Fingon’s bare hands touched his cheeks. “Where is your coat?”
“I must have left it behind in the pew,” Fingon laughed. “I don’t feel cold at all.”
“Come here,” Maedhros said, unbuttoning his coat and pulling Fingon in to share his warmth.
Now it was Fingon’s turn to groan. “You feel,” he said, sliding his hand inside, around Maedhros’s body, linking behind his back, “incredible.”
Maedhros felt himself burning up, losing control. He closed his eyes and rested his chin atop Fingon’s head, the puff of his knit hat tickling his face. Fingon’s breath was hot against his neck, as he fought for his own composure.
For a long moment, neither moved nor spoke, as they caught their breath. The snow fell softly around them.
“That was even better than I imagined it,” Fingon said softly into Maedhros’s chest.
Maedhros hummed in agreement and smiled, his heart still racing, but the sharp edge of need had dulled, replaced by a tender thrum of affection. He could hear the sound of voices rising again, choral harmonies and laughing children.
“Should we stay a bit longer, or go back for your coat?” Maedhros murmured.
Fingon shrugged. His eyes sparkled in the starlight, and his grin was wide, laughter bursting forth as though he could not contain his joy. He tipped his head back, letting snowflakes fall on his face, a soft, contented sigh escaping. “Why rush?” he asked. “We have time.”
Notes:
The real-world version of Project VAIRË is Project Ozma, the first serious search for extraterrestrial signals via radio astronomy.
A reminder, which is especially relevant in this chapter, the university in Tirion is loosely based in part on Harvard, which, strictly speaking, did not admit women until 1977.
This is the chapter where Maedhros wears Birkenstocks.
Fingon’s house is drawn from a few different models of Victorian-style houses in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but the one that spiritually moved me the most is this one.
I’m really sorry to have to tell you this, but Fingon (and, by extension, Fingolfin and Finwë) being cheerleaders is directly inspired by George W. Bush being a high school and college cheerleader at Philips Andover Academy and Yale.
In the library, Maedhros sent Fingon to find The Feynman Lectures.
The folk singer who got nearly booed offstage at the folk festival.
Ilmarë SAS-1 is based on Uhuru, the first X-ray satellite in the world, launched by NASA in 1970. Uhuru sources. Also The X-Ray Universe, Tucker & Giacconi, 1985
Chapter 5: Friction
Summary:
A year passes. Maedhros navigates competing personal and professional loyalties. Fingolfin gives advice. And everyone congregates in Tirion for a major astrophysicists’ conference that brings some old sorrows to the surface. Also, spray cheese.
Notes:
As usual, cultural, scientific, and historical references are explained in endnotes for those who enjoy that kind of thing.
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
A year passed in golden-honey blur. There were long evenings in the computer lab and sleepy mornings in classrooms, nights of breathless kisses and sighs of pleasure, days when the work was so tedious and mind-numbing, Maedhros thought about giving up entirely and moving to Tol Eressëa to sell seashells on the seashore. His research with Fingolfin was clicking into place; his professors liked him; he even got published in one of the leading journals. He moved through the passing seasons without marking them, caught up in the strange sensation of finding meaning in the present moment rather than the lingering past or the looming future.
One early spring Sunday night, he was at Fingon’s house, as usual. Anairë had served a pork roast dressed with mint from the front yard. Maedhros lingered at the table after dinner, rushing through an update on the latest satellite data. He was hungry for Fingolfin’s approval as he began to shape his dissertation topic.
“I’ve been thinking about adapting the programming routines for radio observations,” Maedhros began. “I’ve already written several routines to clean up low-energy noise from X-ray sources. With some modifications, we could automate the identification of known radio sources, too.”
Fingolfin sat back in his chair and nodded. “Pulsars, quasars, radio galaxies, and terrestrial noise. Yes, of course. You could slash processing time in half. At least.”
“Exactly. The more known patterns I can eliminate, the more useful the routines can be,” Maedhros said, “to, uh, other types of radio astronomers.”
Fingolfin took a long time to respond.
“You mean SETI,” he finally said.
Maedhros paused. “Yes, SETI efforts would benefit from this work.”
Fingolfin steepled his fingers and touched them to his lips, brow furrowed. Maedhros didn’t need a punch-card routine to know what that signaled.
“It’s a great idea,” Fingolfin said. “Truly, I suspect the Space Administration will come knocking at your door. They’ll steal you right out from under me.” He smiled, a little rueful. “But it’s long past time I talk to you about something—indelicate.”
Maedhros knew what was coming. He was aware that Fëanor’s research was considered eccentric, at best, by the scientific establishment. Fëanor had earned decades of respect before he started searching for voices in the stars. His talent more than made up for the strange turn. He was a household name with a robust body of work. Certainly, he was controversial for plenty of reasons, many of them valid. But no one could say he didn’t know what he was talking about.
And Maedhros had none of these advantages. Not yet. He was a novice researcher, just lucky to have fallen into Fingolfin’s dining room. If it weren’t for the stupid broken ankle, he never would have been singled out for attention in the first place. If he believed in Varda, Maedhros would have thanked her every day for that accident; without it, he might have taken years to build that kind of connection.
Still, Maedhros’s interest in SETI wasn’t just about proving his loyalty to his father. It really wasn’t! He had put a whole continent between them, hadn’t he?
A memory from the past May, when Maedhros spent a week at home before heading off for his summer fellowship, floated into his consciousness. That week, they didn’t see Fëanor or Curufin for three days. Finally, late one evening, Nerdanel had thrown him the car keys and told him to go find them before they wasted away or blew themselves up.
Maedhros knew Fëanor’s haunts at Formtech well. He checked out Fëanor’s office, the astronomy archives, and the computer mainframe center. Fëanor was nowhere to be found, though he did retrieve Curufin, who was curled up in some corner, fast asleep. Finally, a night janitor pointed him in the right direction. They tracked Fëanor down, listening to recordings of radio transmissions on a headset in a tiny closet. It was Curufin who managed to coax him toward the car and home, distracting him with questions about the work as they steered him along.
And the frustrating, inescapable truth was that Fëanor could still be as compelling as ever. He wasted no time on pleasantries, launching straight into explanations of his latest work. Fëanor believed he was on the brink of making the thousand-dish array a reality. His designs were elegant and detailed, ready to break ground. All he needed was institutional backing and a site. Somewhere remote, away from population centers that could interfere with radio telescopes. High elevation, of course. The thinner the atmosphere, the lesser the signal distortion. Wide, flat land, with dry air, for clear reception. There was no perfect location in mountainous, humid Aman, so Fëanor thought they should look farther afield. A scientific preserve in unclaimed territory.
After exhausting his monologue, Fëanor grew philosophical. He settled into the passenger seat, smoking out the window, talking as much to himself as to his sons. Maedhros rolled down his own window, letting in the warm Formenos night air, thick with smells of hot asphalt, late-night family barbecues, and the acrid, ozone tang of smog.
“I read Nolofinwë’s latest black hole theory,” said Fëanor, out of nowhere. Maedhros almost drove into the median. He was accustomed to Fëanor’s fiery lectures about the overwhelming darkness, passionate sermons about radio waves. But the only previous time Maedhros could recall Fëanor bringing up his onetime colleague, it had been to criticize him for not yet joining the SETI Consortium.
“Black holes, he’s after, now. There is a wide, yawning black infinity in the cosmos,” said Fëanor, rising into his oratorical register. “We are alone on this planet, a single, lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. Languishing in obscurity, cut off from the rest of the universe.”
As always, Maedhros found himself falling into the spell. He tightened his grip on the steering wheel, grounding himself to reality. Even now, the power of his father’s voice could draw him in, until he felt infinitely small within the well of it, helpless against the force of Fëanor’s immense will. He couldn’t help getting pulled in, even when he’d rather be listening to overly earnest protest folk on the college radio station.
“There is no rescue that will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves,” Fëanor said. “It is up to us, it always has been. We long for a father to care for us, to forgive us our errors, to save us from our childish mistakes. But we are alone. No one is coming. Despite what Nolvo might have you believe.”
What, Maedhros thought.
“Always so eager to please some authority,” said Fëanor, as if hearing Maedhros’s unvoiced question. “The academy, the government, the Space Administration. Hypocrisy! Billions of dollars in experimental X-ray research. Yet he calls me fanciful,” said his father, and if Maedhros didn’t know better, he might have thought he heard a flicker of wistfulness in his tone.
The rest of the drive home passed in silence, Maedhros lost in thought. He did not fully understand the history between his father and Fingolfin, but it was clear the two men, so alike in some ways, yet so different in others, could not see eye to eye. Fingolfin was warmer, more patient, and had given Maedhros far more individual mentorship and support in a single year than Fëanor had in the prior four.
But when it came to astronomy? There was no contest. Fëanor’s intellectual supremacy was unquestionable. If Fëanor believed that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence was a valid pursuit, well, that was enough for Maedhros. And if asked, Maedhros could, in fact, argue the case himself. Fëanor, audacious though he was, had always stressed that speculation must be grounded in sober physical reality. The extraterrestrials and their technology must adhere to the laws of nature. Fëanor had torn apart Maedhros’s childish fantasies, comic books about alien invaders, sci-fi films about Carnilian villains. There were no intelligent civilizations on Carnil, Fëanor had explained, even if planetary spectroscopy had proven the presence of water in its polar ice caps.
No, if the civilizations were out there, they were likely far, far away, having evolved under fantastically different conditions than life on Arda. They would almost certainly be more advanced than even the Elves of Aman could imagine, possessing technologies beyond anything they could conceive. They likely would have even encountered new laws of physics. It was hopelessly narrow-minded to presume that the understanding of the universe ended with relativity and quantum mechanics.
The extraterrestrials would have to know that civilizations like Arda’s, just barely crossing the threshold of spaceflight and advanced astronomical observation, would be deeply limited in their capacity to perceive messages from outside their own solar system. They would know this, and if they wished to communicate, they would know, too, how to make it possible. Not too easy. Not without some effort on their part. Just enough that someone with vision, a spirit of fire, and a will of iron might be able to hear them.
That Sunday night, at the dinner table, when Fingolfin said that he felt the need to say something indelicate, Maedhros knew what was coming.
Fingolfin set down his tea but did not face Maedhros right away. He stared into space. He always has found it difficult to talk about my father, Maedhros thought to himself. He felt a swell of empathy for the man.
“It’s funny,” Fingolfin said, “for a discipline that thrives on discovery, space science can be oddly closed to the truly radical.”
Maedhros nodded. “Yes, especially here in Tirion. At Formenos, they were more open to breaking the mold. I think it comes from being a younger institution, there’s less tradition getting in the way. All these hundreds of years of history, they can obstruct innovation, can’t they? Not to criticize Tirion,” he added quickly, “I don’t mean to speak out of turn.”
Fingolfin smiled and shook his head. “I know you don’t. And yes, institutional inertia is part of it, but that’s not precisely what I wanted to talk to you about.” He sighed, looking up at the ceiling, as though gathering his thoughts.
“There’s a threshold,” Fingolfin continued after a few silent moments, “to how many eccentricities the academy will tolerate, even expect, to a degree. Nearly everyone has a harmless quirk.” Fingolfin smiled nostalgically. “Why, one of my own thesis committee members refused to attend meetings after lunch, said he had to go home and take care of his two-legged cat. And you know the present department chair, such a sentimentalist, he can hardly make it through an office birthday party without breaking down in tears.”
Maedhros had been in attendance at several such parties, and he cringed in secondhand embarrassment at the reminder. “Yes, I’ve noticed.”
“But too many eccentricities in one person, that starts to be a problem. And if there are concerns regarding one’s intellectual and personal pursuits, both, well, one might start to question, is this person really suited for a career in academia?” Fingolfin had taken on a didactic, professorial tone, unusual for conversations with Maedhros, with whom he preferred a clubby, first-among-equals posture. “Reservations might be raised during a tenure review, for example. And, well, even a dissertation proposal might face resistance, were the problems too overt to ignore.” At last, Fingolfin turned to face him.
“So, you’re saying… including SETI in my proposal would be a step too far,” Maedhros guessed.
“Not precisely,” Fingolfin said.
His eyes dropped down to the lavender silk scarf tied around Maedhros’s neck—a style he’d picked up in Brithombar—then to the long, loose waves of copper hair cascading over his shoulders.
Fingolfin’s look contained more scrutiny than merely an old-fashioned fashion sense should warrant.
“You’re an excellent scholar. A fine young man,” said Fingolfin. “And there’s a lot I can do to protect you, were someone to ask questions of a personal nature.”
“Is that likely to happen?” Maedhros asked.
“It’s nobody’s business what someone does in the privacy of their own home,” Fingolfin continued, meeting Maedhros’s eyes. The warmth had drained. The eye contact alone was enough to trigger Maedhros’s fight-or-flight response.
“The privacy of my own home,” he repeated, cold.
“I would never presume,” Fingolfin said, “but it’s been brought to my attention that you have, er, explicit reading material in your possession. One should be careful what kind of message one is sending.”
What was Fingolfin even talking about? Maedhros was stumped. He searched his memory. Explicit reading material?
Did he mean the poetry? Surely a Tirion professor wouldn’t come after him for reading poetry, no matter how homoerotic.
Was Maedhros in a position to deny everything? What were Fingolfin’s accusations based on?
They had been so careful. He and Fingon never touched each other in any way that could be interpreted as other than friendly when in front of Fingon’s family; he had never even been in Fingon’s attic bedroom for more than a few minutes. They did not go out for dinner or dancing, they kept a safe distance when walking to and from campus, and they told no one what they were to each other. They’d spent the majority of their time together over the past year safely behind closed doors, in Maedhros’s apartment, tangled around one another in bed.
“I’m not asking you to defend yourself,” Fingolfin continued. “I’m sure you think I’m a square, but truly, I hold no prejudices. I’m not uptight. However,” he said after a pause, “not everyone in the establishment shares my tolerance. Maitimo, I want you to have the kind of career you deserve. You shouldn’t be shut out of any opportunities just because the field is resistant to those who flamboyantly flout the traditions of our people.”
A sense of heavy numbness settled over Maedhros.
“I think I understand you,” Maedhros said without emotion. “You’re making it very clear, what kind of queer behavior can’t be tolerated in the department.”
Fingolfin winced. “You’re not understanding me at all.” He closed his eyes. “What I’m saying is, you might find it wise to choose just one eccentricity, especially now, when you’re just starting out. You’re so young. I hold some influence over others, the types who might question your sensibilities. But I can’t protect you if you’re besieged on multiple fronts. It would help,” he said, “if you shielded yourself. Limit your vulnerability to what matters the most.”
He leaned toward Maedhros then reached out and touched him, grasping him by the shoulder. To Fingolfin’s credit, he neither hesitated nor flinched.
“You’re an excellent scientist, and a good judge of character,” Fingolfin said. “If you chart your course in the right direction, I believe we can sail on ahead, no matter how rough the seas.”
“Your father said something strange to me a few nights ago,” Maedhros said to Fingon. “Do you think he might know about us?”
Fingon, still sweating and breathing hard, sat back on his heels. He wore an eagle-feather pendant on a delicate gold chain around his neck. His brown skin glowed faintly in the amber light of the Fëanorian lamps. “He what?”
Maedhros passed him a glass of water from the night table and told him about the conversation. He kept it simple, just the key points. Fingon looked as stunned as Maedhros had felt.
“What I can’t make heads or tails of,” Maedhros said, “so to speak, is what he thinks he caught me reading. I haven’t even touched anything like that in years.”
Fingon looked moved for a moment. Then, his eyes widened as he seemed to realize something. “Oh,” he said, “oh, no.”
Maedhros propped himself up on his elbows, then stretched out his legs, grazing the outsides of Fingon’s thighs. “Do tell,” he said. He wasn’t angry, at least, not yet, but he was puzzled by the mystery.
“I may have blamed something on you,” Fingon admitted, collapsing onto the bed and burying his face into his pillow. His braids fanned out in every direction, gold beads on their tips like rays of sunlight.
“Wait, this is your fault? Were you going to mention it to me?” Maedhros asked.
“I honestly forgot. I know, I should have told you when it happened,” Fingon said, voice muffled.
Maedhros waited. He had learned that when Fingon was ashamed of something, he was incapable of keeping it to himself. He never needed to snoop or demand explanations, Fingon would always come to him. Over the course of their relationship, Fingon had forlornly confessed to gazing too long at another man in the locker room, to using Maedhros’s toothbrush, and to forgetting Maedhros’s birthday and buying a last-minute gift at the drugstore. Maedhros enjoyed these confessions, whose content never truly bothered him, but gave him the opportunity to demand acts of contrition before pardoning Fingon of his shame. He suspected, without judgment, that this ritual helped Fingon process some of the inner turmoil he had yet to resolve about their relationship.
And, well, if that meant that Maedhros got excited any time Fingon screwed up, that was just a bonus.
“I had an issue of Stag & Swan in my bag,” Fingon said into the pillow. “It fell out, and I panicked.”
“You told your father it was my gay porn that fell out of your bag?” Maedhros cried, both horrified and delighted. He struggled to maintain an appropriately severe tone.
Fingon moaned miserably and shook his head back and forth. His whole body trembled. Maedhros liked the look of him, facedown, skin still flushed, naked and quaking on his bed.
“I told Turgon,” he groaned. “I should have known the rat would say something.”
Maedhros took pity on him, then. He shifted closer and laid a hand on Fingon’s bare back, dragging it across the warm, damp skin between his shoulder blades, before letting it rest there, firm and forgiving. “You should have,” he said sweetly. He leaned over, close enough for his breath to hit Fingon’s ear. “Now, where’d you put the magazine?”
Maedhros didn’t tutor Fingon in physics anymore, to their mutual relief. Not long after they got together, Fingon admitted why he had been such a terrible student.
“I couldn’t help it,” he explained, somewhere in the twenty minutes between the first and second times they slept together. “You would be talking about conservation of momentum or something, and all I could think about was kissing you. And tearing those sweaters off you. And—” He proceeded to re-enact another one of his distracting thoughts, which, to be fair, demonstrated a pretty decent understanding of elastic collisions.
More to the point, Fingon finally gathered the nerve to change his major. “I never really wanted to study physics anyway,” he told Maedhros late one night, as they ate takeout, cross-legged on the floor. “It just seemed like what I was supposed to do. But I had to admit, I don’t have the brains.”
“There you go again,” Maedhros said, watching Fingon slurp the last of his noodles before reaching over to wipe soy sauce from his mouth. “I’m offended,” he said softly, thumb still resting at the corner of Fingon’s lips. “You think I’d fall for someone without brains?”
Fingon grinned and stretched out, wearing only white cotton briefs and a lazy smile. “It’s okay,” he said, flexing and kissing his bicep, “I know exactly what I bring to the relationship.”
Maedhros swallowed hard, and he told himself it was the muscled arms, not the word “relationship,” that made him abandon his own noodles and tackle Fingon to the floor.
“You don’t have to finish school at all,” said Maedhros several minutes later, his mouth hot against Fingon’s trembling belly. “Or ever leave this apartment again. Just stay here. Don’t put any clothes back on. And”—he did something that made Fingon clutch at his hair— “I’ll take care of you.”
There were a few subjects they could joke about but never discussed seriously. One was the fact that Maedhros was quite sure Fingon didn’t, in fact, really want to finish school. Biology was a slight improvement over physics, sure, but he still grumbled about classes, skipped workshops, and refused to study except for all-nighters before exams, or if Maedhros promised sex as a reward. Fingon, Maedhros thought, was ill-suited for academia; he had loved nothing more in his life than working part-time as a firefighter, rescuing people and animals who were hurt and scared.
One night, in the sticky, dreamy place between the heights of pleasure and the depths of sleep, he admitted he’d been happier at that job than at any other time in his life.
“I mean,” Fingon said, “happier, aside from… you know. This,” he added, resting his head on Maedhros’s chest and drawing sleepy circles on his palm, the touch so tender that Maedhros’s heart tightened with something he was afraid to define.
And that was the other thing they never really discussed: What, exactly, was This? Something more than friendship, to be sure. Within weeks of their first kiss, they had fallen into bed together, and ever since, as long as they were both in town, hardly a week passed without Fingon making some excuse at home and staying over at Maedhros’s. He had a key, his own set of stuff in the bathroom (after the toothbrush incident), spare clothing in drawers. Maedhros knew how Fingon took his coffee, light and sweet, and his toast, with peanut butter and marshmallow fluff. Fingon knew which nights Maedhros was likely to stay up at the computer center long after the dining hall closed, and he would have dinner ready and a cozy soul record playing by the time Maedhros stumbled in, bleary-eyed and numb from staring at punch-cards.
Though Maedhros hadn’t slept in the same bed with anyone since he was very small, he found it all too easy to fall asleep with Fingon. Those were the most dangerous moments. When he felt the weight of Fingon’s sleeping body against his, Maedhros found himself wanting the impossible, things too risky to consider, let alone speak out loud. In the morning, Maedhros would wake, clinging, reptilian, to Fingon’s warmth, but as the day wore on, that warmth would recede, leaving behind only the cool, empty place that ached with what they would not name.
So, they did not go out on dates, though Fingon lit candles to celebrate their one-year anniversary. They told no one, though Maedhros would whisper secret names into the back of Fingon’s neck when he was sleeping. He never invited Fingon to join him in Formenos when he went home for breaks, though he imagined what Fingon would look like on the beach, shirtless and shining the sun, the ocean spray salty on his skin. When Maedhros spent time with Fingon’s family, he dug his nails into his palms to keep himself from touching the small of his back as he passed by, sliding his arm around him when they sat together on the couch. They made no promises, nor did they extract guarantees of exclusivity.
And so that was how things were, and how Maedhros expected them to continue, until one day in June, at an astrophysics conference that should have been Maedhros’s shining moment of triumph, his father came to Tirion for the first time in decades, and, though it took a little while for Maedhros to realize what was happening, Fëanor nearly ruined everything.
The conference held its opening reception in the gardens of the Faculty Club, a location chosen, Maedhros suspected, less for practicality than symbolism. Beneath the shade of oaks and sugar maples, the biggest names in astrophysics and astronomy rubbed shoulders with the luminaries of Tirion. Red-brick paths curled from corner to corner like orbital diagrams, and white folding chairs were arranged around banquet tables in irregular constellations. A chamber ensemble played polite classical Teleri music. The entire garden was warmly lit by the late-afternoon sun slanting through the trees. Nearly everyone who was important to Maedhros was there somewhere, divided neatly into family units.
Fingolfin and his family stood near the center, as stately and poised as a painting, tall Turgon looming behind his parents, Aredhel looking bored with the proceedings, eyeing the trays of sparkling wine. Two women Maedhros hadn’t met, but suspected must be Fingon’s aunts, laughed along with Anairë as they sipped from cocktail glasses. Maedhros knew the aunts weren’t physicists themselves; they were here for the dedication, representing the family name.
Fingon’s navy-blue suit fit him so well, like armor, Maedhros couldn’t stand to look at him for long. His smile was genuine, his posture, impeccably cotillion-trained. Matching his mother’s, Fingon’s braids appeared freshly redone, the beads replaced with delicate golden chains threaded through his hair and looping over his ears in a complex pattern. He looked every inch the heir of his father, though Maedhros alone knew how his skin would flush with desire if he peeled the suit off him, slowly, one piece at a time. He forced himself to turn away before he did anything embarrassing.
And Maedhros was immediately delighted to spot Finrod, golden and cheery as ever, with the man Maedhros knew must be his father. The Finarfinian branch of the family had staked out a stone bench under a wisteria-laced archway, mingling with Professor Olwë and other faculty from Alqualondë.
At the farthest northern edge of the garden, as far away as it was possible to stand from Fingolfin without leaving the event entirely, Fëanor held his place at the center of his own cluster of Formtech scholars, Nerdanel and Maglor at the fringes. Fëanor looked at ease, smiling and joking with his colleagues. Maedhros wondered if anyone else noticed how many cigarettes he had already chain-smoked by the time the event formally began.
The ensemble stopped playing, and conversations tapered off, when the President of the Amanyarin Astrophysical Society, a white-haired man Maedhros remembered from a colloquium his first year at science camp, stepped to the podium and cleared his throat, hushing the crowd.
“It is my honor to welcome you all to the opening of the annual Astronomy and Astrophysics Conference,” he said. “We’re particularly pleased to hold this year’s meeting here at Tirion, where so many of our greatest minds shared parts of their journeys, and where, this evening, we honor the memory of one in particular.”
There was a murmur of polite admiration, followed by a shift of attention as the curator of the library’s special collections took his place at the podium. He was a surprisingly young Noldo whose broad shoulders and long eyelashes caught Maedhros’s eye for a quick moment before he remembered himself and looked reflexively over at Fingon. (Fingon, for his part, flashed a smile before mouthing something along the lines of I know, right? in Maedhros’s direction.)
The curator spoke with enthusiasm of the newly acquired archive: Finwë’s personal papers, his letters, drafts, diagrams and notes dredged up from the corners of the physics department and the family’s own files.
“Professor Finwë’s career,” the curator intoned, “though cut short by the tragedy of the Darkening, remains a guiding light. Thanks to the generosity of the family,” the curator nodded towards Fingolfin, front and center, “these materials will now be housed permanently in what will be known as the Finwëan Reading Room, open to researchers across disciplines. It is our hope that this archive will not only preserve his legacy from the past but inspire the future generations yet to come.”
After the curator stepped away, a representative from the physics department spoke briefly, and then it was Fingolfin who closed the program. He was composed and eloquent as always, speaking of his father’s brilliance, his deep love of teaching, his commitment to the advancement of science.
Then Fingolfin paused, looked up at the skies, and swallowed, before he continued.
“When my sisters first approached me with the idea to donate my father’s papers, I must admit that my first reaction was to guard them with my life,” Fingolfin said, his voice resonating like a horn. “Finwë was a man of great certainty,” he continued, “but also of great curiosity. He believed that to expand the boundaries of knowledge, we must be willing to step beyond that which we already know—to follow a hunch, to test a theory, to explore what others might consider strange, or terrifying. That was the spirit he brought to his work and his life. And I realized, after some thought, that the best way to honor him wasn’t to keep him locked away, but to place his memory in the hands of the public, where that same spark of adventure might catch fire in someone new. That’s what he would have wanted.”
Maedhros glanced across the lawn. Fëanor stood with his hands folded behind his back, his eyes fixed, unblinking, on Fingolfin. When the assembled crowd applauded politely, Fëanor did not move. His expression was perfectly blank, though Maedhros thought he saw his jaw working. Then, after it was clear that Fingolfin was done, Fëanor’s shoulders loosened, he smiled, and he lit another cigarette.
Maedhros couldn’t quite place the look on his father’s face. Pride? Regret? Something even older and sharper, perhaps. Whatever it was, it made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up.
After the speeches, the chamber ensemble picked up their instruments, waiters re-emerged to refill drinks, and the mingling began.
Maedhros made his way straight to Finrod and scooped him into a bear hug. He smelled exactly as Maedhros remembered, sea air and lavender, and Maedhros didn’t let go until he’d had his fill.
“I hear you’re presenting a paper?” Finrod said, grinning. “Well done!”
“Co-presenting, with your uncle,” Maedhros said, but Finrod waved a hand.
“Don’t be modest,” said Finrod. “It’s disingenuous, coming from you.” Then he tugged Maedhros by the sleeve and dragged him over to meet his father.
Finarfin was jaw-droppingly handsome, a taller, broader, square-jawed version of Finrod with a deep tan and the kind of easy charisma that came from decades of being the best-looking person in any room. He looked as comfortable in the gardens of the Faculty Club as he probably did waist-deep in the sea. Maedhros, momentarily dazzled, was grateful that Finrod did most of the talking.
“I’ve heard excellent things,” Finarfin said, extending a large hand. His voice was rich, like molasses on dark bread. “From more than one source. My brother tells me your talk will be the highlight of the conference.”
Maedhros and Fingolfin had submitted a proposal to present the findings from the satellite, the still tentative, but increasingly promising theory that the celestial body in Alqua was, in fact, most likely a black hole. They would deliver their paper on the third and final day. It would be Maedhros’s first major outing as a scientist at this level, and he was determined to make a strong impression.
“I’ll try to live up to expectations,” Maedhros said with a smile. Finarfin’s eyes crinkled, knowing.
At the northern edge of the garden, Maedhros caught sight of Fëanor once more. He hadn’t moved, but the crowd had shifted slowly and inexorably his way. No longer was he flanked only by the Formenos delegation. A circle of men had gathered around him, perhaps former students or rivals, pulled into Fëanor’s gravitational field. Even some of Maedhros’s own Tirion professors were eagerly waiting their turn to speak with the most famous of Finwë’s protégés. Despite all his declarations that he would never again set foot in the city, that he hated the place, Fëanor stood at the center of it like a tall flame, animated and dazzling. His eyes danced, his hands moved as he spoke, and even from halfway across the garden, Maedhros could hear the musical rise and fall of his voice—words indistinct, but passion unmistakable.
Maedhros felt the familiar twist of pride threaded with uncertainty. He glanced at the sparkle of the dry, white wine in his glass. What was Fëanor doing in Tirion, really?
After the reception, Maedhros and Fingon agreed to show a small crowd of visitors around campus; several were alumni indulging in Tirion nostalgia, requiring little of their guides beyond the occasional comment. If Maglor hadn’t tagged along, Maedhros could have almost imagined it as a romantic evening walk.
As it was, Maedhros dutifully pointed out the campus landmarks: the old observatory, the science library, the main quad with the statue of Yavanna, whose bronze breasts were worn shiny from generations of students rubbing them for luck.
He had just pointed out a few of his favorite places to grab a late dinner, just off-campus, when Maglor looked at him with an unusually soft expression. “You really like it here,” said his brother.
Maedhros paused. He had not thought about it in such simple terms. Between classes, lab work, and stolen hours with his secret lover, life in Tirion had been a blur of activity. Fëanor had predicted—wrongly—that Maedhros would hate it. But whether he actually liked Tirion had never seemed the point, so much as understanding Tirion. Mastering it.
“Yes,” Maedhros said, surprising himself with his own abruptness, “I do.”
As they walked, Maglor kept asking about his professors, his research. He was being a really decent brother, showing such interest, Maedhros thought. The warmth of that realization made him feel a little bit guilty about wanting, so badly, to get rid of him.
After they looped back, Maglor’s face turned serious. “Mind if I crash with you a few nights?” Maglor asked, trying for casual. “I miss—uh, getting some peace and quiet.”
Maedhros turned to him. “What does that mean? Aren’t you staying at the hotel with—oh, gross.”
Maglor shook his head. “It isn’t like that anymore,” he said. He filled Maedhros in. In sum: the tension between Fëanor and Nerdanel was so bad, they hardly spoke to one another. Spending any time at all with both of them together, Maglor explained, was torturous. “So, can I crash at yours?”
Maedhros hesitated. A few paces ahead, Fingon was chatting with a young visiting scientist, laughing at something he’d said, head thrown back. He’d removed his suit jacket and slung it over his shoulder, making it easier to envision the lines of his back beneath his crisp white shirt.
“Well,” Maedhros began, stalling. He’d been looking forward to a different kind of night.
But Maglor did look tired and a bit vulnerable. Maedhros hated the little creature of guilt crawling up his chest. He glanced back and forth between Maglor and Fingon, thinking.
Maglor followed the path of Maedhros’s gaze. “Who’s that?”
“A friend,” Maedhros said automatically. Then he nodded. “Yeah, you can stay with me. Of course.”
Fingon could wait a few nights, he told himself.
The next morning, the keynote speaker launched the conference proper, in the largest auditorium on campus. Maedhros found Finrod, and together they took their seats near the front, notebooks in hand. The talk was theoretical, speculative, about quasars and the frontier of intergalactic observation, delivered by a physicist so legendary, Maedhros had won an undergraduate award that was named after him. The man spoke with no notes, just a map of the cosmos projected behind him.
Maedhros barely breathed for the entire hour. He felt like the gates of the universe had cracked open around him.
And that was just the start! The swirl of people and ideas was dizzying. Every hallway and stairwell buzzed with accents from all over the world; it was impossible to decide which sessions to attend, when the choices were between Lambengomor prize-winners presenting the most cutting-edge developments in the field. There were new faces everywhere, but Maedhros was pleased at how many he recognized. Aside from the Finwëans and his own family, he ran into his professors from Brithombar, including Dr. LGM, the female astrophysicist who had discovered pulsars. He spotted Glorfindel, his buddy from science camp, now studying full-time in Gondolin like he’d dreamed. They ran into each other coming out of a session on solar wind, heading opposite directions, and promised to catch up again soon.
“Do you know who that is?” Finrod hissed, bumping Maedhros’s shoulder. “Don’t be obvious!”
Maedhros turned, as casually as he could manage. But it was hard not to stare. There, in the corridor, stood the tallest, most beautiful woman Maedhros had ever seen in his life. With luminous skin and dark hair streaked with silver, she was dressed in a dove-gray suit that made her look more like an ambassador than a physicist. She was approaching the far end of middle age, older than the photos Maedhros had once seen in the papers, but her face was unmistakable.
“That’s Melian of Doriath,” Maedhros breathed. “The astronaut’s wife?”
Finrod elbowed him. “Don’t be sexist,” he said. “She’s a theoretical physicist.”
Melian was nodding in encouragement at a red-faced young researcher explaining his poster. Flanking her were two younger Sindar: a silver-haired man in a fitted turtleneck, and a graceful, grey-eyed woman whose intensity frightened Maedhros, just a little.
“They’re all from Doriath?”
Finrod nodded. “That’s her daughter. I don’t know the other fellow. Look,” he said, pointing at the conference schedule, “this afternoon, Melian’s presenting on something about a comet belt on the outskirts of the solar system, let’s try and get good seats.”
The world was changing. Maedhros could feel it, subtle but simmering. Doriath hadn’t allowed any scientists to travel to the west in decades. The fact that they were here, now, meant something. The air was thick with new ideas, minds were opening, and boundaries, perhaps, beginning to loosen. The future was at the door. Anything might happen.
Her talk was engaging enough—a bit too local for Maedhros’s interests, but her theory about the belt of icy bodies, dwarf planets, and short-range comets seemed sound. The room was chattering with excitement when she opened the floor to questions and answers.
“What do you call this comet belt?” asked the first man called upon. Before she could answer, he barreled ahead: “I have an idea! The Girdle of Melian!”
Melian kept a smile on her face through the chuckles and then moved on.
Maedhros had long since lost track of his parents. Nerdanel had wandered off to the aerospace-materials track. Fëanor was swallowed up by a gaggle of senior physicists first thing in the morning. “You’re not presenting?” someone had asked him, incredulous.
“No,” Fëanor had said, with a smile like a blade. “I’m here to learn.”
Maglor, to his credit, seemed to be taking Maedhros’s advice. The night before, in the half-dark of Maedhros’s apartment, flipping through his record collection and avoiding his eyes, Maglor had said, “I’m thinking of applying to the astrophysics program at Tirion.”
Maedhros had blinked. “My program?”
“Well, what do you think?”
Maedhros had told him to consider backup options. If he wanted a prestige school, Formtech might be a safer bet—at least there, he’d be able to leverage the Fëanor connection. But even so, inwardly, Maedhros wasn’t sure Maglor would make the cut.
When had Maglor even gotten interested in astrophysics, anyway? Maedhros was baffled. He had just finished his undergraduate degree at the state college, and as far as Maedhros knew, that was as far as he’d been planning to take it. Unless he’d been keeping a deeper interest a secret, for reasons Maedhros couldn’t begin to understand.
Yet here he was, wearing a new blazer that was just a little long in the sleeves, mingling with the other attendees after panels, charming junior faculty from across Aman. Maglor had always been good at that, earning people’s goodwill without letting them realize how easily they’d given it away. Maybe he’d secure a place somewhere after all.
Near the end of the first day, Maedhros finally caught sight of Fëanor near the exhibit tables and asked if he’d seen Nerdanel. Fëanor merely shrugged.
“See anything of interest today?” Maedhros asked.
Fëanor rattled off a few talks he’d sat in on, and then he said he’d gone over the library to look at Finwë’s archive.
“Did you find what you were looking for?”
Another shrug, this one slower, Fëanor’s eyes faraway.
That night, Maedhros practiced delivering his section of the presentation to his brother, pacing the linoleum while Maglor sat in his beanbag chair.
“Ask me questions,” Maedhros insisted.
Maglor did, and surprisingly, they were pretty good ones. He knew more about X-ray astronomy than Maedhros had realized. “You’ve been reading the journals,” Maedhros said, eyebrows raised.
“Well, of course.” Maglor looked like Maedhros had said something incredibly obvious. “It’s related to your work. And it’s terribly interesting.”
“Did you know that—” Maedhros began, launching into a tangent that he hadn’t realized he’d been dying to explain.
The next day at lunch, Fingolfin emerged from a meeting with the CEO of an Amanyarin aerospace company, one that had just announced a new initiative to fund long-term observational astronomy. When he caught Maedhros’s eye across the crowd, he flashed a thumbs-up.
“I think we’ve got it,” Fingolfin said, leaning in a bit later when they were face-to-face. “Pending signatures. He put a hand on Maedhros’s shoulder. “They’re very impressed by your work in particular, I think you should know. Really sealed their interest.”
Maedhros felt the approval from Fingolfin’s hand like a blast of heat, radiating across his chest, until it burst into white-hot light around his heart.
Then came Fëanor’s voice behind them. “Congratulations, Nolvo,” said he. “You’ve always known how to flatter your superiors.”
Maedhros winced, and his chest clenched. But not for long. He was in too good a mood to be bothered. The satellite needed cash to keep the project on track, so they could continue their study of Alqua X-1. It gave him a deep sense of satisfaction to know that it was his work, all the late nights feeding punch-cards into the mainframe, that had tipped the scales, earning the CEO’s support, out of all the competing demands. Fëanor’s derisiveness barely touched him; it couldn’t put out the warmth glowing inside him like embers of pride.
At the end of the second day, Maedhros wanted Fingolfin to run through the presentation with him, one last time.
“No,” Fingolfin told him, not unkindly. “You’re ready. There’s nothing more to gain from beating your head against the wall about it. Besides, I’ve got dinner plans,” he added, dropping a few of the biggest names in the field. “Findekáno’s around, somewhere. Why don’t you boys go have fun for once? Hit a bar. Just be ready when the time comes tomorrow afternoon.”
Well, Maedhros wasn’t about to contradict his mentor, after all.
It was easy enough to find Fingon, and easier still to get him on board with Fingolfin’s suggestion. On their way out, they snagged Glorfindel and Finrod, too, who were grinning and gabbing about Beleriand within moments.
“Should we invite your brother?” Fingon asked.
“Nah,” Maedhros said, “I think he has some networking thing.” Maedhros hoped Fingon could read the message in his eyes: he wanted to look at him freely, all night, without having to worry about Maglor catching on. It was a rare evening, and Maedhros felt alive.
Fingon wasn’t as dressed up today, but to Maedhros, he looked unfairly perfect: a soft, slate-blue shirt, half-unbuttoned, sleeves rolled up, tucked into trousers cinched by a braided leather belt, and penny loafers with no socks. He’d removed most of the gold chains from his hair and ears and replaced them with hoops that glittered in the low light. Maedhros wanted to remove them with his teeth. He thought about ditching the others while he took Fingon back to his apartment and took him apart, but his stomach rumbled. He’d waited days to feel Fingon’s skin against his own; he could wait another hour or two.
He could wait through dinner, lobster rolls with mayo and greasy fries, washed down with ice-cold beer. He could wait through Glorfindel bowing his head and saying a quick, silent prayer over his own plate, which prompted Finrod and Fingon to do the same.
For once, Maedhros wasn’t bothered by the performative religiosity. He had eyes for other things. Fingon was one of the few people on the planet who could make eating a lobster roll look studly, Maedhros decided.
Fingon caught on early that Maedhros was in a mood, and he didn’t help matters. He licked his fingers slowly and thoroughly, pressed his thigh flush against Maedhros’s on the booth where they sat, and moaned audibly after finishing his plate. He rested his arm on the back of the booth, not quite around Maedhros, but close enough to feel the heat of his body, his breath, his presence like an embrace.
After dinner, they made their way to the jazz club Finrod wanted to go to. (How did he always find these places so easily, Maedhros wondered.) It was only a few blocks from campus, so they walked, past darkened bookstores, neon-lit delis, other students and tourists enjoying the evening. By the time they got there, it was full night, the sidewalks shimmering with starlight reflected in spilled beer. The club’s entrance was marked only by a red door and a chalkboard sign.
Inside, the place was low-ceilinged and dark, the air thick with the vibration of string bass. No tables were left. They stood by the bar, ordering drinks and shuffling around to let people squeeze past. Fingon took the opportunity to slide in close. Maedhros glanced around. In this place, in the dim and flickering light, no one looked twice at two men wedged together at the bar.
Finrod, for his part, couldn’t keep his eyes off the saxophonist. He was older—of course he was—with military tattoos peeking out from the sleeves of his shirt, his jaw shadowed with stubble. The way he held his instrument was intimate, almost indecent. Glorfindel joked to Maedhros, “I think Findaráto’s fallen in love.”
Maedhros inwardly agreed, and not as a joke.
“Perhaps I have,” said Finrod, batting his eyelashes toward the stage. A few minutes later, the band took a break, canned music playing over the speakers, and Finrod slipped away, off to make his move.
Glorfindel’s perfect, fair eyebrows climbed higher and higher as he watched Finrod approach and flirt with the musician, leaning in close, flipping his hair. “Oh,” Glorfindel said, a hand to his mouth. “I didn’t mean to—I didn’t know he was actually—” He trailed off.
Fingon and Maedhros both smiled. Maedhros tilted his head. “He was actually what?”
Glorfindel shrugged. “Ah, I’m just putting my foot in my mouth. Doesn’t bother me, he seems like a nice enough fellow, isn’t he? He’s your cousin, right, Findekáno?”
Fingon nodded, leaning over the bar, trying to get the bartender’s attention. He was just pressed into Maedhros’s side, more than was strictly friendly, not so much to remove all plausible deniability.
But they were off campus. It was late. Maedhros hadn’t seen a single familiar face beyond the ones he’d arrived with.
He wanted more of Fingon so badly, and at that moment, he couldn’t remember any good reasons why he shouldn’t.
Buoyed by the drink, glowing with nervous energy, Maedhros wrapped his arms around Fingon’s waist and pulled him close. He rested his chin on top of Fingon’s head. He felt rather than heard his soft, delighted shock of laughter. Fingon’s body melted into him.
Glorfindel’s eyes were full saucers by now, but he didn’t look upset, just startled. “Oh,” he said, almost as though to himself. “Oh. Well, yes, I suppose that makes sense, doesn’t it?”
Maedhros laughed, and felt Fingon’s hands slide over his own, warm and sure.
The club was too packed for proper dancing, but no one else seemed to be letting that stop them. Bodies pressed close, strangers brushed shoulders and hips. Maedhros’s chest was pressed to Fingon’s back. They found their own subtle rhythm, swaying to the music. Maedhros tightened his arms, their hands clasped, and Fingon leaned back, nestling his body against Maedhros’s like spoons tucked into a drawer. Heat passed between them like an electrical current.
The band returned to the stage for their next set, and the low, sultry notes wound through the air along with the heavy cloud of smoke. Fingon brought Maedhros’s right hand up and held it against his heart. Maedhros buried his face into Fingon’s hair, inhaling the smell of him, his lemony shampoo, his sandalwood cologne, the familiar, clean sweat that came from within Fingon himself. They didn’t speak. Fingon squeezed Maedhros’s hand, and Maedhros couldn’t keep himself from shifting yet closer, drunk less on the beer than proximity, the thrill of being wanted, openly, artlessly, and letting himself want in return.
Glorfindel blushed and tactfully looked away, the tighter Maedhros pressed up behind Fingon.
Finrod found them still entwined, the number of the saxophonist written on his arm in black marker. His eyes met Maedhros’s, knowing. “I can’t leave you two alone for ten minutes,” he said with a smile. They laughed, and somehow a table opened up just then, and Glorfindel hurled himself across the crowd to claim it in victory.
The conversation turned easy again, then, dipping in and out of physics, gossip, music, home. Fingon let his hand rest on Maedhros’s thigh.
Maedhros felt like he was in the presence of pure light: Finrod was glowing golden, teasing but visibly proud; Glorfindel, a ray of sunshine that shone indiscriminately on everyone; and Fingon, an ardent spirit who brought Maedhros inside the circle of his blazing aurora. All of that, combined with the anticipation of his presentation the next day, the successful bid for the CEO’s sponsorship, Fingolfin’s praise—Maedhros was floating. And he wasn’t even very drunk. Just weightless.
And, well. Exceedingly amorous.
After they stumbled out of the club, they walked Finrod—who was pining after the saxophonist but finally agreed to leave—and Glorfindel back to their hotel. It was after midnight, the streets hushed and near empty, lit by streetlamps and the glint of the stars. Maedhros dared to take Fingon’s hand.
As soon as they were alone, Fingon began murmuring impossible things into the night: how perfect, how handsome, how brilliant Maedhros was.
“How am I here with you? How did I get to be the one? I’ll never get over this,” Fingon said, and Maedhros thought no, no, you have it all backwards, but he didn’t know how to say it out loud, not without cracking open something he wasn’t ready to name, so instead he grabbed Fingon and pulled him close, into an embrace too intimate and full of feeling to survive the daylight.
“You’re on something tonight,” Fingon said, laughing softly, and he didn’t pull away. “What’s gotten into you?”
“Nothing yet,” Maedhros said, low and rough. “But there’s still time. I want you.”
He looked around. A row of hedges caught his eye, and for one wild second, he pictured dropping to his knees right there, pulling Fingon out of his trousers while the stars wheeled overhead. It was a clear, moonless night, raw with unclaimed possibility.
But Fingon deserved better than a hedgerow blowjob. “Take me home,” Maedhros said.
Fingon groaned, and reminded him: “Isn’t your brother still crashing at yours?”
“Fuck,” Maedhros said. He had forgotten. “Then take me to your house.”
“Oh, wow,” breathed Fingon. “Seriously?”
“If you can be quiet,” said Maedhros.
Fingon’s grin was wicked. “I’ll try.”
As luck would have it, the house was full dark. Fingon’s siblings were all in bed; Maedhros could hear their snores through the thin walls. He guessed that Fingolfin and Anairë were still out somewhere, celebrating and schmoozing. If they’d been home, Fingon would have had to come up with an excuse for Maedhros’s presence, and fast.
As it was, there was no one, just the groaning wood of the stairs beneath their feet. Every footfall sounded too loud, every breath too sharp. Maedhros took careful steps, hoping that the old house wouldn’t betray them.
Maedhros could count on one hand the times he’d been in Fingon’s attic bedroom, and never for very long. Back when he was recovering from his injury, Fingon had always come down to him. And after his ankle healed, well, they had fallen into each other so quickly, and then it seemed too inherently risky. They had agreed to be careful, and that meant no vanishing acts, no closed doors, no creaking bedsprings or soft, rhythmic noises drifting down to the rest of the house. No one could know. The house had its silent rules, boundaries that should not be crossed.
Now, standing in Fingon’s doorway, the whole night still ahead, Maedhros’s heart pounded so hard, it felt like it might shatter his ribs.
“You’re such a dream,” Fingon whispered, “I can’t believe you’re here. In my room. And you want me.”
Maedhros laughed, sudden and breathy, and Fingon shushed him, covering his mouth. When he let go, Maedhros whispered back, “We’ve had sex at least a hundred times. When are you going to get that I always want you?”
“Probably never,” Fingon whispered, smiling, and eased Maedhros onto to his bed. The attic air was warm, the breeze from the open window the only other movement in the room. Everything they touched seemed to creak or sigh. Fingon climbed onto him slowly, straddling his hips, and cradled Maedhros’s face in both hands. His expression was intent. “You know,” he said, eyes shining, “you, here, in this room—this is probably my top lifetime fantasy coming true. I imagined you here so many times,” He kissed him once on each cheek, ceremonial, precise, and then pressed their mouths together.
“Show me,” Maedhros said low against Fingon’s mouth. “What did you dream I’d do to you?”
“Oh, this is a good start,” Fingon said, between kisses. His hands worked at unbuttoning Maedhros’s shirt, slipping a palm inside. “You, here on the bedspread, looking like that. But your hair should be down.”
Maedhros reached up and pulled out the hair tie. His waves spilled loose over his shoulders, shining copper in the low light. Fingon put one hand into his hair and twisted just hard enough to make Maedhros cry out.
“Shh,” Fingon whispered, not for the last time.
Fingon kept talking through his adolescent fantasies as he peeled Maedhros out of his clothing and then removed his own. He was laughing half the time, flushed with desire. His belt buckle hit the floor. Maedhros got caught up in the heady performance of it, throwing his head back when Fingon asked, letting Fingon at his neck, then moving his body this way and that as Fingon ran his hands over his skin, then offering Fingon his own lips, his hands. He forget to be careful of the creaking twin bed.
There was nothing unusual in what Fingon described. He had hardly understood what it meant to want another boy, unsure of the details of what exactly they might do with each other. In Fingon’s wildest dreams, mostly, Maedhros was simply there, naked in his bed, kissing him and holding him close. Maedhros’s own early fantasies had been shockingly kinky in comparison.
But Fingon’s imagination pulled Maedhros in and had him fairly desperate within minutes, regardless. What intoxicated him most was the idea of those younger selves—before any groping in the dark, before they had any language for what they wanted. Just that raw yearning, born in the valley of the Calacirya, asleep in their bodies over the years, the sense memory coming awake here and now. Maedhros had gotten through all of his awkward, virginal fumbling with other people. It had been the better way, he thought. By the time he got back to Fingon, he’d been ready to lead him by the hand, take his body and spread it out on the sheets, and make him feel so good he lost his mind.
But the sweetness of the fantasy—themselves as teens, here in the attic bedroom, sports trophies still on the shelf, cartoon mouse alarm clock on his nightstand, guitar in the corner—lit something in Maedhros he couldn’t quite explain. It was innocent and filthy, nostalgic and brand-new. It felt like writing over his past, a softer, more delicate version than the one he had really lived, a version that made his chest tight and cock hard at the same time.
“Do you want to come like this?” Maedhros whispered a while later, his body draped over Fingon’s, pressing him down into his comforter, rocking in a slow, regular rhythm, just enough friction to make Fingon beg.
“Oh, please, oh, fuck,” said Fingon. He had one of Maedhros’s hands in his own, their fingers interlaced loosely.
“That’s not an answer. Do you?” Maedhros asked again, speeding up just a little. He knew how to bring Fingon right to the edge and hold him there. “Do you want to come, Findekáno?”
Fingon swore again and gripped Maedhros’s hand harder, so tightly it almost hurt.
Maedhros couldn’t deny him. He shifted, adjusted his angle, and rolled his hips in just the right way. He leaned down and whispered “now” into his ear and caught a golden hoop in his teeth. Within moments, Fingon was shaking and falling and breaking apart underneath him. The bed gave a traitorous squeal. As Fingon arched back, head pressing into the mattress, Maedhros let go of his earring and watched him, pleased with himself.
After Fingon stilled, Maedhros rolled to the side and waited for him to catch his breath before he asked him where the lube was.
“Um,” Fingon said, still a little breathless. “I don’t have any.”
“You don’t?”
Fingon shrugged. “You don’t ever come up here, and I’m not getting it on with anybody else. Why would I have lube?”
Maedhros blinked. His heart clenched around the thing he was afraid to name.
“Do you have something else? Lotion? Petroleum jelly?” he asked, leaning over the side of Fingon’s bed. “Oh, good grief.”
Fingon, apparently, was the kind of man who kept his room tidy by shoving everything into the space between the bed and the wall.
“What about this?” Maedhros asked, lifting a can of something from the rathole.
Fingon’s expression was priceless. “Russo, that’s spray cheese,” he gasped.
Maedhros took a closer look. Sure enough. “What the hell is it doing in your bedroom?”
“I don’t know! I think it was from finals week? You’re not using it for—for that, I know one thing!” Fingon took the can from him, fighting so hard against laughing out loud, tears were streaming down his face.
Maedhros’s arousal was becoming difficult to ignore. He was out of patience. “Help me, then!”
Fingon rolled off the bed and pulled on his white briefs, still giggling. “I’ll have to go downstairs, all of that stuff is in the bathroom. Stay here.” He reached out and moved Maedhros’s hand to his erection. “Here, don’t move until I get back.”
Maedhros groaned, half-mad with desire, but he complied, lying back against Fingon’s one pillow. He kept one hand wrapped around himself, just enough pressure to keep from going insane, not enough to be truly pleasurable, and clutched at the comforter with the other. His chest rose and fell in labored, quiet breaths. He missed the warmth of Fingon’s body immediately.
As Fingon crept downstairs, Maedhros realized you really could hear everything in this house. The steps creaking, bathroom door opening, water running in the sink as Fingon presumably cleaned himself up a bit.
And—then—the low rumble of Fingolfin’s voice as he intercepted Fingon on his way back out.
Maedhros went cold. He couldn’t make out the words, but Fingolfin’s voice was unmistakable, steady and deep. The spike of panic made Maedhros’s heart pound, only somehow, maddeningly, it didn’t dull his desire at all, only sharpened it.
He didn’t dare move or breathe.
Eventually, Fingon returned, blushing, with a bottle of something in his hands.
“Your parents are home,” Maedhros whispered, still afraid to move.
“Yeah,” Fingon said, crawling back to Maedhros and immediately devoting his attention to Maedhros’s neglected cock. “Just don’t scream, it’s fine.”
“Every sound carries in this house,” Maedhros whispered more urgently, though he did not bat away Fingon’s hands.
“I know you can be quiet if you try,” Fingon said, and touched Maedhros in a way that made it very, very difficult. Every squeak of the mattress now felt as loud as a gunshot. Every sigh was a risk. But Fingon’s hands were on him, and Maedhros didn’t care anymore if the world cracked open. “I’m the problem. I don’t know if I can keep my mouth shut. Want to make me?”
“Oh, fuck,” Maedhros said through his teeth, then surged up, flipped Fingon onto his stomach, and with a soft hand, pressed his face into the mattress.
Later, Maedhros wasn’t sure if either of them did a very good job at staying quiet, but in the moment, in the late-night hours with the starlight streaming in through Fingon’s attic window, the twin bed creaking rhythmically beneath them, as they were taken in by the gravity well of desire, he couldn’t bring himself to care.
Afterward, they slept, but only for a little while.
Maedhros woke before dawn, the attic still dim with the deep-blue shadow of early morning. A jolt of awareness hit him—today was the day—and he sat up. He needed to get back to his apartment, shower, shave, change into his most professionally scientific outfit. It was still dark, but it wouldn’t be for long. Someone else in the house would soon be up. Someone might already be up.
Maedhros slipped out of bed and pulled on his clothing from the night before as quietly as he could, but not quietly enough. Fingon stirred, groaned.
Maedhros knelt by his bedside. “Hey, I’ve gotta go home,” he whispered, stroking Fingon’s back. “I’ll see you later, yeah?”
“I wanted to do your hair,” Fingon mumbled, sitting up and sulking. “For your big day. Please?”
Something sharp pierced at Maedhros’s heart. He should say no. He should be halfway down the stairs already. He shouldn’t have let himself fall asleep here at all. But instead, he found himself nodding, and he allowed Fingon to coax him to the floor.
The floorboards creaked as he settled. Fingon sat behind him, knees bumping against Maedhros’s back as he began to gather his hair.
Maedhros thought about telling Fingon not to make it too elaborate, it would be obvious that Maedhros hadn’t done it himself. But the words wouldn’t come out.
Fingon didn’t need to be told. He ran his fingers slowly along each section of hair, separating and smoothing with deliberate care. The braid that emerged was neat, subtle. Plausible enough that Maedhros could pass it off as his own work.
When Fingon was finished, Maedhros turned from his spot on the floor and knelt to face him. The pre-dawn light had begun to stream in from the window, bathing Fingon’s bare skin in warm gold. The sheets were still pooled around his hips. He looked like something out of a movie, something out of a dream. Whose fantasy was this supposed to be, again?
As thanks for the braid, and perhaps because Maedhros was beginning to recognize the thing in his heart that was nearly bursting, he took Fingon’s face between the palms of his hands, stared into his eyes as long as he could bear, and when he could stand it no longer, leaned up and kissed his mouth, long and deep. When they parted, he couldn’t help making a little sound of dismay. He felt dizzy.
“Shh,” Fingon said with a smile. “Now, you’ve really got to go.”
And then, pulse pounding, Maedhros crept down the stairs, quiet as a mouse, each step threatening to expose his presence to everyone in the house. He reached the first floor. It was dark, silent—too silent, Maedhros thought. No one else seemed to be stirring, there was no one in the kitchen, no one shuffling down the hall. No clink of coffee mugs, no rustle of the morning paper. He took another step, and another. The front door unlocked with a click that echoed throughout the front hall. He winced and froze. Still, no one came to investigate.
He slipped out the front door, down the stoop, into the fresh dew of the early Tirion morning, the air cool and sweet, the song of robins and wrens, the hint of the sun eager to crest over the horizon and set the sky ablaze. Maedhros walked slowly at first, waiting for a voice behind him, a door to open, a cough, a footstep, but there was nothing, no sign that anyone had seen, no alarm being raised, and he made it all the way down the street, around the corner, and halfway to his own apartment, before he realized he had fully gotten away, as though he hadn’t spent the night enveloped in Fingon’s arms at all. And somehow that thought was the one that made Maedhros’s chest feel tight and unhappy, as though a strange, near-unrecognizable part of him had almost wanted, despite the dangers, to be caught out all along.
Maedhros and Fingolfin’s talk was scheduled for early afternoon, which gave him plenty of time to go mad waiting. He’d spotted Fëanor earlier that morning, and they had chatted amiably about the sessions ahead. Maedhros had the surreal experience of realizing that his father was speaking to him like a colleague. Not quite an equal (Fëanor didn’t believe he had any), but close enough.
The morning slowly turned to noon. Outside, the shadows of the oaks shortened, then disappeared, as the sun reached the highest point. Inside, the halls thrummed with overlapping voices, the stale smell of conference coffee, and the faint hum of overhead projectors, as the hours passed, another talk, another panel, until finally, the moment arrived.
As agreed, Fingolfin began the presentation, crisp and poised, laying out the parameters of the research with practiced ease. That gave Maedhros the chance to scan the room, to take stock of who had shown up for this moment in Lecture Hall C.
In the front row: his mother and Maglor, who must have arrived early, or perhaps sat through the previous session. Maedhros caught their eyes and smiled. His mother returned it with warmth; Maglor’s face was focused, curious.
Further back, he spotted Finrod and Glorfindel, arms folded, heads bent toward each other. He saw most of his department from Tirion, the other observational astronomers and his entire cohort; Dr. LGM from Brithombar; Dr. Olwë and Finarfin, with their Alqualondë colleagues in crisp linen. He saw the other researchers on the Ilmarë project, representatives from the Space Administration, and, seated close to the center aisle: the younger woman from Doriath, hair pinned up in a crown of braids, watching him with cool intensity. He still didn’t know her name. There weren’t even enough seats for everyone; the far back was standing room only, students mainly, eyes wide, ears tipped up.
But by the time Fingolfin had finished the introduction and turned over the podium, Maedhros knew exactly who he did not see.
There was no sign of Fëanor.
It knocked something loose inside him. He stumbled in the first part of the talk, the easy part, the part he could have done in his sleep. Where was his father?
He glanced toward Fingolfin, who stood calm, unworried, to the side. He didn’t look like he was about to jump in and rescue Maedhros. He just gave him a steady nod. Maedhros inhaled, held his breath, and let it out. He forced himself to slow down.
And the rest of the talk went perfectly. Maedhros realized that in a way, Fëanor’s absence was less a problem than a liberation. He didn’t need to angle for approval or brace for critique. He could simply talk about the work, and it poured out of him, clear, articulate, funny in the precise places he’d practiced. The whole room was with him. They weren’t just being polite, they were leaning in, nodding along, scribbling notes on yellow legal paper, holding out handheld tape recorders.
As planned, Fingolfin took over for the question-and-answer session. The woman from Doriath asked a question about the nature of the proposed black hole so esoteric, it went fully over Maedhros’s head, and even Fingolfin paused and riffed for a few moments while he gathered his thoughts before answering. The more technical questions, he passed to Maedhros. They made a smooth pair, Fingolfin handling the theoretical framework, Maedhros diving into methodology. It was seamless, like a choreographed dance.
Afterward, the room was all abuzz. His mother embraced him; Maglor clasped his shoulder, his face so serious, Maedhros hardly recognized it.
Fingon, who had slipped into the lecture at the last minute to lurk in the back, not wanting to be mistaken for an actual physicist, swept up, shook Maedhros’s hand in full view of everyone, then leaned in and whispered something obscene and full of promise in his ear. Maedhros nearly lost it, wanted to abandon the rest of the queue and run for the door, proper conference presentation protocol be damned. Instead, he squeezed Fingon’s hand and whispered something equally obscene back, enjoying the look of the flush on his cheeks.
After Maedhros had thanked and chatted with everyone else who wanted to see him, last of all came Finrod.
“This was so brilliant, it makes me sick,” Finrod said. He gave Maedhros a look of great scrutiny. “You should have worn the circlet, though.” Maedhros laughed out loud. “And you’ve put a spell on my cousin. Let me know when you’re planning on breaking his heart, he’s naïve about you.”
Maedhros’s face went hot. Finrod was insightful, but sometimes he missed the mark. “I don’t intend to,” was all he managed, throat tight.
Eventually, the crowd thinned until only three remained: Maedhros, Fingolfin, and Finarfin. Maedhros hadn’t seen the two of them side by side before. In truth, they didn’t strike the eye as brothers. Fingolfin was dark-haired and fair-skinned, and Finarfin, all gold and tan. Finarfin’s face, too, was softer-featured, gentler, where Fingolfin’s, though capable of warmth, easily turned commanding with a set of his jaw.
Fingolfin clapped Maedhros’s shoulder. “You did me proud today,” he said. Maedhros’s face flamed hotter than ever.
“Come,” Fingolfin added. “Let’s head to my office. We need to drop off these drafts. Come with us.”
“Oh, I can do that for you,” Maedhros offered. “No need for both of you to walk all that way.”
“It’s no trouble,” said Fingolfin.
“I’d like to revisit the old haunts anyway,” said Finarfin, smiling, and the three of them fell into step, the warm June air curling around them like a hug.
“You were a student here, I take it?” Maedhros politely asked Finarfin.
“Yes, though it was after the time of your father—and mine,” said Finarfin. “By the time I matriculated, he was more myth than man, in the long chronicles of Tirion’s memory.”
Maedhros wasn’t sure whether Finarfin meant Fëanor, or Finwë himself, but felt it rude to ask. They cut across the campus green, sidewalks lined with blooming rhododendrons, crowded with tourists and teenagers on campus tours. Cameras clicked; the bell tower chimed on the hour. A family walked past, eating chocolate-dipped cones from the truck parked just outside the yard, the smell of sugar wafting in the breeze.
Maedhros would later think that, when they got to the physics building, he should have sensed something was off. In hindsight, weren’t there signs? The office suite’s front door, strangely ajar? The hallway too still? The unnerving silence, in a place that usually echoed with footsteps, chalk squeaking on a blackboard? But the truth was, Maedhros was too high off the success of his talk to notice anything amiss, if the signs were even there at all. He was still half-floating, replaying the applause in his head, the glint in Fingon’s eyes. He was already planning how he would recount the afternoon, the way he stumbled, then caught himself, the rapt attention in the room, fielding complicated questions, how, somehow, everything had gone exactly right. He felt expansive, weightless.
Which was why it hit him like a punch to the gut when they turned the corner and saw the office door flung wide open, papers scattered across the floor, and Fëanor, seated at Fingolfin’s desk like a throne he’d claimed by birthright.
He was so absorbed in whatever he was reading, he didn’t even mark their presence until Fingolfin reached the doorway.
“Fëanáro,” said Fingolfin in a voice like cracked ice.
Fëanor stood with a jolt, shoving papers aside, trying to stack them in some semblance of order. But Maedhros could already see from where he stood: these weren’t academic papers, no carbon copies, departmental headers, manila folders. These were mismatched stationery sheets, cream, pink and yellow, creased at the edges. These were personal papers, old-fashioned looped handwriting, fading ink.
Maedhros and Finarfin both hung back, eyes keen on the scene before them. When Maedhros swiveled his head in confusion, Finarfin met his gaze and raised an arm, palm out, as though to suggest, not yet. Wait.
Fingolfin stepped into the room, voice booming. Maedhros had never seen him like this, his jaw clenched, shaking with barely contained fury, his color rising. “What in the hell is going on here?”
Fëanor, for his part, looked wrecked, awful. Maedhros couldn’t bear it. He wasn’t crying, not right now, but his eyes were bright, hand trembling where it covered his mouth as though trying to hold in a surge of emotion. Whatever Fëanor had been reading, it wasn’t early drafts of black hole theory or nuclear fission. What was in those letters?
“You broke into my office,” Fingolfin said, furious. “Did you sweet-talk your way past the secretary? Or pick the lock like a petty thief? This is low, even for you.”
No one spoke to Fëanor like this.
“And are those—” Fingolfin’s voice broke off, incredulous. “Are those the personal letters? The ones we held back from the collection? I haven’t even read most of those—Fëanáro, the nerve!” He took a half-step forward, hands forming the suggestion of fists.
Fëanor hadn’t yet spoken, but at that moment, his eyes narrowed, and Maedhros’s stomach tightened with a more familiar dread. Fëanor’s expression hardened, now glaring. Maedhros feared what he would say next—but Fëanor’s rage, that was a relief, more legible than his bottomless grief.
“You,” Fëanor said, throat working, “have always held yourself the only legitimate heir, but in your heart, you know the truth—you are hardly half the man he was. Grasping at his ankles, coasting on the power of his name. You’re grasping even now, hanging on to mere scraps. When he was lost, some of us were left with nothing, even when rightfully—”
Fingolfin, steam coming out of his ears, moved again, shocking hostility in his speed. It was only Maedhros’s instinct that had him stepping in front of his father in time to defend him with his own body. Fingolfin pulled back at the last possible moment, but his broad chest was close enough to graze Maedhros’s with every inhalation.
Maedhros pleaded for reason in a voice far calmer than he felt. But neither heard him. The next volley of accusations came sharp and fast over his shoulder, words clashing like swords. Fëanor snarled, Fingolfin raged, and it took Maedhros physically holding Fëanor back, Finarfin restraining Fingolfin with a firm grip on his arm, to keep them from coming to full blows.
Finally, it was Fingolfin who withdrew, his chest rising and falling rapidly, but regaining some of his stately composure. “I’m calling the police,” Fingolfin spat.
Maedhros’s stomach tightened. “Please,” he said helplessly.
Fingolfin rounded on him, wild-eyed. “Why defend him now? He used you, don’t you realize? As a distraction—when my back was turned, he took the first opportunity to invade my office, steal my father’s private property. When are you going to understand? Fëanáro will always put his own agenda first. Even above you.”
Maedhros had no answer, only a terrible ache inside of him. The silence descended like a dark cloud. “Please,” he finally repeated. “Don’t do this.”
“Pipe down,” said Fëanor. “This doesn’t involve you. I don’t need your help.” He looked straight at Fingolfin. “Go on, make the call. If you’ve got the guts.”
Fingolfin looked to Finarfin, had a brief nonverbal conversation with him, nodded, then went back to the reception desk for the phone.
In that moment, when nobody was watching too closely, Maedhros felt Fëanor slip something into his hands. A slim envelope, Maedhros thought, taking care to steel his expression, give nothing away. Slowly, Maedhros turned to the side, as though to speak low and privately to his father, tucking the envelope into the inside pocket of his jacket, secure and hidden.
Fëanor nodded once, approving. He had done right.
But instead of the warm light he usually felt inside upon pleasing his father, Maedhros felt only empty. A threshold had been crossed, a point in his life which might be divided into before and after, and though it would take decades before he would learn truth of Fëanor’s desperate, inexplicable trespass, it would not take so long for him to understand that Fëanor had tampered with something precious: his sense of belonging in Tirion, and Fingolfin’s trust.
Hours later, Maedhros sat at the dim little bar in the hotel lobby, flanked by Nerdanel and Maglor, while upstairs, his father finished packing up his things. The campus policeman who answered Fingolfin’s call had arrived on the scene to find four agitated astrophysicists in a seething standoff. He didn’t arrest Fëanor or put him in handcuffs. He didn’t take him downtown to the courthouse. Fingolfin had agreed not to press charges—as long as Fëanor agreed to never come back.
“With great pleasure,” Fëanor had promised dryly.
At the hotel bar, Maedhros held a whiskey sour in his hands, the ice half-melted, the thin slice of orange sunk to the bottom of the glass.
“I’ve put a down payment on a house,” said Nerdanel, in response to nothing in particular.
Maedhros and Maglor swiveled in their barstools.
She named a suburb back home, one known for its swimming pools and jacarandas, close enough to the Jet Propulsion Lab to smell the fumes. “It’s got three bedrooms and a sunroom.”
Maglor blinked. His glass rattled as he set it down on the lacquered bar. “We can’t all live in a three-bedroom,” said he.
Maedhros immediately understood what his mother was saying. He could not blame her. His skin crawled every time he had to go back to the Formenos house. He thought of the thick tobacco smoke, his father’s closed office. It didn’t matter whether he was in the house. You could scrub the counters, throw open every window, and still, you wouldn’t breathe easy. Fëanor was inescapable. How could Maedhros fault Nerdanel, when he had turned and run as far as he could?
“One for me, one for the twins, and a spare, for whoever might need it,” she said carefully, not meeting their eyes.
“But—what about the rest of us?” Maglor asked, his voice cracking. He sounded younger than his years, pleading. Maedhros wondered how much of it was sincere.
“You’re a grown man,” Nerdanel said. “And you know I can’t take Atarinkë from his father, it would break both of their hearts. You’re old enough to take care of yourselves, you don’t need me anymore.”
Maedhros bit back his first nasty, impulsive retort. They didn’t need her? Who had fed the children when Fëanor and Nerdanel were too busy to remember? Who had made sure everyone got to school, finished their homework, didn’t kill each other? Who poured Celegorm’s stash of awful, boxed wine down the bathroom sink and ran interference when his ex-girlfriend’s new boyfriend came spoiling for a fight? Who made Caranthir save his allowance in his piggy bank? Who, when Curufin got skipped two grades and had to start junior high a head shorter than everyone, showed him how to kick out a bully’s knees, gouge their eyes, then cry on cue when an adult showed up?
Who had taught them all to lie low and do as they were told when it mattered most?
Maedhros said nothing. He stirred the ice in his glass, watching it clink and turn. The elevator dinged, and a happy couple emerged, dressed to go out, her heels clicking on the tile, his hand resting in the small of her back. They paused just before the revolving doors to kiss, silhouetted against the low sun outside.
It had been, all things considered, an objectively good day. Maedhros’s talk had gone perfectly, it really had. It was a triumph. He felt scraped clean, as though the inside of his chest had been hollowed out. Somewhere above their heads, Fëanor was packing up his suitcase, about to leave Tirion behind for good.
Maedhros suddenly remembered the envelope Fëanor had slipped him. At some point after the policeman let them go with a stern warning, Maedhros had relocated it from his jacket pocket to his portfolio, where it still rested, safe and hidden.
“I’m going to go up, make sure he’ll be ready to leave in time,” Maedhros said.
The room was on the tenth floor. Maedhros knocked on the door and waited, thinking about the envelope. It was already unsealed when it came into his hands, though Maedhros was unsure whether Fëanor knew what it contained and had swiped it with purpose, or simply grabbed the nearest thing to spite Fingolfin. Maedhros hadn’t peeked inside, because he had been too distracted to consider it until this very moment. And now, he was regretting knocking before taking a look himself.
He waited in the hotel hallway for so long, he thought that perhaps he had the wrong room, when Fëanor finally opened the door. He had clearly just stepped out of the shower, hair wet, skin dripping, just a white bathrobe loosely wrapped around him, dark curls visible on his chest. Maedhros could smell the generic hotel shampoo. He stared at his father awkwardly.
“Can I come in?” he asked.
Fëanor stood aside to let him through, wordless.
Inside, steam from the shower made Maedhros feel sweaty. One side of the room was all glass, the wide panorama of Tirion Harbor in view. Maedhros thought of Fëanor stepping out of the hot shower and opening the polyester drapes for everyone in Tirion to see inside, and he flushed, but of course, that was absurd. They were several floors up. Nobody would see.
Fëanor wasn’t ready at all. The room was in disarray: bed rumpled, ashtray overflowing, jackets and ties tossed carelessly around. Worn socks and undershirts littered the floor, and there was nothing at all in his suitcase. Maedhros felt a rush of irritation at his mother, couldn’t she have taken care of this earlier?
“Do you need any help?” Maedhros asked. Fëanor shrugged and nodded and turned to the sink to shave.
While his father got himself presentable, Maedhros gathered his scattered belongings and packed them up. The silence was only broken by the low voices of the man and woman in the next room over.
When Maedhros was finished, he zipped up the suitcase, and then he didn’t know what to do with himself. The only place to sit down was the bed; the cheap hotel bedspread felt squeaky underneath him.
All of a sudden, Maedhros remembered Fingon (whose bedspread, he had learned just the night before, was well-loved and soft). They were supposed to meet up later. Maglor would be gone, Maedhros’s apartment would be theirs again. He thought of promises whispered in his ear, of Fingon’s strong thighs tensing in pleasure, of the look on his face when he had finished braiding Maedhros’s hair. A lump in his throat threatened to shame him.
What was Finrod talking about, breaking Fingon’s heart? Maedhros had been too cowardly to tell Finrod the truth. He was afraid for the wrong heart.
Surely, Fingon had heard about what happened by now. What would he think? Would he care? Fingolfin wasn’t petty; he wouldn’t try to embellish the story beyond what it was. He had tried to give Maedhros a reassuring smile when they parted, though it hadn’t quite reached his eyes. Fingon was a person for whom loyalty was paramount, Maedhros knew. It would be one thing if Maedhros could explain to him why his father had done what he did. But Maedhros couldn’t even explain it to himself.
He was unaccustomed to asking his father personal questions. Fëanor was of a generation that did not discuss such things, not in the light of day, certainly not with sons. Maedhros felt sick to his stomach, to consider prying into his father’s privacy. Yet Maedhros could not shake the image of Fëanor’s wrecked face at Fingolfin’s desk, reading Finwë’s correspondence, vulnerable and alone.
Well, nobody else was going to do it. Maedhros gathered his nerve. “Is everything all right?” he asked.
Fëanor, still damp, white button-down clinging to his shoulders, was combing his hair by the foggy mirror. Maedhros could see his father’s back where he stood, and his own reflection.
“Of course,” Fëanor answered. “What could possibly be amiss?”
Maedhros felt like screaming. What was amiss? Oh, where to begin? How about Fëanor breaking into Fingolfin’s office, snooping around his files, stealing private papers? How about implicating Maedhros in the crime, making him smuggle out some old letter for reasons known only to Fëanor? How about nearly getting into a fistfight, held back only by his son’s physical advantage? How about almost getting himself arrested?
Or: how about alienating himself from his wife, letting things get so bad, she had literally bought a house right under his nose, and he didn’t notice a thing? When he got back home, would he even notice when she moved out? Would he care that she was taking the twins?
“You didn’t come to my presentation,” Maedhros finally said. “Everyone else came to see me, but you weren't there. You missed it.”
Fëanor stopped what he was doing. In the mirror, he met Maedhros’s gaze.
His piercing eyes went soft and gentle.
Maedhros couldn’t bear it. He looked down at his hands, clutching his presentation portfolio. He removed the envelope, thrusting it in Fëanor’s direction. “Here, whatever was so important, take it.”
Fëanor approached him, quietly took the envelope, slipped it into his briefcase.
“Why did you need it so badly? What does it say? What could possibly matter so much that you would—” Maedhros couldn’t bring himself to say it again. He felt the urge to hide his face.
His father lit a cigarette, then came over and sat next to Maedhros on the bed. Fëanor looked over at him, seemingly thoughtful. He sighed, opened his mouth, closed it again. The silence was laced with intolerable tension.
Finally, he passed the cigarette to Maedhros, their hands brushing. Maedhros took a drag, held the smoke in his lungs. He immediately felt calmer.
“I’m very sorry I missed your talk,” Fëanor said, and Maedhros thought he must have misheard. He held his breath. “If there had been another way—” Fëanor trailed off, visibly gathering himself. “What happened today, that was between me and Finwë. Not you. Not even Nolofinwë, really, aside from the possessiveness with which he treats his father’s legacy—as though he’s the only one to carry it on, the only Finwë that matters.”
The words hung in the air as Maedhros tried to decipher what Fëanor meant. He passed the cigarette back.
“I regret that you found me like that,” Fëanor continued. “I should have kept a closer eye on the clock. If I had just got what I came for and continued on my way, not stopped to read through ephemera, well—no one would ever have been the wiser. Foolish of me, I’ll admit it.”
That, Maedhros couldn’t take. “Forget the clock, you shouldn’t be breaking into people’s offices in the first place. Let alone Nolofinwë’s! How am I supposed to face him now? Don’t you realize how difficult you’ve made things for me?”
“I can see why you would be upset. All I ask is that you trust I have reasons I can’t disclose at the moment. The work, everything I’m trying to achieve—well, there’s a larger purpose at stake here, a purpose which matters much more than Nolofinwë’s hurt feelings. And besides, he needs you too much, he won’t cut you loose just because of me. Don’t ever underestimate your value. When the time comes, I will tell you all I can. I’ll need you, of course, once you’re done here in Tirion, to come back and rejoin our efforts. I can’t do it without you.”
That took Maedhros’s breath away. “I haven’t the faintest clue what I’ll want to do in four or five years,” he said feebly.
“Of course you haven’t. That’s why I’m telling you,” said Fëanor. So plain, so simple.
It would be easy, Maedhros knew, to fall in line, to do whatever his father told him. It didn’t surprise him, exactly, that Fëanor would want him back. But to hear him voice it so clearly, in terms that placed Maedhros himself as the object of worth, not just the person who was most convenient—
Well, that was new.
“Now,” Fëanor said, stubbing out the cigarette in the ashtray and lighting another two in succession. He handed one to Maedhros. “My flight isn’t for another couple of hours. So, about black holes in Alqua. Why don’t you give me the presentation now?”
Maedhros’s heart lifted. He felt light and warm again.
He opened his portfolio and took out the notes. Fëanor’s gaze was attentive, undivided.
“Well, you see,” he began, “it all starts with the Swan.”
Notes:
We are entering the part of the story where historical accuracy and the boundaries of my knowledge of radio astronomy begin to clash with the needs of story. Maedhros’s dissertation topic is absurd (that a second-year grad student would single-handedly come up with the idea of using computers to process radio astronomy data? Embarrassing, honestly), but anything plausible is not only incredibly boring, but too esoteric for me to teach myself in a few months.
“Overly earnest protest folk” could refer to several different artists, but I had Joan Baez specifically in mind here.
There is much in this story owed to Carl Sagan; specifically, in this chapter, some of Fëanor’s dialogue is a mashup drawn in part from Sagan’s personal papers (unpublished in his lifetime) and in part from his 1994 book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space.
Carnil is Mars, of course; water in the polar ice caps had long been suspected but finally proven in 1963 by Hyron Spinrad, Guido Münch, and Lewis D. Kaplan using spectroscopy.
Peanut butter and marshmallow fluff together on bread is called a fluffernutter and is a New England, U.S. delicacy.
Fingon is not subtle. The soul records he's putting on are the Eldar equivalents of Al Green's Let's Stay Together (1972) and Marvin Gaye's Let's Get It On (1973).
The belt Melian is talking about is known as the Kuiper belt in our world. Sorry about the terrible Girdle joke.
It was brought to my attention that non-North Americans may be unfamiliar with spray cheese. The most well-known brand today is called Easy Cheese, it comes in a can, it’s an unfortunate shade of orange and kind of the texture of toothpaste. It’s widely understood to be disgusting these days, though the seventies were a different time. But Fingon is disgusting for keeping it in his bedroom, to be clear.
Thanks to Shadow (daughterofshadows) for beta-reading. As always, grateful to the TRSB25 sprint gang for companionship and support, and especially IdleLeaves, who has always been a great cheerleader for this story, but in particular provided considerable advice and helpful feedback in the revisions of this chapter.
Pages Navigation
dragonbornsandwaffles on Chapter 1 Wed 02 Jul 2025 07:18PM UTC
Comment Actions
AnnaRobots on Chapter 1 Fri 04 Jul 2025 06:16PM UTC
Comment Actions
dragonbornsandwaffles on Chapter 1 Sun 20 Jul 2025 10:41PM UTC
Comment Actions
timelessutterances on Chapter 1 Wed 02 Jul 2025 08:32PM UTC
Comment Actions
AnnaRobots on Chapter 1 Fri 04 Jul 2025 06:17PM UTC
Comment Actions
daughterofshadows on Chapter 1 Wed 02 Jul 2025 08:43PM UTC
Comment Actions
AnnaRobots on Chapter 1 Fri 04 Jul 2025 06:18PM UTC
Comment Actions
aporiawaltz on Chapter 1 Wed 02 Jul 2025 09:01PM UTC
Comment Actions
AnnaRobots on Chapter 1 Fri 04 Jul 2025 06:20PM UTC
Comment Actions
Tenillypo on Chapter 1 Wed 02 Jul 2025 11:48PM UTC
Comment Actions
AnnaRobots on Chapter 1 Fri 04 Jul 2025 06:21PM UTC
Comment Actions
bluebeholder on Chapter 1 Thu 03 Jul 2025 03:41PM UTC
Comment Actions
AnnaRobots on Chapter 1 Fri 04 Jul 2025 06:24PM UTC
Comment Actions
wisteria53 on Chapter 1 Fri 04 Jul 2025 09:23AM UTC
Comment Actions
AnnaRobots on Chapter 1 Fri 04 Jul 2025 06:35PM UTC
Comment Actions
anniron on Chapter 1 Sat 05 Jul 2025 06:58PM UTC
Comment Actions
AnnaRobots on Chapter 1 Sat 12 Jul 2025 01:23AM UTC
Comment Actions
Guest (Guest) on Chapter 1 Sat 12 Jul 2025 12:56AM UTC
Comment Actions
AnnaRobots on Chapter 1 Sat 12 Jul 2025 01:23AM UTC
Comment Actions
HewerOfCaves on Chapter 1 Tue 09 Sep 2025 04:49PM UTC
Comment Actions
aporiawaltz on Chapter 2 Wed 16 Jul 2025 07:32PM UTC
Comment Actions
AnnaRobots on Chapter 2 Mon 21 Jul 2025 12:50AM UTC
Comment Actions
dilettantefeminist on Chapter 2 Fri 18 Jul 2025 11:20AM UTC
Comment Actions
AnnaRobots on Chapter 2 Mon 21 Jul 2025 12:58AM UTC
Comment Actions
Elronds_Library on Chapter 2 Fri 18 Jul 2025 08:19PM UTC
Comment Actions
AnnaRobots on Chapter 2 Mon 21 Jul 2025 01:01AM UTC
Comment Actions
wisteria53 on Chapter 2 Sun 20 Jul 2025 08:50AM UTC
Comment Actions
AnnaRobots on Chapter 2 Mon 21 Jul 2025 01:06AM UTC
Comment Actions
anniron on Chapter 2 Sun 20 Jul 2025 11:50AM UTC
Comment Actions
AnnaRobots on Chapter 2 Mon 21 Jul 2025 01:11AM UTC
Comment Actions
anniron on Chapter 2 Mon 21 Jul 2025 06:29PM UTC
Comment Actions
Tenillypo on Chapter 2 Sun 20 Jul 2025 02:33PM UTC
Comment Actions
AnnaRobots on Chapter 2 Mon 21 Jul 2025 01:17AM UTC
Comment Actions
Guest (Guest) on Chapter 2 Thu 24 Jul 2025 04:02PM UTC
Comment Actions
AnnaRobots on Chapter 2 Fri 25 Jul 2025 12:39AM UTC
Comment Actions
aporiawaltz on Chapter 3 Wed 30 Jul 2025 05:44PM UTC
Comment Actions
AnnaRobots on Chapter 3 Thu 31 Jul 2025 03:23PM UTC
Comment Actions
wisteria53 on Chapter 3 Wed 30 Jul 2025 08:09PM UTC
Comment Actions
AnnaRobots on Chapter 3 Thu 31 Jul 2025 03:25PM UTC
Comment Actions
wisteria53 on Chapter 3 Thu 31 Jul 2025 05:46PM UTC
Comment Actions
Elronds_Library on Chapter 3 Thu 31 Jul 2025 01:15AM UTC
Comment Actions
AnnaRobots on Chapter 3 Thu 31 Jul 2025 03:25PM UTC
Comment Actions
Pages Navigation