Disclaimer: Tolkien owns the characters
Pairings: none
Characters: Maedhros (mentions of Fingon, Fëanorions, Fëanor and Morgoth)
Warning: canon-compliant, possible AU, canon character death, mentions of abduction and torture, allusions to mutilation, fantasies of violence (semi-explicit), murder, unstable mental conditions, possible insanity
Song: Kaishuu Meirei
Words: 1,056
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mirror (noun): a polished or smooth surface (such as glass) that forms images by reflection; something that gives a true representation
The reflection that stared back at him had changed.
For hundreds of years, it had always been the same face and form--unchanged and un-weathered by time. Not a single flaw visible. Just flowing red hair and his mother's eyes, fiery but at the same time gentle, caring and longing. The eldest son of the Spirit of Fire, who wanted nothing more than a brood of a half-dozen or so elflings and a quiet life as a blacksmith within the safety of the walls of Tirion, looked back with a small flicker of a smile, shy but bright.
No more. The familiar expression of faint wistfulness and joy, the sharp features with only laugh lines to their name and the bright silver eyes of that man called Nelyafinwë Maitimo morphed by the day. And what they turned into...
The first thing he had noticed after three decades without his reflection were the scars. Raking down his shoulders and around his ribs in jagged, blackened lines, burns melted into his flesh, claws that had scraped down to the bone, marring the perfect symmetry he had once been named for. Every new valley and trench carved into that creamy skin was something unfamiliar and poisonous, something frightening. Something that made his throat tight and his blood chill.
At first, it had felt like a representation of all that Morgoth had taken from him, body and soul. Ripped his spirit to shreds. Violated and ravaged his soul. Taken every last drop of hope until even rage and lust for blood dwindled and left him empty.
Just like his body, his spirit would never recover. No matter how much he pretended to be whole and hale for his brothers, for Findekáno, nothing would make him the man he had been before the chains and the racks and the endless hours of starvation and frigid cold to bare skin. Too much blood and death. Too much torture and fear. He was like the vast earth, torn and marred, his symmetry broken by the Black Enemy's theme. Nothing of the naive, innocent young prince he had been in the Years of the Trees remained.
Gradually, any last tiny shard of Nelyafinwë Maitimo disappeared.
The smiles were long gone. The image that stared back at him each morning from the looking glass never had curved lips. Instead, they were pale and bloodless, lined wrinkling at the corners, tense and fierce. Maitimo hated looking at the stark expression, devoid of something important, something he could no longer seem to recall.
In its place, his eyes blazed, but held no joy. At first there had just been sorrow, that broken shell that his cousin had cut free from the cliffs of Thangorodrim, a flame that had been doused and strangled of oxygen until it was naught but a faint wisp of smoke and a single glowing ember in the night. Despair had blanketed his being, but slowly it had lifted.
It had lifted and released the violent rage--the madness--boiling beneath.
Rage he was all too familiar with. The need to tear flesh from bone and rend bodies into pieces. It was something he had first tasted in the darkness of Valinor upon the docks of Alqualondë as he thrust his spear through helpless victims, watching them tumble into the water below and stain it with crimson. Watching the life flowing through their veins dripping down his blade, pooling around his boots, soaking into the leather until the sickly warmth touched his toes.
In captivity, the need to taste the blood of his enemies had only grown. Grown into a monster that he kept locked away in the farthest, darkest corner of his mind where he prayed it might never again see the light of dawn.
And now it was unleashed.
Unleashed in wild eyes, eyes that reminded him so much of Fëanáro's terrible light that the mere sight of them had twisted his innards into knots. Fey and filled with divine heat. Suddenly the face that stared back at him resembled his less and less, resembled his father's more and more each day, until he thought he could see a shadow of fire and ash hanging over his shoulder, overlapping with his body, filling up the emptiness that had been left inside him, hollowed through suffering and festering infection of the soul.
Haunting. Pulling him deeper into the bleak, swirling depths below, crawling up his body, longing to overtake him. To drown him.
And then appeared the grins. Like an animal, fangs bared and ready to rip off strips of raw flesh and devour, to drink blood like the finest of wines and savor the copper and salt on its tongue. At first they were only shadows, half-hidden from his sight, mirages that he thought he dreamt over his waking gaze.
Once Findekáno had been killed, they became all too real. Tangible.
It was just too much. Too much pain. Aching in his bones, deeper still than that, until he could not sleep without nightmares plaguing him. Until he could not rise from bed without longing for the death that would bring him either eternal damnation or peace. Until he longed to fall to his knees before the Valar, prostrate himself humbly and kiss their sandals as he begged and pleaded to just make it end!
Part of him could not take any more. The part that shriveled and died, withering beneath a slow-acting poison, a sickness that no medicine could hope to ease or heal. Some days, he could not remember why he bothered to wait, why he didn't just ride out and slaughter them all!
One day, he woke up and looked in the mirror. What stared back at him looked more like a monster than a man. Blankly, he stared at that stranger with ragged hair like fire and eyes bruised and ringed with darkness. The majority of his mind dismissed the image, turning away from the blatant, frightening truth glaring holes into his back.
The small part that was left, the part that could still be called humane, could not help but wonder if the reflection in that glass was his soul.
If, finally, he was beyond redemption.
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Dark and angsty, just the way I like it. I really do love Maedhros, I swear. It's just so intoxicating to pick on him. Definite companion story to "Obsessive". That's where the basic foundation of this piece came from, after all. Anyway, I almost didn't finish this on time to have it published on the 15th (because I was watching Rise of the Guardians with my sister...), but thankfully it's finished.
So I was listening to Kaishuu Meirei from the Erementar Gerad OST. I cannot figure out the composer for the life of me, but I love this song. (Bijo and Yajuu is also awesome, as are many other tracks.) It's got a lovely flavor to it. Nice and dark and shivery. I've loved this piece for a very long time, since several years ago, in fact. I frequently associate this track, and most of the Erementar Gerad OST, with the movie Alexander (yeah, the Great, that guy) because there was this YouTube video of Bagoas dancing to Bijo and Yajuu and it was just amazing...
Uh yeah, anyway... *cough*
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