Alone

Wrong AU.  Life after life ends, in a manner of speaking.  When there's nothing left behind except the knowledge that once it was there.  This is a sort of epilogue-ish piece paired up with "Scarred" and takes place well before Aredhel's appearance.  But obviously it's closely related to "I Know" as well as all other parts of the Wrong AU, particularly "Touch" and "Hands", which were written with a similar idea already in mind.  Takes place in the First Age in Nan Elmoth.

Disclaimer: I don't own the Silmarillion.  Only the backstory.

Pairings: Eöl x first wife

Characters: Eöl, unnamed wife (OFC) (mentions a son and daughter, also both OCs, as well as many miscellaneous elves.  Because Eöl probably didn't live completely alone in a large house in the woods; he probably had servants)

Warning: non-canon compliant, past character death, depression, murderous inclinations hinted, past murder basically stated, unhealthy coping methods

Song: Broken Wings

Words: 1,325
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alone (adjective): separated from others: isolated; exclusive of anyone or anything else: only; incomparable, unique
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/alone

It was a hard reality to face.

Hard to wake up every morning and roll over, reaching thoughtlessly toward her side of the bed and finding nothing but coldness.  To open his eyes, half-awake and questioning as he called her name, sitting up slightly with a frown when there was no reply.  Traversing the room with his still hazy eyes, he would search for her slender form walking upon dancing feet, waiting to find her with expectation of her beloved sight bubbling in his chest.

Only to feel the cloudiness clear away, sunlight splashing down on a landscape that appeared full of life in the shadows but was proven to be naught but barren black and skeleton in a garish revelation.  His fingers would reach out to touch the sheets where she would have lain, searching for her warmth.

Would feel the cold to their tips.  The lack of a dip where her body would have lain.

Would remember all too clearly.

And then Eöl would press his face to those sheets--the sheets that lacked her beloved scent for which he so desperately searched--and try to go back to sleep.  Try to forget again, to return to that sweet daze which had enveloped him and cradled him in blissful ignorance for those few moments just after waking.

That fog that brought her back to life, if only for a few precious moments.

If only to pretend that she was still alive.  Just in the other room.  Perhaps starting breakfast and waking their lazy son who hated rising with the sun.  Just on the other side of that door, soon to come inside and kiss him into full wakefulness with the temptation of the salivating smell of cooked venison from the hunt that had ended the day before and fresh juice squeezed from the ripe apples that they harvested from the trees less than a mile away on the ridge.

He would feel the ghost of her hands upon his back, sliding in a tender caress across his bare shoulders and down the slope of his spine.  And he would lean upward as if to receive her kiss.

And stare at the ceiling blankly.  Unable to rest.  Unable to rise.  Unable to move.  For fear of going through the door of his bedchambers and into the next room.

A room that had never been graced with the loping sound of her brisk footsteps.  That had never felt the brush of her fingers across the walls and stone.  That would never be baptized with her smile in the morning as he opened the door and stepped upon the hardwood.

But inevitably he would rise from bed and take in the damning quiet, knowing there was work to be done yet.  Go through his morning routine, braiding back his hair and pulling on his clothing.  Lacing up his boots and pulling on his leather gloves in preparation of a long day in the forge with the bellowing flames and the red-hot scald of metal.

Would step out of that bedroom into the silence of an empty house.

Eyes would travel across the walls, bare of homely decoration.  Mantle unadorned but for a simple fireplace blackened and dead in the early morning light.  Walls polished and naked, without the tapestries that his wife's hands had so deftly woven and the furs that his son had brought home from his first successful hunt.

Everything was bare.  Looked as though no one even lived here.  Walked here or sat here.  The chaise and the chairs were cushioned and untouched, for Eöl very rarely sat in their comfortable embrace.  The rug almost never need be cleaned, because no boots walked across it each day.  An outsider might have thought it unused, the house of a dead man.

Perhaps it was the house of a dead man.  Or, at the very least, a family-less man.

A man with no joy to celebrate.  With nothing to grasp onto but his bitter hatred and his craftsmanship or risk losing his sanity altogether.

Of course, all too quickly he would leave the private corner of the house in which he resided, and the sound of the servants bustling and going about their business would touch his ears, reminding him that not all had been lost to ash and blood on that morning he would have liked to erase.  Old friends still lived and worked alongside him, still hunted and returned with fresh meat and fowl.  Men he had known since his childhood.

But each was grim-faced.  Rare were the smiles in the household of Eöl.

Each walked past the other like a ghost.  Like a creature living in a different world, as though one could reach out and plunge their hand straight through the phantom of their neighbor.  Each man utterly alone.

No families.  No children.  No homes.

Pleasant memories gone.

They all went about their work separated by a gulf of sorrow and rage.  Each trying desperately to look anywhere but at another, if only to block away glimpses of better times.  Times when happiness had been something within reach, tangible and alive and waiting for them with eager acceptance, to embrace them and lift their spirits.

Eöl hated glancing and seeing the face of a man he had once shared wine with, laughed with as they sat about a fire and camped for the night only a few leagues from their homes, intended to arrive in the early morning.  Laughed and drank and mingled whilst, but a short distance away, their families and futures were slaughtered.

In a way, no matter who stood at his side--a childhood friend, a warrior he had trained with, a child who had befriended his son--Eöl was apart from them and they from him.  Completely and utterly alone.

He was certain they were all the same.  That their quarters were as barren and lifeless as his own, lacking the coloration of a woman's touch or a child's play.  Decorated only with the weaponry they polished and preened out of necessity and the artistry deftly shaped by their hands when they needed to occupy their minds with anything else but those visions...

When they drank, they raged in the confines of their quarters.  When they wept, they closed themselves away in hiding.  And when they needed someone to speak to, more oft than not they wrote in journals.  Wrote to themselves.

Wrote of the hell to which they had been plunged.  Even now, hundreds of years after stumbling upon the remains of his wife and son and unborn daughter, Eöl knew this horror had not ended.  Might never end.  Life might never start over again.  Might never continue.

Might remain frozen.  Just like this.

In silence and stillness.  In the sound of his lone footsteps creaking upon the floorboards as he returned from the forge, day long melted into dark night.  In the hiss of a lamp as he lit the wick and held it aloft to a house cold and untouched where no wife prepared dinner and no son trailed dirt and no tiny daughter spread her toys about upon the rugged floor before the unlit fire.

In the squeak of the bedroom door and the click as it shut.  In the sound of the layers of his clothing peeling away so that he might throw himself down upon the mattress and grasp at a pillow shamefully, burying his face in the down and breathing deeply.

Searching and searching for her smell.  For proof of her existence.

Until he fell asleep and dreamed of embracing her against him.  Until he dreamed of the softness of her hair and the curve of her brow and the sleek angle of her chin.

Until he heard her voice calling his name softly to wake up.

And the next day started just the same.