Consubstantial

Canon-compliant AU.  Another bit of Valarin strangeness.  I blame the religious connotations of this word.  Truly, I do.  Morgoth is referred to Melkor for most of the story, and "Father" is Eru, because that's just what my Ainur call Him.  Anyway, I suppose this is related to lots of other stories, but my brain is too fried to even think of them now, so maybe later.  Takes place at the end of the First Age, but there are flashbacks throughout.

Disclaimer: I don't own the Silmarillion

Pairings: none

Characters: Manwë, Morgoth (mentions Eru, Yavanna and Nienna (as well as the rest of the Valar collectively))

Warning: canon-compliant AU, briefly hints at war and other nasty things, self-depreciation, willful blindness, mental instability hinted

Song: 

Words: 1,018
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consubstantial (adjective): of the same substance
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/consubstantial

Perhaps it was a foolish course of action.  Reckless.  Careless.

From the very beginning--from the moment of their birth together in the quiet of the unraveled universe--Manwë had sensed the difference in his brother.  Melkor had been his antithesis in many ways, loud and brash and strong where the younger brother was quiet, thoughtful and wise.  But all the same they had complimented one another, and for a time they had been content.

He still remembered it well, the time when there had been no divide of jealousy or resentment between them.  The time when they could have spoken civilly--even affectionately--as one sibling to another with their raiment cloaking their joyful spirits in smiling visages rather than scowls.

Once, when they could have sat together in harmony.  In peace.  Like a soft melody floating as a cloud across an open, clear sky.

Well, he remembered it.  Too well.  And he tried to remember that--those moments where their spirits entwined together into a mixture of brotherly love and respect and admiration for each other's differences--rather than what had followed after.  Rather than the darkening and the bitterness and the unhappiness that followed.  The war and the death and the rotting spirit-flesh.

Tried to remember a time where they had been consubstantial in the strangest, most bizarre fashion.  So very different from one another, and yet fundamentally the same.  Balanced in equilibrium as their had always been intended to be from the very beginning of time.

Many years later, it was those very memories--those of a happier time--that drove him to be merciful.

That made him compassionate.

"You will serve your punishment here.  Long enough have you stayed locked away in the Halls of the Waiting.  I would see you free, my brother, and content with the world and with yourself."

Melkor scoffed quietly. "And what, pray tell, have you in mind, little brother?"

"Serve the people.  Get to know them, our Father's creations.  Come to love them."

I know you are capable of love, he wanted to say.  I know that you are able to feel softness and tenderness, for you and I are the same.

"Love them?" The very idea seemed to disgust the shade of his beloved sibling. "You have become weak-minded and feeble in your love, brother.  A foolish and gentle creature, one which I will take pleasure in one day tearing apart."

It saddened him to know that nothing had changed.  That the years of imprisonment had only made that bitterness more acute upon the tongue.

But he had to try.

"You will remain under watch, observed, but I would have you walk freely."

Prove to me that something of the man I remember remains still.

Please.

"I will do my best... my king..." Nothing had ever sounded more sarcastic or more venomous.

From the start, he should have surrendered to the inevitable.  That was what they all said.  Every single one of them.  His brothers and sisters, all faithless, but none could recall a time when Melkor had not been sour and slimy to the touch.  When he had been handsome and powerful and good-natured, enjoying the company of others without scorn and envy and lust for that which was not his.  Without the materialism and the obsession.

They did not remembered the Melkor that Manwë knew like the back of his hand.  A part of his own being, innate and necessary.

Cut from the same cloth, as the mortals said.  A truer statement he had yet to hear.  And it kept his stubbornness and determination burning through those early years of equally stubborn refusal to cooperate.  Through railing tirades of abuse and foul language and complaining and pleading and insulting.

Through the long years of slowly seeing that which he remembered seeping back into the dark hole that had sucked away everything good and pure that once Melkor had been.

But perhaps he truly was naive--him, the King of Arda, the ruler of all the world.  Perhaps he was merely thinking wistfully--dreaming of something to grandiose and unrealistic, too fantastic.

Of a reality that could never come to pass.

And yet, even when they had been betrayed--even when the Two Trees lay in ruins and thousands of years of rehabilitation turned out to be nothing more than a falsehood--Manwë sat down and wept only for his brother, his other half.  Not for the lost of Yavanna's great works, the sprouts of Nienna's tears.  Not for the Eldar lost in the dark, falling apart at the seams.  Not even more the ache in his own chest.

But for that residue of the man he once knew that still lingered in the air, a clean and hot scent that was untainted by death and disease and other foul things of the darkness.  For the little remaining tatters of Melkor, his brother, and not Morgoth the Dark Lord.

Tears in the moments of despair when he accepted that his brother would never be coming back.

In the end he knew, however, that he could not surrender.  That he could not give up on Melkor.  They were consubstantial, one the same as the other, woven of the same spirit-fabric and the same polyphonic twist of melody over the harmony of the deep blue sky and the fiery passion of the world.  And he knew, somewhere inside that monstrosity, his brother must still be trapped.  Captive.

Perhaps it was that which made him merely cast that spirit to the Void.  Cast it to known survival, to a known future of apocalyptic battle and tens of millions of deaths.  Cast it to a known "we shall meet again" because he could not accept...

Could not give up...

Could not destroy his brother.  For they were the same.  Always, the same.  And, were he in his brother's place, he would have hoped and prayed for salvation where none would ever come.  Except from those of a compassionate heart and a reckless mind.

In the end, they were not so different after all.