Letters

Modern AU.  Ballad AU?  The more she learns about that man she accosted at the cafe, the more Sarah realizes that there's no turning back.  And yes, Aegnor now has a "human" name, which would be Aaron.  And she'll refer to him as such for a while, until I divert back to "he"s and "she"s.  Bear with me.  Obviously follows "Machine" and "Morgue".  Honestly, I never expected this random-ass arc to go anywhere.  Takes place in modern times.

Disclaimer: I don't own the Quenta Silmarillion, but Sarah is mine

Pairings: Aegnor x Andreth (past)

Characters: Sarah, Aegnor (mentions Vardamírë, Finrod, Angrod, Orodreth and Galadriel)

Warning: non-canon compliant, OFC warning (friendship only!), severe depression/suicidal thoughts, extreme obsessions, OCD behaviors

Song: Wherever You Are

Words: 1,993
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letter (noun): a symbol usually written or printed representing a speech sound and constituting a unit of an alphabet; a direct or personal written or printed message addressed to a person or organization
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/letter

Understanding Aaron was like trying to understand particle physics and quantum mechanics with only a degree in art history.  Like looking at a page of thousands of numbers joining one into the next, their variables spinning through her eyes in a numerical merry-go-round from hell until she was dizzy and confused and sick to her stomach.  Nothing about that man made sense!

She would sit across from him in the mornings and watch him methodically dissect his breakfast, staring at the far wall and pretending she wasn't there at all.  And then, when he rose to leave at his usual time, she would badger him to come and take lunch with her, too.  Because it couldn't possibly be healthy for a man to spend all his time cooped up in a building where people cared for dead bodies before burial.  He needed friends.  He needed a life.

"You're doing a good thing for him."

The woman behind the counter had never spoken to her in words about him before.  Yet she was now, even as they watched Aaron leave the cafe, his golden braid disappearing around the corner as he set off at his usual brisk pace down the street.

"He just seems... sad."

And Sarah had not done befriended him originally at all out of pity or compassion.  She had been curious of his enigma and not wary enough to stay away.  And had stumbled upon something she could scarcely wrap her head around.

There was just something wrong with Aaron.  Terribly wrong.

"But you make him happier," the woman told her. "Just by being there and talking to him, you make him shine again.  I know you can't see it, but we can."

"I'm not in love with him.  And he's certainly not in love with me."

There was that secretive smile again. "You don't have to be.  He needs not a lover.  Just someone who can listen and understand."

But I don't understand.

Thus was the core of the problem.

It was like the man didn't want a life.  Not just a social life.  But a personal life or a professional life or any life at all.  His only interest seemed to be in embalming the dead and staring at blank walls as though they held all the secrets of the universe within their chipping paint and crumbling plaster.

Even after months of knowing the man, that didn't seem to have changed.  She couldn't see the spark that woman had told her of, that supposed light that he had before not possessed.  Except for the moments when he looked at her--really looked at her--and spoke to her and not through her, Aaron was dead to the world.  A ghost that no one glanced toward twice.

And Sarah knew she was missing something.  Something important.  Something that would explain everything.

It wasn't that she wanted to treat him like a puzzle or a machine to be taken apart so that she might understand its inner workings, not as she had in the beginning of their acquaintance.  He was a person, and he was her friend.  A man drowning, and she had been the only person to reach out and grasp his hand, even though it had no longer been clawing toward the light and the oxygen.

She just... wanted to understand...

---

And when she did, she almost wished she didn't.

This wasn't the first time she'd been in his apartment.  After following him home the first time and discovering the sanitary insane-asylum dropout that he called a home, she made a point to stop by with paintings and decor as often as possible.  Anything to add color and flavor to the empty hell he seemed to live in so contentedly.  Just to make sure that there was something there to remind him that he was there.

After the first two weeks, he stopped taking down the pictures and gave up on throwing out her flower arrangements.  Sarah felt invigorated.

And it was perhaps his acquiescence that had given her the courage to search further and further into the depths of his home.  To search every nook and cranny--because he had to have something hidden here.  Memoirs or old college textbooks or photographs of his family.

He has three brothers and a sister... there has to be a picture here somewhere of one of them...

That was how she accidentally found them.  The letters.

Not a couple dozen.  Not even a hundred.  But thousands.

They were written into bound books, hundreds and hundreds of them.  Sarah's fingers touched the leather and the gathered dust--it was so unlike Aaron to let them get dusty--as they slid along shelves and shelves and shelves of spines.  Of course, at first she hadn't known what they were.  Journals?  Family treasures?  Surely no one, not even him, could write so many words in a single lifetime.

Reaching the end of a shelf upon which there sat only two bound volumes, she plucked the last one out of its place and flipped the black leather open.  And found the paper crisp and white, lined with a company's logo upon the inside cover.  Her fingers traced over it, knowing this was mass-produced and sold down the block at the bookstore.  No way was this an artifact.

It is his journal.

And it was written in a language she hadn't a hope of understanding.  All she knew was that those loops and curves and slender points were the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.  Tracing her fingers across them, she was stricken with their care and perfection, a scrawl naturally fitting into the hand, so flowing and bizarre and lavish, though the letters made no sense to her eyes.

Following and following, until her finger found the bottom of the page.

The name.

She could not read the script, but she knew that it must be his.  And, sure enough, at the beginning of the page before lay another name.  Curling and glorious, written with such intimate care and precision.

Carefully, she flipped through that journal.  And the next.  And the next.

All of them, addressed to the same name.  Sometimes they went on for pages and pages and pages, as though he spilled every ounce of all his life into these lines and left them here in the dark.  Left them here in the care and protection of that name.

If she had to guess...

"I did not think you would find these so soon."

Shit!

Carefully, she shut the journal that had been opened upon her hands and set it back in its place.  There was no point in trying to hide her snooping now that she's been caught. "I can't read any of them anyway."

Turning, she faced him.  Aaron was beside the door, beside the beginning of the shelves.  Sarah half expected to see his face snarling and his eyes narrowed in that burst of anger she remembered so well from the first day that they had met.  After all, she was invading a sacred part of his home and self, something he clearly had not intended to share with her yet.  But instead of wrathful fury, he seemed captivated with the journals, too distracted to bother glaring arrows through her chest at point-blank range.  He instead traced his elegant fingers across their spines, following the line of disrupted dust that Sarah had drawn upon their covers only minutes before.

At least he wasn't upset.  In fact, he seemed lost.  More lost than usual as his fingers pulled free one of the bound books and flipped it open to a particular page.  No doubt he knew each and every one like the back of his own hand.

Staring, he traced his fingers over the words.  And Sarah had a sinking suspicion that she knew exactly which one of those words with gravitational force drew the touch of his rough fingers to its silken softness and gentle curves.  The idea planted itself in her head and refused to go away...

A woman.

And she didn't doubt that that woman was dead.  The sinking drew heavier, like lead settling itself in her belly and chest, weighing her down. "Who was she?"

"Just a girl I was in love with." An understatement if ever there was one. "She's gone now."

Is that why you never want to see the people right in front of you?  Do you really want to be somewhere else?  Do you really want to be with her, up there?

"You'll see her again."

Blue eyes looked up at her, wide and glistening.  But his smile was wry and bitter, a twist of the lips that was anything but joyful. "But I won't."

He carefully replaced the journal, hands so carefully handling the bound book, as though it were a delicate flower whose petals he might crush and bruise should he press even slightly too hard.  But even when it was set back in place, his fingers brushed up and down the spine lovingly, as though it called like a siren to be picked up and read again.  Calling and calling...

And it was just so sad.  To see a man so clearly alive obsessed with someone dead.

"I won't..."

This was it.  The clue.  The piece she had wanted so badly to find.  And she understood and wished so terribly and dearly that she didn't.

But she did.

Reaching out, she embraced him, pressing her face against the warm hardness of his shoulders and back, her cheek against the bumps of his spine and her hands folding across his belly.  Squeezing, reminding him that he was not intangible, not a ghost or a holographic image to be walked through and ignored.  Silently telling him that she was there. "You will," she whispered.

He did not argue, but she knew that he did not believe in her reassurances.

And she knew, more clearly than she had known anything before, that all his equations and numbers twisting and turning across the page had a solution she did not want to see.  That, for some reason, he thought he would be going the other way, damned or forsaken, barred forever from that which he most desired and most needed so desperately to survive.

That the closest he would ever come to being with her was pretending.

And it was so very sweet.  And so very sad.

Even his life, he gave to that girl with the name Sarah could not read.  Put every droplet of his existence into those pages--those letters--and locked them away.  Drained himself completely away into the keeping of the dead.  Because he was afraid of the future or resigned to his fate.

But he was a good man.  And surely no righteous god--be it his or hers or anyone else's--would torment him if it was in their power to save him, ease such tactile, burning suffering written in the tremble of his shoulders and the bowing of his regal head to the coolness of the shelves and the spines.  He was a good man, and he needed to live.  Deserved to be happy.

It was just a matter of bringing back that spark.

And it would be hard.  But Sarah did not give up on a project once she had started.  There would be no abandoning this quest now.  If anything, her determination needed to be ten times as fierce and twenty as impenetrable.  So strong that ten thousand legions of doubts could do naught even to scratch its surface.

"He just needs someone who can listen... and understand..."

She only needed to step forward and take that leap.  To close her eyes, breathe in his scent, and make that promise...