Silence

Mellow Soulmate AU.  Maedhros finds the first of his younger brothers amongst the dead in the ruins of Menegroth.  Quenya names used (Maedhros = Maitimo, Caranthir = Morifinwë or Moryo).  This story is directly related to most other "Second Kinslaying" pieces including Overflow, Worst Day, Villain and, most especially, Storm.  Takes place in Menegroth (obviouly) just after the Second Kinslaying (obviously).

Disclaimer: I don't own the Silmarillion

Pairings: none

Characters: Maedhros, Caranthir (mentions other random elves/orcs/things)

Warning: canon-compliant AU, other pairings contextually implied, depression/suicide implied, torture, rape and slavery mentioned, war, battle, semi-graphic core, cold-blooded mass murder, etc...

Song: Starvation

Words: 1,401
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silence (noun): forbearance from speech or noise: muteness; absence of sound or noise: stillness; oblivion, obscurity; secrecy
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/silence

One never grew accustomed to the aftermath of battle.

For hundreds of years, Maitimo had been upon those bloody fields, gracing them with his prowess in the arts of war and death.  Fighting and killing and slaughtering orcs upon dusty plains turned to mud from blood and entrails and the sweat of those clawing for every inch of ground at the cost of their lives.  And each time it became easier to pretend it was all a dream, a haze of reality one passed through as their sword sang through the air and bit into flesh and crushed down bone.

Once upon a time the spill of guts over his feet would have made him ill and the thought of spilling another's blood would have made him dizzy.  Never would he have contemplated the idea of wielding a weapon against another living, sentient being, let alone in the cold blood or in the midst of war.  So carelessly and recklessly and ruthlessly.

And yet it had become second nature.

The movement.  The moment.  The mere seconds in which the eyes took in every angle of attack, every possible trajectory of the enemy and every potential escape.  The reaction near instantaneous to defend or attack.  To save one's own skin or to hunt down in savage wrath.

To end lives over square inches of dirt.  He did not have to think.  And he would never hesitate.

Many battles had he fought.  And they all ended the same.

No, it had never been the heat of battle that left his mind in tatters and his sanity slipping little-by-little.  But the aftermath.

Walking across those same fields where the bodies--dismembered, beheaded, disemboweled, bled dry or ripped apart--lay piled together into mounds of metal and flesh.  The enemy and the friend mixed from the flesh to the hair to the armor to the blood and everything in between, all corpses equal when their spirits had been ripped away from fleshy cages and shells.  All of them tangled up together as intimately as lovers, their eyes staring up at the sky without light and consciousness.  Dull.

The smell rose and turned the stomach.  Rot and decay and blood and death filled the air, the pungent fragrance of everything he wanted to forget.  That smell that reminded Maitimo of Angband.  Of those pits in which the unfortunate thralls were tortured to death for sport or raped for entertainment or chained cruelly and made to slave away until their minds and bodies shattered.

But even that bothered him not so much as the silence.

During battle the screams of the wounded and the battle cries of the living echoed and raged until they formed a solid wall of sound.  The sound of war and violence.  The sound of surviving and breathing and thriving.

However, with the stillness that followed, the devastation could no longer be ignored.

Well Maitimo remembered many a battle walking amongst the dead, through their veil of silence, afraid that his boots might make a sound upon the stone as he passed through their ranks.  It was only in those moments, without the enemy screaming for blood in his face and without his own rough and raspy voice snarling in hate and fury, that it truly became clear.  That the reality of battle always settled over his mind, imprinted itself deep upon his psyche.

Reminded him that those who fell would never rise again to fight by his side.  That he, the commander, had led these men to their deaths.  In agony and horror upon a field of muck and gore where glory was a mirage and happiness a long-lost relic of the past, he might as well have slaughtered them with his own bare hand.

This was worse still, though, than anything before it.

There were no enemies to be seen here.  Upon the walls and the hallways, caked into the swirling etched designs of the arches and pillars, staining the alabaster statuary and marble floors, everywhere there was blood and the stink of spilled intestines.  Only these ripped and torn bodies, left where they had fallen to be crushed beneath his irreverent boots in disrespect and disdain, did not belong to any orc or demon or monster of the deep.

They were elves.  Friends and family.  Kith and kin.  All of them alike.

Among their bodies he saw the children, their parents fallen nearby trying to defend that which was most precious from the invaders.  Saw the savagery that the broken minds of his brothers and his comrades rained down on such innocent people, tearing them open barbarically and spreading them across the floor in punishment for defiance.  Until all of them lay fallen down to the last infant, little more than obstacles to a greater goal.

And with them, Maitimo found his brother.

Morifinwë looked shockingly still and blanched, lying among the fallen of Doriath, dark to their flaxen and armed to the teeth among their domestic simplicity.  But the brother, for all the weapons he carried--the bow upon his back with his quiver of arrows, the daggers in his boots and strapped to his forearms, the sword sheathed faithfully upon his hip--had none of them drawn in defense.

It was a chilling realization, settling into Maitimo's bones.  That the silence was damning.  And not only that which lingered over the remnants of war, carnage and atrocity in the wake of the spilling of blood and ending of lives cut brutally short.

His little brother had not attempted to protect himself from counterattack.  Had not lifted so much as a finger in defense of his own body against the resistance.

Rather, he smiled peacefully up at the ceiling, his eyes closed gently and restfully.  Were it not for the arrow sticking out of the center of his forehead, trailing streams of crimson over the arch of his brow and the bridge of his nose, Maitimo might have believed he had merely gone to sleep.  He did not appear as a man in pain, but a man wrapped in the comfort of relief.

Relief from the lies and facades and lack of words.

"Oh, Moryo..."

A cold man Maitimo might have been, but when he broke the silence all the stillness--the glass walls keeping him detached from this world of red and terror--shattered and rained down like dewdrops upon his fragile mind, tearing into the vulnerable, exposed flesh of his sanity.  Carefully, he lifted the body, pulled free the arrow and rested his brother against his chest, tucking it beneath his chin as his hand stroked through the matted tangles of blood-stained hair.

Like when Morifinwë was a child.  Sweet and kindhearted beneath his bluster and bashfulness.  Quick to anger, but also quick to forgive, lacking the mother's wrath but inheriting her split-second moods, holding tight to the fury of the father but having none of the will to hold a grudge even unto death.

His younger brother had never been made for a world like this.  For the horror and the guilt and the murderer.  For again and again riding into battle and coming out a little more chipped and a little more broken.

Hesitantly, he pressed a kiss to that brow.  Tasted the drying blood of the fatal wound upon his lips as he gave a last goodbye.

And then he laid down the body, left it where it had fallen.  Maitimo wiped away the momentary sheen of tears that had gathered upon russet lashes and threatened to stain further that grimy and bloody face.  Pushed aside the heaviness of lead within his breast in favor of the twist and turn of flame.

There was no time for mourning.  No time to be wasted upon trivial attachment to a corpse.

This was the aftermath of battle.  A sight he had seen a hundred times over and over again.  And one more scene of destruction--one more vast empty space filled to the brim with silence--was but a forgettable memory in the vestiges of time.  Something to be forgotten and left behind along with sentimentality, compassion and useless pity.

Still...

"I hope you are happy," he murmured into the quiet.  Heard his voice echo and echo and echo.

But no reply ever came.  He had not expected one.