b2mem | ...And Ye Shall Find by amyfortuna

B2MeM Prompt and Path: A Meteor/Shooting Star, Red Path
Format: Ficlet
Genre: Character Study
Rating: T
Warnings: none
Characters: Maedhros, Fingon
Pairings: Obliquely Fingon/Maedhros
Creator’s Notes: Also written for @FeanorianWeek! The title is from OneRepublic's Counting Stars, which is a song I really strongly associate with Maedhros.
Summary: The Eagle came for Fingon; Maedhros receives a different sign.

The Eagle came at sunset; Fingon cut, with a hand trying not to shake, through Maedhros' wrist in the half-light at the end of the day. Maedhros, to his own great relief, passed out immediately, and remembered nothing of how Fingon got him onto the Eagle at all.

He awoke, what could have been hours or minutes later, to the whirl of a starry sky overhead, and Fingon's face, tearstained, pressed against the back of his good shoulder. He felt no pain, just a numbness that seemed to be taking over his entire body.

Staring up at the vast dark blue of the sky, deeps beyond deeps, he counted stars to stay awake, as he'd done on the cliffside while they whirled in a great slow dance overhead. The Eagle flew, and Fingon held him still with one arm, silent and grim, and with the other hand held tightly to a length of cloth wrapped around his forearm. He knew what had happened; Fingon had told him what he was going to do, but he could yet not face the thought of that empty place where a hand was supposed to be.

So he counted stars instead. The silent tread of them comforted him, in a stark and distant way. They had been the same in Valinor. They had been the same in that terrible night when his father turned to ash and blew away on the wind. They were the same when he was forcibly stripped of his weapons and marched to Angband. They were the same on the cliffside, steady and constant as despair. Remote and cold, they gave no hope to him, only a certainty that the Valar watched.

His eye caught movement out of the corner of it, and he twitched just a little, moving his head just far enough to see a star falling in the distance.

A star, falling.

He did not know that stars could fall.

If stars could fall, then maybe there was hope after all.

Maybe he could begin again.

----

End Notes: I'd also like to highlight that this story attempts to illustrate the difference between amdir ('looking up') and estel ('trust').