prompt/inspo: ‘“The poets were always correct,'' I say softly. ''You are half my soul.’”
pairing: maedhros / reader
summary: in the years of peace in beleriand, you help maedhros with his hair. in the years of peace in imladris, you wish he was there to help with yours.
content: gn!elf!reader, who has long hair. fluff in the first half, angst in the last (would the opposite of hurt/comfort be comfort/hurt?), themes of grief, mention of canon character death, mentions of canon-typical violence. this is technically part of a series, though there’s no real order so it doesn’t matter - I'll be posting more as I continue to format my writing for this godforsaken website
words - gregory alan isakov ✵ series masterlist
Your fingers run through Maedhros' hair, parting it properly to braid the strands back. For a moment there is silence as you start your work, starting with a simple face framing braid. After you tie off the first one, his hand reaches up to grab your wrist. Gently, so gently, he tugs you forward as he tilts his head back, and brushes his lips across your knuckles.
“I love you, you know?” He whispers against your skin. Soft words from his cracked lips against your calloused fingers.
His hand holds yours like he's never held a sword before, like this gentleness is all he’s ever known. Like you’re back in Tirion, and the only blood you’ve seen are from scraped knees and bloody noses. If you try hard enough, you could imagine the sunlight spilling over the fire of his hair is that of Laurelin, instead of Arien in her ever consistent journey across the sky.
Another thing you’ve always loved about him, the red of his hair. Under this light, the fire is a gentle thing, the warmth of a hearth instead of an uncontrollable blaze.
You hum softly, and rub your thumb across his knuckles. As if your hands were built for this, sweet caresses and reassurances, instead of used for violence.
His eyes meet yours, shining with the light of the trees, and you swear in this moment he’s more beautiful than their otherworldly glow. The scar across his lips stretch with his smile.
You’d kill for this elf. Have killed for him, stained your hands with blood of those deserving and those innocent. And here he sits, still alive like some impossible dream, pressing kisses to your fingers while you giggle like you’re a young elfling again.
Maybe there could be room for tenderness, even with the violence in a world under siege.
“And I love you,” you respond in kind. It feels like you cannot possibly express how much, as he kisses your fingers again, then further up upon your wrist, a gentle kiss against your pulse point. You wonder if he can feel it, as your heart flutters, your warm pulse beating against his lips, how much you love him. Seeped into your very being, pumping through your veins, inscribed into your bones, you love him so surely you ache with it.
It’s something soft and gentle now, as he kisses your skin again, just to kiss you for the sake of it, and leans his weight into you. You can’t help but lean forward and press a kiss to his head, and wrap your other arm around him in an easy embrace.
“The poets have always been right, I think,” he says, as his fingers play with your own. “You are half my soul.”
You’re inclined to agree. Through peace and war and peace again, he’s stayed by your side as you have stayed by his. Still, the words strike a chord in your heart, and choke you up in their sincerity.
“I love you,” you say again, trying desperately to pour even more into the simple phrase. “You are mine as I am yours.”
You are no poet, but he knows this. Your love is in the braid now laying in his hair, the lips pressed to his head, the rings you help him slip on every morning since he’s lost his other hand - not because he cannot do it himself, but because you want to do it for him. The meals you make him eat when he forgets, the candles you light when he fails to notice it’s getting dark, the sword you swing, stood back to back on even the bloodiest battlefields.
He kisses your wrist again, and smiles, feeling the way your heartbeat flutters. Feeling you alive and reactive, still enamored by his touch after so many years.
Maybe you can be gentle again. Maybe this peace can last.
“Can I braid your hair?” He asks. You blink, because you cannot remember a time he’s braided your hair since he’s lost his hand, and then you smile.
“Of course." It takes another minute for you to swap seats, however, as neither of you want to move, wrapped up in each other and not too hasty in breaking such a moment.
Soon enough it is you in the seat, and him stood above you, his teeth biting at his bottom lip as he weaves the hair framing the left side of your face into a braid just like his.
It’s almost a foreign look on Maedhros as you know him now. So stern your lover has become, so forlorn, creases always between his eyes, his jaw always set too stiffly to allow for anything but a frown.
This is the look he'd wear in the libraries of Tirion, pouring over an essay on politics or some old tome of law, worrying his lip between his teeth as he considered the issues of the kingdom his grandfather had tasked him with. Or when he was sat in front of a particularly daunting puzzle, his brow furrowed as he tried to piece it all together in his mind before connecting the pieces.
You want to kiss him, suddenly and desperately. You want to kiss him silly, over and over, until he smiles like he used to, and kisses you back.
You know better than to interrupt now, and instead watch and wait patiently as he finishes the braid. It’s tension is more loose than the one you put in his hair, a little more messy. It’s the best braid you’ve ever worn, as he’s the one who braided it.
“It’s beautiful, Mai,” you say, running your fingers along the braid as you admire it. Call it nostalgia, call it old habit, the old nickname from your younger days slips out. You hardly notice, far too preoccupied with feeling giddy at the fact he’s braided your hair to look like his.
“Not as beautiful as you,” he responds easily, lifting his hand again to tuck the braid behind your ear.
You pull him down and kiss him then, your patience run thin now that his task is complete. Softly and repeatedly, until he chuckles against your lips and brings his hand up to cup your face, tilting your head and opening his mouth so he can kiss you properly - just as you hoped he would.
Later, the two of you arrive together to dinner, with flushed cheeks and matching braids in your hair. His brothers would tease you endlessly for it, were it not for the way Maedhros smiles that night.
-
Halfway through braiding your hair in your room in Imladris, grief washes over you like a tidal wave, crashing against the shore.
You have to pause, fingers clutching your hair like a lifeline, as longing like you haven’t felt in an age tears you apart from the inside. You wish, impossibly so, for Maedhros to be stood above you, his fingers weaving your hair into something intricate instead of your own.
He used to braid your hair like this, and kiss you on the cheek. His hand, or hands, once upon a time, were steady and sure as they ran through your hair, playing with it for far longer than necessary before fixing it into some style or another.
If you close your eyes, you can picture him, biting at his bottom lip as he concentrates. If you try harder, you can remember not just Beleriand, but Valinor, the light of the trees shining through the open window, the jewelry around his wrists making noise as he fixes your hair.
When he was warm, and safe, and above all else, alive.
But now the space where he should be is tragically empty. A gaping wound once more, a loss worse than any missing organ or limb. Your own fingers, now far too tight in your own hair, tangle the strands.
You’ll never hold his hand again, you realize. You’ll never braid his hair, his beautiful, fiery hair, until the world is destroyed and remade again. You cannot feel its soft tresses under your hands. Cannot feel his fingers scratching at your scalp and pulling your stress away.
Carefully, with a patience made from several ages of practice, you manage to untangle your fingers and straighten your hair back out again. Unbound, it falls back over your shoulders to frame your face once more.
You feel like crying. You feel like breaking something.
Not for the first time, and likely not for the last, you ask yourself why you didn’t cast yourself into the fire right after him. Perhaps more unkindly, you ask yourself why you couldn’t have been a second earlier when you reached for him. If you had grabbed him, if he hadn't fell-
Someone knocks at your door, three quick raps before they peek in the open doorway.
“Dinner will be served early this evening - is everything alright?”
Elrond, you realize. You take a moment to compose yourself, breathing in and then out again, before you straighten up and brush your hair out of your eyes.
“Quite alright,” you say, turning around with a smile that doesn’t quite reach your eyes. He raises an eyebrow, his expression of ‘I clearly don’t believe you’ so similar to Maedhros’ discerning look that another wave of grief crashes over you.
Maedhros was gone. Has been gone for thousands of years. Yet still he was kept alive by his son, a son you’d never truly had a chance to speak to until now.
“Or at least, I will be,” you amend your statement. You knew better than to lie to a healer such as him.
They say two things can kill an elf - steel, and loss. Grievous injury to the body, or grievous injury to the soul, both equally as deadly. You’d made it this far without meeting an end to either, so surely you could weather this storm. Even if some moments were harder than others.
“You will see him again.”
Elrond says it so matter-of-factly, as if he’s seen the future for himself. Somehow he knows exactly who haunts you in his moment, the missing half of your soul that still aches.
“I will wait until Arda is remade, if I have to,” you reply. And you know this to be true, more than anything you’ve known before. Even if you had to wait for the end of time itself, you would, just to see him again.
“I will give you space, then,” Elrond says with a small smile. “Don’t forget about dinner, lest it wilts away without you .”
He bows his head, and leaves as quickly as he arrived.
You sit for a moment, sorrow and grief still tugging down your limbs, before you look back at the mirror on your little beauty stand. It’s easy enough to do a small, simple braid, one that frames the left side of your face.
And if you show up to dinner with such a simple braid, your eyes red rimmed, no one questions it. You are in a house of healing, after all.
