Findekáno's eyes are icy chips of lightning-struck steel staring down at him as he stands at the foot of his sickbed.
He had thought—when he could be reasonably sure it wasn't another form of torture—that his cousin's valiant (foolish) rescue of him had been a message of some kind of forgiveness.
The white-knuckled fists clenched at Findekáno's sides tremble and jerk, nearly imperceptible, furious.
Maitimo—he can't be called that anymore—has been through every possible conceived method of torture, and quite a few new ones which would have been frankly fascinating in their masterful cruelty if he'd not been the subject of such. But he had not endured the long march over the ice after a fiery betrayal. Nelyo can see in his favorite cousin's eyes remnants of the shadow of that crossing, of the bitter cold unfathomable, of a love that had once burned as bright as any of his father's silmarils gone cold and dark.
It makes him want to look away as his stomach flips and something like shameful nausea works it's way up his throat.
"I did not—" he rasps, voice still hoarse and dry from years without other than intermitent rainwater to slack a perpetual thirst. "I tried to stop him." He closed his eyes in a long blink. "I failed."
Findekáno's forcibly neutral—but for the cold burning in his gaze— expression does not change as he nods once, nostrils flaring with a sharp inhale, and turns about-face with silent, deadly precision.
"I had thought," he stops at the door leading from the infirmary room but does not turn his face, "that I was the reckless one."
Nelyo blinks and before he can think to reply, Findekáno has swept out of the room.
He blinks again, and the heaviness in his chest abruptly churns with the desperate need to laugh, and maybe cry.
He can only hope Findekáno's anger is due to his foolishness in getting captured, but even broken as he still is, even as raw and worn out as he feels in both body and mind, he knows that is not all there is.
There are three hands between them stained red, and a forth somewhere laying at the base of a fell mountain.
