#I have been woefully uninspired to write lately

[butraura]

I Wrote This On a Thursday Drabble?

“Do more!”

It isn’t a request, it’s a demand. It’s a threat, it’s a plea, it’s desperation thinly veiled as weariness.

It’s love and an immeasurable amount of grief in the tired hands of Eddie, who spent as long as time would allow, trying to keep Buck alive.

It’s terror, it’s anguish.

It’s the question of, “what if?” What if he doesn’t make it? What if, despite doing more, he dies in the sterile operating room alone. Without Maddie, without Bobby, without Eddie?

It’s the trauma of having loved and lost once before and the feelings bubbling below the surface as he may lose again.

Eddie’s lip trembles. If Buck dies now and Shannon’s already dead, what’s the point in anything? When can they call time of death on Eddie’s beating heart? When can they lay him to rest?

He’s catapulted back to when Shannon was in the ambulance, breaths away from dying. How he didn’t do anything to help her. He couldn’t. He was frozen, still, and watched her die while his friends worked tirelessly to save her.

She was dead before they’d left the scene.

Eddie has felt lost and guilty over how it ended every waking moment since that day. Today, with Buck, he wasn’t going to make the same mistake. He wasn’t going to give Death the satisfaction of taking another person he loves away from him.

His own hands were scarred from the lightning, branded with intricate and delicate patterns throughout his palms and fingers. And still, in spite of the pain, he’d pushed through it to save Buck’s life.

He’d breathe life into him if that’s what it took.

When he takes his gloves off and assesses his hand, he swears he sees a small heart embedded in his palm by way of the Lichtenberg scars.

God, if anything was going to save Buck, please let it be Eddie’s love.

[elesianne]

A Silmarillion fanfic, chapter three / five

Chapter summary: Makalaurë and Tinweriel come to an arragement, both believing that they are the more stubborn one.

Story summary: These are the things we know about the sons of Fëanor: they are full of fire, and they do no give up easily. These things hold true with Maglor too, ever since childhood, and apply in love as well as war. This fic is a four-part exploration of the relationship that develops between Maglor and his future wife.

Rating: General audiences; Length: ~2,300 words

Tag-type thingies for the whole story: years of the trees, romance, falling in love, music, first meeting, courtship, pining, some light humour

Notes:  I had some trouble writing this third chapter and eventually realised that it was because it needed to be two chapters. So the total chapter count of this fic has been upped to five, with both this and the next chapter from Makalaurë's point of view.

(Also posted on AO3 etc.)

*

Chapter III // Crescendo – ‘becoming louder’

Far from giving up on courting Tinweriel, Makalaurë begins to pursue her with a single-minded determination he has never granted anything but his music. Years ago she told him he needed to work hard to prove his talent true, and he did. He can do the same to make her believe the truth of his feelings, and when she does, perhaps she will give him a chance.

After all, they discovered a strong affinity of spirits between them not long after they met. It seems likely to Makalaurë that if Tinweriel can get over thinking him a little boy, and her denial that they could only ever be friends, she could care for him in a deeper, different manner.

He is convinced that the easy, utterly effortless way they have always sang and played in harmony means that they are meant for more than friendship.

Once he recovers from his inebriation and the subsequent indisposition, he realises that a loud serenade in Tinweriel's garden while her family and neighbours watched on probably wasn't the best way to announce his feelings and intentions. Now that he knows, he will alter his strategy. He cancels the plans he made with some musician friends of his for a public performance in Tinweriel's honour and asks his older brother to help him make a gift for her instead.

Their father has been experimenting with coloured metals lately, so Makalaurë crafts seven colourful roses with Maitimo's help and sends them to Tinweriel together with the sheet music for a song about midsummer flowers.

A day later a messenger brings back the roses, along with a note.

Makalaurë,

the roses are beautiful but please do not make yourself do any crafting for my sake – I know that you would rather keep away from your father's workshop.

In any case I must return the roses since I do not reciprocate the feelings they represent. I will keep the sheet music and offer my critique the next time we meet, should you wish for it. The ending of the piece was lovely but the beginning was uninspired, not up to your usual standards.

In friendship

Tinweriel

Makalaurë burns the note and tosses the metal roses into the bottom of a chest.

*

It is he who avoids her for the next week, slipping away quickly from the practice sessions of a company they both belong to. He needs time to think about his next step.

His world shifted when, a few years ago, he gradually realised that he feels more than admiration and friendship towards Tinweriel. It had been an exhilarating, intriguing kind of skewedness that he'd though might would right itself when he told her how he feels, but all that changed is that he feels slightly lost now, and the bright song inside him is fainter.

In the end he sends her a message asking when he can meet her for the critique she offered on his composition. The lacklustre opening has been bothering him too, and she always has good ideas for improvement.

They meet at her house, as usual – Makalaurë's four younger brothers do not make for an environment conducive to any focused work whereas Tinweriel's one older brother is already married and lives elsewhere. Makalaurë brings a bouquet of flowers again, just natural flowers this time, because he wants to bring a reminder of things having changed to this meeting that is otherwise just like a hundred other meetings they have had over the years.

'Don't bother giving or sending them back to me', he says to Tinweriel as soon as he pushes the flowers into her hands and sees her beginning to protest. 'They'll be wilted by the time I get home, so you might just as well put them into water and enjoy them.'

Tinweriel gives him a pointed look, summons a servant and instructs him to put the flowers in her mother's room.

Her comments and critique on his composition are helpful as always. Makalaurë takes note of them and tries not to be insulted or heartbroken that Tinweriel acts a little more formal with him than before, sits with her back very straight and a little farther away from him than usually.

As soon as she runs out of things to say about his composition she rings for a servant again and busies herself with offering him tea, acting beautifully the part of a perfect, polite hostess. Makalaurë would have much preferred it if they'd gone to the garden and sat on the grass and eaten berries straight from a bush like they've often done in the summer. It is a lovely enough day for that.

Still, he supposes he should be grateful that she didn't call for her mother to join them. Even if there is an unpleasant kind of tension between them, at least they are alone.

'We should talk about what we are going to be to each other going forward', he begins, watching Tinweriel closely, seeing her tense.

Before she replies the silence and tension hang in the air between them like drops of condensation about to fall.

'I hoped we would still be friends. You said that we would, on your begetting day, and you came here and we talked just like we used to, so I thought –'

'We haven't been "just like we used to"', Makalaurë interrupts her. 'We used to be easy around each other. Now we have been awkward and odd ever since we stopped talking about my music.'

'If you wanted things to say the same, you shouldn't have serenaded me with a love song', retorts Tinweriel.

Makalaurë bites his tongue and considers his answer. 'If you gave me a chance to be more than a friend, we could have a much more pleasant kind of tension between us.'

'That is impossible, Makalaurë.'

'I still don't understand why it is utterly impossible.' Suddenly he feels cold in the golden-bright room. 'Is there someone else? Did I wait too long?' If she already loves someone else they must have been courting in peculiar secrecy, or Makalaurë would have heard of it.

'There is no one else.'

Tinweriel is as good at lying as she is at other ways of using words with skill, but Makalaurë believes he knows her well enough to know her to speak true now.

'There has never been anyone I was interested in as more than a friend.' Tinweriel gazes out the window pensively. 'Perhaps I was not made for emotions like that.'

Makalaurë knows that there are some people who are very old and have not married, and never even wanted to. Yet even of those people one cannot be sure if they are unable to love, or unwilling, or if they have just not yet met the person to whom their fëa is drawn towards.

Then again love is a mystery truly understood by no one, and all Makalaurë can do is hope and pray and do his best to have even a chance.

'Perhaps', he says. 'But you are not that old yet, you know. Perhaps you just haven't experienced the love one feels for the person one wishes to marry. It may still come.'

'It may', Tinweriel concedes, and Makalaurë is relieved to see she is not being wilfully against everything he says.

'I have a suggestion', he says, for he had managed to think of a plan before coming here. 'Let us stay friends, and once a year – as my begetting day gift each year, you will let me court you for that one day.'

'Do you really want to spend your days of celebration lavishing attention on me?'

'Of course I do.' He groans, and then laughs.

'What is so funny?' Tinweriel asks, looking more mystified than ever.

'I hold on to hope that you feel for me as I do for you, but then you ask something like that, and I know that you don't. You really don't understand.' Makalaurë shakes his head, and laughs more when he sees Tinweriel's eyes darken, her temper flaring up.

'Fine', she says in a voice of steel and silver. 'I will give you one day a year to try to make me understand, and to change my mind. But you should remember that though you are determined and stubborn, I am even more obstinate.'

It's not a question of obstinacy, Makalaurë wants to say, but in the end he doesn't, because this is another thing she wouldn't understand.

When he leaves he bows to kiss her hand, as a reminder, and then straightens up and looks her in the eyes steadily, reminding her that he is finally as tall as she is, or perhaps standing a little taller now that he has voiced aloud what has been growing in his heart for years.

*

On the morning of his next begetting day Makalaurë delivers Tinweriel a sheaf of beautifully calligraphed poetry and another one of sheet music for the flute, all of it inspired by her beauty and wit. Though he has spent a very long time composing both they feel woefully inadequate, little more than what he might bring her to analyse and critique at any meeting of theirs. But she disliked the public performance of his love song a year ago and thus Makalaurë thinks he should give her something more private that she can read in the quiet of her bedchamber and think upon in peace.

He brings her flowers as well, red roses that are almost purple, vivid and extravagant and beautiful like she is.

She accepts the gifts with all the grace she can muster, which is a great amount for she is a great performer, and her graciousness is almost enough to disperse the awkwardness that has returned with a vengeance after slowly fading away during the year that has passed. He takes her out for a walk and she takes his arm and lets him hold her closer than usual, but the acquaintances they happen to meet appear to see no difference in their demeanour, treating them as the close friends they have been for years.

He claims an inappropriate number of dances with her at the party held in the evening and walks her home at the end of the night. He would kiss her on the cheek as goodbye rather than her hand but when he leans in, she flinches infinitesimally, and all his desire to claim a kiss disappears in the face of that proof, and all he feels is lost again.

It is all intensely frustrating and Makalaurë is grateful that his temper, though it can be fiery, isn't as short as Tyelkormo or Carnistir's. He has patience for things that matter, and time – what is a few years of waiting, if they could have countless years together?

After Tinweriel has gone in he stays in the shadow of a tall tree in front of her house for a moment, gathering himself for the walk home.

He doesn't mean to eavesdrop but doesn't dare to move after hearing voices from the closest window, so he ends up overhearing talk of himself and as they say, eavesdroppers never hear good things about themselves.

Tinweriel is telling her mother Silmien about her day. 'He gave me so much poetry I didn't have time to read it all in the time I was at home between walking with him and the party', she says, sounding tired.

'I saw the sheaf of it before you took it to your room.' There is a smile in the voice of Tinweriel's mother. 'It wasn't the work of one day.'

'It might have been the work of a year', Tinweriel mutters in a voice low enough that Makalaurë has to strain to hear, and then feel shame. 'It was all masterfully written, of course – perfect meter, beautiful imagery, filled with a musicality few could match. But there is so much of it. I didn't know what to say when he asked if I liked it.'

'Young men's hearts are fragile, Tinwië', Silmien says very maternally. 'Be kind to him.'

'I am trying', Tinweriel replies, and sighs.

Makalaurë slips away. Even fear of discovery can't make him stay to listen to more of such talk.

My heart isn't fragile, he thinks rebelliously all the way home, displeased with Silmien and even more with Tinweriel. For the first time he comes close to wishing he hadn't come to feel the way he does about her; his love for her has made his heart sing in joy more often than it has made it ache.

Makalaurë loves loving Tinweriel, and if thinking that his heart is fragile will make her keep giving him chances, let her think so. He will just pretend not to have heard that conversation – it might take him a few days to calm down, but he will, and after all he too is a performer, and not proud to the degree of self-harm like his father.

Not that he has a choice anyway. He grew into loving Tinweriel in a way that is more than friendship in the same manner that he grew into a taller but not very tall body and a much more powerful voice; he grew into them gradually, adjusting along the way, knowing these were all things beoynd his control to choose but his own to accept and embrace. They are all inseparable parts of him now, and it would take much more than gentle rejection of his advances for him to hate a part of who he is, or to wish that it didn't exist.

*

A/N: I didn’t have time to edit as carefully as usual, and I didn’t check the ‘nativeness’ of all expressions this time, so if you find anything very silly, please let me know so I can fix it.

Unfortunately there will not be an update next weekend because I'll be travelling and wasn't able to get the next chapter into good enough shape that I could have saved it as draft now and posted when I’m abroad. So the next update will be around the 20th, provided that Scottish midges don't eat me alive.

Thanks for reading! If you have a moment and want to make me happy, leave a little comment :) (AO3 link)