Prompt 22: Dear Mun
The red-haired elf sat at the desk looking out of the window across the garden. Although winter already, the weather was still mild, a bright, low sun making skeletal shadows of the bare trees. In his hand, he held a pen and on the desk in front of him was a sheet of paper on which he'd written "Dear Arhuaine," but that was as far as he'd got.
Maedhros was bad at writing letters. Whether they were letters exchanged between himself and Findekano, or his brothers, or other important people he'd needed to be diplomatic with, he'd always found it hard to express in writing, how he felt. He'd write it how he felt, how he'd say it, but it nearly always came out seeming clumsy and wrong. Findekano's letters, and Macalaure's, would always be full of such elegant prose, and Maedhros always felt inadequate beside talent like that.
He put down the pen and picked up his mug of coffee instead, sipped it, stood up and walked to the window. From this upstairs vantage point he could just about see the front door of the house, and he smiled, remembering the day he first knocked on that door. Someone had opened it, he'd given a sigh of relief and said "I'm lost. Can you help me?" That was five years ago (five years almost exactly to the day, isn't that an amazing coincidence?), and he'd moved in, been here ever since.
And how much had happened since then! He'd had a somewhat sudden introduction to modern technology; the first encountered and still his favourite was the remarkableness of having a hot shower. He'd been shocked and rather disturbed to find his lifestory in print, and for a while he'd read and re-read the book obsessively, always getting terribly upset at certain parts of it. He'd met Findekano again, and several of his brothers; all of them now re-born just as he was, and scattered all around the world, only reachable by the wonder of this amazing device called a computer.
But things being just the same here as they always were, he and Findekano would fight often, and as before, Kano had drifted away and was gone again. Now there was Grey, and he still didn't quite know what to make of that.
Dear Arhuaine,
Maedhros glanced at the paper again and frowned, calling up a memory of her the first time he'd seen her. Short, slightly built, pale. She rarely smiled, and always seemed so sad, somehow, as though she'd suffered some sort of terrible loss. He knew how that felt.
More memories brought a smile to his lips. That first summer, he'd tried to teach her to swim because she'd never really learned, and was so scared of the water that she'd just clung to him, trembling. Then there was the following winter when she introduced him to the English holiday called "Guy Fawkes Night", and he and Ambarussa had been entranced by a sky filled with fireworks over the whole city.
Things were different now. He'd gotten used to modern Arda, and his past was nothing more than a well-read paperback, a handful of fanfiction stories, and the occasional nightmare. Arhuaine had welcomed him into her home, and now it was his home too, as much his home as Himring had ever been.
He sat down at the desk again, set down his empty mug and realised that there were tears on his cheeks. He wiped them with his sleeve, picked up the pen and wrote two more words, in flowing tengwar script.
Hantalye. (Thank you)
Russandol.
Character: Maedhros Fandom: The Silmarillion Word count: 600