Disclaimer: All characters, settings and situations belong to Tolkien's estate, obviously.
Notes: Findis is the eldest daughter of Finwe, who often shows up in HoME volumes, but never made it into the published Silmarillion.
Throwing Stones
Morning is coming, and gold wrestles with silver, their prize the world. Through a wide crack in the curtains, rays of both colours spill in like tangled limbs. Findis will have to get up, soon, and the light of Telperion will surrender, to retreat and watch and wait for the evening. Then it will have its daily chance to gorge itself greedily on revenge, like Laurelin does now. If they are not careful, they will make everyone else hungry.
Her father told her, once, as she perched wide-eyed and small on the island of his lap, that dreams can come true if you want them enough. She wakes early and dreams morning into night. And sometimes, when she feels generous enough, she dreams everything different, like seeing the world through stained glass tinted the colour of perfection.
This isn't what her father meant, but believing in everything is better than believing in nothing; and why shouldn't it work, when she is the goddess of her own childhood, blue-eyed and ever-growing?
Findis used to tell people these dreams of hers, but it only earned her stern, disapproving looks. Her version of truth is one that the world frowns upon, she is informed, although she doesn't understand how Arda can frown, not having a face as it does. Or perhaps its entire surface is a face, the land its unseeing eyes and the wrinkled velvet blue of the sea its skin, but who could tell.
She prefers to see the truth as layered. There are always truths, but some are truer than others. Often they are different for different people. And sometimes she lies, but life is a story, and she would rather invent her own endings. Her father, for whom truth is more important than the tale, tries to correct this, unsympathetic as the stars. He points out the truth where he finds it. Look, Findis, this is black. Yes. This is white. Yes. We are happy. No, she tells him, shaking her head with all the determination of a child who knows she is right.
"But we live in Aman, in paradise," he tells her, firmly faithful. "How could we not be?"
"This isn't paradise, Atar." His brow knit, Finwë drifts like a cloud further and further from understanding. Her mother watches from a distance, a smile in her eyes, and worry tangled up in her eyelashes.
"How can you think so?"
"If it were, I would never have been born."
Silence dances about tauntingly, and no one denies it.
Sometimes Findis forgets that other people can see her, and then her small solemn brother has to tell her not to stare. Now and then she plays make-believe with him, but it never lasts long. They construct their fantasy worlds in infinitely different manners, impossible to reconcile. Nolofinwë wants to be someone, and she wants to be everyone.
Once her father went to the sea and he brought them back spiral seashells, smooth and pink as babies. He showed them how to hold them to their ears. Nolofinwë smiled a curved, shy smile of delight, hearing the waves break against the shore within the shell. The sea, he cried, enchanted. He did not seem distressed that it was trapped, unable to find its way out.
Findis followed his lead and held it tight against her ear, but for all his glee she always knew it was not the sea, only an illusion. She caught a glimpse of herself in a mirror across the room, one of many. She was framed in the cold glass, undeniably real. Now the shell sits dusty on the back of a shelf.
In her house, there are mirrors and windows gleaming enticingly on every wall. This is because it is a glass house. Fëanáro said this once, and the words drifted up the stairs, when she was not sleeping but should have been. First she had heard her father's tired, heavy words dropping like stones at his feet. Then a laugh struck out like lightning.
"Ah, speaking of loyalty and duty again, Atar?" His voice was like music, but lacking the joy of it. "Those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. You of all people should know that." Then a door had closed.
Now, Findis is fascinated with pristinely cold glass, though she's never seen her father throw a stone. Still, she never gets closer than she can help to a window. The mirrors are not so bad, for it is only herself seamlessly duplicated on the other side, and she learned not to be scared of herself long ago.
It is the windows that must be watched, because you can never tell who might be on the other side, watching you. Worse, you can never tell what you might see, and be unable to forget.
Once she saw, in the window, Míriel walking briskly about the corridors, her hair curling out behind her like smoke. Findis was in the crisply green garden, and she was worried that she'd dreamed herself out of existence. It took hours to muster up enough empty courage to go in. In the end she was wrong, but it didn't make it any better.
She still sees her sometimes, on the top floor where there aren't so many people, where the stately grandeur is beginning to fade from lack of attention. Splendor, like the dreams collected in the drawer by her bed, only thrives if you believe in it. Findis wonders if her father sees her too, Míriel with her hazy outline; the air clings to her, reluctant to let loveliness vanish. With her own gold hair and her usurper's smile, she never dares speak to her.
One day Fëanáro comes to stay, unhappiness and resentment sweeping behind like a cloak, spreading a shadow over everyone. He brings his two sons, the second newly arrived, pink and hairless and ready to be admired. Finwë sits the elder boy on his lap, a fire to warm himself, and she is suddenly, sickeningly jealous. Findis takes to pacing around and around the upstairs corridors. The faster she goes, arms swinging, the easier it is to pretend she is going somewhere, instead of walking these same circles, over and over.
Sometimes she does not want to be found, and she knows where to go. In one of the smaller rooms, rarely used, there is a window seat hidden behind a tapestry, brilliantly coloured, threads running through it like snakes. Everywhere, there are these thread-snakes slithering across the walls. The house is still full of tapestries. Some rooms are so covered you cannot see the walls, as if Míriel couldn't stop, as if she was trying franticly not to be forgotten. The window seat is large enough for comfort, done in a blue fabric so wide and deep she wants to drown in it, and because of this she can forgive it for the window. The curtain is kept down.
One time, in the crisp early hours of the morning, sitting there, she is not surprised to find Fëanáro suddenly beside her. She has seen the long-abandoned scraps of metals and parchment under the seat. His legs take up much of the room, and she is unwelcome in her own house. She finds that she is synchronizing herself with his breathing, in and out, in and out, faster, faster, faster.
She says, "I see your mother sometimes." He stares at the curtain as if he can see the trees blowing on the other side. Findis doesn't doubt that he can. "She walks about the house."
"Do you?" In the garden, the birds have begun to sing. The louder ones shriek. Music went wrong once and it's never been perfect since. Fëanáro looks back at her, curiously still, quiet and almost deafening. He is wearing red. It doesn't match the curtains. "Or do you see yourself, made just unrecognizable enough?"
Fëanáro asks questions of the sort that do not demand answers. To respond to them would be to demean them. They are their own answers, and she understands that. They listen to the birds for a time, quiet.
"They say you can make jewels that are beyond perfection," she says.
"No, not yet. But I have almost done it, almost." He laughs and there is something of the wolf in it. His teeth glisten like pearls until he closes his lips again, like lids, red in dawn's light. "Do you see, then, why I cannot stop? Not now, not so close."
"Perhaps you'll never manage it." She peers at him, brows slightly bent. Outside the birds hear the stillness and fly away, wings flapping smugly.
"That is impossible, you must know." He is deflated, somehow; the air has escaped from his chest. Now he is only puzzled. "I've always been able to do everything."
Day after day she waits in the window, and he comes. She never finds out if he hates her for looking like her mother or for not looking like her father. Maybe he doesn't have a reason. Maybe he doesn't need one. Maybe he doesn't even hate her. She speaks and he listens, poised, coiled as a snake ready to strike, and she talks and talks, ready to be devoured.
One day, lonely, sitting cross-legged with her hands folded in her lap, eyes blue and hopeful as the sky, she asks Fëanáro if he hates her. This isn't what she is really asking. There isn't an answer. She didn't expect one. He left a long time ago, a trail of dust behind him like an arrow. He and his wife will not come back, she thinks, –which might be a victory of sorts but it is lacking a victor- not here, not anymore. There is no one and nothing but loneliness beside her.
So Findis sits and builds him up in front of her, builds him of dust and air, glues him together with willpower and the odd bit of resentment, patches him with rich, multihued imagination. He is her greatest creation yet, her thought-dummy, exactly like Fëanáro in every way. Or, rather, exactly like her idea of him, the quietly blue, unrippled surface of the pool, undisturbed by anything but her reflection. This is what makes her carefully constructed people easy to be with; they are, unlike everyone else, mirrors rather than windows. She rises towards herself through every one of them, like a sea-creature mounting hazily from the depths.
Across from her, her imagination sits and smiles, smiles, smiles like a mannequin. She pours them tea and they watch time pass, marveling as if they were watching the stars.
When Findis walks, he follows, and she grows accustomed to the light footsteps, like a dance. She walks quickly to leave behind the knowledge she goes nowhere; he dance-walks his way through the days like rain and she wonders who travels further. The answer to this is like all the other answers, always just around the corner, elusive. When people talk, he laughs softly at them as if he knows better. Sometimes he does it when she talks, too.
She asks him, one time, if he has gotten his work any closer to perfection, but it is a bad question. He doesn't know. Then he goes away for a few days, and when he comes back he is changed.
One day the Fëanáro-that-is-not-really-Fëanáro looks at her, bemused, and says, "You don't really believe in me, you know."
"Yes I do," Findis says, glaring. She has tied her hair back but tendrils are escaping. They must be caught, put back in their place.
"Is that so," he says mildly. He has no intention of agreeing.
Findis glares. She'll have to kill him now, bury him in the deep brown earth of her mind. His smile widens, growing, growing, he is all smile now, grotesque. No one should be that pleased, or that mocking.
He laughs, throws his head back, his throat white as a swan's, and says, "Do you really think you can kill me without killing yourself?"
She slips away. The endings are hers to create, not his.
The years creep by, and slowly, they vanish, the people she plays with like puppets, fading away into the fog of childhood. First an eye, then a leg; after a time she is talking to a toe, then nothing at all. Fëanáro is no exception.
The real Fëanáro, turned unrecognizable by pride and the slow rot of perfection, marches away with her people. She watches from her roof as they grow smaller and smaller until they seem children, the tiny flames of their torches darting like fireflies in the distance. Findis wants to follow, almost, for a moment, but she can't bring herself to leave behind what she knows, what she's made. She stays, and wanders about the empty white city with the other ghosts.
Now that they've gone, it's just her; the real Findis, and the other versions, all the people she could have been, watching from the windows. She keeps the curtains tightly closed.