Work Text:
Míriel is reborn on a spring-blue morning with little fanfare and less warning.
This is by design — hers, at least. The decision to return is one that she has known for a long time would eventually come, and eventually have to be spoken. So: in the woven silence of the Halls, she speaks, and persuades, and demands, and eventually her wish is granted.
You will be alone, Vairë warns her, as she has warned her before. This was written into law in Ages past, with the dissolution of your bond with Finwë.
To keep the Eldar from further strife, to maintain the peace that has reigned for thousands of years. For this — for the breaking of the world that she precipitated — she has kept her distance. Will continue to keep her distance.
Her first breath of living air feels like drowning.
***
There is a house waiting for her in some remote part of Valinor. It is an elegant thing of brick and gray-painted wood, built beside a stream and bounded by a garden that melts seamlessly into the dark forest around it, flowerbeds becoming labyrinth bushes becoming looming cedar trees.
She expects the house. What she does not expect is the figure waiting for her in the doorway. Golden hair in one intricate braid, glimmering in the sparse sunlight that finds its way through the ragged clouds. Blue eyes like the sky reflected off the sea. An unspoken defiance written in the tense lines of her body.
All of Míriel’s convictions and clever words flee. She stares, mute and startled, and Indis stares back, her polished and queenly smile not quite disguising the hard light of challenge in her eyes, nor the stubborn set of her shoulders.
Finally, words come. They feel flat on Míriel’s tongue as she says, “You should not be here.”
“So I’ve been told,” Indis says, smile vitrifying to something brittle.
Then why? But if she asks, then she leaves the door open for Indis to ask the same of her, and the determination that has crystallized in her heart over these long millenia still feels too volatile to be exposed to air.
“Have you no heed for the laws of the Valar?” she asks instead, feeling her own lips twist in something too bitter to be called a smile.
“I have connections,” Indis replies. “Strings that I’ve pulled. No one will trouble us here.” As if she is speaking of minor political favors, not defying the Valar themselves.
She should tell Indis to leave. But the words wither on her tongue. She was prepared to be alone — thought she would welcome it, the peace of solitude without even Vairë to disturb her, her hands free to weave or fall still without question — but seeing Indis here has shaken something in her. Not her determination. A memory of longing, perhaps.
Indis steps aside, gestures for Míriel to enter. After a moment, Míriel wills herself to move, to step over the threshold. When she brushes past Indis, heat prickles up her bare arms.
“Welcome home, Míriel,” Indis says, her quiet words nearly lost on the wind.
***
The bath that Indis leads her to is square, sunken into the tiled floor. The water within steams gently, heated by some ingenuity involving pipes running through the stone walls of it. Indis leaves to fetch her a towel and Míriel strips entirely, leaving her robe in a carelessly crumpled heap on the floor and sitting at the edge of the pool, resting her feet on the first step down. The heat of the water sinks into her skin where her legs dangle into the water.
She stares at her own thighs, the unmarked width of them, absent the lighter lightning-sweep marks of skin stretched and healed by time and exertion. Like every other inch of skin on her body, it is flawless and new. When she presses her fingernail to the inside of one thigh, it leaves a divot that fades as she watches.
She trails her nails up the top of her thighs, touch light as a feather, then again, pressing harder, a tingle sweeping in their wake—
“Míriel.”
She raises her head. Indis stands in the doorway, one hand resting against the frame, the other draped with a set of white towels. She wears a gauzy pale green robe that blurs the gold of her tunic to a soft color like new grass under Laurelin’s light, tied closed with a belt in a style Míriel doesn’t recognize. Well, of course — Ages have passed. Even among the stagnant and undying, fashions will change.
Her fingers flex thoughtlessly, nails digging into the soft flesh of her legs. She doesn’t know if Indis sees, because her star-blue eyes haven’t wavered from Míriel’s face, respectfully refraining from dipping lower.
Míriel remembers with a detached sort of surprise that she’s naked, the water of the bath warm against her feet where they rest on the first stone step. She wonders for a moment if she should be self-conscious — Indis has seen every inch of her body, if not this version of her body, in years past. And there is so much they should speak of, that she already knows Indis won’t ask about — not through incuriosity but because she’s always been so careful and considerate, waiting patiently for Míriel to say the words that she keeps locked behind her teeth—
She sucks in a breath of steam-heavy air. Her head spins as she forces herself to speak. “Come in or stay out, but do not linger in the doorway.”
Indis steps inside. Her slippers are gold, too, layered silk embroidered with dark green. She sets the towels down at a safe distance from the water, then turns her gaze back to Míriel.
“Would you like me to help you bathe?” she asks.
“I am not a child, nor an invalid.”
She can hear the smile in Indis’ voice as she says softly, “I’m not offering because I think you’re incapable.”
They had bathed together, long ago. Heat and steam and skin. Hair in silver and gold and black, like Laurelin and Telperion and the night of Cuivienen.
“Nor to pressure you into intimacy,” Indis adds, as though she knows what memories she has prompted.
Míriel’s breath catches in her throat with a painful hitch, and she looks away, staring down at the water. There’s a buzzing sensation under her skin and her heart feels too quiet, like there’s an empty wound carved into her chest. She shifts her hands with a conscious effort, pressing her palms flat against the tiled floor to keep them still.
“No,” she tells Indis. “I will manage on my own.”
Indis hums a quiet acknowledgement.
It isn’t until the door closes behind her that Míriel wonders if she should have thanked her.
***
For the next few days, she drifts through the house, cataloging each surface by touch, trailing the tips of her fingers along the edges of hewn stone, newly-cut wood. There is a loom in a room all to itself, a grand and gilded thing with shelves and baskets of richly-colored thread. She touches these, too: silk, cotton, flax.
The fibers are familiar, but subtly off — she can’t tell if it’s the glacial change wrought by thousands of years of incremental alteration to the cultivation of silkworms or cotton, or if her new skin simply doesn’t remember the same things her mind thinks it should.
Gone is the soft glow of Laurelin, the radiance of Telperion. The sun is a strange, burning thing in the sky that hurts to look at. Her heart is silent in her chest.
Indis speaks to her softly of inconsequential things: the garden, the quiet meals they share, the beautiful sunsets over the forest. Míriel replies by rote, pushing food around on her plate, wondering when Indis will get to the point.
***
It’s the smallest thing that breaks her, in the end — Indis offers to help her reorganize the baskets of thread in the weaving room, and Míriel finds her throat closing up and her chest caught in a sudden vise of panic.
She turns and flees.
The bedroom set aside for her is simple and airy, white curtains at the windows billowing in the faintest breeze. Sunlight — golden, harsh — streams through. Outside, the wind rustles through the bushes and the distant creaking branches of the cedars, carrying birdsong and the scent of flowers through the open shutters.
It is not the quiet of the Halls. Míriel’s ears feel as though they are stuffed with cotton, her own breathing too-loud, too-present. She sinks to the floor, back to the wall, and draws her knees up to her chest as though she could fold herself small enough to disappear.
She chose to return. What right does she have to fall apart now, when she has only been granted what she asked for?
Her head spins. Her throat feels tight, and when she sucks in a breath it comes with a shock of pain. Something hot and wet spills down her cheeks, a burning feeling behind her eyes.
A sound breaks the silence. It sounds very much like a strangled sob, but it couldn’t have come from her — could it?
Light, too bright. Shifting shadows on the floor. Movement across the room as the door swings open and Míriel flinches, trying to press further back into the wall.
Cool hands on her brow, against her cheeks. Familiar hands. They pry her fingers apart where they’ve buried themselves in her hair, tangling and tugging without conscious thought. Miriel’s hands are guided away, towards soft fabric that she fastens onto as if drowning.
“Breathe, Míriel.” The hands move to her shoulders, stroke up and down in a soothing motion. Míriel struggles to obey, clinging to the gentle sound, focusing on the feeling of cloth beneath her fingers and the rasp of air in her throat. “In and out, love. In and out.”
She takes one ragged breath, then another, the stabbing feeling in her chest fading more with each. The panic recedes painfully slowly. Eventually, she blinks her vision clear.
“There you are,” Indis murmurs, smoothing Míriel’s hair back, tucking a stray strand back behind her ear.
Míriel swallows. “Here I am.” Her voice sounds rough and foreign to her own ears.
She expects Indis to break the silence of unsaid things between them, to speak of lost love and lost children and lost time. The words would be a relief, almost — the final inevitable blow, the one she has been anticipating — but Míriel thinks they would also shatter something inside her, leave her full of glass shards and frozen air.
Instead, all Indis says is, “Can I show you something?”
***
The path through the maze of bushes leads into the forest, where a barely-visible trail winds beneath the shadowed trunks of the cedars. Míriel watches where Indis steps, her red-slippered feet sure and unerring, the hem of her crimson robe whipping in her wake.
The path ends beside a pool of still, clear water — rainwater or mountain runoff collected in what must have been the quarry for the stone that the house was built from. Indis sits beside it, then pats the stone next to herself.
Míriel hesitates, then folds herself down beside Indis. Around them, the forest breathes, a soft sigh of wind through the whispering needles. The air smells of water and moss and cedar, and the stone beneath her carries the latent heat of the sun that makes her eyes sting.
“It takes time to readjust to having a body,” Indis tells her, no trace of judgment or pity in her voice. “More so the longer you have spent without one.”
Indis would know, wouldn’t she? How many people has she done this for? How many has she welcomed back with gentle hands?
Doesn’t she ever get tired of it?
“I’m aware,” Míriel says, when the silence has stretched long enough to be uncomfortable.
“What I’m saying is — there’s no shame in struggling.”
A hot, unpleasant feeling curls in Míriel’s gut. She looks down at her hands, at the water, back at Indis. “Why haven’t you asked?”
Indis frowns. “That’s a broad question, you know.”
“Why I left. Why I came back, after so long.”
There’s a long silence. Indis drops her gaze, looks at the rippling surface of the pond. Her fingers trail across the water, lift up dripping.
“You don’t owe me an explanation, Míriel,” she finally says. “Not for this, not for anything.”
“Maybe I want to give you one.”
“Do you?” She fixes Míriel with a piercing look. “Or do you want me to pretend I don’t already know and demand that you explain yourself?”
Míriel’s voice dies in her throat.
She loved Indis, once. She was loved by Indis. And still she left — and then Finwe, and then it was Indis alone through the long stretch of eternity—
But there’s no blame in Indis’ eyes, and Míriel wants to take her by the shoulders and shake her until retribution spills out of Indis’ mouth and she pins the guilt where it belongs. Míriel allowed herself to become a myth. A parable. An motivation, an indictment of the paradise promised by the Valar, the first step on a path that unraveled the long peace of Valinor. And then — and then, eventually, she did what all myths do, and she faded from memory and regard.
Why leave? Why come back?
Because they were choices she could make, out of a limited selection presented to her. Because all she has ever cared about was being able to decide her own fate, rather than have it dictated to her, even by those she loves.
Because the Eldar are eternal, but they are not unchanging. And she wanted to prove that, ambitious and stubborn to a fault. Even in freedom, a person can stagnate. Even in a vacuum, a person can change.
But she isn’t alone. Indis is here, and her gentle eyes make Míriel want to shatter.
Her hands move, unfastening her robe, dropping it to the sun-warmed stone in an ungraceful pile. She leaves her underclothes on, rising to her feet — not looking back at Indis as she closes her eyes and steps off the edge of the stone.
The water swallows her in a shock of cold, and her eyes fly open to a blur of sun and blue and bubbling air. Her heart, so quiet in her chest since her rebirth, stutters — and beats. Once, twice, again.
She surfaces with a gasp. Indis has leaned forward, hands braced on the stone lip, looking for all the world as if she’d been about to dive in after Míriel to rescue her.
“Come in,” she tells Indis, teeth chattering.
Indis gives her a dubious look. Unbidden, a smile tugs at Míriel’s lips, and something terribly close to hope sparks in Indis’ eyes. She doesn’t disrobe — just slips daintily off the edge, robe blooming like a scarlet flower around her as she plunges below the surface, then comes back up sputtering. Her golden hair is slicked back against her head, the robe clinging to her shoulders as she treads water.
A laugh tears free from Míriel’s throat, unexpected and sudden. She swims closer to Indis, places a hand against her cheek. Despite the chill of the water, it feels like cupping fire in her palm. Without breaking eye contact, Indis turns her face into Míriel’s hand. Brushes her lips against Míriel’s wrist, the touch like a brand on sensitive skin. Míriel’s breath catches, heat blooming in her chest.
“I’ve missed you,” Indis whispers. She slips one arm around Míriel’s waist, movement slow and deliberate, giving Míriel every chance to pull away — she doesn’t resist as Indis tugs her closer, the water making the movement languid and slow.
When their lips meet, the heat in Míriel’s chest spreads, catching like tinder through every bone in her body.
Indis trails her mouth lower, down Míriel’s throat, settling in the hollow between her shoulder and neck. She mouths at the skin there, lips moving as if to shape words she doesn’t dare speak out loud. They’ve drifted backwards together, into the shadow of the quarry edge, limbs and silk tangled together underwater.
“I miss you too,” Míriel whispers into Indis’ hair, tasting cold water and salt. Indis shakes her head.
“I’m here, Míriel.”
She can’t explain, not in a way that Indis will understand. How long it took for absence to sink into bones, how long before the only language she spoke was that of missing, and that language she wonders if she will ever unlearn.
But Indis kisses her again, and the sunlight off the water is dazzling but not painful, and Míriel thinks maybe she can try.