Title: Masks
Fandom: The Silmarillion
Challenge: Masks
Rating: G
Length: 300
Content notes: N/A
Author notes: Thanks go to Morgynleri & Runa for encouragement & sanity-checking.
Summary: What is Kingship but a mask, a role?



Kingship was a kind of mask, Fingon thought, running his hands through the pins and clasps and hair-decorations that littered the dressing table. Someone had collected all of Fingolfin's (his father's) 'state' jewelry, robes and appurtenances, and put them in here. And since 'state' and 'personal' had been a difference without a difference these last four hundred-some years, effectively this was everything, public and personal both. The King's jewels. His father's things.

Jumbled now amongst his own things.

Fingon had known the duality of leadership — experienced it himself as Prince, watched his cousins deal with the same ideas more or less effectively, coping more or less well. At the moment, he was not coping spectacularly well himself. Not that how he felt about any of this mattered.

The Noldor in Middle Earth needed a High King, and the task had fallen (quite literally) to him. Of course he would do it.

A mask, a role, a symbol, but more than that as well. Maglor had refused the title, the outward seeming, regent, not King, but had done the job, played the part, fulfilled the role. Done it well, for all he hated having to do it.

Fingon knew he could look the part, don the mask, say the words. He knew what the job entailed. He was not at all sure he could actually *be* king, rather than just play the role. More to the point, he knew that if he was to succeed (and he wanted to succeed! He hated to do a thing badly) he would have to do it as himself, not as a poor copy of his father, of Fingolfin Finweion.

Slowly, deliberately, he reached for the fine gold ribbons he customarily wore threaded into his hair, and began to weave them in with his braids.