Title: Hope
Fandom: Silmarillion
Challenge: Crush
Rating: G
Length: 200
Content notes: N/A
Author notes: Thanks go to Zana, Morgynleri & Runa for encouragement & sanity-checking.
Summary: Hope fails



As it happened, it was not Fingon crushed under the weight bourne up by his unquenchable hope, for his hope did not fail. But none of the rest of us could uphold that hope without him, and that was on us, that failure, not him.

Also surprising: that it was Caranthir who succumbed first. Our middle brother was as fell a warrior as any of us, and he and Fingon were not close — in that, one would have expected despair from Maedhros, but he seemed determined to carry on as if his hope was yet with him — but Doriath saw Caranthir greet death with resigned relief, hardly fighting it, though one would not say he invited the arrows from hidden recesses. Celegorm and Curufin were determined to the end, if not precisely hopeful.

(Fingon would not have approved of what we tried to do at Doriath, much less what we did there. Sirion he would not have countenanced at all. By then we were none of us people he would have recognized, much less have wanted to know.)

After Doriath, Maedhros held not even to the pretence of optimism, and that put paid to any hope of my twin and I.