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“You attacked Lord Melkor,” Fingon’s father said with incredulous emphasis, “with your teeth.”
“With a chair, first,” Fingon said. He had attempted to use weaponry before resorting to unarmed combat. “I wanted Uncle Feanaro’s sword, but I didn’t think I could get it away from him in time.”
He was aware that this was not actually helping his case. It might have helped his case if he had collapsed into some kind of mock breakdown instead, puddling onto the desk in his father’s study in heaving sobs, but he had never been much of an actor, so he stood before it instead, a reporting soldier before his general, instead of a penitent youth before his father as he should have been.
He might have been able to dredge up some penitence, actually, if only for the pain on his father’s face, except the provocation had been so very great that he really felt he could not have done otherwise.
His father at last stopped his pacing and collapsed into a seat behind his desk, holding up his hands in supplication. ”Why, Findekano?”
Fingon paused.
His reasons were entirely natural and entirely irresistible.
However.
They were not reasons that would have been at all comprehensible before Findekano had found his way to Thangorodrim and become Fingon.
“I had sworn to do so,” he tried.
The last time he had seen his father look so despairing, it had been right before he went off to go fight Morgoth, although not, admittedly, with his teeth.
He thought. He'd never actually asked.
“You swore to hit one of the Valar with a chair,” his father clarified in the flattest tone Fingon had ever heard from him.
Technically, no.
Technically, what he had sworn was to never let Morgoth lay a hand on Maedhros again. The fact that he had not pictured anything remotely similar to these circumstances when making that vow did not exempt him from it; nor did he particularly wish to be considered exempt from it.
Just because he had somehow found himself in a time before Morgoth had revealed the evil in his heart did not mean that evil was not already beginning its foul work.
“Swore an oath to whom?” his father demanded.
Fingon did not think the truth would be useful to family tensions, or the fully explained truth to the recently shaken belief in his sanity.
In the face of his stubborn silence, his father’s exasperation slowly drained away, leaving only his weariness behind. “You could have been killed,” he said. “If Lord Melkor had lost his restraint for even a moment - “
For a moment, it was not his father’s current, unblemished form, that Fingon saw.
Whatever his father saw on his face, it made him change tactics. “This cannot be kept quiet. If we can assure the Valar it has been handled, perhaps it need not come before Manwe, but - “
An idea suddenly blossomed, one born of a very different case before Manwe.
He did not wish to approach the Valar with the truth of his situation, not when he didn’t wish it undone.
But certain other truths . . . well, they had come out in a trial once before.
“Let it go before Manwe,” he said, interrupting his father. “Let it all be handled in the open. It will be better that way.”
“Findekano - “
“It will be,” he promised with a quick bow before darting out of the room without waiting for leave.
He suspected his father wouldn’t want him to leave the house at present, but he really must; he needed to find Maitimo as he had a horrible suspicion he might have accidentally hit him with that chair.