InsaneJournal

newspapers and heartbreak.
Amrothos sat at his father's ornately carved fortepiano, and pressed one key after another to listen to the tiny metallic hammers hit strings deep within the mysterious wooden songbird. Beside him was a daily dispatch, written in that heavy scribe's hand that marked all the gossip newspapers. Amrothos Swanhelm makes his first public appearance after Umbar, the large header said.

His eyes were swimming, as he pressed key after key, faster and faster. The notes fell under his hand immediately. They should have been a song, but were merely harmonizations of the song he had played the day his wife had left him, and that played daily in his head every day since. Faster, and faster, and his soul reached for notes that once had fallen so easily under the right hand, that he would never play again.

And that was when it hit him. Everything came back at once, the whole year replaying in horrible suddenness, Aeriel's birth, his declaration of his true identity, the fight, her awful words, Dol Amroth would never allow it; the sight of her backside as she walked away from him and the dreadful silence after she shut the door.

There was more, there was always more. Searching Dol Amroth for a year, Aeriel in tow as often as possible, wandering from brothel-house to brothel-house to ask everyone he knew if they had seen her. But she was gone. Writing frantic, furied letters to every city in Gondor, begging anyone for word of her -- nothing, silence. The slow creeping realization he would always be alone.

He wept until his hand could not touch the keys anymore, and fell limp to his side. The dread silence was terrible and terrifying in the room, and frantically he reached over, hitting disharmonious keys with his fingers, anything to muffle the sounds of his sobs. She was gone. She wasn't coming home. And now, not even music could comfort him.

Shuddering horrifying gasps wrenched his stomach, cramping his muscles, choking him, until he thought he might throw up or scream, or maybe just die of convulsions on the spot. He found himself wishing he had drowned, misery wrecking its painful havoc on his physical senses as well as his thoughts. Better to die than live without music. Music and Aeriel, these had been his only consolations. And now music was gone, and Aeriel restricted from seeing him but a few hours a day, and he cried, and cried, blind with long-hidden grief, until he collapsed against the fortepiano and could weep no more.

And oh, how he loved her, and loved her more every day they had been apart. It had not been rage or anger that had driven him, but fear, fear and the undying, merciless longing to see her, not to tell her he was sorry (though he was), but simply to see her, and know she was well. Longing was like a knife in his chest, stabbing him with pains just to remind him his heart was still there, still beating. He saw her face in his blindness, as he had when he lay dying, and choked on a strangled sob too exhausted to form tears. He could not even play for her.

The forgotten dispatch lay on the bench in front of the fortepiano and blared out the news; Captain Amrothos was seen yesterday afternoon walking to his ship, The Doxy where he was greeted by loud applause and cheers by all assembled on the docks. The captain looks to be recovering well, and must be ready again for action, for he was wearing his uniform, now tied below the right elbow with a smart-looking band. The Dol Amrothian sailors are praising him as a hero, but he was heard demurring that the real heroes of last month's Umbarean attack were those men with families who sailed the fireships alongside him -- some of whom did not return. The captain did not stay long on his ship, instead walking back to his father's house. Rumors have abounded that the captain will give up the sea with the loss of his right hand, and turn to provincial matters, but as yet there is no word from the naval commission if such a retirement request has been received or processed...