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Maglor had never claimed much talent at healing. He’d learned - some skill at it, at least, from the Laiquendi; names of plants and techniques for their use, memorised like patterns of melodies and accompanying chords had once been. And maybe sometimes it was enough to just be there, while the other person’s body knit itself back together, presence a medicine enough itself. It was a skill learned through necessity, more than anything; haphazardly tying together a poultice or boiling water for a tisane, those days when his brother’s eyes sank into shadows and skin faded pale like a ghost beneath his curtain of fiery hair. Later when, well, there was hardly anybody else who might tend to the scraped and cut and broken limbs of two small elflings.
But never anything quite like this.
He’d suspected there might be wargs in the area, said the sick feeling in Maglor’s stomach, worming its way up through the layers of dulled aching stuffed full in his chest. Why didn’t you agree to leave right then and there? He fumbled wetting a clean cloth, hand stiff and clumsy with poorly-healed scar tissue, and began to wipe layers of dried and caked blood from the teeth and claw marks and lacerations haphazardly crisscrossing Daeron’s body and torn-up clothes.
His companion stirred finally while Maglor was midway through stitching up a deep cut down his arm (not doing a very good job of it; there’d almost certainly be an ugly scar, because of him on at least three levels, wasn’t it).
“Idiot,” Daeron wheezed at him, the final stop deciding it would prefer to be a cough halfway through. “My own fault I ended up like this. Getting caught in an ambush I should have seen coming. And funny you should start looking after anybody left for dead in the woods.”
Just because your state is the fault of your own recklessness and acquiescing to foolish counsel when you knew you had reasons not to, doesn’t mean you don’t deserve death, Maglor thought, or something like it. But it was too many words to form and push out of his mouth. “It is returning a favour,” he said instead, speech stilted and hoarse.
It was the “idiot” comment that reminded him as much. Daeron had said the same to him when he’d found him, dragged him away from where he’d reportedly lain unconscious and half-starved on the shores of Anfalas.
Maglor had awoken after that to the smell of charred meat, which he’d barely seen sitting before him in a rough homemade pottery dish along with some nuts and berries before he rolled over and vomited up something that tasted like it might have originally been seawater.
When he’d lifted his head up finally, he’d discovered another elf sitting across from him and gazing at him evenly with a slight air of disgust. The elf was whittling a long stick with a hunting knife. Maglor recognised him, he knew. Couldn’t quite remember.
Daeron, of Doriath, supplied some part of him that still held clear memories rather than just a mass of anguish vaguely organised into events, and he let out a wordless moan before curling his knees up to his chest.
What, is a live Sinda too much for you? came the commentary from the other elf. Lucky I’ve got more decency than you lot. Now eat, you idiot. I didn’t go to that trouble for nothing and if you don’t I will.
The words had made his stomach clench up even worse, but he managed, he didn’t know how slowly, to push himself up from the ground into a sitting position. Thank you, he’d mouthed the words, might not have managed to voice them (why would you do that, I’m not worth the effort), and tore off a small chunk of flesh from the meat.
Daeron had only sneered and picked up whittling away at a branch halfway to becoming a spear for hunting fish.
Well I couldn’t just leave you there, could I? Dying of your own self-induced misery? It’s pathetic.
But he’d stuck around after that, hadn’t he. Occasionally prodded Maglor rather harder than necessary and snapped at him to quit fucking moping around. Not that it exactly helped. He supposed it just a slight concession to keeping Maglor from nearly dying from something unforgivably pathetic again.
Being ambushed after warning your traveling companion of just that was, in fact, rather pathetic as well. So yes, it was as Maglor had said. It was all he could do now to return the favour.