Fading and Feelings
It was as though the world had come to a stop, time feeling as though it were moving through treacle as she sat there, desperately trying to understand the truth which had just been dropped upon her so suddenly.
“Am I, uh, dying then?” she asked, feeling as though a sudden weight had decided to take the place once occupied by her heart. Yet her voice didn’t waver, a familiar resignation filling her once more as she stared at her friend intently.
Memories flashed before her eyes, part of her musing on how she’d once hoped to die, if only to escape the pain. There was no longer any pain, and thus no longer a reason to seek out her own death. After all, that was all death had been to her by that point in her far-too long life: an escape, an end.
And in a sense, Haruno Sakura had died; Aerloth was the one who lived, or at least the visage of the person she had to be. The shell she wore, even if what was inside wasn’t quite the same anymore.
She hated the thought of it.
“Fading is a slow process, Aerloth,” Meldir explained, looking as though the words were physically paining him to say aloud. “Depending on how deep the hurt goes… well, some recover, and others do not. Their spirit returns to the Halls, and the ones left on this side of the ocean can only mourn their passing and hope for the day they might be reunited upon the shores of our homeland.”
Her eyes narrowed, part of her realising that he hadn’t quite answered the original question. “So I am dying, then?” she questioned, ignoring the anchor that felt like it had lodged itself in her gut. “Or am I recovering?” Sakura sat back in her chair, folding her arms across her chest as she stared at her friend intently, silently willing him to give her a straight answer. “It can only be one or the other, not both.”
“It may be surprising, but I am no healer, Aerloth,” he said, finally taking a seat opposite her with a heavy sigh. “I cannot determine exactly where you fall on the scale of dying and recovering… all I know is that your spirit has dimmed, and I am unfortunately old enough to have seen some of our kin who were rescued from Angband before most of them decided to venture across the sea to heal.”
“Angband?” the questioning note escaped her before she could help it, head tilting as she stared at Meldir.
He looked at her then, blue eyes sharp and piercing. “How much have you truly forgotten, Aerloth?” he asked, staring at her as though she might vanish if he looked away for even a moment. “You have no memory of the markets… you barely know your way around this home of yours… you could not even remember my name, and now you’ve even forgotten what happened to your brother…”
Her lips clicked together with a soft pop, words refusing to come as she sat there, all too aware of how oddly she was behaving in Meldir’s eyes. She wanted to vomit, even before the familiar bundle of nerves came to gnaw savagely at her stomach.
“If I were to ask you who Morgoth is, would you be able to answer?” Meldir questioned, and silently her mind raced – as though she might be able to figure out exactly who that person was by merely the expression on her friend’s face. She knew that his name meant friend, and her own name there meant Sea-Flower, and the name Morgoth meant Black Foe. He was an enemy, she could hazard a guess, and yet—“You don’t know, do you?”
Her silence said it all.
“We should eat,” she declared matter-of-factly, all but grabbing the rudder of the conversation and making a hard shift to starboard. “Before the food gets cold. You worked hard to make it. We should not let it go to waste,” she said, stabbing her fork into the largest piece of pie she could find and stuffing it into her mouth.
“This conversation is not over,” Meldir stated, and she forced herself to swallow her mouthful even as her stomach heaved. “Angband was the fortress of Morgoth back in the First Age of the Sun, and likely for some years before that,” he explained between bites of his own meal. “Yet I suppose the fact of the matter is that Faelion was held captive there for nearly a hundred sun-years.”
Sakura blinked, part of her wondering just how many years she had similarly been held captive in a different time and place. Reflexively, her grip on her cutlery tightened, and she silently willed those memories of a time she would have loved nothing more than to forget to vanish back into the depths of her mind.
‘It’s your fault for making yourself like this,’ one of the voices she wished she could scrub from her memories whispered, and she shook her head then.
“Aerloth, are you quite alright?” Meldir questioned, frowning at her intently as she sat there, feeling infinitely lost.
“I’m hungry,” she said, pointedly grabbing a hold of her fork and shovelling in the next mouthful of her dinner, staring pointedly at her friend all the while. She didn’t want to talk – not when every other sentence out of her mouth seemed to make it only more starkly apparent that she was so very different from the Aerloth he had known.
Meldir only sighed, still frowning at her ever so intently as she sat there, trying to distract herself with the admittedly rather tasty dinner that her friend had cooked up. “We do need to talk about this at some point,” he said, ignorant of how those words made her want to vomit. “I cannot stay for the rest of your exile, no matter how I feel the need to… and I would rather like to ensure that you are well-cared for during the remainder of your stay here.”
“I am fine as I am,” she declared, thinking then of the forge and that familiar warmth that made her feel ever so slightly more relaxed. “And I will be fine when you leave,” she said.
Everything had been ever so chaotic since his arrival there, and it was almost terrifying how quickly the time had gone by in contrast to the hours and days that had trickled by without his presence. Everything would return to normal once he left… Sakura swallowed thickly, ignoring the slightest bit of comfort she felt at Meldir’s presence there as she ate her dinner – all the while doing her best to ignore the strange mix of feelings racing through her.
She was used to being alone by that point in time. Company hadn’t meant good things for a fair amount of time for her. Yet Meldir brought back very distant memories she almost thought had been lost forever…
Sakura sighed.
“I worry, Aerloth,” he murmured. “I think anyone would…” he said, pursing his lips even as he ate his own dinner in a rather subdued manner. “I do not think it wrong to worry either. Faelion would be besides himself with worry if he were here… Enough, I would think, to bundle you aboard a ship and take you back to Lindon to be seen by the best healers, exile or not.”
Her stomach twisted at that, a familiar fear coming to gnaw at her guts at the thought of her strangeness being realised by more than just Meldir. “You will not tell him,” she reiterated, watching as his shoulders sunk in resignation.
“I know,” Meldir said, sighing deeply at that. “Have you even forgotten that every order you give I must obey?”
Her fingers tightened their grip on her other arm, part of her wavering then… It was part of an internal debate she was having: whether or not it was okay for Meldir to know the extent of the knowledge she was missing. And yet was there really much point in hiding it when he was seemingly so adept at figuring out just what knowledge she was missing? All he had to do was ask a direct question – a request for information she should have known – that she couldn’t deflect and wait for the telltale pause signifying her lack of knowledge.
“Will I ever be able to convince you to even let a healer examine you?” he asked, already seeming to know the answer she was about to give by the expression on his face.
“No,” she answered, skin crawling at the thought of someone touching her to examine what exactly was wrong with her – to figure out exactly what made her tick. “Never.”
Meldir smiled; a small, sad thing. “I see,” he murmured, shoulders sinking in what looked like defeat.
“Enough with this. We should finish eating,” she said, praying then that she had put a stopper in that conversation once and for all. Though given how stubborn she was starting to see Meldir was… part of her doubted she had heard the end of that argument. It was her own turn for her shoulders to sink, a sliver of relief coursing through her as she sat there, eating her dinner in the remarkably tense and awkward silence that had fallen.
All she could hear was the sound of her heartbeat and the faint clinking of cutlery as they both ate.
“I will come check on you later,” Meldir declared minutes later, having polished off the rest of his plate. He was a fast eater – either that or he was desperate to escape the almost choking atmosphere that seemed to linger in the room. “Please be safe, Aerloth.”
The familiar sweltering embrace of the forge was welcome to her after dinner; the lingering worries vanishing when she took hammer to iron. Or whatever alloy of metal was in front of her… It wasn’t as though they had been labelled. She tilted her head then, wondering if she was allowed to experiment with making varying alloys to find the desired strength of blade she wanted. She tilted her head, wondering whether the only father she remembered had ever done such a thing.
A soft hum escaped her, a faint tune lingering in the back of her mind as her mind ticked over her varying thoughts. She was in the forge to make a blade, first and foremost… and then whatever else tickled her fancy after she had an actual, useable sword with which to use… Sakura paused, the music vanishing like smoke as she wondered just why she wanted a blade.
Nostalgia, for the father of a life left behind in the dust? Sakura tilted her head, sweat trickling down from her forehead as she sat there contemplating on just why she was fixated on smithing a blade that could be used. Hadn’t she experienced enough violence for a lifetime? She chewed on her lip then, thoughts racing and veering off in different directions as she sat there, hammer set to one side from the vaguely blade-shaped piece of metal that she’d been working on.
“Aerloth,” a familiar, almost dreaded voice called, and she turned, meeting those blue eyes that seemed to pierce straight through her.
“Meldir,” she greeted in kind, feeling ever so disgruntled at his sudden appearance. “What brings you to this forge I tend to destroy?” she asked, a sliver of bitterness seeping into her voice then even as Meldir watched her ever so curiously.
“The restock of the forge then…” Meldir murmured, evidently taking in the sight of her sat there, hammer set down to one side, her half-finished creation laid out in front of her. “It wasn’t that you destroyed it,” he declared, stepping into the room and running his fingers along one of the ingots stacked on the shelves behind her. “You were using it. You are using it… quite regularly too, I would assume.”
“You saw me last time. Are you really only putting the pieces together now?” she asked, a sardonic smirk curling at her lips, part of her bitterly acknowledging that her safe space had been intruded upon.
“I think Gladil would be overjoyed to know that another of his siblings has an interest in following in their father’s footsteps,” he said, and part of her longed then, for memories of that world – if only so she could feel less like an outsider blindly stumbling into things. Maybe then she would know which one of her brothers Gladil was… There were too many strange names to remember, and she had a mind full of things she’d love more than anything to forget.
“I do not think that’s any of his business,” she declared, stomach twisting in on itself at the thought of anybody besides Meldir learning of just how different of a creature she was in comparison to before.
“How could it not be his business when it is his forge you’re using right this instant?” he questioned, silvery brow rising in query.
“I thought it belonged to our father?”
“It did,” Meldir said, and Sakura had a feeling he was about to grace her with knowledge that she should already have known. If she hadn’t been someone else wearing the shell of Aerloth… “Yet now that your father has ventured across the seas, right of ownership falls to the eldest child or the oldest child which picked up his craft, which is Gladil in this case.”
Her teeth ground together at that, and she wondered then, ever so briefly, if there was any point in trying to pretend that she was still the Aerloth that Meldir had once known. It didn’t seem like he would be able to tell others about just how strange she was without her expressed permission thanks to whatever oath he had sworn to her so long ago. Would it even hold up, what with how she was Sakura and not Aerloth? She chewed on her lip, a familiar undercurrent of nerves gnawing at her stomach at the thought of anyone else knowing.
“You were barely interested in rights of inheritance before… yet this isn’t mere disinterest,” Meldir said, evidently having figured out it was yet another thing she was now completely clueless about. “This is yet another fact that you have forgotten…” Those blue eyes stared at her, the hairs on the back of her neck standing up on end as he looked at her ever so intently. “You are acting like a completely different person, Aerloth, and it scares me…” he murmured, and Sakura felt her heart skip a beat at how he’d unironically hit the nail right on the head.
“And what do you want me to do about that?” she demanded, ignoring the shaking in her hands as she searched for something to occupy them. Meldir couldn’t know just how much his words bothered her – he was far too perceptive for that. Or rather, he knew the original Aerloth far too well, and their apparent personalities were far too different for her to do anything about… She swallowed thickly at that. “It’s not as if I can flick a switch and recall everything I wish,” she admitted, shoulders sinking in defeat. “No matter how much I wish I could.”
“Talk to me,” Meldir pleaded. “Tell me what has happened for you to end up in this state…”
“It’s not that simple,” she answered, ignoring the unpleasant squirming in her chest as fear and loathing came to a head there. “Besides, I do not want to talk about it. I barely know you,” she admitted then, heart beating ever so frantically in her chest.
Amnesia was understandable, wasn’t it? She could get away with admitting that much without ending up as the subject of someone’s insatiable curiosity, couldn’t she? The lump in her throat was thick to swallow, her mouth feeling inordinately dry all of a sudden, and she climbed to her feet abruptly.
“I need a drink,” she declared, walking around her so-called friend and leaving the sweltering safety of the forge. Which probably wasn’t all that safe… Meldir had intruded there, and ultimately discovered yet another thing which separated her from the true Aerloth. “You do not have to follow me around. You are not my shadow,” she said, trying to ignore the soft footsteps trailing behind her own.
“Yet that is what you used to call me,” Meldir murmured, keeping pace with her on her trek to the kitchen. “I always used to follow behind you when we were children… We were the closest in age in Harlond all those sun-years ago, so perhaps it was only natural.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because you have forgotten,” he said simply, as though it were a plain fact and not life-changing information that ought to have altered the way he looked at her. “How else are you supposed to remember?”
Her breath caught in her throat, an emotion she didn’t quite understand welling up in her chest. A strange mix of longing, and loss that made absolutely no sense to her. “And if I never remember?” she questioned, tasting something bitter on her tongue. The house she might as well have called home – even if she had yet to fully explore every nook and cranny – was far too large. The corridors were pointlessly long, and there were a few too many stairs for her liking.
Yet Aerloth had probably been used to pointlessly long corridors, if that was where she’d grown up.
“We can cross that bridge if it comes to it,” Meldir reassured. “You need to focus on healing, I think,” he said, reminding her then of her seemingly fragile state.
Was she dying right then and there? Sakura could only wonder, and she sighed in relief when the kitchen door came into sight. She just needed to focus on the present, part of her was already deciding. She didn’t want to think of the past, and there was not much point on wondering on the future still to come.
What would happen, would happen…
She had left behind the life of a shinobi and the world of chakra, and the life in front of her was elven, not human, and was ever so strange to her ears and eyes. She was dying or had come close the death because of that. In fact, she barely knew anything about the strange life that was apparently hers from then on out. She didn’t fundamentally understand just how elven was different to human, and that was probably too strange of a question to ask.
The basic fundamentals of her logic were rooted in ways that were undoubtedly human, and if there was a point that had been hammered home; it was that she wasn’t human anymore.
Part of her didn’t know how to feel about that because in hindsight it had been obvious in some ways… and yet, when it all boiled down to it, had she really even been human by the end of it? Why was she even so fussed about it?
“Aerloth?” Meldir’s voice was soft, his touch at her shoulders ever so gentle.
“I’m tired, Meldir,” she murmured, feeling the wave of exhaustion creep up on her ever so suddenly – a rip current that had caught her in its flow and was dragging her out well beyond the sandbanks. She closed her eyes, sighing softly as she let her head rest against his chest for a moment. It was a strangely comforting thing to do.
“Then you should go and rest. Properly,” he answered, arms steering her then towards the stairs and she didn’t bother to fight that much. She wanted nothing more than to forget her situation and let her mind wander for a few hours, and not in the usual waking-sleep that had become slightly more common for her.
“Here,” she declared when Meldir tried to lead her towards her original room – the one she hadn’t dared to set foot in since she had woken up inside.
“This is Tathrenor’s room,” Meldir said, as if that might convince her to follow him back to the red room she hated with a fervent passion. “I do not think he would be pleased if he learnt you had stole his bed.”
“Then you will not tell him,” she retorted, pushing open the doors and making her way towards the wardrobe she had claimed for her bed. “Besides, it’s not as though I’m using his bed.”
“Aerloth… that is the wardrobe,” Meldir said, staring at her in confusion as she pulled the wardrobe doors open and clambered inside.
“It’s comfy.”
Those blue eyes stared at her, a practically characteristic confusion in them by that point in the day. “I can see that, but—never mind,” he mumbled, shaking his head then. “Do you want me to close the doors?” he asked, and Sakura could feel his stare boring into her back as she sat there in her next of blankets, duvets, and pillows.
“Please,” she requested, almost sighing in relief when she heard the magnet click into place, keeping those doors shut until someone opened them once more.
“Is there any reason you chose Tathrenor’s wardrobe?” Meldir asked, his gaze just about visible through the slats. “I know your own wardrobe has quite a few clothes—”
She sighed heavily then, mind conjuring up the colour red and everything it meant to her by that point. The colour of her own blood was practically ingrained into her head by that point; a sight she could never forget. “The colour red,” she murmured. “I don’t think I like it very much… anymore,” she added, because Aerloth had evidently once been fond of it. Just as little baby Haruno Sakura had once been fond of it, before her liking for it had been soured in memories of blood and endless amounts of pain.
“Ah,” Meldir hummed, the face she could see through the gaps in the door one of confusion and pity – and, curiously enough, understanding. “Faelion does not much like that colour either,” he said softly, and part of her could only wonder just how much she had in common with him right then and there. How much she shouldn’t have had in common with him, if she truly had been Aerloth… “I will leave you be now, Aerloth,” Meldir called, pausing in the doorway for a brief moment. “Rest well.”