"The sky is falling," Celegorm said, voice loose and slurry.
His elder brother lay on his back on the divan, one leg folded up and the other hanging limply over the edge, one arm behind his head and the other holding a glass and spinning it between his fingers. The rain sounded like thunder, echoing in this small room; the wind lashed against the windows, setting them to rattling.
"It's a storm, you idiot," Caranthir said, tearing his gaze away from his brother and looking down at the empty glass in his left hand, resting on his thigh. "That's all."
"No," Celegorm said explosively. "I know that, Moryo. But it sounds like it, doesn't it? Sounds like it's all coming down. All ending."
"I shouldn't have let you near anything to drink," Caranthir muttered, though his brother's glass was only half empty. It wasn't the drinking doing this to him. Just everything else. Sometimes it felt like he could track the slow disintegration of his family by Celegorm's moods. He never seemed to smile anymore.
"Not your problem," Celegorm said, and turned his glass so the light refracting through the drink played patterns on his face. Caranthir watched him, quiet, and didn't argue. "…doesn't it seem like that to you? Like the whole world is just…tired."
Caranthir set down his glass on the table and got up, threw another log on the fire. The rain lashed against the windows, and he looked out into the knife, wondering if he was imagining the sound of wolves carried on the wind. Anything could come upon them in this darkness and storm, and they would never see it coming. "No," he said, eventually. "This world's too young to be tired."
"Nothing's ever too young to be tired," Celegorm said softly, and swirled his drink around once before having another sip, lips barely parting. In the glass of the window, Caranthir watched a trickle of the red wine drip from the corner of his brother's mouth, and tried not to think of blood.
What happened to you, Tyelko, he could hear himself asking, and knew the answer he would get; nothing. In all likelihood, his sibling wasn't even aware of how different he looked. Glancing in the mirror of the glass again, he found Celegorm's grey eyes glassy and distant. The silence stretched out. The rain thundered down, harder than ever.
"Come outside with me," Celegorm said. The fire crackled loudly as Caranthir turned to stare at him.
"You're mad. Go out in this?"
Celegorm laughed, and there was a slightly strange note in it. "Why not? I need to feel it. The rain on my skin, the wind in my hair. It feels like such a long time since…"
"Since you did anything royally stupid? There could be anything out there."
"No," Celegorm said with a strange note in his voice. "I don't think it's been long at all since that." There was a pause, and Caranthir listened almost apprehensively to his brother breathing. Then he stood. "I'm going. You can come with me or not."
"Wait," Caranthir said weakly, knowing he couldn't let his brother go out alone, not while he was like this. "Just let me get my cloak. I don't need to feel any more rain than I have already."
Tyelko waited impatiently for him by the door while he slung his heaviest cloak around his shoulders and pulled up the hood, and was halfway down the hall before Caranthir was out of the door. "Eru, Tyelko, where's the fire?" He asked, lengthening his stride, and got no answer.
He didn't catch him until he burst out of the fortress and into the storm. The stone at his back and the overhang sheltered him for the moment, but Celegorm stood out in the open, face tipped up toward the sky, hair already too soaked to move in the wind. Caranthir shivered as the wind cut through his clothes like a knife.
"You've felt it, Tyelko. Come back."
"I'm right here," Celegorm said, voice strange and distant so that Caranthir wanted to object that no, wherever he was it was not 'right here,' but he held his tongue, and edged out from under the underhang. A gust of wind pelted the rain into his face as he drew even with Celegorm and looked sideways, up, trying to fathom his face.
"Let me help you," he said, suddenly, on an impulse. "Not everything is lost."
The breath hissed out between Celegorm's teeth, explosively. "But it is, Moryo. The world's falling apart, and all the happiness is slipping through the cracks." His head fell forward, into his palms. "I should have known better than to try to hold it. It would always trickle out of my hands eventually."
Thunder rumbled distantly, and Caranthir glanced up at the sky. He thought that the sky seemed to boil, the clouds rolling over each other, and the rain continued to come down. It stung his arms when he pulled them out from under his cloak. "Look at me," he said roughly. "Look at me, Tyelko-" The rainwater dripped off of the tip of his nose, and he could only imagine how drenched his brother beside him must be. "It's not everything."
He watched his brother's shoulders shudder. "There's nothing left. I dream terrible things, Moryo. I don't know what I am."
"What does that mean?"
"That I don't know what I am." His voice shook, trembled just for a moment. "It's too much. I cannot breathe." Celegorm's eyes turned, looked directly at Caranthir, strange and distant. "I am going to die."
"Not on my watch," Caranthir said fiercely, and Celegorm laughed.
"You think that you can stop it? Findarato's death hangs around my neck like a stone. Every night his eyes watch me, and every morning I wake with the feeling of his hands around my throat. It is over, Caranthir. I have lost."
Caranthir's voice strangled and died in his throat as Celegorm's shoulders shook, minutely, and he realized that his brother was weeping. "Come inside, Tyelko," he said. "There's nothing for you out here. Just the rain."
"When you were young," Celegorm asked, quietly, not turning, but his fish-scale eyes might have slid downwards, "Did you ever think that things would last forever? Friendships, happiness…love?"
"Everyone did," Caranthir said, quietly, and Celegorm laughed, a strange, soft, sad sound.
"I don't think I understood the meaning of forever," he said. "But I can see it now. It's not for me." Caranthir opened his mouth to answer, and another rumble of thunder covered his words. Celegorm sighed. "I hope he will be gentle when he comes for me," he murmured, and staggered slightly, voice sick and delirious.
"Who?" Caranthir asked, sharply, reaching to catch him.
"Findarato," Celegorm murmured, head slipping sideways onto Caranthir's shoulder. "Who else?"
The thunder rolled again and the clouds tore in two; the rain turned to hail, pelting down, and for a moment he wondered if his brother was right in his strange delirium, and the sky was falling after all.
But then it was only hail again, and he slammed the door against the wind. He listened to the hinges rattle and could almost imagine his cousin's tattered ghost tapping at the door, asking his way in.