Smoke clouded the street behind him, acrid and thick, the spent lifeblood of a thousand torches that lit the darkened city. There was a traveling cloak already on his shoulders.
"Nerdanel," he said. "Come with us." The proud tilt of his chin and the dangerous gleam of torchlight in his grey eyes - trained upon her - almost made her heart quail, but Nerdanel stepped out onto the doorstep to face him. She held the doorframe with one hand.
"Why have you come, Fëanáro?"
"We leave for Middle Earth. Have you not heard? We escape at last the cruel chains of the Valar," he said, grasping the hilt of his sword in a way that seemed more to comfort him than threaten her.
"I have heard," she replied, voice expressionless.
Tendrils of smoke curled around his feet. The smell of it began to be choking.
"You should come with us. With me."
Nerdanel looked past him into the street - the empty street, showing no sign of her sons.
"Why have you come to beg for me to return now? Why now, after all this time?"
He paused. "Because soon it will be too late. We depart, wife, and if you do not come now you cannot come at all."
"I do not wish to come. Why do you so desire to leave Aman and all we have built here?" she asked desperately, voice tinged with the beginnings of frustrated anger. "Why do you seek to uproot our people and set them adrift in the wild outer lands at the mercy of Morgoth? Do you want-"
"I seek to avenge my father!" he interrupted, livid, breathing hard through his nostrils. "I seek to regain what is mine, and to be my own master instead of the slave of cravens! I seek freedom and justice and revenge!"
"Stop this madness before it is too late, Fëanáro!" she begged. "Nothing but death awaits in the outer lands! You would condemn your people to the despair and torment that I foresee?
"Fëanor," she said softly, touching his face. "You don't need to leave. You don't need revenge, and you don't have anything to prove. Everything you need is right here. Stay with your family."
She searched his eyes, pale silver dark with sorrow. "Stay with me." She barely suppressed a tremor in her voice, finger trailing over the angle of one sharp cheekbone. Fëanor's mouth turned up at one corner, although no happiness lit his features. He looked at her with something strange in his eyes; pity, or regret - or nostalgia for a more innocent time when they loved each other wholly - or maybe all of them at once. He grabbed the hand tracing the line of his jaw in both callused hands, elegant but work-hardened.
"Oh, my love," he murmured, face shadowed with grief. "My beautiful wife."
Taking her face in his hands, he pressed his lips against hers. His hair brushed her cheek; it smelt of smoke. "Nerdanel," he said softly, and the agony in his eyes would have drowned the sun.
But he blinked, and his gaze hardened.
He stepped back, dropping her hand and drawing up to his full height; beautiful and terrible, cold as a mountain of steel and just as proud. He tilted his jaw.
"My family," he said, "Are those who follow me. Not those who leave because of their own weakness. And... my father is dead because of the Morgoth; I will not sit idle in grief and wait for his darkness to grow deeper."
He swallowed, adam's apple bobbing against the pale skin of his throat. "I offer you one last chance to join us. Come now, or languish forever in the cage of the Valar, knowing never the freedom we are owed and wallowing in bitter regret that you were too fearful to seek it."
His eyes glinted with a fell light. "Well? Freedom or servitude? Revenge or passivity? A blue-velvet sky full of stars, or chains? The choice is yours, wife!"
His form before her was perfect, dark in his quieted rage even as his soul burned with the consuming fire that drove him on. His dark hair blew in the slight wind that rustled the cloak around his ankles, and the tightness of his sculpted jaw made her want nothing but to please him; a mix of fear and desire rose in her.
She though of her sons.
She shook her head slowly. "No," she said. "You are wrong. Your followers are the ones who will be full of regret, and your oath is a prison; not the life we lead here." She took a steadying breath. "Run away from Valinor on a fool's quest if you want, but I will remain here."
Fëanor's eyes flashed. "So be it. Waste away in thralldom if you so desire."
"I only regret that you've given your poison to our sons," she said quietly. "Ambarussa are so young."
"Pityafinwë and Telufinwë are old enough to make their own decisions," he said through tight lips, stressing his use of their father names. "Their great deeds will be remembered."
"No doubt."
"Yes."
They stood motionless, eyes locked, for an eternity. Then Fëanor spoke softly.
"So, then, this is goodbye."
"Yes," she replied coldly.
He closed his eyes. "I love you, Nerdanel," he said.
"I love you too," she whispered, fighting the stinging behind her eyes that threatened to spill over into desperate tears. "Do not do anything rash."
She let out a choked laugh at her own words, and he touched her cheek. He smiled, a wry twisting of the lips that wasn't quite happy, nor even ironic.
He turned away and left. His form disappeared into the twisting smoke.