It hurt. Everything hurt. And it was not the fading kind of pain. This was constant, never abating, only ever dulled by the crashing of waves upon the shore, and torn open again by the screams of the gulls.
Sometimes, he saw ships from afar, and wished them a better voyage. Ships never bothered him. None of these creations of Man had the grace and elegance of the ones his father, no, that he had stolen. None of them seemed skim over the waves, to glide over restless seas as if they were glass. No, ships never bothered him.
Men bothered him. They thought that they could be wise, could be brilliant, could be great. He scoffed. THey were young; their lives a vapour in the wind. They strove to be indelible, but their lives were barely false starts on the parchment of history. He envied them though, because they would die, and could leave this world. He would wander for eternity.
Fires bothered him. There was too much fire in his life, too much destruction, too much burning. If he thought back far enough, fires had not bothered him.
Atar always smelled of smoke, unless an occasion called for formality. To find Atar, all he had to do was go to the forges. Sometimes he went there just to watch, just to see the sullen glow burst into great light with the bellows. Just to see a bright bar birth tiny stars under the pressure of a blow. Just to see his Atar lit as if from within and without by fires.
Then came death and confusion, and the fighting and the ships and the order. "Burn the ships." Atar had said. So he did. He watched them burn, tormented by the thought of intentionally destroying beauty. The flames burned more brightly than the forge-fires, reflected by the water as they were. And he watched his father lit from within, even in this inferno, though now he was lit with rage. Atar still smelled of smoke. It was no longer comforting.
There were fire beasts of darkness on battle fields. He was not overly dismayed by them, but the smell of burning made him retch. The cookfires made him flinch, sometimes, when they leaped to high, and burned too fervently.
Maedhros had cast himself into the great flames, and he had not seen. He had not needed to. He knew fire. The fire of the silmaril was his last. It had burned him, as he deserved. He had cast it away because fire bothered him.
He gazed at his heavily scarred hands. Some days, he could barely make his fingers strum the strings of his sad little hand harp. Some days he sounded worse than he had as a child, before he even knew music. He still played. Still forced himself to play. If he didn't play, didn't sing, where would his sorrow fly? Where would his bitterness slither? Where would his anger and frustration and pity and exhaustion run loose? He couldn't hold it all inside. Surely they would all burn too. And he couldn't put out fires only he could feel.