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Disclaimer: All characters belong to Tolkien.
The Healing
Time means nothing here; he knows no day and no night, nor of the coming of others that would tell him how time passes without. He does not know how long he has drifted alone through these halls - even their master is curiously aloof, seen once, when he arrived, and not yet again.
Without occupation, without company, he has only his thoughts. "It is useless to dwell on what cannot be changed," his father had once told him, but he did so nonetheless, and how fitting that his talent for brooding has left him with nothing to do but brood, until the end of Arda, if he so chooses. He laughs at fate's perversity, laughs even as he howls in pain, laughs though his laughter exists only in his imagination.
He wonders if he could lose his mind, and wonders what that would mean, when he has nothing but his mind left to him. "What good is this?" he asks. "How can I be made whole again when I am coming apart?" He waits long for an answer, as he reckons time, or perhaps only a few breaths of Arda.
It comes from the last source he expects.
"Can you be made whole again? Is that not the question you should ask?"
"Is that not why I am here?"
"Perhaps. I would not know - I came without your guilt, so my journey, I think, has been different."
"How can you say that you came without guilt? Surely, you have a conscience, Atar!"
"Ah, but what guilt can one have when one believes that the ends must be served, whatever the means?" He pauses. "I did not say I came without regret."
Silence falls; they have not had much to say to one another since he was a child. "I have so many to whom I owe apology," he begins.
"Apology! You do not yet know for what you should apologize. You waste your time - you take blame for what you cannot. But you were ever so." His father is as brusque and unforgiving as he remembers.
"You have been here long, Atar, but you have not changed. Is that why you remain here?"
"Do you think you will change in this place? With only yourself for company?"
He wonders if he has finally gone mad. Perhaps his father is what he seems: a voice in his head.
"You are not mad. Not yet, at least. But perhaps you will drive yourself to madness." His voice is curiously dispassionate, as if he considers a syllogism posed by Rúmil.
"Why am I sent the one to whom I owe nothing? What can you teach me, Atar, save what has already doomed me? Or did you seek me out?"
"Perhaps both."
"Will you answer a question!"
His father says nothing for so long that he fears he has gone.
"I will," he says at last. "I learnt long ago to deflect what I did not wish to answer. One cannot live in the shoes of another and consider too much one's actions. You think I have been harsh, but less so I was than my father to me. I was too much a son to be a father."
"So, you are not guiltless."
"No," he says sharply. "What guilt can one have for what is already woven into destiny? I have regrets, but you cannot make amends, only learn from the past. That is your failure."
"That I wished to make amends?"
"For the crimes of others? How can you presume to do that? How dare you presume to do that?"
"How could I not, being left to carry the blame for such crimes?"
"Righteousness has its own rewards. Those who suffered need no petty tokens - no more from me than from you. They need only to forgive."
"I do not accept that. We are not so determined by destiny that we bear no responsibility for what we have done."
"For what you have done, for the choices you made in defiance of what was given you. Your grandfather thought to take on Eru himself, to change the tapestry of what would be. He only succeeded in removing himself from it until Eru sees fit to remake it. Blood was rendered in blood and the tapestry soon righted itself.
"You were ever wilful, yonya. You did not learn from his example." (1)
"Do not compare me to him. My intentions were noble."
"You think mine were not? Allegiance to a father's last wish? Is that not a noble cause?"
He cries out at this, wishing he could stop his ears or turn away. "How can you say this? How can you pervert all that is good and right and claim nobility in your actions?"
"I said not so. My intentions were noble. What I did was far from it, but what will one not do to achieve great ends? Do not think yourself above me, for you have done the same."
"I was misled."
"You will never leave this place if you continue to hold yourself accountable for the actions of others. You could not have known."
"That is it? That is your much-considered advice? That I absolve myself of my sins because I knew not where they would lead?"
"Do you not listen? The sin itself keeps you here. You thought to defy the Doom - you tried to pause Time itself." He laughs bitterly. "You should have gone West, when pressed to do so, but I cannot say that I am sorry you did not. The curse upon us is laid to rest at last.
"I thought I should be free of the curse, when my father perished, but his fire had long ago consumed me, that nothing remained of my own. Nothing but my son."
"No!" Always, his father could persuade, hiding his aims behind eloquence. "I will not be your vessel, Atar."
Anger, black waves of it, flow as his father answers. "Loyalty has never been your strong suit."
Could it be? "You are jealous." He senses rage and knows that he is right. "You are jealous."
The anger evaporates. "I am remembered only for what I destroyed."
"History will be no more kind to me - better, it would have been, to be forgotten." After he saw what he had wrought, his hand had become too heavy to lift; he could not return to his work. "I doubt that I will take up the hammer again, should I return."
"You could not live so."
"No."
"Time brings healing, yonya. Perhaps we cannot forget, but our wounds heal. Time will bear me away, and I am patient."
Perhaps he, too, can find healing in time - he has only to forgive himself.
Epilogue
"They tell me you have been stirring up trouble."
"It was ever my talent. We do not truly change, but I need not tell you that." His father gives him a lopsided smile. "Do you suppose they would send me back?"
"Most likely send you away from the city. Perhaps you should not press them too hard."
"No. But it amuses me." He pauses. "I came to see your work."
"I have nothing I can show you." He has ghosted by the door and drawn up plans, but the heft of his tools still feels strange to him.
"But you will?"
"Yes."
"Good." His father touches his arm awkwardly. "I must go. But I will return."
"I would like that." He finds that he would.
He sees his father off and stares at the hands for which he had been named. From the outset, he had been destined to follow his father. He had come to see his hands, the family legacy, as agents of destruction, but they have themselves been destroyed and made anew. They are not the hands of his past.
Tomorrow, he will take up his work again, he decides. He is ready, now, to be his father's son.
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(1) yonya - my son (Q). The possessive suffix for 'my' is -nya and one would thus expect yondonya here. However, in his Quenya Course, Helge Fauskanger notes that yonya is attested in The Lost Road, 'The Lost Road' (p 68 of my Del Rey paperback edition). He suggests that this might be the vocative form, and I've used it here in the same manner. (Helge Fauskanger, Ardalambion, 'Quenya Course', Lesson 14)