It was one of those rare times, that Maglor found himself stuck in writing a new song. The flow in lyrics had gone well, until that he found that something was missing. Something in the middle, to be precise.
"Uuuuuuncleeeeee!"
A cry in distress from the outside, since he had been tasked with babysitting today. Well, whatever it was that Rûsa had found himself into this very moment, it did not sound like it would cause panic for the family, Maglor had learnt to guess it from the sound of how his youngest nephew would speak. Rather, it sounded like the reborn Elfling needed help with something he could not do himself.
"I am coming."
Maglor found, at coming out to the back yard, that he had guessed almost right. Rûsa was not injured in any manner from the playing he had been doing outside in the vast garden, but he had been unlucky to slip in the mud near the little fish pool and in a strange chain reaction, the landing had resulted in Rûsa also getting sand and dirt on both himself and the clothes, which he seemed to be most upset about.
"I think you need a bath to wash off all that properly," Maglor said in a gentle voice, trying to remove some mud from Rûsa where it was most likely he could have gotten faint wounds on the knees or other parts of the body where the skin was a little thinner.
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Thanks to the indoor pumping here in Formenos, it did not take too long time for Maglor to pour up enough warm water in the tub. Because Rûsa still had the body of a very small Elfling, even if he had grown over the years to the point of being roughly the same size as the other Elflings in the same age nowadays, he needed to be a little mindful of the amount of water.
"Ammë is going to be mad about the clothes…" Rûsa muttered while Maglor used a wet cloth to clean off the worst from his face. Of course Rûsa worried about making Maedhros angry for something he had no control over. He had not fully adjusted yet to how different his new life here in Valinor was from his old life as a slave in Angband.
"No, my sister grew up with Celegorm as one of her brothers, he was infamous for returning home more dirty than when he had left the house the very same morning, all of him covered in mud sometimes. It happened that Huan looked more clean than my brother on the worst days. But he was always careful to not ruin his clothes too much, even we knew how valuable fabric is in economic terms and if his clothes was damaged too much, well, that meant that he had come home in rags."
"How valuable is fabric? I know that newly arrived slaves in Angband could wear colourful clothes at their arrival, though those was often ragged after the long travel and taken from them as a sign of that they now was only allowed to wear the most basic kind of clothes. Even a loincloth was viewed as better than being naked."
Seeing a chance to give Rûsa a unexpected lesson during the bath, Maglor started to tell about just howa lot of time that was really spent on making fabric. Like that it came either from plant or animal fibers, like the wool from sheep. How much time spent on spinning the fibers into thread, and weaving it into fabric.
"Because of how much time that is spent just to make all that thread before weaving, fabric have always been valuable. Yes, newer techniques have been created, but the very basic have not been changed at all."
Rûsa remained silent as he listened, allowing Maglor to wash his hair as well. Apart from the first few weeks after his rebirth, when he had not really understood the meaning of a bath, it had never been a problem with getting him to wash off his body or any other bath-related struggles normally happening with children in that age.
"I remember the first time I took a bath in one of the rivers in Beleriand. It was during a scouting mission, and awfully hot...yes, I think it must have been summer. It felt like I was almost cooking in the armour I wore, even if it was nothing like the ones worn by the Noldor back then. And….the water was just so pleasant cool. However, I was really surprised at coming back up from the water and seeing just how…."
Maglor stopped scooping up water over Rûsa's head for a moment.
"How pale you really was under all the dirt and such? I can imagine that must have been painful in the sun later, your mother was unlucky to have gotten some awful burns on her skin because she had no protection from the sun before Fingon saved her. That why she and the others in the family insists on wearing those large hats or fully covering clothes, redheads tans very easy in the sun and there is a big risk for burns as well."
Finally Rûsa was fully clean again, and to Maglor's internal relief there was no wounds hidden under the dirt that he had missed. The skin on the knees would be a little red for the rest of the day, but hopefully normal again the following morning.
"What about my clothes?"
"You can borrow one of my shorter tunics while we wash your own clothes and let them dry outside in the sun and wind. It will be very long because of your current height, but that is what safety pins is useful for. The most important is that you will not have to run around naked during the wait for your clothes to dry."
Not the most dramatic day, not in terms of what could happened in Beleriand, but it was still something to break the calm.
