heretofangirl

[heretofangirl]

describing my relationship to someone by introducing them to people as "an old wound"

[heretofangirl]

[heretofangirl]

( credits to @winterswake for this phenomenal gifset ! )

3/? | SEAWARDS, TO YOU. ; REPENTANT!AU

summ.  A continuation. Sauron learns what it means to be human— and what it takes to be one. or: Sauron experiences the best & worst of mortality. pairing.  (Repentant!Mairon/Sauron) Halbrand / f!reader , ( established in #SEAWARDSTOYOU ) w.count.  4k a/n.  Important tags in first chapter ! Warnings for implications to PTSD & slight horror , including Non-graphically implied Animal Death.

THE BARNACLES STARE.

They’re overgrown; marrow-white and clinging onto the cracks of the salt-licked rockface, breathing and blinking at him like the thousand, ever-watchful eyes of the Ainur. 

In his dreams, every single one turns to blazing stars that wink out in an instant as he passes them. The shadow of Morgoth is a powerful darkness: it can dim them into lightlessness and nothingness. He tells them he is neither Morgoth nor Melkor nor Sauron nor Mairon, that he is something new; something different— but they can’t hear him under the sheet of waves crashing like a tempest on the shores, pulling him down, down, down, and under.

(He drowns. Rarely does he choose to fight the currents.)

In other vivid dreams, the barnacles don’t listen. They don’t because they can’t listen; because they’re dead and lifeless and the colour of their shells look eerily vertebral and bone-faced. They’re skulls, he later realises. A thousand of them. Endless. Both young and old. Their missing teeth and gaping maws, frozen in terror, roll in masses that wash in from the bloody tides and take up the shore beneath his feet. They fracture and splinter and cry out in pain when he walks on where soft sands ought to be, begging for mercy with every black step he takes.

He wakes up restless. He wakes up mortified. 

A forest fire rips through Eldalondë.

It dies out as quick as it had come, however; by the grace of the Valar and their blessed storms! The Faithful cry.

“Blessed,” Galadriel hears Halbrand scoff underneath his breath. They’d both sailed down the river Nunduinë with the other locals to help with clearing out whatever the blaze had left in its wake, and the very air now is clogged with residual smoke and the stench of death. She doesn’t comment on his muttering. (He had yet to heal completely from the rope burns in his palms from when they’d been stranded at sea, after all.) 

“You think it’s a sign?” asks one of the arborists. 

A grave weight seemed to have sunken into Galadriel when the scent of the Mellyrn had greeted her, and she’d been brought to the heart of the massive grove, where she lay a hand on the now-sundered tree.

“These very trees were brought as seeds from Aman by the Eldar of Tol Erresëa. Elros Tar-Minyatur himself had hand in planting these.” She remembers Elrond, too, had come to sail and plant a tree of his own here. The forest had been so young then, in the early years of the Second Age. Now the woods seem unsettled— even the very winds that blow between its spaces.

“Not idly do the trees of Valinor burn,” she finally warns. “Even when ensnared by lightning.”

Halbrand had seen it from afar, coming downwind from the riverbank: the tree’s colossal trunk— thick as a Dwarven-hewn mountain pillar— torn in its center from the high canopies of branches, snaking all the way down to the spindly stretch of roots. The bolt of light had rent an ugly, gaping wound into its silver bole, hollowing out the wood and carving it out to look like a glaring crack into the Unseen World.

He can still see the gleam of red embers between the bark of the tunnelled tree.

He can still hear it crackling in its seams, even.

Or… no. That isn’t the fire— 

“Galadriel!”

Mallorn branches grow great and wide, so it takes out an entire stable when it crashes down. 

One of the horses get caught underneath. 

They cannot move the branch. (It wouldn’t do any good, even if they did.)

Abârzî, the sea-cadet weeps, stroking the mare before he went to braid the hairs of her tail and cut it off. He chants it like a prayer.

Abârzî. Abârzî. Abârzî.

(No one has the heart to finish the job.

Halbrand does not exactly offer— but they don’t stop him either when he begrudgingly enters the stables for them.)

“What was he saying?” Sauron asks, after, in some poorly attempt to clear his mind.

“Her name,” Galadriel translates, solemn. “Abâr holds several meanings. It stands for strength, might, endurance. ‘One of Valiance’, even. Perhaps: ‘Admirable one’—”

It’s the first time Mairon ever experiences throwing up.

Galadriel sits beside him, and doesn’t say a word more.

He’s glad. 

Or, maybe he isn’t.

He doesn’t understand what he feels these days.

The wine Sauron pours to the raven-haired elf in his dreams is thick.

Too thick to be wine— but just as deceptively sweet.

On other nights, he pours and it keeps going, and going, and going. It gushes down his palms and down the nameless peak he’s standing in, and cascades down the cliff- like a thundering waterfall— no, an open wound. Sometimes the elf pushes him forward from the back, and it stings like a stabbing betrayal. (Other times, Mairon simply chooses to fall.)

When he plummets, it’s into red seas. It feels like wading through molasses; exhausting a pain into his limbs more than the dull ache at his nape and the throb of his suffocating lungs. Then there’s the twinkle of starlight throwing him off every time he swims. He always mistakes them for the night sky, and he blindly reaches towards the surface— until they turn out to be the white-faces of barnacles instead, attached to the maws of a sea-wyrm deep in the ocean.

Tonight, however, he swims in the right direction. 

The raven-haired elf pulls him out with a trusting, helping hand wrapped in a gauntlet; and when Sauron breaches ashore, he’s not kneeling at his feet on sands or bones, but instead on the all-too familiar cracked, black stones of his old fortress up in the bleak frigidness of Forodwaith.

Mairon is garbed in soaking red robes.

This time, Adar coronates Sauron not with Morgoth’s crown, but with a rotting horse skull named Abârz—

“You have a strange shadow, ‘Maril,” Eärien tells you, not long after you’d come down to Nísimaldar to assist in the clean-up effort. “It’s shaped like… a funny-looking man who always seems to look as if he’s rolled around in the dirt for ten hours.”

You blink, puzzled, then turn to where she’s peering over your shoulder.

Halbrand’s eyes dart away just as you meet his gaze. 

“Friend,” you correct, levelling an unimpressed glare back at your table of teasing looks. “Halbrand is a friend.”

Isildur raises his brows once you begin gathering another fresh bowl of seafood. “Don’t forget the oysters. I hear they’re great for men’s libid—”

“Shut your mouth when you eat,” comes your sharp flick at his ear, going to leave as the rest of the cadets break into laughter. “Even Berek has better manners than you, airhead.”

Halbrand, shaded under a temporary forge set up by the treeline near the half-constructed stables, senses you long before he hears your voice. You’re appraising him again. He can feel it. It reminds him of the barnacles staring, and he has to actively remember not to be instinctively beset.

You’ve been kind, after all.

Frustratingly so. 

And Sauron, as uncertain as he has been of everything (and by everything, he means his entire simulacrum of an existence— or, reincarnation? Re-embodiment?) of late, is smart enough to know not to bite the hand that feeds him. You’d made it clear that night in the forge, after all, that you’re a friend. And if not that, then at the very least— an ally.

So it’s no surprise he sets the horseshoes he’s working on aside, and relents to your plate of food. It is a surprise, however, when a few minutes later you go:

“Thank you, by the way.”

He shuts your train of thought down before it can take off.

“Don’t start,” Sauron says, voice a low rasp. He knows where you’re going with this: You’ll thank Halbrand for going out of his way to help, for lending a hand with the rebuilding, for putting down a boy’s dying horse. He wants nothing to do with it. 

“Then I want to—”

“Don’t apologise either,” he interjects, failing to hold back the mild bite. (So much for biting the hand, huh?) 

Sauron had chosen, anyway, to take it upon himself to toil away in the forge, from sunrise to sundown; Dedicating himself to aiding the reconstruction by crafting everything from bridles, stirrups and bits, to metal brackets, hinges, and nails. He’d toiled because it focused him; because he’s utilitarian at heart and so despises uselessness; because it helps blur the waking haunts of horses and the seas under the hissing and clanging of working metal. 

(Besides, there’s plenty to improve in this part of the island, and Sauron is the type to not count flaws and cracks but to instead step up and fix them.)

So there’s no place for you to apologise. 

“You work quickly,” you redirect instead, avoiding the urge to bicker with him. “Some might say almost tirelessly. Seems you’re getting into our good graces, from what I hear.”

“Well, you ought to listen closer.” Local gossip is difficult to not earwig, especially if the topic is about a low-man from the South; even more so that they don’t expect said low-man to have a passable fluency in Adûnaic. 

You don’t bother to hide the amused look on your face. “Right. Well. They do say eavesdroppers never hear but ill of themselves. What have you gathered, jailbird?”

“That I would be their downfall,” he says, then after a mouthful, goes: “That I would squander their resources and drain their waters and steal their women,” which makes you laugh.

“Númenórean women are not so easily taken.”

He hums at that. “And are you?” 

“…Am I what?”

“Númenorean.”

You blink. Halbrand levels a gaze you suddenly can’t meet. It’s a game he plays, you guess right then, between the crawl of heat up your cheeks. Of sharpening ulterior meanings into both sides of his words like one would a sword’s edge. 

(“The low-man said that?” Isildur titters, much later. “What a smooth advance! I ought to give him a—”

“Beheading,” Eärien overrides, “You do know he also effectively implied your sister may be easy?”

Isildur cheers. “And he’s honest? Outstanding!”)

“I believe I am one, and that’s enough for me,” you lie. The thought has crossed your mind before— that you may very well be an orphan descendant of those who had sided with the Enemy, once upon a time. That it’s likely you’ll die long before your own foster family does. 

“And if you’re wrong?” asks Halbrand. He enjoys making you squirm. “Shall that be enough?”

“Then so be it,” you wrinkle your nose, displeased yet matter-of-fact. “It doesn’t matter what type of life we’ve been chanced to be given, jailbird, so long as we live it doing the right thing.”

Until it becomes part of your nature, Sauron abruptly remembers Diarmid; of his words; the necklace he’d cruelly taken from the old man that stormy night. The advice had been unwelcome then, and now it seems to haunt him still.

“Is that your heraldry?”

Halbrand loosens his grip. His hand has been flying to the pouch out of habit, lately. “No.” Then, after you scrutinise him, cocks his head and says, “Is it so hard to believe we might quite be the same— Lost and found at sea?”

“You have a past,” you point out, the same way Elendil had chivvied you then. (If you had noticed him blink away in a flinch, he’s grateful you don’t mention it.) “But no, not so hard to believe, considering that’s precisely how my father found you too. It’s just hard for me to believe someone would be so willing to sever ties with their history.”

“I found this on a dead man.”

“Then why keep it?”

“Thought it looked fancy,” he dodges.

“A pearl is fancy,” you reflect, unconsciously flexing your fingers. The ring he’d caught the first day you two met lustres now at certain angles of the setting sun, beyond the horses grazing lazily in half-barren pastures.

Your answer is hardly a surprise to him. A bereft orphan would likely covet something as insignificant as a worn-out emblem if it meant a potential link to their true heritage, no matter how thin or nonsensical. Yours just happens to be a pearl.

“Beauty is subjective, seabird,” he comments sagely, before letting curiosity get the better of him to ask, “Is that from the tidepool, too?”

No, you want to say. I like to think my mother gave it to me. “Yes. It was in my grasp when my father found me; so came my name.”

Halbrand finishes his bowl, and doesn’t say a word more.

You’re glad.

“You know, I meant to say earlier, before you interrupted me,” you begin out of the blue, voice possessing that Nienna-esque lilt that makes him unconsciously want to shrink into himself. “…You shouldn’t have had to be the one.” 

He follows your gaze to one of the Bay horses being herded away. Its body gleams; a vibrant, rich red-brown in the dusk that needles a strange grief into him. The colour reminds Mairon of his old form. 

“You’re right, I didn’t,” he agrees distastefully. Needless suffering also falls under the realm of uselessness, however. Perhaps, in a twisted, roundabout way, Sauron had chosen to put down Abârzî. “…But I’ve done far worse things.” 

You watch him tuck the necklace away beneath his collar, and he wonders, briefly, if you’d caught his shudder; his waver. 

“To survive,” you emphasise. Surely.

He laughs under his breath. It’s neither sad nor sordid, just empty. 

“Not all of it.”

Sauron opens his eyes to a crowned shadow and a blade.

Do not fear, it says. And when its hand had come away with a fistful of his long, braided hair, cut from his blazing red head— it repeats itself to him again, though this time in the commanding tongue of Black Speech.

Do not fret.

(He frets, and begs. He disobeys because he’s terrified— but it’s all happening under his skin. Black Speech cannot completely overpower the mind, you see, but it can command and seed an intent in it; a sliver of power over the flesh, if willed so. He can fret and beg all he likes; it will never translate to his body. 

Now he’s just a vessel, still as a Bay horse caught neath a great tree, watching and waiting; helpless and paralysed.)

He catches the glint of the dagger but he cannot scream.

Do not fret, Morgoth commands, in that divinely, beautiful way only a Valar can make all guttural words sound. Do not fret, Abârzî.

Mairon startles awake.

When the candlelight flickers with the moon, he mistakes them for blood on his hands and a stable floo—

“Y’alright, brother?” Someone claps him on the back.

It’s noon, now. It feels like he’s woken up for the third time today. 

The stables are coming up nicely (Quickly, because Halbrand works when everyone else is asleep). The clouds are thick, so the day isn’t beating down on the horses as they feed on bran and alfalfa, and there aren’t any damning signs of coming rain to hinder what little is left of the reconstruction today.

“Never better,” Halbrand says, after steadying his heavy breathing. The perfectly delivered lie is somehow miraculously seen through, however, and promptly called out, via: an insistent pint of ale into his calloused hands that’s supposedly the ‘cure to all ailments’. 

He learns the old drunkard’s name is Seamus.

He learns a bit of everything to nothing, really; until the sun had sunken too far beneath the canopies of the Mellyrn, and the dappled light faded into drifting spots, and all that was left of their drinks was a final sip. Sauron had found himself both inexplicably refreshed and exhausted between the overload that managed to distract him from the cavernous feeling in his chest.

“It’s a swallow bird. We sailors tattoo it as belief it’ll lead us back home when we get out at sea,” says the old man, between a tangent on island customs and traditions beyond the primly ‘Nobody kneels in Númenor’ ones. “Why? Lookin’ to get inked yourself?”

Halbrand blinks.

He had composed as Mairon among the other Ainur in the Timeless Halls for the Ainulindalë, once upon a time; and then served, much, much later, as Sauron alongside Morgoth in the Iron mountains of Thangorodrim. Neither exactly had been something anybody would call a home— One was simply a state of Being far beyond Eä, and the other had been both a fortress and a prison. 

“Don’t have a home to return to,” is all he decides.

It sounds a lot like a realisation.

“Aye, well…” The drunkard flails his hand to the chilly winds. “Swallows mate for life.”

Halbrand frowns in confusion. Seamus just laughs, mad.

He doesn’t understand what the crazy old shrimp had meant, until two days later (of which Sauron still had only understood half of what was told to him, if he’s being honest) when the stables had at last been completed and the locals put together a small feast for everyone who had come together to help.

Crab legs had been the catalyst, oddly enough. 

Or, rather, how you seemed to move amongst the people-who-may-not-be-your-people, and spoke to your family-who-isn’t-actually-your-family.

“Here,” you say, and idly lay skillfully de-shelled crab legs and a lobster tail on your bright-eyed sister’s plate. Then onto your even-more-bright-eyed brother’s plate, before doing the same to those within your reach at the table, including Halbrand— sitting adjacent and at a length, because nobody quite fancied sitting next to a brooding stranger.

“I can de-shell my crabs on my own,” he had wanted to huff, put out by the way he suddenly felt impeccably small by your limitless grace and social-butterfly-ness, but one of the cadets had beaten him to it.

Your answer is a smile that’d made Mairon think of Nienna again, followed by a winsome, “I know you can.”

He lingers on what you’d told him ere a week ago, at the forge when you’d come to him saying he looked most at home with a hammer and tongs in hand, and drafts in his head something he tells you much later, which is:

“You looked different around your not-people.”

You’re wrapped in a pelerine cloak that seems to do little with the cold Mallorn-fragrant winds, here at the Bay of Eldanna, where you’ve somehow convinced him to follow you down to at the crack of dawn. (It’s not like he could sleep through the night, anyway, now that the stables are complete and there’s nothing left to busy himself with for the time being.)

It’s early enough that the carpet of stars in the sky shines the rocky shoreline a blinding silver, and only the lantern-lit trawlers far out at sea are awake to fish for teeming shoals of shrimps in season beyond the reef. 

“My not-people?” you yawn, gathering up your cloak and shift dress to toe between the rocks. “Ah. I get it. Because I’m an outsider.”

He raises a tolerant eyebrow. “I’m the outsider, seabird.” To which you answer, breezily, as if it’s a simple equation: 

“Not to me. If it helps though, we can both be outsiders together.”

He barely has time to wrap his head around together when you begin skipping across the tidepools.

“I meant,” he trails after you, ungainly and tender-footed to the shallows compared to your well-versed steps. He had not been raised by the sea like you. “That you looked at home; with your people. And tha— Eärmaril, why did you bring me out here with a bucket?”

You peer at the crevices of the outcrops, turning over black slabs with a trained eye. “Have you ever had soft-shell crabs? They’re active around this time of night, so watch your step. If you’re not getting pinched by their claws, you’ll get stabbed by an urchin.”

“You loon!” he exclaims. “You brought me here for a hunting trip?”

“Hush, now! Or you’ll scare the fur seals further down the coast,” you hiss over your shoulder. “And no. I brought you here because I know you won’t be sleeping, anyway.”

The blatant accusation has him slipping from a jutting rock face.

You catch his hand to steady him.

(He’s warm. Some part of you wants to pull him close.)

“I overheard the farriers. They say the only reason the stables got put up that quickly is because you worked through the night.” You inform him as delicately as you can, because there’s a recognisable, vestigial haunt in his eyes you’ve seen in your father’s, under the shimmer of Eärendil’s starlight. “Is it nightmares, Halbrand?”

“See, Amm— Mother saved Isildur when he was a child.” Nobody in the family prefers to say drowned except your father, because the word is bitter to the taste. “I was there when it happened. Couldn’t sleep for weeks after. Do you dream of the waters too?”

The defensive frown he’d put up melts away, but you can see Halbrand steel himself, still, in order to answer.

“I dream of barnacles,” Sauron allows, brusque so as to cut the conversation short as he regains his footing.

You let go and narrow your eyes at him. 

After a long moment, you conclude, resolutely: “Valar, you’re a terrible liar, jailbird.”

And Mairon couldn’t help it— 

He laughed.

(It sends your heart stumbling.)

“Believe me when I say, seabird, that if I were to deceive you, you would never know.”

“…Right,” you scoff, quick to turn away to hide the budding smile on your face as you carve his laugh and awfully handsome grin into memory. “Now, come and be useful, will you? Before the tide runs in with daybreak.”

He can do that. He likes to be useful.

So he does.

Sauron, however, gathers alarmingly quickly that he’s as helpful as an infant grappling the ways of the water for the first time. Some distant part of him enjoys it, though— learning. It reminds him of his long gone time with Aulë.

Learning to follow your effortless sea-nymph dance across the jagged shallows, memorising how to identify which rocks to flip and the right ways to harvest mollusks or crabs without risking a fingertip, all while unconsciously committing to mind the shanties you hum under your breath.

You tell Halbrand stories and Mairon listens despite the general inanity of it; because he’s a quiet sort, and because he likes the diluting distraction of it all. 

Little things, like how your mother had bequeathed the craft of pottery to you, or that your father had preferred to teach you to fight instead of fish (“I can hardly imagine that,” Sauron muses, which earns him a sharp look and a: “Well, you don’t seem the imaginative type, anyway.”); that Eärien’s artistic strength is adapted from her uncanny skill of observation, and that Isildur is often wayward because he’s as free-spirited as the sun.

The conversation whiles and goes until the sky slowly pales awake, and the fur seals begin to bark and bay at the shorebirds and skimmers diving close to the rolling surfs. When the stretch of Eldanna’s shoreline finally raises, peaks and tidepools drowning back below the cresting of blue seas, the both of you make headway back inland.

“I was telling the truth,” he says, abruptly, which made you stop in your tracks at the beach. Your cloak is billowing from the salt gusts, edges sticking to the wet of your ankles.

“You don’t have to tell me,” comes your honest answer. 

But he wants to. It feels right to. Here Mairon stands bearing witness to the intimacies of your life, while he had nothing to offer you in return beneath the veneer of Halbrand. It’s only fair to do the same. An exchange, if you will. It’s all he’s ever known.

He sets the bucket of skittering crabs on to the wet sand, and dips his feet at the lap of the tide. “I dream of the Dark,” Sauron admits. “Of a light I cannot reach. The ocean is always red— red as my hands— and the rock-faces are always white and blinking.”

Barnacles. You understand now.

“When I wake up, I feel like I’m bracing for something, but I don’t know what,” he says, which he’s quick to realise had been an instinctive lie, and so he amends it with an explanation. “Like I’m charging headfirst into the abyss, and I’m bracing myself for the impact. For a fight or a— punishment.”

Halbrand kicks at a bubbling bump in the water and out pops a shell. (It’s a whelk. Lightning whelk, if Sauron is being precise. He’d listened to you listing the different kinds an hour ago.) 

“Anybody home?” you peer.

“Mh.” Sauron assents and tosses the hermit back to the waves.

He looks at where the open sky meets the sea, thinks of the knee-high swathes of sea oats growing at the coastlines of Valinor if he’d set sail Westwards from Eldanna and choose not to look back. He entertains idly on the idea of home for a beast such as himself— if it’s even possible to tame savagery into such domestications. 

Then he resists on asking you if there’s a difference between making a home and inventing one (those are questions for another sleepless night, he supposes), and instead glances down to where you’ve stepped into one of the remaining tidepools and back out.

A smooth pebble with a perfectly circular hole in its centre, still damp from its discovery, sits in your palm.

“What in Eru’s name is that?” he furrows, watching you wink at him through the gap.

“A hagstone,” you say, unoffended. “My other brother Anárion has one, though he prefers calling it an adder stone. Ammê told us they were naturally-occurring talismans. They ward off anything evil and protects its keeper. Catch.”

He does so with attractive ease.

(…You commit that to memory, too.)

“You don’t actually believe this little thing, do you, seabird?” he asks, tossing the piece up in his hands.

His snort makes you roll your eyes. “See! You are the unimaginative type. Halbrand, it’s the nature of a thing that matters, not its form.”

Right. He’d forgotten you are You; who built a home in the people; whose wound is your geography and history— or lack thereof— and who’s chosen to anchor to Númenor, because your foster family is where you found your true port of call. 

“You Númenóreans are an odd lot,” he settles candidly, and curls his fingers around the hagstone.

“Odd?”

“Superstitious,” he clarifies.

“I prefer traditional,” you volley.

“Try paranoid.”

Your warm laugh breaks with the surf of the shore, makes him tarry on the sight and sound of you.

“Red sky in the morning; sailor’s warning…”

“Red sky at night; sailor’s delight,” Halbrand recites Seamus, scoffing humorously. “I mean… Boarding a ship right foot first? Nailing a horseshoe under the mast, laying a silver coin for Uinen or tattooing swallows to lead the way home? And no whistling on board, lest it’ll challenge the winds; Or so Isildur claims of Manwë.”

“Ah, but don’t forget—”

“—Never rename a ship,” he says in unison.

Halbrand shakes his head, but the fond look on his face is undeniable as you break out into another merry smile. Your plan to chase away his night-terrors seem to have worked perfectly. If you’d thought him handsome before, then he looks utterly divine now. 

“Well, I suppose you’re right. There’s another one, though,” you hum, eyes fixated at the gulls taking wing to and fro their nests, the trawlers sailing home with their morning catch. “Never ever bring harm to a seabird.”

He cocks his head. “If I didn't know any better, seabird, I’d say you were making a threat.”

“And?” you smile. “Do you, jailbird?”

“Do I what?”

“Know better.”

Halbrand laughs again. A charming peal of a sound, canine-wide and punched out. It makes your heart sing— makes you wonder when was the last time he laughed this freely.

“You!” he exclaims once more, but there’s a thunderdrum in his ribs to reckon with all of a sudden, from the way the first break of light begins to dawn on your face and the charming, affectionate grin flowering across it, and so he couldn’t finish his insult after all.

You offer him wine in his dreams. 

Soot blackens your fingers as he takes it, but the stains don’t seem to bother you.

Weighty is a hagstone in his palm.

The sea is blue and quiet—

And barnacles are just barnacles, now.

Footnotes in AO3!

[heretofangirl]

[heretofangirl]

Of One Blood

A @whiteoliphaunt white calf fill for @maglor-my-beloved, featuring Fëanor, his grandson Elrond, The Jungle Book, storytelling, and a quiet moment in Fourth Age Valinor.

My heart is heavy with the things I do not understand.

Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book

The rain came down relentlessly, soaking Elrond’s cloak until it clung to his neck like a toddler. Around him, the earth softened, forgot itself little by little and gave way — sand rising to claim his boots, puddles pooling in every step. The trees bent, their leaves glistening and turning this way and that as though caught crying. Elrond could feel the water slipping under his collar, tracing cold lines down his back, and for a moment, he considered just standing there, letting the rain wash him into something smaller, quieter, easier to carry around. Instead, he knocked on Fëanor’s door.

“Peredhel?” he frowned, eyes widening at the state the former lord was in, hair clinging to his cheeks, frost making white lines on his brows. Fëanor pulled him into the hallway, clicking his teeth and hissing. “What in… Elrond, it is pissing it down!”

“Biggest rainstorm Tirion’s seen in decades,” Elrond gave a wavering laugh, genuine if frothy, shaken between his rattling teeth. “They’re battening down the hatches at home.”

“And you are here, instead of battening down the hatches alongside them because?” Fëanor huffed, pulling across a towel, clicking his teeth in mild disapproval (not because he didn’t want Elrond there, but because Elrond clearly walked all the way from Tirion to the sea in this downpour, which is not something the average Normal Elf would do). He shoved Elrond down into an armchair and began towelling his hair vigorously.

“Ouch — Daerada!” came the muffled voice. “Leave it! I can — ouch! You’ve just pulled out a —“

“Get a grip, Elrond. I had seven sons and none of them went bald,” said Fëanor shortly, ignoring Elrond’s protests with the practiced air of, well, someone who had seven sons. “Now, tell me why you’re here.”

“Because your house is salty.”

Fëanor blinked, ceasing his ministrations with the towel in his confusion: “apologies, but what did you call my house?”

Elrond considered explaining that it wasn’t because the beach house on the shores of Aman Fëanor and Nerdanel had taken up in order to avoid said seven sons (well, the three youngest and quickest to re-embodiment), their progeny, and their irritating little problems, was salty. Not directly at least. It was only that the saltiness of it reminded him of Maglor’s cottage by the Havens in Middle Earth, where he still lived.

Everything in that house had been sharp, brined by the air itself. Salt crusted along windowpanes, dusted the floors like an uneasy frost, and clung to the cracks in the wooden beams. Anything left too long — shoes, tools, books, Elrond — was kissed by it, worn and bitten as if the sea had reached in to mark its territory. The air stung with it, tasting of sweat and tears, and the walls seemed to sweat as the house endured the Ages. Nothing in the house by the sea was soft; even silence had an edge there. And that was why Maglor had read him stories on the stillest nights even on visits when Elrond was six thousand years old — to take the edge off that silence, dull it enough to lull him to sleep.

He didn’t know how to explain that was what he craved: that he hadn’t slept in days, and he wanted to hear one of Maglor’s stories. Even though he was seven thousand now — young and spry enough to walk from Tirion, but too old to long for beaches and bedtime stories. No, not just any bedtime story but that one. The one with the best line which crept in towards the end, when he and Elros were closer to sleep than wakefulness. He didn’t know how to explain this to Fëanor, mainly because it wasn’t exactly the done thing to suddenly grow a grandfather after six thousand five hundred years, let alone ask him to tell you a story. Still, it would be better than Fëanor assuming that Elrond walked for a day and a half to lick his walls, like a very persistent goat.

“I only wished to know…” Elrond began, flushing as Fëanor finally put down the towel and shoved a piping hot mug of cider into his hands, almost growling at how cold the half-elf’s fingers were. “Whether you knew that story. About the animals. The children’s story. Maglor used to say you knew it, that — that it was you who first told it to him.”

Fëanor shook his head, somehow even more confused by the explanation than the situation. He sank down next to his get-one-free grandson, wondering whether insufferable eccentricity ran in Thingol’s line or whether it was a learned trait. He decided to humour him.

“What story?”

Elrond smiled across at him, and put on a deep, maleficent voice, like what a tiger might sound like had tigers possessed the power of speech:

“Ye choose, and ye do not choose!” he cried, causing Nerdanel to poke her head in from the next door, roll her eyes, and slink back. “What talk is this of choosing? By the bull that I killed, am I to stand nosing into your dog’s den for my fair dues? It is I, Shere Khan, who speaks!”

A sudden lump rose in Feänor’s throat. Oh, Elrond.

He didn’t say anything of it. Fëanor sat in silence, looking at the slow disappointment crawl across Elrond’s face, until it got too much for him to bear. Fëanor jumped up from the couch, spread his arms before the fire, casting a long, dark shadow across the room (Nerdanel, watching from the doorway, stifled a snort).

“And it is I, Raksha The Demon, who answers!” he all but roars, striding back and forth, all six-foot-three of him turned into a snarling she-wolf. He bared his teeth, snapped them. “The man’s cub is mine now — mine to me! He shall not be killed. He shall live to run with the Pack and to hunt with the Pack; and in the end, look you, hunter of little naked cubs — frog-eater — fish-killer — he shall hunt thee!”

Elrond’s eyes widened. Lips trembling all of a sudden, he buried his head in his hands as his grandfather, panting and laughing a little, sat back down beside him. Fëanor waited patiently as Elrond sat very still, waited and watched the fire roar ever higher until he finally sat up, wiping his face on his sleeve, clearing his throat.

“What sin have I committed, Eru, that not one person in my very large family has heard of a handkerchief,” sighed Fëanor, dispelling the tension by dropping one in Elrond’s lap. “Please blow your nose before I cut it off your face.”

“Sorry,” Elrond said thickly, laughing as well. It’s funny — he knows Fëanor has been called every adjective under the sun, accused of everything from arrogance to zealotry, but few touch on his biggest descriptor: a perpetual father of seven. “Sorry, I was only… impressed. That you remembered that by-heart.”

“Of course I know it,” Fëanor shook his head. “I know every damn bedtime story there is to know, and a thousand others that haven’t been written yet. It’s not impressive, it’s an occupational hazard of having seven sons.”

“Still, it’s impressive,” Elrond said, and then paused for a long moment. “Though I cannot believe you know all of this. Absolutely not.”

“No?” Fëanor frowned sharply at Elrond, before his face softened in understanding. “Is that what you think, then? What if I… demonstrate? Though no prowling around the room again, my bones are too old for such nonsense.”

“Do I look five?” Elrond looked mortified. “Did I ask you to prowl anywhere? But… yes. A demonstration, perhaps. I’d like that.”

“Just to make sure I know it, hm?”

“You can never be sure.”

Fëanor settled back on the long couch, watching Elrond sip his cider. And then he closed his eyes, and began reciting the story he had told seven thousand times to seven boys, one of whom clearly told the same story to his two boys: now Rann the kite brings home the night, that Mang the bat sets free!

Elrond listened to the story for the first time in, oh, how long has it been? Since he sailed, yes. Since Maglor. Fëanor’s voice surrounded him like warmth rising from a hearth. It wasn’t the story he heard really, but the cadence, that familiar lift and fall, wrapping around him in a way no fire could quite manage. The rain lingered on his skin, insistent, but his grandfather’s voice smoothed it away, filling the space with bears, wolves, tigers, alive, alive, alive. It was almost like it was with Maglor, in the cottage by the sea. How even between the words, the silence held its breath, no longer oppressive but tender, until Elrond himself melded into it, another animal crouching low to watch the jungle tell its story. He sat still, unmoving.

It was not a stillness that waited for a shattering, but one that lulled him to the half-asleep state he was in when Fëanor got to the part he and Elros used to wait eagerly for Maglor to get to. The part where Fëanor pressed his hand to his own chest, and then Elrond’s, and said very softly and intently: we be of one blood, ye and I.

And as Fëanor’s voice went on and on, Elrond fell asleep right there on the couch, safe in the knowledge that even if the story stopped, the echo of his Daerada’s voice would remain. Of course it would, woven as it was into the walls, into the cottage in the Havens, into the air, into Elrond himself, into the stories he told his own children, and into the stories they told theirs.

Fin.

I don’t love Kipling, but have a pervasive headcanon that Maglor used to tell (an in-universe version of it, that is) The Jungle Book stories to Elrond and Elros, and have mentioned it in other stories. This was a fun opportunity to explore that, and think about stories that carry on through generations. Hope you enjoy the fill, happy new year, and of course, thank you @minubell for running this!

[heretofangirl]

brooding men who cannot communicate their feelings if their life depended on it are only hot when they're fictional. if i have to deal with one in real life i will curse him and pray for his downfall every night before i go to bed

[heretofangirl]

The Knotted String

A @whiteoliphaunt gift for @herenortherenearnorfar - featuring Annatar/Celebrimbor, material cultures, closed practices based on Zoroastrianism, not-knowing, and the final days of Eregion. Happy New Year! And thank you so much to @minubell for running this.

The stairs take longer tonight. The stars are mostly hidden, too far to touch. The wind has picked up, and it sends a chill through his wet hair down to the waist. A fever is the last thing Celebrimbor can afford, but one seems inevitable with the way his muscles ache. Celebrimbor does enjoy aches and pains, normally, laurels for his craft. And if he’s being honest, he enjoys them in the gleeful way the Eldar tend to enjoy looking decrepitude in the eye and denying it, point-blank. Still, the stairs take longer.

“What is that?” he is freshly bathed and half-clad when Annatar walks in; tunic strewn on the bed, leggings loose around his waist. “That string.”

Celebrimbor has a circular piece of thick white twine twirled around his fingers, five large knots equally spaced along the string like knucklebones.

“Just a ritual,” he shrugs, as he does each time.

There’s no ritual that really surprises Annatar these days; he has tried most of them, from the first song to whatever they do these days in Lindon. Still, the way the twine wraps around the callouses compels him in a way that does truly surprise him. There’s a strange peace to Celebrimbor here that he has only seen when smithing or fucking, when he’s coiled tight. Usually molten, red-hot purpose rolls off of his shoulders in such thick waves that sometimes Annatar is surprised the elf can ever stand still at all. Fragile, he realises. Celebrimbor only looks like this when he’s holding something he perceives as fragile. Like a mithril-thin ring, or him.

The smith turns from him, begins the evening ritual. The cord unwinds like a hymn, pale and coarse, gleaming faintly with the memory of the fire which blessed it. He loops it around his waist, each turn a tether, lips moving soundlessly. The movements repeat, five times, one for each knucklebone. With the fifth, he passes the cord over his head, bends, brushes the floor with his fingers.

“A prayer, then?” whispers Annatar, when he is done, eyes blown wide, curious. “I have never seen prayer like this.”

“Fëanorian nonsense,” says the smith, his words so soft over the nonsense that it means the opposite, yet so casual with the Fëanorian as to be a deliberate shutting-out. A deliberate shutting out of Annatar.

They look at each other for a long moment, and each second Celebrimbor doesn’t tell him feels like a thin wire pressed into Annatar’s skin. A slit of moonlight peeks through the slats of the balcony, neatly slicing Annatar in two, from a divine thing into two small, envious little poltergeists. Celebrimbor’s jaw clenches.

“You cannot just know everything about my life before you and aside from you,” Celebrimbor says, shrugging. The air has a cold, rusty taste to it all of a sudden, Annatar thinks. “You know that, don’t you? You know me, you know all of me as relates to you. But the things about my life that you do know, I chose to tell you. This knowledge is not yours.”

“It was you who offered yourself to me,” there is a little petulance to the downturn of his lips. Celebrimbor savours it: it’s like smithing, sculpting, casting, his penchant for finding the gremlin within every god. He is Fëanor’s grandson through and through, he supposes, with another smirk that has Annatar’s cheeks flushing with rage at being excluded from.

“Yes. I offer what I offer,” Celebrimbor tucks the knotted string away into some sort of slight-of-hand Annatar cannot follow. Celebrimbor presses a kiss to his lips, like a consolation prize.

Annatar spends months trying to follow the string. Asks him about it, flushed and glistening from pleasure, asks him every day, asks him at last, in the final moments. The last few days, when each knows what the other is and will become, and tries so hard to forget it for just a little longer. He tries too, to follow it in other ways. In books, in whispers, asks around about the cultural practices of the Fëanorians. The way they lay their dead on tall, silent towers for carrion birds to peck at. The fiery, smoky incense they burn for their prayers to Iluvatar. And still, the knotted string remains just that. A thing that might die with Celebrimbor.

“You will not die!” Annatar roars, at the close of it all. He rounds on Celebrimbor like a warg, suddenly close, suddenly burning, wild-eyed, beautiful and furious. A finger held out in front of him as if to force the world into submission, to force Celebrimbor into living for him instead of dying despite him. “I will not lose you — it is out of the question. How dare you ask me — as if you had the right — as if you have the right to ask me to kill you, after you offered me your life — I refuse it! That is within my power, and I will exercise that power as I see fit. As I see fit — not you. You will not die.”

“I offered my life?” Celebrimbor laughs, even now. Somehow it is him who remains calm, not a single molten thing left within him. He shakes his head. “I offered what I offered. And it is not everything. It is not my life. You know that as well as I, that it is not everything, no?”

His waist is exposed, the knotted string looser than it has ever been. Annatar steps forward. Celebrimbor can feel his glowing eyes, heavy on him, like two more swords pinning him to the earth. He can smell his own sweat, the leather of Annatar’s gauntlets, the woodsmoke of Eregion. He smells like what his home was, what it has become now, the beautiful, furious monster it has shifted into. Annatar cannot look at Celebrimbor or he’ll lose control. He’ll claw at his face, kiss him, plunge his last knife between his ribs. Or worse – yes, worse – he’ll cry, soften, he’ll say let us leave. Yes, yes, anything. Yes. Don’t tell me. I don’t need to know. It’s all right. Let us leave, you and I.

Lesser beings allow themselves to be blinded by things. Anger or love or fury or shame. Higher beings are blind with things, chasing mindlessly, embracing unidirectional tunnel-vision. Annatar, personally, is blind with want. He wants Celebrimbor’s balcony, so open and bright and full of the two of them, full of nothing, the broad shoulders turned away from him. Celebrimbor doing his secret thing with the string, locking him out. The way he allows it, despite wanting to know. The way he is blinded by him.

The way Annatar waits patiently outside as he had never done before. The way he counted the seconds while the city walls shrunk little by little, the air thicker, more and more putrid every second, the door left unlocked, escape always possible, leaving Celebrimbor and the rings and the world and declaring himself. Annatar would have the whole world before him, but where would he go? Where else but here? Who else but him?

It is another week before Lord Sauron leaves the burnt-black city of Eregion, a sweat-stained, knotted string curled in his pocket like a sick, sleeping mongrel. He will never know what it was. But he knows what it is now. It is a kiss — a consolation prize, offered up on a balcony, the stars too high up to know that the two of them were standing there that evening, too high up to remember they ever stood there at all.

[heretofangirl]

this will be the year I finally convince everyone to abandon New Year's resolutions in favour of Yule Boasting, the clearly superior tradition

[heretofangirl]

hey sorry for getting really pissy at you earlier because I could hear you chewing. see I have a condition called [remembers pathologizing my behavior is unhelpful] it's actually because I hate you, specifically,

[heretofangirl]

Buying you time

[heretofangirl]

was suddenly moved to draw a toony sort of character design .. but this is a bit too close to 2013 tumblr sexyman for my own comfort

[heretofangirl]

For the tidbit “wish you would write” post… maybe something on the downfall of Mairon? And the tragedy of his tale, considering in Tolkien’s universe, ‘Nothing is evil in the beginning.’

Ooh that sounds very interesting. If I were to approach that, I’d go about it focusing on cycles on violence begetting future violence, on “falling” being a symptom rather than the cause.

Here’s a bit of prose!

Need. Such a base thing, need. Begging, craving, yearning. Mairon cannot recall a single day not entirely engulfed by need in some shape or form. When Morgoth screams, and when hordes of tampered-with corpses come crashing through forests to rip the world to pieces, it is not desire or anguish that Mairon feels. It is need. The world in his hands, in his control, a quiet, soft-breathing thing as it was in the beginning. The neck of a small animal, the near-translucent belly of an infant. His need for it blinds him, turns him rabid, indestructible.

He knows there will come a moment he breaks something that cannot be unbroken. It will not matter what it is. What matters will be the silence that follows, and in it a whisper of tyrant. Mairon knows. He knows that once you choose need over all else, you cannot return. He knows need cuts both ways, he understands what he will become.

On the quietest nights, he wishes it wasn’t so.

[heretofangirl]

this is the best tweet i've ever seen bar none

[heretofangirl]

last night I conceived of a truly diabolical plan of pointless and petty evil and I shall have such fun putting it into action. a little birthday present to myself.

[heretofangirl]

[heretofangirl]

One of my core LotR memories is the time Mr Balls and I watched the first Hobbit film years ago and he spent a good half hour telling me how it made no sense that the Lord of Imladris would ride out on orc hunts (forgive him we were like 17) and I was just sitting there nodding away as if the sheer sight of said Lord of Imladris riding a horse in the tightest armour known to mankind wasn’t, for me personally, the cinematic equivalent of sitting pussy-out on a washing machine running a particularly vigorous spin cycle 👍🏽

[heretofangirl]

war of the rohirrim is awesome actually because going into it blind i laughed when the king one tapped that guy who i thought was going to be the villain and my friends and i joked about how insane that was only to be gobsmacked into silence (followed by extremely loud cheering) an hour later at That Scene because holy shit maybe the instant kill was a MERCY