#aroace fin-galad in my heart

[aurore-parle-de-ses-idees]

blinding things

hey look. we're doing @aspecardaweek this time. tada! have some fin-galad (ao3) notes: probably qualifies for both genderbend and background romance. character death & vague violence (on account of the general state of beleriand after dagor bragollach and also being turin-adjacent). not for any of the prompts in particular; could fit most of them tbh.

People have always loved to call you after light. After blinding things. You guess it isn’t so surprising then that they have such a hard time seeing you. Sometimes you have trouble, too.

They- a nebulous, ever-present they- say it’s all a part of being. Of being a person, an Incarnate- any of it. They speak in inevitabilities. Things that are because that is simply the way of the world. Those are old rules, though, things from the perfect lands that are only true in stories and in half-imagined memory. They’re not the rules of lands that know the touch of the Enemy, that know the feel of fire and of endless tears. Those rules are not true now- if they were true even then.

You grow up a princess, mostly, and you decide early on that you will do what pleases you instead, and they love you enough to let you even if they never understand the why. You braid your hair like a prince’s when you are young and play with Gwindor and Gelmir and Megoril, because someone has to be the prince and they all want to be captains and heroes and you are the best at it, after all, and when you return to your chambers in the dimmed evening lanterns you find you like the way it feels. 

You learn to do all your own braids for court rather than deal with the questions that come in private. What does it matter? you want to ask. It’s still me. But there is light on you, Orodreth’s child, and that means that you are noticed. You wonder if they would care less if you were someone else. You wonder if they would indulge you less.

It isn’t even that it’s sharp, the way they ask, not harsh or demanding or meant to be hurtful. There are things far worse and far stranger in Beleriand than a child who’s a little odd. They are so very certain, though, that you will make up your mind, that you will settle, that you will grow out of it. When you grow a little older, they add that you will find your one, and that you doubt even more than you do the thought of settling as prince or princess. What does it matter? Is it not enough that you are yourself?

“They say sometimes it takes centuries to find someone,” Megoril says, tugging at your hair as she braids it for nothing but the joy of it into some unholy horror that carries no meaning at all.

“I don’t think I ever will,” you say. “I don’t think I want to.”

And you are so, so sure of it.

---

You go to see the pools of Ivrin once, you and your friends who are the rising generation of Nargothrond, and Gwindor wakes you just before dawn and brings you to a ledge that overlooks the mirrored surface of the pools. Together you watch gold light fill the hollow and the falls sing like laughter, and it’s then that he first calls you Faelivrin, and the sound of it in the moment is as beautiful as the crystal waters.

Four months later he tells you he loves you, and you tell him you love him, too, but not the way he seems to feel it, not with the burning thing that seems to live in him when he looks at you. He says he knows. He says he won’t begrudge you unreturned affection, that he loves your company for its own sake, and you are happy to believe him.

Those who know you less well are less understanding, and you’re a lady of the court except for the days you’re a lord, and all that really means is people ask you twice as much to dance with them and go on outings and follow all the lines of courtship that have always seemed so silly in your eyes. It’s impolitic to constantly decline, but saying yes once just means they’ll ask again, and you have to turn them down eventually, and then you’re rude for giving them false hope.

“You might choose someone you could at least stand to be with,” Megoril suggests once, passing you a handful of dice across the table. “It’s not a perfect solution, but they would at least stop asking.” You roll the dice unhappily, and move your pieces towards Gelmir’s, and do not look at Gwindor on your other side. You wonder how serious she is.

“I don’t want to promise you something I don’t have to give,” you say to him when he asks you about it, weeks later, deep in the caves beside a still pool, a thing lit from below by luminescent crystal. “Nor to ask you to settle for a thing that makes you unhappy.”

He takes a long time to reply, standing in contemplation beside the pool whose clarity belies its great depth. “Why should it make me unhappy to spend my days with someone I care for so deeply?” he says at last. “I would not ask you to be what you are not. I made peace with myself long ago on this matter- I ask you now only because you have not been yourself in months.”

You muster a smile for him. “You are my dearest friend, you know.”

“I could ask for no higher esteem in your eyes.”

---

You announce your betrothal with the next spring, and it feels as if the weight of every eye has vanished all at once. You have done as they believed you would, as others do, as they understand all do in time, and so they look away. It’s one part relief and one part frustration, and one part amusement at their expense for so easily buying the deception.

“How much of it really is a deception, though?” Gwindor asks. Gelmir is with you today, more invested than either of you are in the planning of the celebratory banquet.

“Enough,” you say, and then concede. “Not much.”

“Less of it is their business,” Gelmir puts in from behind his extensive spread of notes.

“You must allow them some gossip at least,” you say, only a little flippantly. “It’s one of Nargothrond’s most treasured pasttimes.”

“Perhaps,” Gelmir says with perfect neutrality, and Gwindor laughs at his expense. “Do you want any of the cider from Brethil?”

“Oh! Do we have some again?”

The banquet is a bright moment and gives you blessed peace. The Sudden Flame is brighter in all the wrong ways.

Gelmir is gone. Beleriand boils over. Gwindor paces in your room- Finduilas’s, still, though he’s left his family’s home more and more since Dagor Bragollach- and worries over all the world outside. You worry more about the one inside. 

---

The day the Nightingale comes to Nargothrond you are at once bewitched. You see her only briefly, once on her arrival and once when she leaves, but you look on her and think that this is one who will not be bowed by any will but her own. You step back and let her pass when she and Huan steal through the deep ways that lead eventually to the surface. You do not raise the alarm, and she looks at you, and tilts her head, and nods.

Later, when news of her quest reaches Nargothrond, a letter also comes for you, and with it a small, smooth river stone that glitters beneath dancing light. For one who also changes, the message reads. May you still know yourself. 

You don’t know if there is Power in the stone, but you keep it in your pocket, and when you go among your people that day you pitch your voice down as if in song the way you learned from your uncle now gone and you find it easier than you ever have before.

---

You hold Gwindor close the night before he sets out to join the Union of Maedhros. For his brother, he says. You don't know what it's like to have one, but you wonder what you might do if it was Gwindor who was lost, or Megoril. Before, the answer may have been nothing, but everything in Beleriand, it seems, is obliged now to grow teeth.

“Return to me,” you whisper to him, and if you have no marriage-bond between you two you at least have something all your own and through it you feel him clinging to you in turn. You wonder if he knows something you do not.

He goes, and he does not return.

Most don’t, after the ruin of the Fifth Battle. You ask your mother too late to show you what she knows of the spear, but you never were the hero in your childhood games and it’s too late now to make yourself a warrior fit for the fires in the north, but you can learn at least a little, you hope.

And then Gwindor returns, and he brings with him a friend.

---

You were so very certain, years ago, that you wouldn’t be in love. You could never see it. You don’t know if this is it, but you know that there’s a wanting in you, an urge that draws you nearer, and you find your thoughts dwell on him without your leave. He is great, it’s true, and strong and fair of form, and you wish to be near him, to have his friendship- even in unguarded thought you call it friend, but there is an acuity in this that you’ve not felt before. You grip Lúthien’s river stone until your hand aches and wish the world felt less like it was falling out from under you. It feels silly, too, when all Beleriand is going up in flames. Who does it serve to doubt yourself now? 

Your father does his best, but he is too cautious for those desperate for hope, and even he is caught up in the fervor of victory in open battle. Gwindor watches with apprehension as the great bridge is built, and in your heart you wonder if the foundation of the thing you tried to build with him was something entirely incorrect. Did you truly judge yourself so wrongly? Did this always wait for you?

“Do you love him?” Gwindor asks one day, watching you practice the few forms your mother showed you, and you open your mouth and find it empty. How can you answer and have it be the truth if you can’t tell yourself? It would be cruel of you to deny it outright and find it to be a lie. It can’t be much less to hesitate as you do. You could tell him all of it, perhaps, but the weight of the years that he’s been lost is heavy on him still, and you can’t bring yourself to lay any more on him.

“Túrin is not in love with me,” you say, for it’s all you can be certain is true, “and he will not be.”

You wish you could say something more. You wish you knew yourself half as well as you thought you did.

“I will not ask you to be what you are not,” Gwindor says to you after a long, quiet night. “Unless it were to be happy.”

“Do not think I want any less for you,” you whisper, and fabric rasps against fabric as he takes your hand.

“That becomes a more distant dream by the day,” he says. You tighten your grip.

“There is still hope to be found.”

“Ever more of it burns away.”

“Gwindor-”

“I could not resent either of you for it- indeed, I can’t say I don’t know what you see in him. I only wish it could end in anything but sorrow.”

And you wish you could ease his heart- or know if he spoke the truth of it. You’ve always found it far too easy to believe him, though.

There might be rules to be broken here, too, in the way you’re almost good at breaking things by now, in a way that gives all three of you a day of joy, but the dragon comes.

The dragon does not care what you call yourself or who you care for, and you do not care what the deep answer is when you scream for Túrin held entranced on the bridge. Your people don’t care either, now, hanging on your words when you are thrown together when the warband rests, all of them watching you like the promise that someone will come for you is all that holds them together.

The orcs don’t care any more than you do, and neither does the spear that pins you to the tree.

---

They say the river saved you, when you wake at the mouths of Sirion. They say that Teiglin’s keeper bore you away half maddened from the blood in her waters, that you were the only survivor, that you were believed lost in the fall of Nargothrond. There’s a hole in you that makes you think you probably were.

More accurately, they say Finduilas is lost. There aren’t many who could recognize you here, and few of them are permitted in the healers’ wards where you lay long and silent in the quiet Havens. They call you Duinel, the one from the river, and it suits you as well as anything else. They can do as they please.

News comes with rumor of the death of the great Worm, of Túrin, of all that's overrun with the fall of your city. You felt the loss of Gwindor like a bruise on your heart as you were dragged away. You feel it still. It doesn’t matter any more to anyone but yourself what you felt for them.

There are people from the Falas here; you remember the days they thought you had a twin brother. You thought it was funny, then, so you let them believe it, and you didn’t leave Nargothrond often enough for it to matter. Eventually, there are a handful from your home. You don’t precisely hide who you are, but you don’t declare yourself, either. Not yet.

The enemy creeps closer to the hidden refuge- too close, they fear once, and a spear is pressed into your hands in defense of the Havens and they do not tremble. You stand unmoving for hours, though, until someone shakes you out of it and pries the shaft from your grasp. Your fingernails leave half-moon marks in the wood.

---

You sit on your heels and stare up at the greying hull of Círdan’s ship drawn up out of the water for repairs. Something that must have claws as tall as you left long furrows in the wood below the waterline. The Shipwright thinks you should lead. You doubt enough of your people have survived for it to matter, and anyway- “Why shouldn’t they follow you instead?” He laughs under his breath.

“I am no king,” he says, “and most certainly not to the Noldor. I will count myself lucky if they heed my advice on sailing, much less rule.”

“Even my father’s kin are not so hard-headed as that.” Círdan makes a skeptical sound and your lips twitch. It’s almost a smile, you think.

You go with him to the Isle of Balar, and grudgingly you take up responsibilities. You don’t have as good a head for logistics as Gelmir did, but you make do.

---

You never do discover who started calling you Ereinion. It prickles on your shoulders, son of kings, but you don’t think you dislike it entirely. There is work to do, and you think you don’t dislike that, either, after so long in a hidden land and enough time as Duinel. It keeps you busy. You don’t have so much time to dwell on what you’ve lost- but when you do, you find that that, at least, the people of Balar understand.

All the flotsam of Beleriand washes up in the Havens, eventually. Celebrimbor joins you, cousin who you knew for a time in Nargothrond who always told such fascinating stories. Doriath falls, and then Gondolin. Megoril makes it to Balar, your only living cousin on your mother’s side, and says Ereinion ought to have a guard, a spear to protect herself, and that she can do the job better than any one else.

You still have so few friends who know you, who don’t need to be reminded that Finduilas isn’t dead, that she’s still here, that you are still here, that you’re still the one who loved Gwindor your own way, that even if you’re nothing like a princess any longer you are still you.

You’ve never met this father-side cousin of yours who calls a meeting in the Havens, but Celebrimbor speaks highly of her. She speaks of the need for unity, for a steady hand for all the fractured Noldor, for preparing for worse before it comes to it. You think that she is right, and that she will put herself forward as ruler- as a High Queen rather than king. You think that you are fine with that, and that she certainly knows what she is doing.

You are caught entirely wrong-footed, then, when she turns to you instead.

You protest, but Idril has an answer for every one you offer, and you know all the while that you’ve already given in, because someone has to do it and they will all be something else and you are the best choice that remains- and none of them care what you call yourself or what you feel, and if they can’t afford to when it seems the world is ending, that’s almost as good as not caring at all.

You brush the river stone in your pocket, one of the last things left to you of happier days. Your hair has been bleached almost white after years in the sun here. “I would not always be king,” you say, but it cannot long forestall the inevitable- and she has an answer for that, too. The dwarves call their rulers king regardless of what they are in private, Celebrimbor says. Idril says it’s a fine solution here, too.

“You’ve been most thorough,” you say, and Idril inclines her head. “I would take no lover and my heir would be chosen rather than a child.” Lover or not, Gwindor’s loss still aches. You will not be moved to try such a thing a second time. 

The hole where your home was aches, but you leave the tower of the Havens of Sirion Ereinion Gil-galad, High King of the Noldor, and think that you are still only you, and you hope you still know what that means.