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fictiongods · 5 months ago

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You meet a girl. She’s traveled across states just to meet you. She makes a show of it too, she makes sure you know she’s there before ever introducing herself. She tries to get along with your friends. Your mom. Your kinda dad. And even your sister, when you later remember.

She tells you stories that you know are fake to sound cool, but you won’t challenge her on them. You guys don’t hit it off right away, but there’s something there. You and her are intertwined. Connected. She gets through something, it pushes you to do the same. You don’t know why. The universe didn’t want it, you barely want it. But there the girl is anyways, and there you are.

You start going out at night. It’s dark, emotions and adrenaline are high, and she’s saying all these things, these things that you definitely can’t think about to hard. Your friends think you have a boyfriend. You say she’s not really, but you are going out tonight together. You guys do that a lot.

But then she sees you with a guy. She’s angry. She feels cheated. Dumped. You didn’t owe anything to her, but you apologize anyways. You go down and say you’re on her side. That she can trust you, because you care. She doesn’t buy it.

You invite her to Christmas, she lights up brighter than the damn tree when you open your door, and you guys are good again. Bump in the road, but you’re fine. You guys start really hanging out. She makes sure you know that you and her are special. Different, somehow. No one else is like you guys. The chosen two. She says you’re better. She believes that makes her better too. She comes to your class and draws a heart, and you not only skip that class, but you skip a very important test that you were panicked about earlier. But…she’s here now. What can you do? She wants you to let loose. She wants you to lean into your temptations, into your urges. You do it. She keeps throwing her arm around you for some reason. That didn’t have anything to do with your urges, but you notice that. You rush into things because she did. You steal because she told you to. You take what you want because she did. You get caught together, and are arrested. But it’s fine, because you’re with her and together you got out of it. You start to believe that it really is her and you. Just the chosen two.

Then she gets into trouble. She accidentally kills someone. You were with her. She completely shuts you out afterwards. You are left to think after all this time of her saying you guys are connected, that she doesn’t care about you. You are left to believe that maybe she never did. She pins that murder on you. But she’s your friend. You won’t give up on her.

From what you learn, she tries to hurt your friend. The one you’ve known for a decent amount of time before her. A friend you love. But still, you refuse to give up on her. You get your boyfriend to try and help her. He makes it worse. She runs away to hide.

You find her. You call her your friend, but she seems upset by that. You don’t know why. She tells you you’re the same. But…you’re not her. You can’t be. She likes violence. She likes to be overly sexual. She wants stuff you would never want. You punch her in the face. She smiles at you. With pride and bravado, she calls you her girl. You get attacked again by threats the world believes you and only her were destined to stop. You save her. She saves you. You again, reinforce the fact that you will not give up on her. Everyone else has. Your best friends, your kinda dad. You can’t tell your mom about her, she doesn’t really understand, and your sister, well, she’s too young for stuff like that.

You thought you saved her. You thought you helped her. You thought it was her and you again. The chosen two. But she betrayed everyone. She betrayed you. You plan. She thinks she brings your worst fear back. He was too good at being that fear. You learn how angry shes been. How lonely. How sad. How jealous of you she’s been. It doesn’t change anything. You give her a little of that betrayal back. A little of that trickery. She kisses you on the forehead. You’ll later give one back.

She’s turned. The one girl in all the world like you, and she’s turned against you. She’s decided to work with the enemy. You steal her knife. What was hers is yours. She tries to kill your boyfriend. She’s never liked him. You’ve never known why. She tried to sleep with him. She knows it would be the closest she’d ever get to being with you. She tried to do this before. She asked you about it. Only she knew you didn’t get it anyways. That was the problem. You never did.

You guys fight to the death so you could save him. You try and kill her with that knife you stole. Before she makes a scar, before she leaves you, she smiles. You’ve become her. Everything she wants.

She comes to you in a dream. Hers, or yours? it doesn’t matter. What’s her is you after all. It’s so soft there. She’s smiling, you’re smiling, but you don’t really understand, because it’s so violent out there. She cups your cheek, as tender as she’s ever been, and you awake.

You press your lips to her in the spot she once did for you, and now you understand. You are like her. That kiss is recognition. A thank you. A silent confession. She never knows. You never tell her.

You move on. You get a boyfriend. He doesn’t get you, not like she did. She wakes up. You know what she did. How she hurt you. Your friends hate her still, and you…can’t. You defend her.

You try to find her again. You do. Shes mad again. She hates your boyfriend. She’s bitter. She’s telling you about the dreams she’s had. You were there.

You’ve had dreams too. They were always so soft. Even when mixed with violence, it was soft there with her.

Only that delicacy doesn’t extend in the real world, only in your bubble. She ties up your mom. You hope your sister wasn’t home. You miss it, but she talks to your mom. She says how mad she is at you. How hurt she is. How she feels she got dumped by you. You stop her and save your mom, and you fight again.

You tell her you don’t think about her. That you’ve forgotten her, just like she thinks. But in truth, you can’t stop thinking about her. She haunts you. In your thoughts, in your actions, in your words, she’s there. Because, everything that is her is you too, right?

She steals your body. You have hers now. What was yours may now be permanently hers. Your friends can’t tell it’s her. She fools your mom, your friends, your sister, and your kinda dad. She fools your boyfriend. She sleeps with him. She tries to be close to you again through him.

You find her again. She’s crying then. She’s hitting you in her body. She speaks words of destruction and detestation. She speaks words that will be yours in a time to come. You don’t know if she knows if it’s her or you. Maybe she fooled herself as well. She leaves your body and you leave hers. You feel what she felt. You clutch…your heart? Her heart? You try and hold it close. You try and tear it out.

She runs again. She’s gone, you’ve lost her again. You hate her for that. You miss her for that. You loath her for that. She’s the mirror of who you were. She’s the mirror of the you you might have been. She’s your mirror. It’s shattered, it’s broken, and it’s you.

She comes back after years of departure. You’re still bitter. She’s cracking jokes. She’s learned. She’s reformed. And you? You wonder if that’s true. You fight to the end of the world with her. This time, she’s on your side. She listens to you. She follows you. Everything she’s done is because you told her to. She did what she’s always wanted for you, and when you got hurt she said she’s never wanted it.

You find a weapon that’s yours. You can feel it in your bones it’s yours. You take it to battle. You save the world in that battle, and you hand that weapon to her in moments you believe to be your last. She can take it because, what’s yours was always hers too.

Do you get it now? It is a love story, and it always was.

#IT FEELS LIKE ITS MINE. I GUESS THAT MEANS ITS YOURS.#strap in everyone it’s ramble fuffy hours #i hope i did them justice #did I go on and on? yeah. do i regret it even slightly? not at all.#do I feel slightly sick and ill and gut punched by them? perhaps.#guys…this is over a thousand words someone send help they won’t get out #buffy summers #fuffy #faith lehane #btvs #buffy the vampire slayer

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queenlucythevaliant · 5 months ago

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I. Many waters

When Eärendil was a child—a hína ?—either, both— his father would take him to the edge of the water at Sirion and ask him, “What do you see?”

“I see waves,” Eärendil would reply. “Tall waves like the towers of Gondolin-that-was.”

“What more?”

Eärendil would scrunch his freckled face and gaze with a critical eye. “The current along the north jetty is strong today,” he might say, or else, “there will be good fishing this week.”

His father would smile back and clasp his son’s shoulders. “Do you know what I see?” he would ask, and though the answer was always the same, little Eärendil would always chorus, “What do you see, father?”

“I see the horizon,” Tuor would say. Even as a boy, Eärendil knew deep in his sinew that what Tuor really meant was, “I see my doom.”

For all his mother Idril’s fairness, Eärendil was a gangly, freckled child. He tanned leather-dark in the sun, his tow-colored hair bleached gold and his feet perpetually covered in sand. As a child, he spared little thought for the stars. It was the ocean, always the ocean that called to him as to his father, and with it the sun and the sand and the salt.

He played with toy boats in the river. They were roughly hewn by elvish standards and impossibly detailed by human ones. Eärendil would set them in the river and watch their small sails unfurl. Then he would race along the river banks as his boats were dragged, inevitably, inexorably, out towards Sirion’s open mouth.

Usually, Eärendil retrieved his toys before they were pulled out to sea. Supplies were stretched thin among the refugees at the Havens, and even a hína knew better than to waste. Yet sometimes, when the current was too strong or the waters too swift, Eärendil would watch as his little boats floated out to sea beyond sight. He would watch them disappear and he would wonder where they were going, and if he would ever follow them.

Years later, when he was a man grown and Tuor stooped and weary, Eärendil worked beside his father to build the ship Eärrámë, roughly hewn and finely detailed. Eärendil did not question his father’s need for a ship. He did not know then— and would not know for several months yet— that it was built to carry his father and mother to the horizon, to their doom.

Tuor and Idril set sail in the late afternoon, as the shadows were beginning to lengthen. The sun in the west was golden by the time Eärrámë finally passed beyond sight of Eärendil’s half-elven eyes. By that time, the party that had gathered to wish their lord and lady farewell had largely dispersed. Yet Eärendil remained at the water’s edge, watching as sunset faded to night and the stars began to appear in the sky. Only Elwing waited with him.

Eärendil had known Elwing since he was first brought to the Havens, nearly as long ago as he could recall. In appearance she was his opposite: petite and fair where he was rough and tanned. Yet in all other respects, Eärendil and Elwing were just alike. They were the only two peredhel at Sirion, perhaps in all the world. Their strides matched one another in growth and maturation as no one else’s ever could. They could not help loving one another; for they fit together as two halves of a clam shell.

Elwing waited beside Eärendil all night long after his parents passed beyond the horizon. She was quiet for a while, and then presently she began to name the stars.

“There’s Alcarinquë,” she whispered, pointing. “Ele! How bright it is. And there is Luinil, blue and steadfast. I think it would be impossible to lose one’s way on a night as bright as this.”

With Idril and Tuor gone, their son soon took up their mantle as leader of Sirion, with Elwing beside him. They married quietly, for to them it seemed as though they had always been of one body, one kind. As inexorable as the tide, their union; and perhaps also their doom.

Yet now that he was grown, Eärendil’s mariner-heart could not content itself with toy boats and river-mouths. The ocean called to him in the voice of many waters, and so, on another starlit night, Eärendil crept out of bed and to the shed where Tuor had hammered and sanded and built Eärrámë. It was there that Elwing found him come morning.

“You’re building another ship,” she murmured, coming up beside her husband where constellations of sawdust hung in the air. “Where are you going?”

Taking her hand, Eärendil led his second self out to the shore, where the first dawn light lapped gray on the water’s surface. “Tell me, Elwing,” he murmured. “What do you see?”

In the late nights that followed, Eärendil showed his wife how to lob off the edges of the wood; how to cut and sand and shape the it into something that resembled a roughly hewn ship. He took her small hand in his own large, freckled ones and guided the tools along the wood. Elwing helped her husband build his ship; but in the wee dawn hours when they returned to bed together, she would clutch his arms tightly, leaving tiny, crescent-moon divots when she released him.

A fingernail moon was etched against the western sky when Vingilot made its first voyage. In truth, Eärendil was not thinking of Valinor when he left, nor even of his mother and father: all he could hear was the echoing sound of deep crying out to deep.

At sea, his heart was calm. Eärendil navigated by the stars, charting an all but arbitrary course across the waters. He came back to Elwing a week later, a little more tanned and freckled, his hair a little more sun-bleached. He tasted like salt when Elwing kissed him. She tasted like starlight, like home.

She found him at the dock several nights later, tending to Vingilot’s rigging. “You’re leaving again, aren’t you?” she murmured, and gripped his arms with her fingernails.

At sea, Eärendil dreamed of light far off in the west. He dreamed of rivers opening their mouths to the sea, of monsters roving through the deep, but always there was the strange light that shone off in the distance. Night by night, it grew nearer. He would wake with a fierce, frenzied look in his eyes that frightened his three shipmates. Eärendil wondered, sometimes, if this was how his father felt when Ulmo first spoke to him.

“Where are you going?” Elwing asked him again.

“There’s a light in the West,” said Eärendil. “I am going to find it.”

“Valinor?”

“Not Valinor. A star.”

II. Fingernail divots

Elwing was sister to twin brothers and mother to twin sons. She knew about loving helplessly; about holding on and letting go.

“Mariner’s wives are always widows,” a human woman warned. “Their husbands go where they cannot follow.”

“I know it,” said Elwing.

Her husband left, and he returned. At home, Elwing sank her fingernails into his arms, his shoulders, his back. She left crescent divots wherever she touched him. Sometimes, she drew blood.

Eärendil never complained. He knew that Elwing had to hold on tight, in order to let him go again.

She bore their sons while Eärendil was away on one of his voyages. Because Elwing and her husband were both peredhel, their children would be something new. They came too soon for elves and too late for men. How could their father have known that they were being born, but that he had not strayed from Sirion?

The pain of childbirth was greater for Elwing than it had been for her Sindarin midwife, or either of her full-blooded elvish handmaids. Human women suffered in childbirth, doubly so when they bore twins. It was the silmaril that carried her through all the long, painful hours of her labor.

The sacred jewel for which Elwings parents had died never left her person. She clutched it as a man clutches a war-prize, knowing it has been paid for in blood. On the childbed, she held it so tight it left its imprint on her hand. She gazed at the bloodstained jewel and saw only sacred starlight.

Her pain lessoned a little. Beauty was an anesthetic, of a kind. Elwing’s heart swelled with supernatural hope, and soon she was holding two little sons in her arms. She had paid for them in blood too.

Eärendil came home late at night a week later, when the moon was eggshell-large in the sky. Elwing was holding the twins in her arms when he opened the door. She looked up when she heard the latch.

"Your children are born," said Elwing. "Elros. Elrond."

"The sea and the stars," her husband answered. He studied them, with love and fear of loss all writ across his face.

"The sea and the stars," Elwing echoed back. The two great lovers with which she would always share her husband.

The babes were holding each other tight in her arms: mindless, instinctual, because they had never been apart. It was ironic, in the end. The stars endure forever. The waves roll in, and then they go back to the sea. Her babies would let each other go, in time; just as their mother would let them both go one bloody day, very soon

"You're going to run," Elwing said, gentle and firm as she knelt in the the nursery before her two little boys with her hands on their shoulders.

“Ama, you’re hurting me,” Elros whispered. She looked down. She was gripping him tight, so tight. There were fingernail divots on his shoulders.

“I’m sorry, beloved,” Elwing said. With effort, she released both boys’ shoulders. "You're going to run, and you're going to hold hands. Tight as you can, do you understand? You're not to release one another for anything in the world."

Her sons nodded: Elrond solemn, Elros stubborn. Elwing wrapped her arms around their small bodies one more time and squeezed them, not too tight. She released them. They ran.

Outside, Elwing clutched the silmaril until it hurt; until her hand bled where its facets had cut her. All her family before her had died for that jewel, to keep it from other hands. It was obsession, and beauty, and hope. It was the star that Eärendil searched for on his far-flung sea voyages. It would save Middle Earth one day, when a little hobbit named Frodo would raise a phial of its captured light and shout her husbands name.

Elwing knew about holding on, and about letting go.

She made for the cliffs.

III. The speed of light in a vacuum

The ocean of the heavens was like the oceans of the earth, except in all the ways in which it was not. Vingilot rocked smooth and rhythmic on cosmic waves and occasionally it rolled from side to side as though tossed by storms. Eärendil navigated by the stars, and by the light of the silmaril studied his maps and charts. The ocean of the heavens was always different, for all that the stars stayed the same.

When he’d first landed in Valinor, Eärendil had been all but certain that the Valar would destroy him. He’d been sailing west a long time by then, seeking after that elusive star; yet he knew, like his father before him, that the horizon was also his doom. It was only that last, desperate hope that carried him to Valinor’s shore: that perhaps, before they struck him dead, Ulmo or Nienna or Varda would at least hear his pleas and understand.

Eärendil did not want Elwing to follow him to shore. He wanted his wife to live, live and find their sons, if by some grace they had survived. But Elwing had been letting him go for as long as the ocean had gripped him. Only at the last, at the forbidden shore of the sacred isle, did she finally leap into the shallow water and go running after her husband, reaching for his hand.

The silmaril should have been blinding, set between his eyes as it was. When Eärendil took it from his head and studied it, its brightness put all of heaven’s stars to shame. Yet when he looked out from his little ship, his eyes were clear. On the ocean of the heavens, Eärendil half-elven leaned over Vingilot’s rail and glimpsed interstellar clouds that billowed with color and brightness. Towering and fae they were, and his were the only eyes born of Arda ever to have seen them up close.

Eönwë had greeted him, “Hail Eärendil, the longed for that cometh beyond hope, bearer of light before the Sun and Moon.” It was a greeting unlike anything Eärendil could have expected. It changed him utterly.

In the dreams that followed, the voice of the sea was quiet; a lilting lullaby rather than the fierce, inevitable call it had been for so many years. Now, now it was starlight that ran through his heart like lightning. Now the sky, not the sea, became his doom.

When Vingilot passed through the Door of Night each morn, Elwing’s birds were always the first creatures to greet him. Gulls and osprey, albatrosses and terns circled round his mast and cried out in high, fair voices, Good morning! Welcome home! in the language of birds. Then, at last, Eärendil would catch sight of his wife’s feathered wings, white and silver-gray. She was only a speck at first, but his eyes were elven-strong. When Elwing came into sight, Eärendil would cry “Utúlie'n aurë!” “Day has come!” as he rushed to the prow of the ship. Elwing would reply in clear, glorious birdsong, and then she would alight on the deck and fall at once into Eärendil’s arms.

When at last they broke their embrace, Eärendil was always covered in bits of feather and Elwing in glittering stardust. They would both laugh the way only exiles do as Eärendil steered his hallowed ship into the waters of day. Elwing would run her hands over Vingilot’s paint, which she herself had long ago brushed onto its beams. She would look at her husband, so much less tan and freckled than he was in their youth, and he would kiss her tasting of plasma, with lightning in his eyes.

When Manwë had summoned them to Valimar, Eärendil told Elwing, “Choose thou.” She chose the Eldar, and for that choice, Eärendil was given a hundred thousand million nights of sailing through the heavens’ ocean. The stars sang to him, burning at Eärendil’s heart with a kind of beautiful, terrible fire that scorched as much as it overwhelmed him with joyous longing. They carried him away from Elwing, for all that she gripped him tight.

Before he set sail, Eärendil spent one last night with his wife in his arms. “Our parting will not be long,” he whispered, holding her tight to his freckled shoulder. “The Lady Elbereth told me. Light traveling through the void is the fastest thing in all Eä.”

IV. High Hope

Hobbits were simpler folk than elves. When Frodo’s heart pulled him away from the Shire, there was no obsession in it. It was only love for his uncle, his cousins, his friends that made him go; only duty; only courage. Only that.

Galadriel gave him a phial of starlight, and it was a gentle, desperate thing. She didn’t tell him that the star which had cast it had been the cause of more bloodshed than any other bright and beautiful thing in their world. She only called it hope.

More than anything, Frodo longed for hope.

He could feel himself coming unraveled, drawing close to Mordor. He was stripped bare and hollowed out, and all his longings turned ill by the bit of metal that hung around his neck. Yet in his cloak, cradled close to his heart: starlight.

In the depths of the earth, Frodo pulled the star-glass from his bosom, and the Star of High Hope—Eärendil’s star—shone about the pit. The longed for that cometh beyond hope, Eönwë had said. Frodo did not know those words, but he felt them deep in his sinews.

Eärendil stepped down from his high sunset paths with the last silmaril upon his brow. He stood beside Frodo in that cave where nothing lovely ever came, casting rays of lightning into the dark till it was as sun-soaked as the Havens of Sirion. Hope, he murmured in Frodo’s ear, the stars. The sea.

Frodo gasped, and with a voice that came from somewhere beyond him he cried out, “Aiya Eärendil elenion ancalima!” The very darkness trembled at his words. Eärendil smiled.

Yet from close by, Sam watched helpless as Shelob came and snatched Frodo away. Sam would have dug crescent moons into Frodo’s arms, had they been within reach. As it was, he could only pick up the star-glass where his master had dropped it and go running after him.

#i love them okay?#earendil and elwing are easily my favorite story in the silm #just the perfect culmination of the whole thing #and i love how their story echoes into lotr #i hope i did them justice #Aurë entuluva!#Aurë entuluva #can never remember if i have an exclaimation point in that tag #i will not say the day is done #tolkien legendarium #leah stories #pontifications and creations

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