#i've been reading a lot of mun's stuff so i'm sure that impacted who i wrote them

[lordgrimwing]

Circa early TA 2500

Celebrían loves her star-dust husband. 

She’d loved him since she first saw him—or felt something special at least, even if it had taken her a few years to realize the depth of those feelings. She hadn’t said anything at first, of course; neither had he, though it wasn’t long into their courtship before he admitted (blushing and so sweetly shy for someone nearly four hundred years her senior) as much to her. She’d stayed silent at first because she thought it was a youthful fancy, something she would forget after a few months of knowing and working beside him, and later because he was her mother’s dear friend and Galadriel certainly would not approve (she’d been wrong on that last point, at least once her mother got used to the idea). Now, there was nothing stopping her from sharing her love every day, every moment.

He had an ageless kind of quality about him. His agelessness went beyond the classical elven beauty that went unchanged by time as the centuries rolled ever onward. At first, she was hard pressed to describe precisely what that meant. After so many years of watching how his body changed with the passing time in a way no elf’s ever would, she found the words: he was ageless as the constellations; ageless as the stars that shone before the sun and the moon, before the Trees or the Lamps; ageless as Ilúvatar’s Music.

And sometimes, the divine shines through.

***

Celebrían and Elrond are in bed; she is sitting, sketching the crescent moon as it sails toward the far end of the hidden valley while he sleeps beside her. The short summer night is a few hours away from drawing the nocturnal orchestra to a close, and she listens as the sounds of birds and insects shifts toward diurnal patterns. Her charcoal whispers as she drags it softly over the linen page, filling in the last details.

She has many pages filled with drawings like this one. She never grows tired of the view across Imladris from her bed, and she likes to have a little something to keep er hands occupied on nights when she wishes to stay with her husband but has no need of sleep herself. She will show him the sketch when he wakes and tell him all about the pair of bats that play-chased each other outside while she worked.

The mattress shifts. Her hand stills as she looks over at Elrond.

He is still asleep, dark hair pooled around his head. Stars blink in his hair, weaving in and out of existence with each breath as they are so want to do these days when he cannot be troubled to hide them (it hadn’t been like that when they married. Back then, if he did not choose to share his light then it stayed hidden under his skin for the most part, and when he came to Ereinion’s court, he could not choose one way or the other, it merely happened—sometimes at very inopportune moments, which she wishes she could have seen). He sighs in his sleep and twitches.

She watches. Mannish sleep is cyclical, she’s learned, guessing he is entering the phase when his body can move but is not ready to wake up yet. She spent many nights charting the peculiar cycle and knows it well. He should wake in about an hour, perhaps an hour and a half if they are lucky. His sleep had been troubled as of late, and she’d hoped her presence would deter whatever half-forgotten memories were plaguing his rest. She sooths the back of her hand across his forehead as his breath speeds up, brushing their fëar together as she does to share the calmness of her spirit.

He seems to settle after that. For a minute, she thinks that is the end of it, that all will stay calm until he wakes, rested and happy.

Celebrían should know better by now than to tempt Doom, but she is ever optimistic.

A minute draws into two draws into five. She turns back to her drawing, picking up the charcoal stick.

A twitch of his arm and a shiver against her fëa are the only warnings before Elrond is struggling back into wakefulness, gasping like one half-drowned and fighting against the sheets to escape their confines.

Art entirely discarded, she turns back to him, pulling the bed cover down as he blinks, unfocused and shaking. Light pours from behind star-strewn eyes, leaks from the lines in his skin as he sits up. Fireflies flash in each ragged exhale. In the panicked moments between sleep and full consciousness, his elven veneer is thin and brittle.

“Elrond,” she murmurs to him. When she reaches for him, she finds his fëa has completely retreated behind thorny defenses thicker than any briar growing in Middle-earth. She doesn’t touch him yet; his heart is beating like that of a panicked deer, and she may only startle him further. “Peace, Elrond. Peace. I am here.”

Words and spirit infused with all the calm assurance and love she could pour into them, she let her presence wash over him, gentle and safe.

“Celebrían?” The whispered word comes out of his mouth half broken on a sob and repeats off the walls as though they are in a cavern. He reaches out blindly for her.

She takes his hands in hers. “Yes, love, I’m here. We are in Imladris. All is well.”

He repeats her name as he cries. Relief so thick it’s almost cloying fills the space around them. She tries to hug him, but he grips her hands tighter to stop her from moving them away from his. Instead, she rests her chin on his head, tucking him against her as she murmurs sweet nothing to him until he calms. Stars prick her skin like forgotten needles.

“Was it Sight?” She asked at last when he’d dried his face and was no longer leaking light like it would all burst out of him at any moment.

“A nightmare,” he says firmly, resolutely. He repeats the words again with a shudder.

“Of the children?”

It isn’t uncommon when Elladan and Elrohir went off traveling, as they were now, for Elrond’s sleeping mind to mix the twins into his memories of things that had or might have happened to his own twin brother and himself in war-torn Beleriand. Arwen, too, is not spared from his terrors. The great evils of that time are long banished, but that detail is easily forgotten in the throes of a nightmare.

“Orcs,” he shudders but tells her no more.

She refrains from pushing him. She knows he will tell her more if needed to rid himself of the last of the dream. She strokes his stary hair as they sit entwined, waiting for the sun to rise.

[godstrain]

mun questions: 3, 7, 13

mun questions (accepting)

3. whose writing has impacted your writing style the most? (you can choose anyone! famous writer or not.)

by far, my biggest writing inspiration ever has been j.r.r. tolkien. from childhood, i've been reading his stuff. i admire his worldbuilding and just how detailed everything is. sure, my friends joke about me writing silmarillions for all my blogs, but it's pretty legit.

7. describe your favorite relationship dynamic. (can be any kind, platonic, romantic, familial, antagonistic, etc.)

ougheheue uh... i think that varies between my writing partners and what works best. in the end, i like when things make sense. when they aren't forced. whatever that relationship may be! it also varies by character that i'm writing- i'm aware that most relationships with wesker are just strained and antagonistic due to how he behaves, and any positive relationships will take time to build, but that's the best part!

13. what themes/motifs do you hope other people notice most about your character?

wesker's a disaster of a man. i know he's also uhh the funniest character in RE because we also have "chris? stop it" as a LEGIT line thats canon dialogue. most of his canon dialogue is rather campy and that's why he has that charm. but on the other hand, he's a man-made monster who has decided that humanity just has to go. he's a bio-terrorist who throws away anyone who isn't useful to him, and he's closed his heart because why have strings attached when people are just going to die?

i like exploring the "why" of a character's motives. the things that built him up to be this, when he could've been anything else if left to grow up not in spencer's shadow- i work as a nurse in the mental health field, and one of the aspects i am most interested in is the impact of trauma on behavior. not everyone responds the same.

looping back to the previous answer about realism, it's that i want people to get a view of a character that is well rounded without veering too far from what we're given. to not excuse, but to shed light on the thought process. to show that unfortunately, anyone could be wesker in trauma response. i want to allow my readers to learn about reality and the impact of abuse and allow this to be a cautionary tale. yeah, humans hurt each other a lot, we fuck up a lot, but there are other paths.

i also like exploring the healing process, or the attempts at the healing process. the harsh truth of the world is that some damage is too great to heal. it becomes baseline, but truly, you'd be shocked at the impact of even one person holding out their hand to say "ok, let's give you a chance to experience positive things when you've never had that before" can do. i just want people to learn, and if not from my writing, then from the writing of others- we should better ourselves at every turn so that we may become kinder and wiser.