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"You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth."
- Khalil Gibran
The revelry is in full swing by the time Elrond sidles through the crowd and stands behind him, holding out a glass of mulled wine. Thranduil is sitting at a table alone, in a state of mild confusion that seems difficult to shake these days. The ring has been destroyed, Legolas returned, Aragorn crowned and last week wed to Elrond's daughter. The two kingdoms of Men had decided to hold the raucous reception in Rohan upon the plains, and though they had invited far too many people for Thranduil to enjoy any aspect of the celebration — he couldn't not go.
The long war, the defense of Mirkwood, all of it still sits somewhat heavy in him. The world has been put to rights, yes, and his son has played an enormous part in it, but still a wariness lingers in Thranduil. A secret fear that orcs and spiders and other ill omens still linger in places, smaller and diminished but still extant. Obsolete relics of a time when cold, implacable evil was commonplace.
There are times these days, such as now, when Thranduil feels like something of an obsolete relic himself.
Thranduil hears the rustle of robes before he sees his fellow obsolete relic grinning as he wound his way through the crowd towards him, and is reminded of his firm-held opinion. That the only reason Elrond has avoided fading across the series of misfortunes that had been his life, was because he would make a terribly incompetent ghost, always too sincere and earnest and smiley to be much good at haunting.
"Your daughter's tiara is the gaudiest thing I have ever seen," he says in lieu of a greeting, and moves aside to make room for the other to sit down. "And where have you been? This is the first wedding reception I have been to where the father of the bride has disappeared for hours on end."
"Have you been to many Mannish wedding receptions?" Elrond winks, and nudges Thranduil with the goblet until he accepts it, rather ungraciously. "I did not disappear, my friend. Our horses were unsettled, possibly due to the completely different environment in comparison to their normal lodgings in Imladris. And whilst I do not think warhorses should be allowed to rule the roost, Glorfindel can and would lead a mutiny against me had I let his Asfaloth run off. It was a rather difficult task, so time ran away from me."
"I almost forgot about your insufferable tendency to over-explain everything," Thranduil rolls his eyes. "And so what is your defense when it comes to letting your daughter wear that veritable helmet on her head?"
Elrond laughs.
"Unfortunately, the tiara was Celeborn's doing," he admits, fishing out a bit of lemongrass from the wine. "Belonged to some ancestor or the other. I have a sneaking suspicion it might have belonged to you-know-who, but I have no method of confirming such assumptions."
"Ah, Luthien? A rather clever joke on Celeborn's part, I commend him. Though you are no Thingol. Possibly something cheaper, perhaps a counterfeit."
"I am starting to think you and my children are all conspiring against me," Elrond bites his cheek to avoid smiling. "Just yesterday, Elladan referred to me as 'Thingol-plated' like I was a dwarven bracelet."
(Elrond felt Thingol-plated, frankly, when his daughter's wedding day had dawned with a pure white sky brighter than dragonfire and everybody around him kept saying it was a miracle, a good omen, a blessing.
Sometimes the sky just did that, he raged to himself. Sometimes it just flares and lights everything up like the world is ending. He was angry at them all for playing Apocalypse, for wearing the costume of a dying world. It felt almost insulting.
For some of us, he thought viciously, the world is ending. Some of us are left breathing and whole, not knowing what to do in the aftermath.
He did not voice these thoughts. He placed Arwen's hand in Estel's. Estel's features had been cast in deep shadow where he stood, his hand clasped in her hand. Arwen was pale as moonlight, looking above her to the white sky. Elrond moved his own hand back, stepped back and watched the two embrace on the bleached-white stone.
He was reminded of all the old stories. Maiar and Ainur and the years before the sun. Under the tree, white flowers falling around their faces, it was easy to believe the two of them were something higher, something divine. Perhaps he too needed to believe such things. Perhaps it would have convinced him that he was there as father to the bride, and not the primary witness to a suicide pact.)
Thranduil squints at the half-elf. Laugh lines and crow’s feet and a small pink scar hidden under his temple. He's smiling as he watches Aragorn, Legolas and his twins organise some sort of archery contest, except they are all a few pints deep and would certainly end up taking someone's eye out.
“You look terrible, like something any self-respecting farmer would drown," Thranduil says, though there's a slight concern in his voice. "Is it grief?"
"Partly, yes," says Elrond, before admitting with a rueful smile: "Though the cut is from almost cracking my head open on my headboard waking up this morning. I forget the kings of men do genuinely enjoy miserable wooden furniture."
Thranduil laughs through his nose but continues scrutinising the other. There's a sadness in him; of course there is. A sadness that comes from dressing alone for his daughter's wedding in the woodsmoke and warmth of his room, buttoning his own collar, wearing whatever he wants to because there is nobody to match with. Pulling loose threads from the cuffs. A sadness as he walks both his children to the aisle alone, as he braids his own hair instead of sitting on the floor leaning against his wife's knee, taking turns. Thranduil too knows such lonely routines.
Still, Elrond is smiling fondly, even laughing as the game of archery gets rowdier and more hazardous. It is the trait Thranduil finds most aggravating in him. His ability to sniff out a silver lining in even the darkest cloud.
Thranduil first met Elrond on a battlefield under the slopes of Orodruin, the final day of the last alliance. He was bloody up to his elbows in the chest cavity of some poor dying thing. Moving with purpose in the frantic hubbub of the infirmary tent - a blur of salvation amid the screams, a soothing balm over charred flesh. Standing amid all that death and blood. Watching him bark orders, wipe sweat from his brow with his sleeve, take instrument after herb after scalpel in a desperate attempt to try and bring dead men back to life so they could go out and die again.
And even in the midst of all that, there had been something divine about him, his clear grey eyes sparkling with life even as he consoled the dying man. Thranduil had been surprised, later, to learn that Elrond was born in Middle-Earth and had never set foot in Valinor. He looked, in that moment, like someone who had seen the trees, someone from the world they left behind, someone who still had passion and optimism and hadn’t been worn down by the madness of Middle Earth yet.
Thranduil hadn’t seen that for a long time at that point, and it was hard to look away from. It didn't inspire him, not really. It made him feel more weary, more exhausted — more inadequate. He hated Elrond for it, and he hated himself for hating him for it.
It is different now, of course.
Thranduil hears a sniff, and is about to make a pithy comment about Peredhel being knocked off cliffs by the common cold. But he looks closer, and sympathy twists in him hotter than bile. The Lord of Imladris seems perfectly composed, even happy, at peace and chortling at the shooting game. But from up close, he sees his friend's eyes are tinged pink, swollen, and the cuff of his robe wet. He has clearly been crying for some time, has clearly used the unsettled horses as a ruse. Thranduil grits his teeth — the image of Elrond indulging in quiet tears, alone in a stable as a wedding reception went on, brings a sharp, unexpected heat to his own eyes.
He doesn't comment upon it. Thranduil is not the kind of elf who enjoys dissecting emotional upheavals over a glass of wine. All he does is take a handkerchief from his pocket and pass it over, silent.
"Oh dear," says Elrond mildly, accepting it. "Could you tell? I was hoping it wasn't obvious — I didn't want to upset Arwen."
Thranduil doesn't deign to answer, and instead says stiffly: "if the warhorses are unsettled again, call on me,if you will allow me to accompany you. I am not too practised with the steeds of Imladris, but I can help you soothe them. You — you should not be alone."
"Ai, mellon nin," Elrond's voice cracks, and he sniffs again. "Thank you. That is very kind."
"For the Valar's sake, blow your damned nose," the Elvenking says in response, awkwardness making him brusque. "Don't mention it. In fact, stop talking. Don't say anything."
"She and I will be parting in a week," Elrond finds himself musing absently, completely oblivious to the virtues of silence. "We have decided to put a date on it to… to make sure we go through with it, I suppose."
Thranduil wants to give Elrond a sharp retort. Something-something scheduling sundering in his diary, micromanaging misery, a little quip about levying taxation on tragedy. But he cannot bring himself to do it. The bite has gone out of the two of them with age, with children and wars and losing far too many things. Their debts to each other are old and complicated, and he hesitates to press too far beyond the fragile surface.
He can feel the sadness now, sharp and bright as sunlight, and all he thinks of is how practised Elrond is at hiding such bitterness, most of the time. How he is currently letting him see it. How he trusts Thranduil with the weight of it.
"That must be…" Thranduil sighs. He can’t name it. Legolas was always better at words. Not a poet, no, nothing so ridiculous and - dare he say it, Imladrisesque - but his son always has had a predilection for unexpected, wondrous and unprecedented and profound words. Legolas would be able to find words for a friend sitting beside him, pencilling ruining my life into his diary.
"That must be…" Thranduil tries again, and then lights on a word. "That is… a new expression Legolas used before me the other week, one he apparently picked up from his new Dwarven friend."
"Oh?"
Thranduil wrinkles his nose, and then gives him a rare full smile: "like pissing horse-shite."
Elrond blinks at him for a second, not understanding, which Thranduil understands, because he himself would not have believed he had just said that, just five minutes ago. And then Elrond presses a hand to his mouth and actually wheezes with laughter, choking out: "it is indeed like pissing horse-shite."
Thranduil places a hand on his back. A sigh settles heavy and then disperses in Elrond's chest. The hand surprises him, but he leans in rather than away, smiling.
The castle is built on a hill but apart from that, Edoras is a flat place, realises Elrond. Plains and heather. Fields of brown grass. There will be no varied horizon for Arwen and Estel to disappear behind, no mountains in this basin county except here atthe fringes. It will be like they simply disappear. Swallowed up entirely by distance and a blank grey sea.
Thranduil wonders how he would feel if it were his boy. If it were his boy who was choosing to remain, choosing to sunder himself for the love of another. Even the thought of it sears like dragonfire.
“Are you alright?” Elrond is saying to him in turn, just as quiet.
Thranduil shrugs.
"Do you ever wonder if you did right by them?" he asks, watching Legolas bicker with one of Elrond's twins. "Whether you have prepared them adequately for the cruelty of this world? Sometimes I feel as if I have failed. Sometimes I fear the world will break my boy. Do you?"
“Every day,” says Elrond. The horizon goes on and on and on. "But they can see this world through. I believe they can."
"And us? What about us — do we just leave the world to them? What do you think our role is now? Artefact, relic or monument?"
"I cannot be sure of that part. Here we are, still, all these years after our worlds have ended, be it in Beleriand or Sirion or Imladris. And there is no one left to steer the ship but our children, whom we may or may not have failed. And nothing left to do but turn around and face whatever awaits us at the end."
"If only there were a metric to measure how badly one has or has not failed their children," Thranduil says dryly yet sincerely. "We could tally our scores, calculate the possibility of utopia, count the days to Dagor Dagorath."
"Oh, I am under no qualms about whether or not I have failed my children," laughs Elrond. "I have. I have failed them countless times. All parents fail their children. But I have made peace with such knowledge."
"You? You could never fail your children. You are incapable of such a thing," scoffs Thranduil, suddenly heated. The admittance sits bitter on his tongue.
Elrond looks dumbfounded. Both by the statement, and because he knows how difficult it must have been for one as prideful as Thranduil to even admit such a thing. But Thranduil is not offering empty comfort. He does not give a damn whether or not Elrond is comforted. He says it only because he is right.
He remembers a visit to Imladris when Aragorn was a toddler, two or three years old, and his utter horror when he came across Elrond on all fours in his library with the child riding on his back, holding on to his collar like a very small lord from Rohan.
"Elrond, have you gone mad?" he remembers exclaiming, aghast at the sight. "What are you doing? There is a delegation from the House of Durin two floors down and you are — you are —"
"This is horse," provided the child helpfully. And then perhaps slightly less helpfully: "you silly elf."
"My apologies, Thranduil," Elrond had laughed from his undignified position on the floor. "Don't take it to heart, he's been on a roll with the insults these last few weeks. Called Glorfindel ugly hairy girl last week and I am certain he wept over it. Estel, you cannot call people silly. That is not kind."
"But he's not know horse!" exclaimed Estel, and then kicked his foster father right where spurs would have been. "You silly horse."
"Elrond, what in the world are you doing?" Thranduil had repeated, completely ignoring the child and wondering if this was the other pathway widowers took that he himself managed to avoid — a total embrace of insanity.
"Oh, Estel here was a little upset, I thought I'd tire him out somewhat before sending him down to his mother," the half-elf had explained, rolling over deftly like a cat and scooping the toddler into his arms as he stood. "My sons and Glorfindel went out hunting and of course, our little friend here could not accompany them, and he was rather sad about it. So, I told him he could ride a better horse than Asfaloth and, well, here we are!"
"Good horse, Ada," Estel offered, patting the elf's face. He glared at Thranduil, whom he presumably blamed for the game ending. "Silly elf."
"Good horse, am I? High praise! The last time we played this game, you told me I was the worst horse you'd ever been on!" Elrond bumped noses with the child, chucked him under the chin. "Do you remember that, hmm?"
"And I bited you," said Estel sweetly, back to being helpful. "And stealed your hair. You 'member, Ada?"
"Yes, I remember, you did indeed yank out some of my hair," Elrond shifted the child onto his other hip and winked at Thranduil. "I am certain you must be thinking that all the children of Mirkwood are much, much better brought up than our little hellraiser here, are you not?"
Thranduil blinked, feeling rather helpless and discomfited, as though the ground was yanked from under his feet by this eccentric approach to parenthood. He considered his words carefully, before settling on his first choice:
"What is wrong with you?"
"Oh," Elrond had shrugged, brushing off his robes and laughing sheepishly. "Too much to get into now."
Thranduil had chalked it up to one of Elrond's deranged little idiosyncrasies, something-something raised by kinslayers, but found the image impossible to shake, found himself consumed by a strange, corrosive feeling. It took him a while — years, actually, to put a name to it.
Envy.
Not because the Lord of Imladris played at horses on the floor with his son, no, Thranduil would truly throw himself off Caradhras before he walked around on his hands and knees in front of a foreign lord. And he truly did believe that the Lord of Imladris' notoriously soft touch with child-rearing was why every single creature raised in that godforsaken household was equally notorious for their terrible, borderline feral behaviour.
No, it wasn't the act itself. It was rather how easy it seemed to come to Elrond. How natural, how at ease he had looked, crawling around the floor steered by a toddler. How smoothly his mind seemed to work when it came to fatherhood — how he saw an upset child and immediately threw away all pretence, dedicated himself to comforting it at any cost to his dignity. How fondly he said oh, yes, I remember you yanked out my hair and tickled the child's nose.
Thranduil had felt so awkward, standing there.
It was not that he thought himself a bad father, no, not at all. It was more that he had to work towards it every day: that it did not come as naturally as breathing to him, that he had to think and think twice about every decision he made concerning fatherhood.
But now, no more jealousy curls within him: every last drop has been replaced by a deep sense of unfairness. That Elrond had been a perfect father, that everyone who knew of the Eldar knew how much the terribly behaved Imladris children adored their father. Yet it is Elrond sitting here, about to part from not only one child but four. That Elrond had crawled about on countless dusty floors playing with his children, that he personally changed their soiled linens as infants instead of appointing staff to change them and yet it is him who spends his daughter's wedding reception weeping alone in the stables. This feeling, realises Thranduil, is a hundred times more unbearable than envy.
Perhaps there is no perfect route to parenthood. Perhaps Elrond too had been as lost as him. It is not the first time he has thought what a cruel world ours is. But it is the first time he thinks it about a tragedy which has nothing to do with himself.
"I'm sorry Elrond," he says lamely, because there is nothing really, that he could say about something like this. "About how it has all ended."
"But it is almost everything I wanted. The world has been put to rights, Thranduil. It is almost everything we wanted. I remind myself of that on days like this, when so much is – well — the opposite of what I wanted."
Sundering is nothing new, Elrond knows that deep down. He has been here many times over the years, when all the time he spent at war knocks at the door and takes someone away from him; picks them up and sets them down askew elsewhere. This will pass, he knows, like all the other times have passed. Elrond has never been someone who breaks apart after a parting, for all it carves up his heart. He won't break. It's just one more long dark night to get through—
Dagor-lad had passed after all, and that was the longest night. It was there he first lay eyes on Thranduil too, though it was a few hours after the latter first saw him in the medic tents.
After they extinguished Gil Galad's charred body, Elrond had sunk to the ground and Cìrdan had started to sing a prayer. His voice high, impossibly fast, almost ululating the words. Orc footsoldiers bursting back and forth around them, running like dogs on all fours, scrambling through the ground like rats.
Elrond did not join in on the prayer, did not open his mouth at all because he was deathly afraid that if he did, he would scream, or worse, vomit all over himself. Just the sick rotten stench of the orcs rank in the air, combining with the smell of burning flesh, the charred corpse of their king, of his friend. His gorge rises at the thought and he gags, swallows hard, looking away at a low hill behind the field where Oropher's archers stood.
He zeroes in on one of them, a young commander with golden hair, Oropher's son. He stood straight, uncaring of the carnage roaring around him, the men dying behind him. Elrond stared at him until his stomach settled, until the scream of sorrow within him stilled into a whisper — he used the figure as an anchor, a tether to the living world, a living future.
The archer's face was alight with concentration, his figure imbued with a sense of purpose, looking straight ahead at what his arrows pointed at, and in the waning sunlight he seemed to glow.
And just as the orcs got close enough to the archer that they almost touched him, just as Cìrdan's wailing prayer reached fever pitch, Elrond could have sworn the golden elf's arrow burst into flame.
“For a long time, I couldn't place who Legolas looks like,” Elrond leans forward, squinting at the game as the sun sank lower. "But I think I know now."
"Are we both acquainted with them?" asks Thranduil mildly.
"Intimately."
Technically speaking, that was quite a meaningless distinction. After all, Elrond and Thranduil know all the same people. For years, they’ve shared adjacent fates. Their tragedies are blood relations. He brings his hand up to Elrond's shoulder again, squeezes once and leans closer, sighing heavily.
"Ah. Yes, I know. He is the spit of his mother."
Elrond shakes his head swiftly, though not unkindly. After all, he too has always been an expert in this specific strand of foolishness.
"Then who?" asks Thranduil.
There were long years where all Elrond wanted was to turn everyone into someone else. He tried not to. He tried to keep his twin, his king, his wife, his fathers as what they were: faces in paintings, lifetimes in songs, pages in history.
But lost things have unruly lives. Have a tendency to breathe, move, find themselves in the edges of eyes before you can blink. Elros, named so for playing in the spray of a waterfall, flows through every cliff of Imladris. Celebrìan lives in every crooked grin of Arwen's. Maglor sings in every twopenny bard. There is a strange allure about living in memory: a sense of sanctuary, hidden from cruel worlds that take, take, take.
Sometimes he wishes he was more like the Elvenking. How his life would have been if he kept looking towards the future and nothing else, if he raised his children in his own image instead of seeing them as facsimiles of lost things. How his family would have looked if Elrond did not have his white whale, his desire to fix the world of all its ills.
The elven capacity for relentless memory-living, their tendency for melancholia, the kind that gapes wide in hearts, was filled or closed or locked or shoved away in Thranduil when Legolas was born. He trusts his son. His son is everything to him. Legolas will always be the Elvenking's sword to face the world with, the crest emblazoned on the back of his shield. Elrond wishes sometimes that he too had raised his children like they were futures, not pasts. Perhaps then, they would not keep running, running, running. Away from the past and hurtling towards a future, a wonderful future yet one he could not follow.
"Who does he look like?" presses Thranduil.
Edoras is neither Mirkwood nor Imladris, with their thickets of trees and monumental cliffs and libraries of memories. Edoras is a flat place. And Elrond and Thranduil: they are neither of them used to having nowhere to hide.
Elrond looks at Legolas again.
The blonde elf is trying to shoot an arrow at a glass balanced on Elladan's head. There is a look of passionate determination on his face, like this drunken gamble is worth giving his all, is worth trying his very best and leaving his mark on the world. Face tensed in concentration to shut out the din around him, Legolas pulls the bowstring back with intent, eyes blazing with confidence. The sunlight strikes off his figure, makes his arrowhead glow the white-hot of a flame.
Elrond cannot help but smile at the familiar sight.
“You, Thranduil,” he says softly. “He looks like you.”