Work Text:
The end of the world was a noisy affair, Elrond had learned.
Each day, the sea chewed up more and more of the shore like some great, gnashing beast barely held back by the straining leash of its master. A strident din heralding calamity, the earth broke apart underfoot in booming echoes that rocked the very foundations of the world. It was hard to imagine these lands had ever been mountains at all and not always a coastline, even though Elrond had seen it crumble himself – entire landmasses, peaks scraping the very stars, disintegrating into dust like dandelion pappus blown away by a child’s careless exhale. Arda Remade.
Elros had rolled his eyes. Leave it to you to make poetry out of anything. When Dagor Dagorath rolls around, you’ll be comparing it to a wilted rose. But that was what apocalypse did: baffled the senses, escaped all comprehension. The mind stuttered in the face of its enormity, the totality of it all, fumbled for the safety of metaphor when the world turned absurd and inexplicable.
Beleriand beloved, Beleriand drowned. Everything Elrond had ever known – every tree, every blade of grass, every bird, every creature, every home, every rock, every toy, every marketplace, every strip of beach, every river, every riverbank, every flower, every weed, everything, everything, everything – it was all gone, disappeared beneath the hungry waves while he was left standing on a receding shoreline, clutching at hollow attempts at poesy, like the right meter, the right turn of phrase would bring back all that was lost. A very Elvish tendency, that – at least he could content himself with the knowledge that, if nothing else, he had made his choice rightly.
Círdan assured them they were safe where they were, their tentative new settlement in no danger from the crumbling, nascent coastline that crept ever closer and lapped at their feet; they could start building more permanent structures than the patchwork tents they lived out of, always ready to move more inland at the first sight of danger. Ossë himself had directed his old friend to this region, making promises of sanctuary, but Elrond did not hold much stock in the word of higher powers. Hard to trust the hand that fed when it held also a whip. Others, not so distrustful, had already begun to call their fledgling tent-city Mithlond – the Grey Havens – and he knew well enough how quickly even the best havens went up in smoke. When he professed his fears to Elros, though, his brother brushed him off, urging him to have faith in the powers that be.
You worry too much, he said, We are safe here. Why else would Ulmo lead us hither? and Elrond wondered when his brother had begun to put such trust in the Valar. A stupid question – probably around the same time they had pulled an island out of the seafloor for him and crowned him king.
Perhaps, Elrond mused bitterly, the Valar had recycled old bits from Beleriand to fashion Elros’ new island nation. It was only efficient – here, the forests of Brethil; there, the mountains of Echoriad, the wide plains of the Gap. Maybe Elros would unearth battered shoes and drowned bones from the sands of his kingdom. An uncharitable thought, but Elrond was in an uncharitable sort of mood these days.
While his brother spent his days at Círdan’s side, preparing for the making of a great fleet that would tow his people across the sea, the Lady Galadriel took Elrond under her wing. Your foremother once taught me her arts, she had intoned solemnly, and now I shall teach you in turn. Some measure of talent he must possess to have drawn her eye and kept it, for the lady did not suffer fools; but more likely, it was grief and guilt made manifest. A retroactive atonement, the survivors’ reparation. When she looked at him with veiled and guarded eyes, it was not him she saw, but rather the faces of all loved and lost, and how could Elrond fault her for it? That was how everyone looked at him here, these exiles of Beleriand. He was a hundred ghosts crammed into the body of a half-boy half-man. Was it any wonder Elros wanted to run as far away as he could? Elrond could not fault him either.
So much blame in his hands and nowhere to put it. All he could do was take it into himself, swallow it like poison and hope he did not rot from the inside out.
Week after week, they sent out teams of scouts and cartographers to survey the land, and Elrond joined them as often as he was able. There, amongst the uncharted forests and rushing rivers, lived a frisson of excitement, of what, one day, might even grow into joy. Beauty existed yet in this world, not all had been tainted by the Shadow, not all was destroyed. Dwelling in this new and strange land were peoples he had never met, languages he had never heard – so much to learn, so much to find, and if he must do it alone instead of as one half of a pair, then so be it. That too he could learn: how to breathe without accompaniment, how to limp onwards into eternity, a forever crippled creature.
Lord Celeborn was of great help in their endeavours: this land was not unknown to him. In the days before Morgoth’s return, he had told Elrond, before the Girdle was set, I spent some time east of the Ered Luin amongst my mother’s people.
“There is a vast range of mountains,” he murmured to him as Elrond sat at his feet, parting his hair carefully to set therein the braids Elrond had never learned to weave, “further east of here. A great many of our forefathers were felled there during the March. And beyond it, woods of great beauty – so splendid many of our people wished never to leave and abandoned the journey westwards to live amongst them evermore. If all is well, we should still have kin in those lands.”
All was seldom well in Elrond’s experience, but he kept that to himself.
Lord Celeborn was very kind to them, the long-lost grandsons of his niece, but he could not quite hide the flinch in his eyes whenever they alighted upon Elrond. Still, he soldiered on stubbornly, on his lips always a we, always an our people, like Elrond was not an impostor, a traitor. Like he deserved to be counted as one of them when hidden under the blood of Elu Thingol lurked the mind of a Noldor.
Like he had not sold out his people for a warm blanket and a sweet song.
Their’s was a familiar routine by now: most nights, after a day spent rushing around camp or in the tutelage of Lady Galadriel, Elrond would retire to sit by Celeborn’s feet in front of a roaring fire and his kinsman would teach him the ways of their people – how to wear his hair in the styles of the Sindar, the old histories Elrond should have known but didn’t. Often, he would pull him up and guide him patiently through the dances of Doriath until his feet flew across the ground, nimble and fleet as a gazelle in flight, flowers sprouting in his wake like little starbursts of light against the dark grass. In an unbroken chain, for time eternal, the traditions of their people had been passed along thus, Celebron assured him, transmitted orally down the generations under Vard– Elbereth’s star-spangled veil, and if Elrond was older by far than was usual, neither made mention of it.
But some nights, when the grief lay quiet and somnolent, Celeborn would teach him nothing at all and instead, in low, bleeding tones, tell him stories of his grandmother and her wild childhood spent racing amongst the trees of Neldoreth. For a long time, all Elrond had ever known of Nimloth was how she died – badly – and now quietly, he populated the image of her corpse with all the little details her uncle brought to life for him under a velvet sky. The queen, lying dead in her throne-room with skewed limbs, blood in her punctured lungs, had once been a child who ate dirt and leaves and spilled sticky jam all over Thingol’s best robes. She had laughed and loved and lusted, had dreams and ambitions and favourite colours, and now all of it, everything she had ever been, was dust on the seafloor.
Of Lúthien too, Celeborn spoke with halting tongue. You take after her, he told Elrond once after a night with too much drink, as though Elrond had not known it already. As though the knowledge was not there, in every blanched face that turned away at the sight of him, every gaze that lit up for a fraction of a second with wild hope before dimming as realization set in. As though Celeborn had not turned pale and trembled, the only time Elrond turned up to a feast with his hair in Iathrim braids, refusing to meet his eyes.
I’m sorry, Galadriel murmured to him later, when he slinked back to his seat, having quietly slipped away to undo the elaborate plaits, it is difficult for him. Elrond had only nodded mutely, a lump in his throat that burned like coal. It was difficult for all of them in this new world.
“If I am remembering correctly,” Celeborn said, doing something complicated with his hands that Elrond struggled to follow, “there is a lake some leagues north of here, its waters so clear and still, it reflects the stars like a second sky. I have been telling my lady wife of it.”
Elrond hummed, unsure what this had to do with him.
“We might remove there – only after Gil-galad has been set up, of course. ‘Tis a good place to raise a child, I have always thought.”
Elrond’s heart panged. Ah, so this is farewell. He should have known; Galadriel and Celeborn could not be expected to dawdle in Mithlond forever, play-acting at family with orphan princes. It was past time for them to start a family of their own, and what better time than now, with this tremulous, apocryphal peace stretching slowly across the land. He would miss them, both husband and wife – strange and forbidding though they were. They cared for him in their own way, in the ways in which they were able, but he was not so selfish as to entreat them to stay. Much practice he had in goodbyes, but somehow they never hurt less. A failure of habituation, maybe. A defect of his peredhel biology. At least Celeborn had been kind enough to give notice.
“That sounds – nice,” he managed.
“I bring it up only that I may ask… perhaps, when the time comes, you might like to join us there?”
Buried beneath the habitual austerity of his manner, there lay a kernel of hope in Celeborn’s voice that Elrond baulked to hear. He had not been prepared for such an invitation, had not thought to expect it. Mouth dry and heart a heavy lump sinking ever downwards, he picked his next words with care.
“I have been made an offer – Gil-galad has asked me to serve in court as herald.”
Bracing himself, Elrond waited with held breath as the words settled heavy in the air like leaden rocks.
“You plan to accept,” said Celeborn after a pregnant pause. It was not quite a question.
“I do,” Elrond admitted honestly.
He felt rather than saw Celeborn nod, more a reflex, a twitch of muscle and ligament, than any indication of assent. “Of course,” he murmured, as genteel as ever, “Of course, you must do as you see fit.” But there was a tightness in his voice he could not quite conceal. The thought rankled, Elrond knew – the scion of Elwë serving as vassal to the heir of Finwë. ‘Twas a matter of ignominy, no easy thing for a man proud and unbending as Celeborn to bear.
But Elrond liked Gil-galad – they understood each other. The Noldorin king who had spent his life running across the hot sands of the Falas, more at home swinging from the ropes of a fishing boat than in the finery of a king, and the prince of Doriath who spoke in clumsy, Mithrim Sindarin and knew only the songs of the Golodhrim, who wielded the sword better than the axe or spear.
Together, they almost managed to be one whole of the person they were each supposed to be – greater than the sum of their parts, they fused together to form a crooked amalgamation, a scarecrow king. In Mithlond, Elrond knew, he could be useful. That was all he wanted, all he could hope for. For something worthwhile to come of his existence. But it did not make Celeborn’s quiet disappointment easier to bear; He was not used to being the one who walked away.
The deft motion of Celeborn’s hands picked up again after a second, but there was something mechanical and perfunctory about it now. The silence that fell between them was no longer the comfortable kind they had enjoyed many a time before, but rather weighty. Loaded. Roiling with too much under the thin cover of quietude.
Leave it be, said the Elros that lived in Elrond’s head, do not press the matter. But Elrond had never been very good at leaving things well enough alone.
“I have disappointed you,” he spoke into the tense hush, splintering the silence into a hundred needle-sharp pieces that turned then their points upon him. It was not something that should have been spoken aloud. His relationship with Celeborn teetered on a delicate balance, a fragile ecosystem that depended on tactful silences and polite pretence and the unspoken agreement to look away from all that lay crooked and spoiled between them.
Celeborn had stilled. “Disappointed? Why?” The words fell out in a tumbling heap and were followed almost immediately by a wince. For, by saying them out loud, Celeborn had drawn the shape of the thing festering between them into stark relief, acknowledged its sickly sweet rot-scent on the air, summoned it from the margins of awareness to the forefront of both their minds and now they could no longer escape it.
Elrond swallowed. “You know why,” he said at last, shame gnawing at his viscera like a horde of hungry rats.
They were not what anyone would have asked for, he and Elros. The Sons of Elwing had been taken away in the night and returned something other – something alien and warped. And no matter what anyone said, Elrond knew they did not measure up to the lamblike paragons they had been made into in their absence, those emblems of saintly suffering. It was easy to mourn the sweet, captive boy-princes cruelly snatched away by shadowy figures amidst the fire and rubble of their home, harder to reconcile those imagined martyrs with the men that returned, all flesh and blood and human frailty, flawed and changed, the enemy's tongue falling from their lips.
And Elrond tried – he did. He bundled away all trace of those that had raised him, excised their very names from his mind and sanded away the thorns from his speech, never speaking of the years before he and Elros stumbled weary and filthy into Gil-galad’s camp as if his silence would undo time, but none of it – not a single bit of it – changed that when Elrond dreamed, he dreamed in Quenya.
Everyone could see it, the sin that clung to them. Like grease, it smeared and blackened, clinging on, impossible to wipe away. The people of Mithlond flinched from the very sight of them – the Sindar from the reminder of all they had lost and those who had taken it from them, and the Noldor who wished not to face their own complicity, from the reminder that the Sons of Fëanor were not wholly monstrous, that they were creatures capable of being loved still and had once been one of their own.
“Elrond,” said Celeborn, faltering and awkward, “I hope you know that no one faults you for…” he trailed off, and Elrond smiled mirthlessly. Celeborn could not even say it. “You were just a child,” he finished lamely.
That was what they all said – Oropher and Thranduil and Círdan and Galadriel, all of them repeating the empty words like it was a line they had been fed, like repetition would take away the sting. You were only a child, you were only a child, you were only a child. But Elrond knew the truth – children though they may have been, he and Elros had known what they were doing. They had known. And if the others found out – how easily they had given in, how very little was needed for them to lock away the memory of Elwing and call instead their captors father – they would never again welcome them into their homes, never again look upon them with kindness.
Elrond had made the wrong choice to love the wrong people, and now he would spend the rest of his immortal life trying to atone for it.
And the worst part of all, the part that seared his blood and charred his bones in a hot, scalding humiliation: it had all been for nothing. Elrond and Elros had betrayed their mother and forsaken their people for naught but scraps of affection, only to be turned out like unruly mutts at the first possible opportunity. Loosed back into the world with fangs pulled out and claws sawed off – a threat handily neutralized. Strays taken off the streets and kept for a while to tide away the interminable time between massacres, returned once the charm wore off. And all their betrayal had earned was two minutes of a half-hearted protest – not enough to prevent blood from being spilled for a fourth and final time, but just enough to secure Maglor his long-coveted redemption.
How convenient. How lurid.
Elros? Elros had run from the knowledge, from the shame, right towards the waiting arms of death. But Elrond had frozen in the face of it, a deer caught in the hunter’s cross-hairs. Helpless and wide-eyed. Waiting for the bolt to sink into his flesh, the slow seep of blood to drain him of guilt, a tithe he must pay. And the longer he waited – for the arrow to fly, for the steel to pierce his willing flesh – the more restless he became, braying for the pain of it, for the release. For without it, how could he ever hope to be absolved? But it would not come; it would not come; only ever the feeble acquittal of you were just a child glancing uselessly off his skin.
“We are kin, you and I,” said Celeborn at long last, the words coming out slow and aching, “Nothing and no one will ever change that. As long as I draw breath, you will be welcome in my home wheresoever I make it.”
Elrond closed his eyes. Longed for the arrow. Its deathful kiss.
Instead, stooping, Celeborn plucked something out of the ground and tucked it into Elrond’s braids, tying them off – a bloom of niphredil. One of the ones that sprang from the soil wherever Elrond went.
His voice was heavy with a nameless grief when he said, “I hope one day you believe me.”