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the children of elrond have always had too many fëar in their heads. is fëar the right word? they’re not really sure, sometimes. memories?
memories is a better word. memories, or weight.
their mother takes after her mother, who takes after a maia. their father takes after his father, who is a star, but also his mother, who was blessed, but also his foster fathers, who saw the light of the two trees, who were kinslayers, who sacrificed - everything.
their heritage is...complicated. their heritage is unlike anything else, and the children of elrond cannot deny this. elladan and elrohir do not grow up the way elros and elrond did (four sets of wings and too many teeth and all-seeing eyes and a hunger, to devour stars and light and blood and an inability to control it, for many many years) but elladan and elrohir grow up seeing other faces in their reflections and other voices in the shadows - eluréd? elurín? where are you? or pityo? telvo? it’s just me, it’s your brother, it’s me - and memories in their heads that do not belong.
(they feel the hunger, though. they sometimes eat deer while they’re still alive. it tastes better. they do not tell anyone that they do this. the lifeblood in their veins, warm from the heaving flanks of the deer, and sometimes they wonder - is this how stars feel? this burning from the inside out?)
too many memories. too much weight. they run with the rangers of the north, through the ruins, and sometimes they are overlaid with the splendor of lands now sunk beneath the sea. they do not talk about this.
(they do not know, what their father was. what their father can be. perhaps this was his mistake. perhaps it was not. they will know anyway.)
then their sister is born. raven hair, such small hands, and for a moment they are just they, and she is just she, and the three children of elrond are alone in their minds, and there is love, and hunger, because what are they?
and their mother leaves for different shores, and the stars in their father’s eyes grow diminished in his grief, and yet arwen grows, and elladan and elrohir grow, and -
arwen looks in the mirror, dresses herself in silver, says aredhel, white lady of the noldor, and here shall be my grave. shakes herself. sees elwing in her shadows (remembers what it feels like to fly) and hides herself with elladan and elrohir when she dreams of the cold of the helcaraxë, of falling through the ice, feeling the pain of her own death as both participant and observer.
elladan and elrohir hug blankets around her. when that doesn’t work, they take her out into the hills, and show her the stars. show her to hunt and skin. arwen is a lady, yes, but she is their sister, and besides, since when have the women of the eldar ever been delicate? (arwen takes to it like her hands have always known it, and for a moment she looks at them with fear in the eyes of lúthien as she hisses celegorm, curufin, and all three of them look around for huan before they come back to themselves. who is huan? they huddle, and pin down the twitching deer and eat it alive, and do not speak of this.)
some days arwen cloaks herself in white, cloaks herself in mourning, thinks i am earwën of the teleri, and my people were slaughtered like animals. some days elrohir hears the song that sang with fingolfin when he faced down morgoth, the song that finrod sang when he strove to master sauron. some days elladan wakes up to the unfamiliarity of having a right hand, and remembers decades of torment, and cannot breathe.
(the strangest is when elrohir wakes next to elladan, among the ranging men, and asks, elros? and elrohir is himself and his father, all at once. and he looks around him with the eyes of elrohir, son of elrond, but also of elrond, son of maedhros and maglor and eärendil. and he can see at once the double visions of mountains where there are fields and a river where there are trees and he does not have so many eyes like his father, but he may as well, when he sees both beleriand and eregion, when he sees both the past and the present, all at once.)
the strangest is when elrohir and elladan see estel (no, aragorn, son of arathorn, no, elros, son of maglor and maedhros and eärendil) take up his birthright - he speaks with the voice of his ancestors, he speaks with the voice of those long gone, he speaks with the voice of tar-minyatur, and the twins cry for their father, cry as their father, because here is their twin, here is their other half - but they are not elrond, and this is not elros.
no wonder arwen chooses the mortal path. no wonder elladan and elrohir wander middle earth. no wonder, no wonder, no wonder.
how can you live this one life, when you have lost so much? how can you lose this much, when you have lived so many lives? they are burning from the inside out, filled to the brim with fire and inheritance and legacy, filled to the brim with something that is neither elven nor mortal, and no wonder -
no wonder they are who they are. no wonder this is their burden. no wonder they have to make a choice, because otherwise they are something indefinable.
stars.