Work Text:
“Ammë.”
Elwing feels the breath leave her body in one great rush. She is certain that this must be a dream, but it feels less like a dream and more like a vision of something that hasn’t yet come to pass, the kind she used to have when she was young and Doriath was still her home.
She looks at the person standing before her, and Elrond, her mind chimes in, Elerondo. My son. Her heart lodges itself in her throat and her lips curve in a smile and her eyes blink back a flood of tears, but she doesn’t feel any of it, she can’t feel any of it because this is only a creation of her mind.
But then she thinks back to the night when her foremother Melian came to her, a night when the sea-breeze was gentle and the moon was huge and bright.
Melian was standing on the beach before Elwing’s white tower like a vision of a starlit evening deep in the woods. Elwing had never met her in person, but she knew her, deep in her bones, deep in the recesses of her heart.
“My lady,” Elwing said, bowing low, but Melian took her face in her hands and lifted her up and up and up until Elwing was standing taller than ever.
“You do not bow to me, indonya,” Melian said in a voice light as bird-song (bird-song under the eaves of Doriath, and home, Elwing thought, a shiver running down her spine, home where the shadows were of deepest green and the air was sweet and the birds sang through the night).
Elwing nodded. “What can I do for you?” she asked, her cheeks feeling feverish underneath the cool softness of Melian’s palms.
Melian let her fingers slip away. “Ask rather what I can do for you.” She held Elwing’s gaze for a long moment, her eyes bright and unblinking. “I am here to be the bearer of happy news: you have long been sundered from your sons, and one of them has passed into a fate beyond our knowledge, while the other has laboured long for the good of our Middle-earth. But no more. Elerondo is coming, indonya. The evil in the East has been vanquished for a time, and Elerondo’s part in the tales of these days has reached its end. He will sail, indonya, and soon.” Melian smiled at her, and there was such grace and sorrow in her face that Elwing’s heart ached. “You will see him again.”
I will see him again. Elwing quietly repeats Melian’s words to herself as she looks at the vision of Elrond standing before her, and it is as if a veil has been drawn back from her eyes: the vision is not a vision at all, nor a dream, nor a figment of her imagination; it is real, as real as she herself is, as real as the sea and the sand and the sky.
“Ammë,” Elrond says again, standing limned in the light of the westering sun on the shores of Alqualondë where he has disembarked from his ship. His voice shakes ever so slightly, and the light in his face is so bright, so full of life, nothing like the ghosts in Elwing’s mind, the ghosts of her two beautiful boys. Elwing would not admit it to anyone, not even to Eärendil, but the images in her mind have faded over the years, shot through with the sorrow of that day at the Havens like corpses stuck full of arrows; what she holds in her mind now of her baby boys is not who they were but who she thinks that she thought they were, memories of memories that are faint and distant and impossibly precious like pearls sunken in the depths of the sea.
Elwing takes Elrond into her arms, this Elrond, the Elrond that is warm and solid and alive against her. She holds him as tightly as she dares, and it does not and cannot make up for all the lost years, all the facets of each other that they will never get to see, but it says I am here and I will never leave your side again.
“It’s so good to see you,” Elwing says, the words tumbling from her, spoken quickly as though a dam has burst. “I love you, I’ve loved you all these years, and I’ve missed you so much and I’m so incredibly proud of everything you’ve done.”
Elrond clings to her as he used to when he was a child (Elros would run to her, barrelling into her legs and demanding to be picked up, but Elrond was more tentative, more tender, waiting for her to open her arms to him and clasping her close with his chubby fists); Elwing feels her chest swell and it is like she has swallowed the sky, the clouds and the sun and the endless glorious blue of it.
She half-expects him to speak with the same nervous reserve he held as a young boy, but he doesn’t.
“I have missed you too, Emel,” he says, slipping out of the High-elven tongue and into the language of his childhood, sea-salt and carefree smiles and their all-too-brief time together on the shores of Belegaer. No longer speaking for the benefit of the lords and ladies gathered here, kings and princes and the mighty Ainur themselves, but for her benefit and hers alone. He gives a little shake of the head, a disbelieving smile on his face, and his voice is warm as he adds, “I have imagined this moment so many times over the years...”
Elwing nods, and though it feels like her heart might burst into pieces, she releases him from her embrace, lets him part from her and stand on his own. “What did you imagine?”
“Something a little like this, something a little unlike this.” Elrond shrugs, easily. “Most of all I imagined your face.”
Elwing cups his cheek in the palm of her hand, feels the warmth of him underneath her fingers. “Me too. All the time.” Her fingers travel downwards, over the curve of his jaw. He stands half a head taller than her, now. “You were so little when I last saw you,” she says, not meaning to, but she cannot stop the words now that she has started to talk, she cannot for fear that she will never have this chance again.
Elrond laughs, and there is something of Melian in his laugh, light like bird-song, lifting the heart. “I’m not little anymore.”
“No,” Elwing murmurs, her fingers still lingering against her son’s face. “You haven’t been little in quite some time, have you?” There is such sorrow in her, missing moments, an emptiness that gnaws through the core of her—what is a mother without her children? she thinks as she has thought so many times before, and her answer is me, fractured, alive. She should be grateful, for her life, her husband, that holy light on his brow that guided them here; she isn’t, not right now, hasn’t been in too long.
She realises her fingers are shaking. Elrond plucks her hand within his own, holding her within his warmth. “We can get to know each other again. We can be a family.”
“We can be whatever you want us to be.”
“It is also a question of what you want us to be,” Elrond tells her gently.
Elwing wants to cry; she cannot, will not, because this isn’t about her, but she can’t stop herself from asking, “Do you want him to be part of our family too?”
There’s no need for her to clarify who she is talking about.
The Kinslayer. The Fëanorion. Maedhros.
Her chest feels tight, filled to the brim with something hot and wild, but she waits for Elrond’s answer in silence.
Elrond takes a moment to consider.
“I would like to see him again,” he answers, truthfully. “But I will not ask you to have any interaction with him beyond what you are comfortable with.” He smiles, gentle and knowing. “Maedhros and Maglor took good care of us. We never wanted for anything, and they loved us as much as they could. That is the nature of love—to expand, to share, to nurture. But neither of them ever tried to be your replacement, or Adar’s, nor would that have been possible. I only have one Emel and she is right here.”
Elwing finds herself laughing, and her laughter comes with such a sense of release that she feels giddy, as giddy as if she were spiralling downwards through the clouds with the wind in her feathers. “I’m sorry,” she says, laughing still, and there are tears on her cheeks now that weren’t there a moment ago; “Valar, I’m so sorry—”
“Don’t, please,” Elrond says, “there’s no need for you to apologise for a single thing. I am at peace with the path my life has taken. I can say that I left Middle-earth kinder than when I came into it. That is all any of us can hope to do. Like you, Emel. I’ve always looked up to you.”
Elwing has stopped laughing; she lets the sea-breeze dry her tears.
It wasn’t kindness, sending her boys from her side, watching her people die upon the swords of their own kin. It wasn’t heroism, jumping into the sea with that holy light clutched like a babe to her breast. It was what had to be done. The only thing she could think to do.
Some have called it fate. She just remembers the scream tearing from her throat, how it came to a gurgling stop as the water rushed into her lungs.
“Are you all right, Emel?” Elrond asks her, and she starts at the sound of his voice. This happens often in her life on these blessed shores, the past becoming the present crashing back into the past; she sees with the eyes of the person who thought she would drown in the roaring waves and she has to remind herself that that person is her and that she is here while the lands that witnessed her sorrow are now lost beneath the sea.
“Don’t you worry about me,” she says with a faint smile. “How are you, love? Are you hungry? Are you tired?”
“Truth be told, I would dearly like some food,” Elrond replies with a laugh, like bird-song, like the tinkle of little rivers deep in the woods. His fingers are still curled around Elwing’s own, and he swings their joined hands like he used to when he was a child; Elwing gives him a little squeeze, just to feel him there.
“Come, then,” she says, and she begins to tug him along, towards her white tower. “Adar won’t be home for a few hours yet,” she continues, and here they go again, the past and the present, the intermingling of them like paint through water, but this time there is a gentle wonder glowing in her chest; she never thought she would get to say those words again.
“That’s okay,” Elrond says cheerfully, following close behind her. “We have a lot to talk about, you and I.”
“I want to hear everything.”
“Surely not,” Elrond exclaims, “otherwise we’ll be up for a fortnight!”
***
Dinner is bread and cheese and cured meats, not much but it is all Elwing can put together at short notice. She doesn’t cook much, doesn’t have the patience for it, and besides, Eärendil prefers this lighter kind of fare, wanderer’s food, a preference built over a lifetime as a refugee.
Still, Elrond doesn’t seem to mind. He digs in happily, talking with such ease and warmth that Elwing’s heart grows and grows and grows until she’s sure it will carry her off into the skies like a sail catching the wind.
“Tell me,” she says once the food has been cleared away and the fire in the hearth is burning low, “what do you remember of Elros?”
A shadow passes over Elrond’s face, but it is brief.
“He was larger than life. A man with a dream, brighter than starlight on sea-waves and more driven than the most ardent of soldiers.” Elrond’s lips quirk upwards. “He was also absolutely infuriating.”
Elwing laughs; it takes her a moment to realise the sound is coming from her own lips. She has buried Elros in her thought, has built a small cairn of smooth sea-stones for him behind her tower. She is used to thinking of him with the pounding of grief in her chest like a second heart. She never thought she could remember the dead with such warmth.
“That is not true!” she cries.
Elrond makes a face at her. “It is, I tell you. ‘Brother mine,’ he used to say to me, ‘I have built this kingdom that you see before you in the short years allotted to me as a man. I know your time is not limited like mine, but I’ve been thinking of how you’ve spent your life and I can’t help but wonder: when will you get off your backside?’”
Elwing claps a hand over her mouth to stifle her laughter. “He was always cheeky even as a child.” She shakes her head, a fond gesture half-remembered from happier days. “I’m glad to hear he never changed.”
“He was too headstrong to change.” Elrond looks away; his voice drops to a whisper, barely audible over the crackle of the fire. “I miss him.”
Elwing reaches out to him and takes his hand. “I miss him too. Every day.”
“A parent’s joy is deep, but I’ve come to see that a parent’s sorrow can be deeper still.” Elrond meets his mother’s gaze, and tears shine in his eyes. “My daughter chose the mortal path as well.”
He looks so young all of a sudden, and Elwing holds his hand that little bit more tightly, rubbing a thumb over his knuckles. “What is her name?”
“Arwen Undómiel.” Elrond leans towards Elwing, and though his eyes are still bright with sorrow, there is happiness there also. “You two would have gotten along marvellously.”
“I know we would have.” Elwing takes a deep breath, then lets it out, slowly, like she always does before leaping out of her window into the cool air and taking flight. “There are tragedies at each corner of our lives, my sweet. We have a right to grief, perhaps more so than most on this earth. But we are here, and we have each other, and there is brightness on the horizon.”
Brightness like the coming of dawn, Elwing thinks, like all the times she would fly to meet the sunrise until the light swallowed her whole.
She shivers, on the verge of something huge and nameless.
Sat across from her, Elrond looks less like a young boy now and more like a lord of lords, gentle and wise.
Elwing suddenly understands.
“I know why you said what you said,” she tells him and she feels herself becoming soft, like a sleeping bird (and funny, she thinks, to her birds have always been motion and flight, shrill cries, the beat of the wind through her wings, but this softness feels right, somehow, it feels like a second skin over her own). “You wanted me to see past my own grief. Thank you.”
“It has been my duty for many years to know the hearts of people,” Elrond says. “I remember your sadness from when I was young. You would spend your nights standing at the edge of the sea. Your cheeks would always be dry when you came back to us at dawn, but Elros and I knew better. He would ask me why you didn’t cry if you were sad; he would say that you should cry and we should hug you afterwards, like you always did for him to make him feel better.” Elrond reaches out to her with his free hand, brushing a strand of hair out of her eyes. “You deserve to be happy, Emel.”
“You’ve always been kind,” Elwing tells him in a voice that would be shaking if she were anyone else.
“We all need a little kindness in our lives.”
Elwing’s gaze slips to the patch of sky visible through the open window. Outside, darkness is slowly lightening to a pink dawn, the stars twinkling and going out one by one like little lanterns. Eärendil will be home soon.
“Perhaps that’s something you can help me with, my sweet,” she says quietly, thinking of ends and beginnings, the Silmaril that she once bore into the sea, a lone ship sailing West.
Elrond smiles, haloed by the gentle light of dawn.
“We can help each other.”