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The cold woke him first. When Estel opened his eyes the frosting sensation on his eyelashes was bone-chilling. His sight was fractured and misty, as if he were viewing the world from below a sheet of ice. It wasn’t supposed to get that cold.
He had left the window open. When he rose from his blanket cocoon with teeth chattering, he froze again, enraptured by the sight of snow drifting through the window to land in little white flurries along the seams of the stone floor. The wilderland outside was coming in. It was wild, and freezing.
His fingers felt clumsy, unfit and all wrong as he fumbled with the glass panes, found the clasp and pulled them shut like a tiny door in the wall. The pile of snow remained intact on the floor. His fingers and toes felt like blocks of ice.
He had also forgotten to light the fire, and no one else had thought to do it for him. Mostly no one else had any need for fire, or heat; they would only shiver in the dark and wake up fine, if they slept at all.
Estel had long ago come to terms with not being one of the Eldar but that did not help it hurting sometimes, leaving a bitter taste in his mouth. All he had for an example of what it meant to be mortal was his mother. She hadn’t even come to wish him a good night. She hadn’t since he turned ten, and he remembered her ever-increasing heaviness on those nights when she used to sit up with him. Her ever-increasing darkness and the way she would seem to fade away even as she sat beside him. Perhaps if she had said something, anything, sweet dreams, he would not have woken so cold. His dreams were a misshapen mess, barely remembered.
The hour was late, it could have been any time, even early morning, but the snow-choked sky was too dark to make a guess. He spent mornings in the woods often enough, nights under the moon, but he was still learning to be in touch, feel the time like his brothers did so effortlessly. They were patient, too patient with his prying questions.
The longer he sat, hunched over near the end of the bed, with the air whistling up his loose shirtsleeves, the more the cold was inside him. It was all silvery-grey dark in the little room. Estel could hear his thoughts too loudly, as if that small, rustling voice that came from his lips was reading them aloud.
His own voice always sounded disembodied to his ears. His thoughts were often the same. The cold in his bones was hollowing him out slowly.
“Brrrr,” he said, and then was ashamed. The sound was thin and speaking aloud to himself made him feel even more childish than usual. His family and the rest of the household was at least centuries older than him. He hadn’t even lived a score of years yet.
Age was one of the subjects he didn’t like to touch, but then again so was his voice. So was his mother, nowadays. It was so late and wintry that he didn’t seem to be working right.
Hardly able to feel his own limbs in motion he slid across the bed, touched his toes to the flagstone. It was about the same temperature as his skin. He stood and tried to remember not to be conscious of himself, but it was frigid and he was nothing but awfully conscious.
Estel left the room, left his breath misting in the air behind him and wondered aimlessly if he was still breathing. He couldn’t see it anymore. The hall was warmer, disturbingly. The temperate air put fingers on his skin and went to work thawing the outer cold, but his bones felt the same.
At first he didn’t know where to go. His mother’s door was just a few down. His pallid little feet found their own way there, and he touched the smooth wood panel just above the doorknob with his fingertips, tentatively. The way the wood was textured inexplicably reminded him that it was a dead tree, inside the door was still that tree, forcibly severed. There was a wide crack between the door and the wall, wide enough to peer through and see if there was any light inside. There wasn’t, only a rush of bitter, winter wind that smelled like glass, marble and tears.
Estel thought suddenly of a few months prior. His hair hung choppily above his shoulders now, he had hacked it off at just that right length in secret, and then been flooded with shame. He was certain it would be cause for concern, painfully serious discussions with his collection of parental figures.
The first person he encountered in the hall was Elrond, who had looked up from an armful of books and immediately noticed, reaching out to pull on one strand absentmindedly while he scrutinized Estel’s face intently and Estel tried not to squirm.
“It suits you better,” he said vaguely and then breezed off with the parting gift of an airy smile.
Elladan had immediately ruffled the new hair, like it was an impulse, and he looked very pleased with himself, as if the haircut was his idea all along. He’d said something mindlessly nice while Elrohir smiled at Estel inscrutably and made him feel simultaneously sharper and safer. They had both begun to treat him differently, in subtle ways.
Nobody had confronted him about it at all but now Estel felt like confrontation. He needed to talk to someone and his mother’s door was too cold. He went down the hall, past rooms he knew were empty, rooms he knew were occupied and others he couldn’t have made a guess about. He took three flights of stairs, every step like a knife scraping along the tendons in his calves. He would have collapsed halfway down if not for the cold stiffening him.
If there was anyone who could possibly understand what he wanted to say—
Estel found himself outside Elrond’s rooms, on the lowest level, adjoining the nicest little courtyard garden, which was splendid in late summer. When Elrond looked at him, they seemed to really be looking at him, whatever him was there to see. Not his faulted body, because if there was anyone who lived outside of their own body it was Elrond.
Before he could speak Estel had known his father, but he couldn’t remember anything about the man now. He didn’t want to; around the same time he’d learned his first words in Sindarin he’d called Elrond his father and it wasn’t right but it was further from wrong.
He could feel in the air that Elrond was awake; the fire was lit and the room was warm. His bones ached so badly to be closer to that warmth, and light.
Estel knocked on the door, just once. It was courtesy, and caution.
“Yes, of course,” came the disembodied voice through the door, light with sleeplessness. Elrond had several ways of answering the door but somehow he always knew when it was important.
Estel slipped in and the gust of properly warm air that washed over him was enlivening. His skin tingled all over, and when he looked down at his too-delicate hands he saw color and blood blooming back to the surface.
His eyes were un-iced and he could see the depths of crimson in the heart of the flame roaring merrily in Elrond’s little hearth. The room smelled like spices and the way nightingales sounded singing. His foster parent was sprawled out on the floor, toes awfully close to the sooty hearthstone, leaning against one of the armchairs he’d had forever, a matching set that he only ever used half of now.
Wordlessly, Estel allowed the heat to pull him into the fire’s orbit and he alighted on bent legs on the other side of the hearth, facing Elrond, across the threadbare rug. Nothing in the room had changed as long as Estel had known it, which was nice.
Now that he was here, now that he could feel for certain his heart was still frozen and reluctant, Estel wasn’t sure what to say.
He stared numbly at Elrond’s familiar brown robes, a mud cloud golden-spangled with sprigs of metallic thread. It felt like an old quiet, with just the cracking of the flames and his own invisible breathing.
When he looked up the concern in Elrond’s face was palpable and he looked away, stomach dropping with that feeling of wrongdoing.
“Sit nearer the fireplace Estel, please,” Elrond said fretfully and the feeling evaporated, replaced by a lulling jab of annoyance. “You could have been frozen.”
“I did, I mean I was,” Estel said, but he scooted across the floor hurriedly, to where the heat was almost frightening, and just right.
Elrond shook his head but he was smiling. His features alone, out of everything else in the room were sort of soft, and fuzzy around the edges. It was a particular look Estel remembered from being very young, and catching Elrond off guard.
He looked away at the roots of the dancing flame, embers like little sapphires winking.
“We can pretend I am not here, if you would like,” Elrond said and his voice was like the breeze, already half gone. Estel was torn between heart-wrenching appreciation, because it was exactly the right thing to say, and desperation to ask him not to disappear.
“No, I feel alone already,” he admitted finally, and his voice sounded like small and lonesome. He couldn’t bring himself to meet his foster parent’s eyes but it was all coming out nonetheless.
“I am a man?” he said, almost too softly to hear his own voice. It wasn’t a question and as soon as the words were out they rested heavily in space.
It was anticlimactic, because Elrond already knew, even if no one else did. Estel had thought he would stop breathing or his heart would stop beating, but instead it just softened, like something fleece and sweet. He had thought if he ever said something it would be incredibly painful and it would be the end of everything, as opposed to the renewal he so desperately craved. This was somewhere in between.
“Well, I am not.” Elrond said calmly, as if one such admission deserved another. Estel wanted to blurt out something foolish, no, of course not, he was an elf, at least mostly. But that wasn’t what Elrond meant.
Estel squinted, looked up, and saw what Elrond meant, which he supposed he must have known before, but hadn’t understood. Maybe it was why he was there, the sympathetic vibration of that otherness in Elrond’s eyes, which he knew was reflected in his own. Right now the otherness wasn’t only ocular, although the mud pools of Elrond’s eyes were strange. It was in the way he had his hair clipped up with all his old gem-encrusted pins, a cornucopia of scarlets and ambers and emeralds, the way he tilted his head and listened, rested his chin on his long hand gently. It was indescribable and looking at him Estel felt synapses firing and failing as he tried to grasp at the meaning of the words, what he could see, and what he couldn’t.
“You’re not any one thing?” he heard himself saying, and it was almost a different voice. It wasn’t intended as a question, because Elrond swam right in front of his eyes, a liquid melding of disparate forms and meanings.
Elrond was already nodding.
“I have chosen the life of the Eldar but such a choice as that could never have been so definitive as we say,” he said, detachedly, almost lecturing. He was very good at lecturing. “The name of our house, Half-elven. I know that I could not have been any other way, but for another the choice to be counted among the Eldar might have been more complete. I can still be as you are, and I can be as I am. It is my own gift.”
Estel’s thoughts were whirring, trying to follow. He had never heard Elrond express himself in this way before. He didn’t talk about himself often, which was really only customary among the inhabitants of Imladris.
“'Not any one thing' certainly feels true to me,” he clarified softly, as if in response to the wandering look on Estel’s face. “I am pulled between so many spaces, but I am a part of all of them and they are all a part of me. Fluidity is a gift, to be all and none and in between.”
It was visible, in the ageless cast of his face, his features that always seemed to slide in Estel’s memory from one season to another. Everyone looked ageless and was so, but Elrond’s ageless was older, more touched by time, as if he felt it more acutely.
It took a moment of breathing in the wood-fire scent and feeling his lungs fill with hot air for Estel to feel better.
“I… thank you,” he stuttered. It felt like the wrong thing to say but the truth was such an enveloping comfort in that moment and he couldn’t think of anything else. With the overwhelm of what he had to say it felt better to be taken outside himself for a moment. But it was difficult sometimes to not think of Elrond’s being such a perfect person to talk to as part of his job description. He was always right, and sometimes it was painful.
“I’m sorry,” Elrond said, sounding more like himself, and the high resonance that suffused him dissipated. He subsided into silence for a moment and Estel wrapped his arms around his own chest protectively, feeling and unfeeling all at once.
“Do you want a hug— how do you want me to hug you?” Elrond asked, stacking the questions up like well wishes and Estel was suddenly aware of how delicate he was being, how really unsure he was of what was the right thing to say. He was trying his best as he always did, but it was strange for him. The insight was mildly uncomfortable, Estel wasn’t sure he was ready to think about anyone else's feelings.
“Yes,” he choked out, scratchy and pathetic. He felt impossibly young, but not in the usual way that was like dredging his old self up out of himself.
He wasn’t sure how a hug on the floor would work but Elrond slid over to where he was crouched like a feral animal and held out his arms. Estel folded himself carefully in, leaning sideways against Elrond’s chest and burying his face in the cinnamon-smelling heaviness of his robes. He felt his parent’s hesitance, and guided his gentle arms so Elrond was hugging him around the shoulders.
It was just a hug, there had been so many others, but Estel felt wholly comfortable. He hadn’t had a hug where he wasn’t awfully conscious of his own physicality in a while. This time everything was what and where it was supposed to be. All he could feel was Elrond’s sonorous heartbeat and the soothing feeling that seeped from his arms holding Estel tight.
He sniffed back a snotty tear and focused on the rise and fall of Elrond’s chest against his cheek.
“Thank you,” he said waveringly, fisting his hands in Elrond’s robes, at which Elrond just sighed.
“No thank yous, don’t be silly,” he hummed, rubbing a little circle on Estel’s shoulder, a concentric spiral of warm, safe feeling. “Do you want to talk any more about it?”
He didn’t even have to think about it, all the thoughts that he suppressed, that sometimes overwhelmed him, came welling up.
“It’s bad,” Estel began hesitantly. “I feel, I feel like I am a dead body.”
He whispered, as if the words would strike a bell and make the fear come true. When Elrond continued his soothing hand motions Estel pushed on, no longer sure where his terrors ended and his self began. “I am tissue and mass and I don’t want any of it and I am rotting on the inside because... Horrid it’s— horrid. I don’t want to have a body.”
He sniffed louder and then stifled it in shame. The words hurt his mouth on the way out. There weren’t really words enough to get at the core of how he felt, his body at a disconnect, but he was less physically conscious and more emotionally conscious of how it weighed on him. The physical was bad enough, without constantly thinking that he was carrying that other person inside of him. That other person everyone else still saw when they looked at him.
“Aew nín, I wish I could have seen before,” Elrond said, and it could have been awful, a reminder of what he had been the last time his parent called him that name. A reminder of mornings birdwatching in fluffy dresses while he flapped his arms like a bird. It wasn’t awful, although Elrond’s guilt was, but Estel didn’t feel big enough to protest it.
“You do not deserve to feel this way,” Elrond amended with a pressing edge to his tone, that made the words sink in. "Do you think you could imagine, tell me how you are meant to feel?”
Even as he said it Estel felt Elrond’s edges blurring and a sharp, tangy scent almost like nutmeg washed over him. The question was abstract, it took Estel a moment to consider and by the time he knew he was being held by softening air and cooking spices and rough-edged pebbles and shifting blue-green love. Somehow he still felt Elrond’s arms as well, and for that reason it wasn’t scary to encounter the melting of reality around him.
“I wish... it’s supposed to be, I’m supposed to be just solid, and whole and warm ,” he blurted, the last coming out louder than he had intended in sudden realization. Even as he said it he could feel the blood singing in his veins unimpeded; he was already warm.
“Yes, I’m glad you know,” Elrond said simply. “It is painful to feel as you have felt, I wish it never had to be that way, but there is still healing. You will not feel funereal forever and that extra weight will leave you. There are paths here you can take.”
Estel misremembered how to breathe and hurried to chase the dangled thread of an offer perhaps, something more than commiseration. He was not sure what anyone, even Elrond, could do, he had never dreamed a solution.
“What do you mean?” he gasped, no longer minding his own lack of patience and knowledge. “Can I really be a man like that, is it real? I mean… not only an ache?”
“Oh, Elbereth, you are more than that ache,” Elrond whispered and the residual sorrow in his voice made Estel pull back to look up at him, still not without the secure circle of his arms.
“What you feel is very real Estel, even if I could not see what I see, even if I did not understand, I would be able to see that.”
It wasn’t just thoughtless empathy, he did understand. Elrond was different in this moment, but this separate dimension had always been there just below the surface. They had the same hazy, kindly smile. Their head was wreathed in long, dark hair and a blue presence like the reflection of a summer sky. Their features were hard like glass and just as transparent, so Estel found himself reading a multitude of emotions across their face.
“I am not afraid, I think I see,” he said, unnecessarily, for Elrond laughed and it was the chiming of bells in the hills beyond.
“No please, don’t be afraid, I would feel very foolish and unkind if you were, I apologize if you do not remember me this way, it happens sometimes.”
As soon as they said it Estel remembered, all the times he had shadowed his favorite parent around the halls of Imladris, to the halls of healing where he had watched Elrond take the hands of strangers and diffuse himself. He could be iridescent or crystalline or smokey, crack like the embers on the hearth or descend in silence like the snow in the night outside. All the shapes were familiar.
“Could you, do something?” he asked, although he already knew the answer.
Elrond took one of his hands gently, like they were searching for a pulse. Their fingers trickled over his wrist like cool water.
“I can... maybe something so you can hear your heart more clearly?”
Estel must have made a face because they quickly elaborated.
“Hear your heart in alignment with your mind, I do not think I can tell you more than that, about how it might feel. It is late, and you should find some semblance of peace before you sleep again.”
Elrond’s hand on his wrist was gradually closer than the skin.
“Will it make me real?”
“Estel, I promise you already are. It might help you feel that.”
Estel was already nodding and Elrond’s words trailed off into lilting melody. It was indiscernible, the strangest thing Estel had ever heard. At first it was just Elrond holding him and their familiar voice gravely intoning intangible song.
Then the notes, underlying chords, started to sink in. It was like looking out from a hilltop into the night sky, with a canopy of stars stretched overhead in a curving roof. Estel was suddenly looking elsewhere, more places than he had ever looked at once before. The song itself fit him like it was his own, seeping through him and lighting him up. He was a star.
The feeling was the best part, a lifting sensation in the pit of his stomach like he was floating, and a delirious oneness. The song lit him up and only he was there, whole and complete.
There were no words besides the kind that were felt or seen. He was looking into a notch in an old tree trunk, underneath an enormous, mossy boulder, down the lip of a waterfall, at the fluctuating heartbeat of the moonlight. He was looking at a snowflake and then millions, as if he were infinitesimally small and could hug them in his arms, knowing they would be just the right temperature.
He was present, and incorporeal, and firm. He felt himself sharp and notched, flowered and falling, to the thunder of his heart. There was nothing he did not want and everything he did.
Estel gasped a breath at the sound of his own heartbeat resonating in his toes, knees, chest, shoulders. Then Elrond’s voice was back, but sweet and high and fuzzy. Her hands were holding Estel’s hands like two birds, maybe less small than they had been before. It wasn’t the same song, just a tune he remembered from childhood, with evasive words. He hummed along, just the last few notes and then it faded.
The silence sputtered like the flames leaping in the hearth, with Elrond’s head bowed, her lips pursed in concentration.
“How did I, how did… that was everything,” Estel stammered, mouth dry. The feeling was sticking with him like a charm, something he could hold.
“Are you alright?” Elrond asked hesitantly, and her hands trembled, light in Estel’s hands which still seemed more real than they had been before.
“Yes, quite, very,” Estel assured her, suddenly conscious of how it might have felt for Elrond, to let him go like that. It was an exercise in trust, two-pronged.
“And how do you feel,” Elrond pressed with a sigh, tension lessening somewhat as the air settled. He smiled tiredly, making the shadows under his eyes visible.
“I feel!” Estel cried and then stopped, unsure what came afterwards. It was so much feeling that had been iced-over. All the brighter sides of himself. He squeezed Elrond’s hands and his parent squeezed back, comforting and comforted.
Elrond’s face was suddenly very solemn, an expression Estel knew well. Some of his vibrant colors drained out, and the serious grey crept in like mist.
“I am glad you feel yourself,” he said. “I am glad you know, clearly you knew and now you know more . You can connect with yourself and for you that is beyond important. Your identity is important. Even if it does not seem that way at the moment.”
It seemed to be of the highest significance to him that he imparted the message but to Estel it was dense. There was a reflection of something in Elrond’s eye, dark, silver, ancient, high, but not in the usual ways. Estel couldn’t read the little slivers of memory for his own. He nodded hesitantly, screwing up his face as seriously as possible with the distinct impression that he had failed miserably. Elrond’s look of suppressed humor confirmed that.
“Okay,” he said as politely as possible. “Thank you,” he added, because he hadn’t in a while. It was like Elrond had said, Estel felt more peaceful. Like he could sleep until the snow all melted away. “Can I sleep here?” he blurted out as an afterthought.
“Well—” Elrond began, brow furrowing in consternation. Estel hadn’t really expected him to have any response other than a long-winded explanation that all boiled down to no. “If you really want to,” he interrupted himself unexpectedly, looking just as surprised as Estel to hear himself say it.
It took a while to hunt down blankets and by the time Elrond did, Estel was curled in a ball in the middle of the rug, face and toes to the hearth. He could still feel the orange heat licking him gently but he was too sleepy for anything else, other than a pleasant little shiver when Elrond draped the blankets over him, one by one. Layering until the warm kissed him into sleep.