Work Text:
The ship spread its smoothened wings, bow slicing neatly through the choppy waves, and Elrond tried their best not to bite their lip in anxiety as they stood at the narrowest point of the dock like a figurehead, arms crossed to wield off the damp breeze.
The wood creaked beneath their feet and the sound of the ship sailing into the harbor was a thunderstorm of canvas descending with the force of the long year the two of them had spent apart.
The ship was a modestly-sized vessel with more ornamentation than the entirety of the village clumping cozily along the cliff behind the harbor. The hull was curiously curved, like a small shell arching upwards out of the water, subtle ridges in its abalone-white body.
Elrond traced the rigging unconsciously, following the trails of rope and netting downwards as the pattern became almost too complex to follow. There was something about boats that had always scared them.
A splash of sea foam, laced with salt, collided with the legs of the dock and spangled Elrond’s line of sight momentarily with droplets of white, and in that moment the speck of shadow in the prow became clear. Caught in the glittering spray of seawater, Elros appeared a miniature figure, wrapped in a swirl of pale fabric.
Everything condensed: the wailing of gulls far above, the hushed roar of the ship soaring nearer, the saturated air, the insistent breeze. The sky was a distant blue. Although he was still much too far away, Elrond could make out every line on Elros’ skin, the crinkles around his eyes and folding of his knuckles, like a perfect little doll. They felt Elros smiling.
“Is that him?”
Elrond nodded distractedly, bottom lip between their teeth. Gil-galad’s hand was heavy on their shoulder, radiating serenity, probing with gentle curiosity.
The ship swept inwards, with that ever strengthening rush, and the greedy lap of the waves.
“He looks like you!” Gil-galad cried suddenly, fist clenching on Elrond’s shoulder. He stepped forward to assess Elrond more intently, blue stone chips in his eyes flashing. In the midday light his skin was glowing, the color of summer.
Elrond met his searching gaze and remembered to breathe. Gil-galad was tall and stern enough to stand out against the oblivion of the sea, cut out in dramatic contrast, the darkness of his jaw and his brow. There was something comforting about his interminable presence, and solidity. It had become quite impossible to lose him, and Elrond had stopped trying.
“Why wouldn’t he look like me?” Elrond snapped, fluttering their hands to shove Gil-galad’s face out of their line of sight. He stumbled back with a huff of laughter. Behind the two of them, lined up and down the wharf, a dozen precautionary spears lifted like the necks of waterbirds, and sank slowly.
The ship was docking, just barely crawling through the surface of the water, bobbing more heavily with the motion of the tide. Scattered shouts, flung echoed and wide by the water and distance, filtered down from the decks.
“Well, you know,” Gil-galad said inanely, flapping his hands back at Elrond, suddenly appearing quite interested in the progress of the ship.
“Why are you here?” Elrond asked, shooting him a venomous look.
Gil-galad cleared his throat and began, mellifluously pompous, “As High King of the Noldor it is by propriety and tradition my duty to recognize a dignitary from the newly established island nation of Númenor, especially one so esteemed—”
“ This is just Elros,” Elrond cut him off testily, and was met by a swell of gratitude that was not their own. The strength of the emotion almost made them stagger, and they slid out an arm to balance in the wind. Proximity had never had an effect on the connection before, perhaps they had fallen out of practice.
The feeling was unmistakeably Elros, tinged with bright, salmon orange ferocity and a distinct confidence. It pressed effortlessly through Elrond and was gone, leaving their mouth stinging with the taste of citrus.
“Yes, I know, this is a personal visit,” Gil-galad allowed, with a slight edge of confusion in his eyes as he tilted his head, like he could sense that Elrond was no longer solely their own.
There was a fresh outburst of shouting from the decks of the ship and Elros appeared, clapping his hands over the railing, leaning precariously over. He’d cut his unruly hair to a distinctly unfamiliar shag around his ears. It was a very mortal look, reminiscent of the countless bearded, messy-headed bodies Elrond had met on debris-strewn fields at the end of the prior age. They weren't supposed to be thinking about that.
Elros was yelling something, cords in his neck straining, the wind and the rush of the docking whipping his voice away. Gil-galad waved back casually, as if they were old acquaintances. Elrond saw the light dance in Elros’ eyes.
The ship was rocking gently now, settling down in the frigid waters of Forlond harbor. The palace guard in their neat lines were shifting position, defensively, yet somehow politely. Gil-galad’s flair for the dramatic extended to his ceremonial escort, who were as ultimately harmless as Gil-galad pretended to be.
As Elros’ lips moved rapidly and his head disappeared, Gil-galad wrapped a firm arm around Elrond’s waist. His deft fingers were reassuring as he sank them into Elrond’s skin.
Shaking their head, Elrond thrust his arm off.
Gil-galad gave him a serious look, eyes clear, and then angled his head straight and proud, to seize in his gaze a cluster of attendants fleeing the now relatively stable ship. It was smaller than Elrond had expected, but now that they were closer they could see the whorls of the ridges that crossed the hull like raised brushstrokes. The whole ship looked like a floating conch, delicate and airy, filled to the brim with the echo of the ocean’s yell. It was white enough to reflect the blinding glare of the sky. A mysterious, unpractical color.
Elros announced himself against all that blinding whiteness like a shadow ghost coming home to roost. His robes were loose and gray, but his bare arms were sun-soaked bronze. He was a splash of color on the cloud of his own world of ship and sky. He was smiling bigger than Elrond had ever seen. The closer he came, the less real it felt, and the more their stomach twisted into intricate ribbons of unrest.
At Elrond’s side, towering imperiously, Gil-galad held out an arm and waved regally, called out a greeting.
Elrond couldn’t crack their sore lips to say a word until Elros bounded down the gangway, every step shaking the planks horrifically, his fearless movement threatening to toss him to the bed of the harbor.
Before Elrond could relinquish the breath they were holding and reprimand him, Elros had run into them. He engulfed Elrond in his arms, suddenly larger than they had known he could be, encompassing, the heat of the sun in his belly and his broad shoulders. Still, when they wrapped their arms around him with a matching frantic heave, Elros trembled.
Like one final leaf clinging to a rusting autumn branch, like his shaking hands trying to pull flowers out of the ground with his thoughts as a child, like he had never stopped being the same, like the fragile breath that beat his hull of a chest was the same whistling song Elrond had fallen asleep humming along to for years and years.
Where did you go , Elrond heard their own voice shaking in the misty air where only the two of them could hear.
The sea, the sea, the beautiful sea, something from deep within Elros responded, without a stutter, with a childish glee, singsong and careless.
Elros pulled back first, hefting Elrond back at arm’s length and meeting their eyes. It was like staring into a mirror, staring at a stranger. He was big and bold, like Elrond drawn in stronger, more self-assured strokes. His skin was speckled in a way that spoke of sweating under the relentless face of the sun on white sands, sand as fine and pale as crystal, water that caressed the shore with the sound of glass tinkling. The horizon was in his eyes. He was bigger, and smaller, than he had been before.
“How’s nation-building?” Elros gasped, and seemed to deflate a bit. There was a comfort in the line of his shoulders, the smirking set of his nose.
“I should be asking you the same question,” Elrond deflected, matching his easy tone with the confidence of a liar.
Elros squinted in mock anger and stepped back, eyes darting to survey the harbors and the shore before him. Elrond blinked and then they too were watching as Elros scanned the soft, crumbling rocks that made up the low cliff faces, the crowded stone village commandeered by traders and merchants, bustling around a fleet of vessels closer to the shore. The flat turf and scraggly trees along the moors beyond the deliberate crown of the palace. Something about the way the sky smiled always made Elrond think of snow. As they did, Elros raised a hand to rub his shoulder, unconsciously sweeping off the chill.
It was a heartbeat of a moment, and then Elros was satisfied, and Elrond more off-balance than ever.
Gil-galad coughed daintily, and Elrond fought the sudden urge to wrap their hands around his smooth throat, and squeeze that particular courtesan mannerism out of him.
“Gosh, I’m so sorry,” gasped Elros, stepping back, straightening, then clasping a hand to his chest, with a staggering absence of formal grace. Elrond cringed inwardly, thoroughly conflicted now as to who was more deserving of death for embarrassment. “It’s been quite a long time and I think I must have simply forgotten the customs. Ereinion Gil-galad.”
“Tar-Minyatur,” Gil-galad allowed, dipping his head, uncharacteristically solemn but for a telltale glitter in his dark eyes. “Some customs are unnecessary. I understand that these are unusual circumstances, this is not a diplomatic visit, and no one is to know you are here. Welcome to Lindon.”
Elros grinned, an easy, toothy smile that looked more like home than ever.
“Thank you, for your understanding and… discretion,” he said, shooting a lightly pointed glance at the rows of uniformed guards and gathering of villagers beyond.
The assembled people had everything from baskets of fish to skeins of yarn, to crates of apples in their hands. There was a woman with a lute perched on a barrel playing a hollow, reedy tune over the crowd. They all evidenced a shameless interest.
“Allow me, Elros,” Elrond interrupted, more for Gil-galad’s benefit than anything else. Elros lifted a hand, looking confused.
“You need time, I’m sure,” Gil-galad interjected himself again, intrusively helpful. Elrond considered pushing him off the dock, and restrained themself.
“We’ll have tea,” Elrond said unequivocally, and excused themself with a nod.
Elros followed on their heels on a string. He grinned carelessly at anyone who made eye contact, so bright and vital and un-placeably strange that everyone looked away.
Elrond and Elros cut through the town like chalk.
“My ship is called Hwesta Maiwëva, ” Elros supplied, as Elrond ascended the pathway into the arbor. His words were lathered in the slap of the water against the hull, a cool blast of air to the face, a natal rocking motion.
It was bizarre to hear his voice as they spoke, it was bizarre to watch the expression on his face, be forced to take meaning from language. They had spoken without language for so long, that layering of communication was strange.
Elrond swallowed, salt pungent on their tongue, and nodded.
“It’s the first one that’s mine,” Elros added, twisting his lips.
The trelliswork above their heads was an evening hue of wood, the same harsh, coastal type as the stand the arbor was tucked up against. It was all choked with sea roses, hedged in with aurea and purple moor grass. The roses had a stubborn odor of perseverance, unlike garden flowers they were encrusted with the salt and grit of the coastal air. On the other side of the arbor, the moors yawned away down to the cliffs, and the village, and the water.
“It looks like a giant conch,” Elrond said, drawing out a chair at the hidden table, tucked into a recess of wood. Thinking of the silver pink shimmer on the soft insides of the shells they had loved, the horny tips on the shell’s exterior like fortifications, like setting a siege.
“You would think that,” Elros said, wiping the images, shaking his head, “that was the intent.”
Elrond watched the way he bent to sit down, the stiffness in his sides. He was holding himself carefully, he felt differently. His skin was tough, hardened and patterned like the shell of a crab.
The table was laid with holly leaf tea in gilded teacups, oysters set in glamorous beds along chips of ice and lemon slices like glaring smiles. Elros’ eyes were depthless pits as he eyed the plates, starving.
“I haven’t had anything that isn’t fish since I left,” he confessed, laying his callused hands palm up on the table, in supplication. “There are too many fish in the seas. I wanted them all to die sometimes.”
The cadence of his voice, that petulance, now with self-awareness, was so familiar it made Elrond’s chest clench up, shoring against the way they had been, the memory, the way it hurt. Instead of responding in kind, giving in to the pull of that rhythm, they took a sip of the spiky tea, and deflected.
“Is that related to the issues you prefaced, in your letter? The lack of resources? The way you made it out, your island is a desert of white sand and now some squat, white sand dwellings, and nothing to chew on.”
“Well, yes, probably, well, maybe,” Elros said, eyes casting upwards, to the squares of sky visible through the anchoring net of woodwork.
He had developed that slight wisping quality to his voice, more apparent than ever when he lost assurance. It was all too well known, like the edges of Elrond’s vision blurring. A softness, the presence of breath, which although itself a promise of life was always reminiscent of headstones carven and laid heavily, gnarled tree roots resettling. Surely Elros was unaware, there was no one else around who would have recognized it. They had both grown up surrounded by that tentative airiness in the voices that hovered in their ears, tricked them into and out of sleep, wove around them and tied them together in song.
“I don’t understand,” Elrond said, furrowing their brow.
“Well, yes, the fact that there is only fish is a problem of resources but it isn’t quite so dire as all that considering the aid and blessing of the Powers themselves... and things are swimming really, swimmingly. I was really concerned about you, here.”
Even as he said it, Elros was staring down the lemon-drizzled oysters like they had begun and ended the world. He had just returned from the ocean, perhaps hunger was natural. He also seemed to be holding back, his palms laid like dead birds on the table were pleading for something more than oysters, something more than he could bite or swallow.
“Eat, please,” Elrond said, and stopped their own heart, at the way someone else’s words and voice had fallen out of their mouth like sand flecked with ashes. Elros’ face blanched, and his face was suddenly a ghost’s mask, etched with a deep frown.
Someone else still sat between them. Gently, like the wind tore the cliffs. Red thread. Gold strings. Raven’s wing.
The moment teetered horribly for a moment, where Elrond’s thoughts flew from guilt, to simmering, to retaliation: they both had the same little tendencies, there was no erasing themselves like that. Then Elros reached out and snatched a glossy oyster with steady hands. He busied himself getting his fingers oily.
“Keep that up and you’ll make me stop missing you,” he said lightly, downing the oyster meat in one gulp. His lips shone. When he met Elrond’s eyes again his gaze was steady, and sincere. It was the same, looking into his eyes was the same.
“Don’t be superior,” Elrond snapped, unable to keep their shoulders from sinking with relief.
“Just being,” said Elros smugly, thumbing the hard edge of the oyster shell in his hand and looking down the high bridge of his nose in a very superior manner, implying that he had been born seconds earlier, breathed ages longer.
“What was that you just said about being concerned, for me?”
“Did I?” Elros mused innocently, and then dropped the act with a sigh. “Of course I was concerned, I am, always. I know it can be difficult for you, and the other is true too, I miss you.”
The pain at hearing him say it was unbearable, and Elrond wrapped it in layers of disbelief and buried it thoroughly in the sand of consciousness, stifling the inner voice they knew Elros could hear. Something like, howcouldyouafteryouleftmeanddon’tyouknowimissyousomuchmore.
“Elros. You are the one who took several boatloads of refugees out of Middle Earth to establish a new kingdom of Men on a brand-new island in the middle of the Great Sea. You just told me you have no food, and no idea what you’re doing, you’re concerned for me?”
Fleecily, almost sheepish, Elros looked down. He placed the vacated shell on the plate and tapped his fingers on the table.
“You’re here about resources, trade, architecture?” Elrond prompted, at his continued silence. “If you’re concerned about Ereinion, don’t be, it might be slightly outside of my official duties but this is the sort of thing I deal with all the time. Talk to me .”
It was a strange, vain impulse to share with him, outline their own role in the development of the kingdom, delineate once and for all how real they were, and how capable. The way things seemed to work around Lindon was that they didn’t, unless Elrond made them.
“Elrond, of course, you're the best I know at planning, counselling, building things, I never dreamed of talking to anyone else, but—”
Although they could feel his frustration and something else mounting, swirling like choking sediment, Elrond tried to ignore it. Being so close to him as the emotion grew was overwhelming, their own thoughts and feelings blurred. The tides pulled at their thoughts, a slippery mess, outwards, in crescendo.
“I’m here to help. I would like to, tell me about the island's infrastructure, don’t be con—”
“Why are you so detached?” Elros burst out. “What are you even talking about?”
His agitated voice broke off harshly and he took a deep breath.
He had slapped Elrond across the face. Their skin was tingling. His eyes had drained to a pale shade of green, unnatural, the color of seasickness.
Elrond could suddenly see the two of them, sitting cross-legged on a stone wall, babbling on in circles about one meaningless thing or another, the way the light changed and things condensed and the living world around them became filled like a canvas with their images, and colored with their emotions. Elros was weary, vulnerable; underneath his speckled shell, he was reaching out, one hand towards the light.
“Sorry,” Elrond said, and then they were the one looking down at their hands, twig-like. Close and skittish like long, brown insects. There was something in the way the both of them were unable to communicate complex, important feelings verbally. It was maladaptive, stunted, but their other ways were much more productive. Elrond didn’t have to tell him that acting far away was a defense mechanism, because they were fragile— he already knew.
Elros cracked a lop-sided smile, shaking it all off with a toss of his head.
“No, it’s alright. Besides. Your life.”
“I quite like this holly tea. There isn’t much time for sitting around.”
Elros nodded, processing the memories. Elrond could tell by the depth of his eyes that he was desperate to know what their new life was, to press the question until Elrond sank under it all, but he held back and sipped another oyster. He still hadn’t touched the tea, but he had never liked tea: too bitter, too wild, too watery, he said. Perhaps Elrond had never forgotten a thing he’d said, or perhaps it was all floating back up now, like mud disturbed at the bottom of a pool. From stirring.
“How did you come here?” Elros asked, more directly. It was the sort of question that invited a sifting through the threads of the past, a weaving of some tale, half-remembered from experience, half unfamiliar. The pleasure was in storytelling.
“Went east, walking, stayed in Lindon,” Elrond said, seeing the hills sweep before their eyes, not turning or craning their neck back to see the ocean lapping ever closer as the land slid under. There had been a wide stretch of flat land, Elros had gone one way and Elrond the other. They had held hands, the smell of ashes heavy in the air, the sense of everything grinding to an end and churning to a new beginning, devastating and hopeful all at once. It had been difficult to maintain contact after that, for a while everything was so loud and close. They found each other again later, much later, when the geography had calmed itself, when their parents had taken their respective places countless leagues above and below the earth, diluted into the essence of the world itself, when every last person had chosen a direction and turned and went. “The King— Ereinion needed someone to talk to.”
“I liked his outfit, and his hair. And you... I’ve never felt that from you before, he gets under your skin,” Elros said, not even making an effort to hide the smirk on his face, pleased with himself.
“Yes, I mean no ,” Elrond said, narrowing their eyes caustically when Elros let out a cackle, smiling wider than he had any right to. “It’s your turn.”
“You know, things are busy,” Elros responded reflexively, and there was a widening, a distance in his aspect as his life regained clarity in his own mind. It was a lot that Elrond had seen before, and all that they hadn’t felt familiar anyway, phantom limbs and memories.
Lelyallë in white, a crowd of strangers in matching hues, the children speeding from soft bundles with sweet, doughy faces into streaks of energy and flailing limbs as they dashed about and covered every foot of the island with their own.
There was a boy and a girl, matching fawn heads, close enough in age that their shapes blended together sometimes, close enough that they could play together. Elrond had not seen this before it happened, although they had known Elros had descendants, a world of them. Somehow several steps had been evaded. Elros did not look worn enough to have children, but as they looked at him again, they saw with renewed force the signs of age, unfamiliar, almost unbelievable. Elros should not have been capable of children, after how the two of them were raised, when Elrond was incapable.
Elros’ children were mortal. Elrond would never meet them, this they knew for certainty. Elros’ children, with their smooth brown hair and slim eyes and sun spots, chattering in voices like birdsong, while his wife looked down on them with a beaming smile, difficult to contain in an idea.
“Your family is lovely,” Elrond said sincerely, melding their own longing and loneliness into praise.
Elros squinted involuntarily with happiness, a glow that reflected the warmth of his home, his place, his solidity, his assurance.
“Tindómiel is so much like you,” he said, still bright. “She has little gifts, and she is far, far smarter than me.”
Once, she wrapped cobwebs around her own foot when she sliced it open on a rock, way out in the wood with no one else around to care for it. Cobwebs, where there were no spiders on the island. She thought it all up, he gushed in the inner voice, and fragments of the moment were clear, suffused with pride and wonder.
“The one who makes jewelry out of pebbles and small things, like we did,” Elrond clarified.
“Yes,” Elros said, leaning in, a light of mischief sparking in his eye. “That reminds me, I have gifts, but you’ll have to wait for everything to be unloaded.”
“Pebble jewelry!” Elrond cried, leaning in as well, rocking their heels on the ground. It was a habit they had left behind, coming back across the sea to them like childhood. “Thank you.”
“I haven’t told you what the gifts are yet,” Elros said stubbornly, and when Elrond’s excitement would not abate, “I’m glad there’s no salt on the oysters.”
“Salt gets in everywhere here,” Elrond swallowed the bait, sufficiently distracted. “You drink it through your skin and when you breath, don’t need it on the food.”
“Everything in Númenor is salted too, it’s sickening, I feel like I’m shriveling up.”
Elrond spared another glance at Elros’ broad shoulders, like the one faded memory they had of their father. He had chosen to live forever, but he had lied. He was mortal too. That faded figure, layered over Elros now, was tinged with sadness; if there was any indicator that he really was separate, his physicality was definitive.
“You look like a barrel of fresh-caught wrasse,” Elrond said.
“Well, you look like a pampered, wet rat wrapped in someone’s leftover silks,” Elros snickered, sinking his teeth into a lemon slice like an animal.
“Silk is classy,” Elrond retorted, “you dress like a dog transmogrified into—”
“Is there anything either of you need?” Gil-galad’s rosy voice sifted in from the overgrowing garden, as he slipped down the steps leading back towards civilization.
His voice settled like down across Elrond’s shoulders, gentling them out of the other world they shared with Elros, so soothing that the initial shock of his intrusion didn’t register.
Elros’ eyes flickered over to him with surprise, and he twisted in his chair, unsure of how to respond when the High King of the Noldor ambushed him in an approach like a servant with the task of bringing them more tea. Elros thrown off balance was enough for the rest of the world to reach Elrond’s brain again, and they prickled.
Gil-galad had never been good at being alone, he had confessed years ago although it was always apparent. He feigned stability but he needed, deeply. Knowing all of this did not assuage Elrond’s frustration at his continual overstepping, the way he toed over lines as he fumbled blindly, purposefully through life, knowing nobody could tell him no.
“This is not his job, he’s actually just being nosy,” Elrond assured Elros, letting the hand with their teacup settle with a clatter on the table. It was a threatening gesture.
Gil-galad winced at the noise— and the idea of damage to his sky-blue china— and had the decency to look a hint embarrassed.
He had found the time to change into a casual dressing gown in shimmering shades of royal blue, simultaneously drawing out the sapphire of his eyes and his resemblance to past monarchs. He was all portraiture, regal bearing inherited rather than learned. It was if anything easier to be angry at him when he flaunted his overbearing loveliness.
“I don’t mind at all,” said Elros, with a wide smile, straight-on for once, as he betrayed Elrond. “You’re welcome to join us. I love that gown.”
Elrond felt as if worms had invaded their stomach. They seethed.
“Go on,” said Gil-galad, brush of a returning smile gracing his lips as he leaned in, inclining his posture towards Elros subtly.
“Blue is such a perfect color,” Elros said, leaning his chin on his palm and tilting his head up to deliver a shameless monologue. “It’s striking, it’s the color of our veins, the sea and the sky, life itself. I don’t think it works for simply anyone.”
Elrond was caught between moral outrage and sureness awaiting vindication that both were deliberately trying to drive them mad. They fixed the heft of their madness on Gil-galad, who seemed to be purposefully avoiding eye contact, flattering Elros with the intensity of his mesmerizing gaze.
“I rather think you would splendidly,” he was saying, twisting a hand flippantly in the air like an alluringly enchanted bird. “You have such lovely eyes.”
Elros laughed, wracked with his own mischief and adulation. “I suppose you would know. Please, sit down.”
“No,” Elrond interjected, fists balled under the table, gritting their teeth even though they had no cause for civility here. “Ereinion, leave.
Gil-galad and Elros shot them with twin expressions of hurt, marred somewhat by the glee apparent in both their eyes. Elrond had not considered before how similar they were.
“Darling, don’t you think it would be a bit rude, after your brother has so kindly—”
“No. I think your intrusion is rude, especially after we specifically discussed— you don’t listen.”
Gil-galad had glanced downwards to adjust the hem of his flowing gown, which was resting above his bare feet in the dirt. At Elrond’s words his head jerked up guiltily.
“Alright,” he said, and stopped himself, resuming with a more pleasant gloss. “My apologies. It’s so nice to meet you, Elros.”
Elros just grinned, fiendish.
With a sweeping bow, layers of fabric lifting into wings, Gil-galad exited the way he had come, gleaming with satisfaction.
The air was cooler without his hovering, more wholesome. Elrond sighed and Elros threw his elbows down with enough force to make the glassware chatter.
“Why do you talk to him that way?” he asked, face suddenly serious. “You love him.”
“Yes,” Elrond said.
Everything was Gil-galad, from the strangely shaped flowers darkening the bower over their heads, to the lemon and shellfish, to the impression of tufted grass where the cliffs reared up, out of sight. He could be suffocating, but Elrond breathed him. They had no comparison, it was love.
But every time they drew near the thought they saw a falling star. Streaking down through a sky choked with unnatural gray-blackness, smoke and the ether of lives lost. Radiant, landward evanescence.
Elros smiled with his eyes and there was a disconnect between them, something implacable until Elrond realized he hadn’t seen their ominous vision. It was blazing in their eye and he hadn’t noticed.
“Can you still… move water?” Elrond hesitated, unsure if he would understand.
Elros’ brow crinkled and they tried to feel less like he was crumpling their heart in his hand. It felt like such a loss, incredibly isolating. He wasn’t like that anymore.
Realization alighted slowly. “No,” Elros said, looking down at his hands, flexing them as if he was looking for something, a blemish, an old scar. “No, not anymore. I hadn’t even thought…”
His low, crackling voice trailed off and in the silence the distant crash of the waves was audible. The sound of plants stretching and growing.
Elrond was picturing the way Elros would send well-water splashing up from the pitcher, icy and perfect, to spray their faces, to make a mess of the breakfast table. The way he would part the course of a stream as they padded across, stepping on suddenly bare, dry stones, smooth on his feet.
Elros grew distant, retreating into their shared past. It had always seemed natural, to share an entire life with someone, there were no experiences they had gone through not-together. Everything had split very suddenly, and untenably, Elros did not now remember. He looked so lost and distraught that Elrond reached for his hand. Elros held on tightly, held too hard, but Elrond ignored the clench of bone.
“It’s alright,” they said softly. “Better, anyway.”
Elros clenched his jaw, the struggle still inherent, as he worked the sudden memories through. It was another heartbeat before they saw him relax.
“I’m sorry, I don’t know where… where it... do you still…” he trailed off as if could see the flames reflecting in Elrond’s eyes, the basins of water that had risen into lakes in the halls of the palace at Mithlond. He dropped it, wisely, there were some things too volatile.
“So many things aren’t the same,” Elrond said wistfully. They welcomed mourning, and then Elros did the same. It wasn’t only the children of their shared past, it was the past itself, it was everyone who had faded over the sea, and everyone who had stayed, wandered, faded in place.
“I didn’t believe it when they said he was dead,” Elros said. He could have been referring to so many faces, but his inflection narrowed it down to one. With a pang. They still had to be gentle, when they talked about family.
“He isn’t,” Elrond said defensively, reflexively. Instead of getting upset Elros just sighed. They could mourn anyway, mourn what had and could have been.
“Still, that’s one thing that changed in the world.”
“Everything is placid now, there’s so much stillness.”
“I don’t have that. But there isn’t that same…”
“Lingering darkness? The sun would rise and there would be darkness on the horizon, like a fingernail, just a scratch.”
“Yes,” Elros said, seizing on the image. When they were younger they hadn’t known the sky could be clean, and pure, and wide. They hadn’t known the sky was meant to mean freedom. It was winter throughout most of their youth.
“I let it stay… quiet,” Elrond said.
“Then it will stay. You can protect things,” Elros said, even though Elrond had never in their life protected him.
Elrond had been overly formal, and then they had been light, and it was all to avoid looking the monster of mortality down its diamond-studded maw, razor sharpened with ill-intent. The worst of gifts, besides foresight.
Elros had left. They didn’t want him to leave again.
They were both speaking from their inner selves now.
“We can do better.”
They said it like they meant forever, there was a sense of permanence to the words, their meaning. Holding everything they loved in their hands.
“We can. You should come see the ocean with me.”
It was as neat a bow on the subject as there was, an impasse. There was one thing that Elrond could never do, one thing they were both intimately familiar with.
Finally, Elros picked up his teacup, with excessive delicacy, as if he was worried the dirt underneath his fingernails or the lines on his knuckles might cause it to combust. He took a sip, and it was cold.
Elrond missed the taste even though it was in Elros’ mouth, they missed him even though he was right there, and they were still holding hands, loosely. Letting go was the worst thing there would ever be.
They sipped their own tea, companionably, and listened as the sea swept onward, again and again, kissing the shore, and falling back in a rush, a hush, and a silence.