Chapter Text
The Dagor Bragollach
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“I’m impressed you held Tol-Sirion as long as you did,” came a quiet voice from Orodreth’s side.
When Orodreth turned (had he not noticed somebody riding up beside him? he must have been more dazed from the syrup he’d been fed for the pain than he thought), he was almost alarmed for a moment; alarmed at the man wearing Curufin’s features but covering them in an entirely different demeanor - oh, of course. Curufin’s son. His cousin.
(Orodreth couldn’t remember if they’d ever even met as children; he doubted it, having never visited Curufin’s house and Curufin never visiting his own father’s, and there were few enough parties he could remember, once he’d been old enough to attend without just clinging to his parents’ legs)
“It was not quite my own doing,” he responded, and he was surprised at just how much bitterness had sputtered out along with his words; he had not intended that - (when it got too quiet he could start to hear the echoes of shouting and screaming and crackling, and something he could not call a sound but he knew it was his father).
His cousin’s eyes - grey, rich like silver, clever but certainly warmer than what he’d seen of Curufin’s - cast down toward the muddy ground they rode through at Orodreth’s words. Perhaps ashamed? or contemplative? Orodreth could not quite read him.
“My apologies,” he said softly when he looked up again, though he did not quite meet Orodreth’s eyes. (Apologies, as if he had done something wrong? Orodreth frowned in the back of his mind, for condolences would certainly be more appropriate to the topic.) “Your uncle Findar- Finrod, he received a stroke of luck, and lives still, at least. And you have your own life.”
Orodreth’s stomach tightened, and this time he was the one to look away. What would Finrod have said to his daughter, if his cousins hadn’t arrived when they did? (She was better suited to his care anyway, a thought stabbed at him, before he strangled it like a creeping worm.)
When he replied, at least, it was in an even tone, betraying little. “Glad indeed that Nargothrond still has its king,” he said, to which his cousin replied, “I shall enjoy meeting him again.”
It hadn’t quite hit him until then, Orodreth realised, what would happen when they arrived back at the city. For Celegorm and Curufin traveled not just with an escort for him, but with all of their remaining people - a straggling band of farmers and craftsmen along with the warriors. They were coming as refugees to Nargothrond.
He shivered, slightly, at the memory of his uncle’s anger one night, years ago, when the topic of his half-cousins had come up. Kinslayers, architects of his people’s deaths and torment on the Helcaraxe.
When he looked back at Celebrimbor (that was his name, yes; it had taken him a certain while to recall it), it was hard to keep from wondering - from imagining him with sharp steel in hand and the blood of Orodreth's grandmother’s people splattering his armor, imagining him with sea-spray in the long curls of his hair while tossing a torch onto the deck of a crimson-lit swan…
“If you will excuse me,” Orodreth murmured to his cousin then, a slightly odd quality to his voice. “I am not yet healed and simply riding can be somewhat exhausting.”
Celebrimbor was at least courteous enough to leave him with no protests.