Chapter Text
When Curufin pressed the cloth into his hands, Finrod could almost swear he felt warmth from his cousin’s palms held inside the fabric. Or radiating from the cloth that encircled him, stitched together and embroidered to perfection already – and the body beneath.
“I have told you numerous times before, I am not your sovereign lord to require such gifts and tokens put to me,” Finrod murmured – as if in pushing away Curufinwe’s inscrutable generosity, he was doing as much physically as well. It was not so.
“As if my regard, or such show of it, would be bought with mere titles, cousin?”
Curufin only lowered his eyes then – contemplatively? no, too purposeful – it was a new gesture, one Finrod could not yet guess at. “Your best robes are more worn than last I recall. Your tunics less bright. And yet the new jewels…” His eyes flicked to the rings about Finrod’s fingers, new only in the past two centuries, but. “There are roads that bring the dyes you once preferred, from the east and south. And much trade with my brother’s lands.”
A thin stream of air sucked into Finrod’s mouth, and he took the cloth fully, no longer simply touching while it remained in Curufin’s hands. “Then receive my thanks for it,” he replied. Slowly. Softly.
Curufin took his step back in much the same way.