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Maedhros
Steve knows there’s something not quite right about him.
It’s not the obvious, that he’s skinny and frail and constantly sick--that’s unfortunate, but not unheard of in their neighborhood. There’s something else, like an itch that’s not in his skin or a song running in his head that he can’t quite catch. It’s in how he has to work twice as hard as any other left-handed kid he knows to correct to his right hand, because when he’s little sometimes he forgets that his right hand is there at all. It’s in how he can’t stay out of fights even (especially?) if they’re unwinnable, like that’s where he’s used to being before he even knows the word for “bully”. It’s in how something deep in his core needs Bucky’s ironclad friendship, clings to it with a seriousness that isn’t quite called for in the time and place they’re growing up, and how he knows that Bucky’s not quite the right person for this, but is the closest he’s going to get.
When he’s seventeen, he reads this new book that’s out, The Hobbit , and it’s almost like he can scratch the itch and hear that elusive song. The fighting over the Arkenstone, though, almost makes him have to stop reading entirely.
He’s just a punk kid from Brooklyn, but he gets a librarian to help him and writes to Mr. Tolkien anyway, telling him that the book is almost like the dreams he sometimes has, except the dreams are much worse and he thinks there are two extra magical jewels in them.
The war comes, and he’s torn between the fight being a habit he can’t shake and it being a nightmare come to life--right up until an ocean gets put between him and Bucky. It’s not supposed to be this way. He’s the one who’s supposed to go sailing off east and leave his friend behind.
The serum is supposed to perfect him, so Steve initially wonders if maybe it will take the whatever-this-is away, but it doesn’t. The dreams get more vivid, especially once he’s really fighting, and really especially after Bucky...after the train. He can’t remember them clearly once he’s awake, just that in them, he’s still in a war but with different weapons.
The one good thing about the serum is that finally, somehow, his body feels like he belongs in it.
Maybe if he’d made it out of the war alive, he might’ve had time to chase down some answers. But there is no time, just the grinding ice.
*******
Amras
Before he’s even old enough to articulate it, Clint knows that he’s at least one brother short.
There’s Barney, but Barney somehow doesn’t count, no matter how much Clint tries to make it so. It isn’t that he doesn’t love his older brother--if anything, he almost wants more big brothers --but what he needs is a twin.
The empty space at his elbow doesn’t go away or get filled up as he gets older, but he makes himself ignore it, tells himself that it’s just a kid thing, a product of the weird childhood he had. He definitely doesn’t mention it on any of the SHIELD psych profiles he has to go through once he settles on the military as the thing that makes sense for his life, any more than he mentions the occasional dreams of burning cities and black smoke and technically outmoded weaponry.
(In the dreams, there’s always someone in that empty space beside him. He doesn’t remember much about them, but he’s very clear on that.)
Any internal weirdness notwithstanding, he’s very good at his job, which is presumably how he ends up getting assigned to take down the Russian assassin nobody else dares to tangle with.
And yeah, the Black Widow has a deeply scary rep, but the mission actually turns out to be very open and shut. Clint could have absolutely killed her.
Except that in the second before he can, he happens to lock eyes with her, and ValinorAdaMorgothSilmarilsOathdeathwarfamily all comes flooding back at once.
And when he blinks hard, he knows the fëa behind those eyes.
“Ambarussa?” he says when his mouth works again.
And the empty place beside him suddenly isn’t empty anymore.
*******
Amrod
By the time Budapest happens, Natasha has very nearly broken herself of the habit of needing someone.
That is not something that is allowed, in the Red Room and what comes after. Needing someone makes you less effective, and more importantly it implies that you are a person who can need things, and that is perhaps the most dangerous thing to let them know you might be thinking.
So she shoves it deep down, learns to fight on her own, makes sure she survives. It feels like she’s been surviving the impossible for so long that ceasing to do so is almost unimaginable.
The years when she has the Zimniy Soldat for a partner are among the best in her life. He doesn’t quite fill up the empty place at her back and by her side, but at least there’s someone. It’s not his fault that she sometimes turns to him and expects red hair matching her own and a bow slung over his back. Not any more than it’s his fault when their partnership is inevitably ended.
After he’s gone, she’s just gotten back in the habit of solitude, and her world makes sense except for when she dreams--
--and then there’s an arrow at her throat and the right person is looking at her out of the wrong eyes, and the memories pounding between her temples tell her that “Ambarussa” means her. It means her and the familiar stranger in front of her, both of them together, and of course she’s found Amras when he’s been sent here to kill her. Of course this is how it happens.
He doesn’t kill her, obviously. They’ve both killed a lot of people, in their old world and in these new, shorter lives, but brothers are off-limits and killing a twin is beyond unthinkable. The rest of the world will just have to deal with it.
Amras takes her back to the people he works for now, since they have to pick a side and it seems like SHIELD is less likely to kill them than Natasha’s--Amrod’s?--no, those are definitely Natasha’s associates. As he pilots them back, they don’t speak much, even though they have so much to catch up on and they’re no longer able to speak mind-to-mind. It’s enough, right now, to just exist with each other, the way they haven’t in so long.
They are not killed when they return to SHIELD. They are, however, told to immediately report to Director Nick Fury for Amras (or Clint, as they call him) to give an explanation.
Centuries of on-and-off war and a few further decades of living and breathing Russian spycraft have Natasha inclined to suspect that this is just a precursor to trapping and killing them after all, and all the way to Fury’s office, she runs through as many escape plans and scenarios as she can conjure.
None of them end up being even remotely close to what actually happens, which is that, once they’re shut in alone with Fury, he looks them each dead in the eye in turn and says, “Alasse, hinatya. Anda lúme avánie,” flawless Quenya in an accent that has never been combined with that language before.
There’s a frozen moment of silence, and then she and Amras both choke out “Atya?” in near-unison.
And suddenly Natash-Amrod has not just one family member, but two.
*******
Fëanor
He remembers the Void, inasmuch as something like the Void can really interact with something like memory.
He remembers the guilt and pain as each of his sons in turn joined him there. He remembers something finally hurling them away from Arda and Aman, out into even deeper nothingness. He remembers approaching this new world, but his memories from then until toddlerhood are understandably fuzzy.
Most of all, he remembers his sons’ fëar falling to this world with him (he thinks there were seven. He’s almost sure. He hadn’t been able to keep as close track there at the end). He’d known, as soon as he was old enough to understand what had happened, that they had to be out there somewhere.
Once he learned about SHIELD--there wasn’t much information in this new world that could be kept from him, once he had a grasp on the technology--he’d known that would be the best way to find everyone, and had therefore set his mind to working his way to the top. He was a craftsman by calling, but he’d also been enough of a leader to convince an army to follow him across the sea. He might have been king of the Noldor, if things had been different. Becoming Director of SHIELD is nothing compared to that.
Pityo is the first he finds, by a stroke of luck, as he combs through a new batch of personnel files and his eye catches on the recruit with the inexplicable predeliction for archery. Fëanor is elated, right up until he determines that unlike himself, his youngest doesn’t seem to remember anything before life on this world. The realization is incredibly frustrating, because the more he observes the man calling himself Clint Barton, the more obvious it is that this is his son--and yet there doesn’t seem to be anything he can do about it.
He tells himself that it’s better than nothing. He keeps looking for the others.
It’s a risk, sending Pityo after the assassin he’s almost certain is Ambarto, but simultaneously, Pityo is the only one who might possibly have a chance of bringing her in alive. He’s tense and snappish for that whole mission, and it only really goes away when he sees security footage of them entering the base.
Then his knees buckle, because he gets a glimpse of their eyes in the video feed, and he sees how they’re already moving as one, and he knows they remember.
There is disbelief and bewilderment, when they finally reunite in his office, and there is also some understandable shouting, not to mention a certain amount of tears and embraces at the end. For a moment, holding his youngest two close, Fëanor is almost at peace. They’re mortal now, and they’re all a little broken, but they’re here.
Five more aren’t.
Ambarto and Pityo are immediately willing to help when he tells them he’s looking for the rest of their brothers as well. There’s only so much they can do without someone starting to wonder why he’s favoring these two agents, but they keep their ears out, help him research.
Pityo is the one who finds an odd letter from one S.G. Rogers in a wild-hair investigation into Tolkien’s papers and miscellany. Ambarto is the one who connects it to the half-remembered captain-hero-friend her old KGB partner would occasionally tell fragmented stories of.
Fëanor channels more money and effort towards the petering-out Arctic expeditions founded years ago by Howard Stark. He has to make some thinly-stretched excuses to a few powerful people, but it’s worth it when, after everything, he meets his firstborn’s eyes across Times Square.
Maitimo is already struggling with finding himself displaced in time, and the abrupt onslaught of memories doesn’t do him many favors. He had, after all, come to the Void because he had sent himself there. Fëanor gets him out of there as quickly as he can, and summons his other two known children, and they all huddle together in the living quarters they’ve been establishing.
“How are we here?” Maitimo asks.
“I don’t know,” Fëanor admits. “I’m going to look more into it, once I have us all back together.”
Shortly after that, Ambarto talks him into letting her go investigate Tony Stark.
*******
Curufin
Tony has always been driven to create things that are just a bit beyond what’s actually possible.
The laws of physics are a deep annoyance to him from the (precociously early) time he’s able to make things at all. Nobody really understands why these limitations that everyone else takes for granted drive him up the wall, and by the time he needs both hands to count up his age, he knows better than to say because the metal should just do what I want because I say so, because there’s a potential for beauty here that you people might not be able to comprehend, because there should be music here and I can’t find it .
He discovers rock and heavy metal, and that’s decidedly not the music of the beautiful impossibilities some part of him insists can and should be made--but it is the music for what he can make, and the music for the growling angst of not being enough for the father he needs so badly to please.
There are spaces around Tony where people should be and yet none are, and he doesn’t know what to do about that, so he fills the spaces with robots. One in particular, his best, he tweaks for hours until he gets the voice as close to perfect as he can, because...because, well, this AI is almost like his kid, and there’s just a certain way that a kid of his should sound in order for all to be right with the world.
(Which is a stupid thought, because with the way he fills in all the remaining emptiness with questionable substances and even more questionable flings, the odds of him being trusted with a real, breathing human child are below zero. He files it away with the other stupid thoughts, like the one poking at him to make the AI’s acronym TYELPE instead of JARVIS, and the one where he remembers hearing that voice screaming, unreachable, in his nightmares.)
The bulk of his making, though, is weapons. Weapons feel...not quite like what he’s
meant
to do, exactly, just...habitual. That’s it. He’s very, very good at it, and he doesn’t see any shame in it, regardless of what people say. The things he makes are supposed to mean victory, and safety, and keeping
brothers
people alive.
Then Afghanistan happens.
The need to make armaments doesn’t go away, but Tony doesn’t trust anyone else with them now. He needs...he makes...
A suit of armor. Well, “a” suit at first. There’s always room for improvement.
Everything always has room for improvement, but he figures he has his life mostly figured out and under control, a year after Afghanistan and Obie and the very first armor--
--and then the new secretary he’s about to half-jokingly hit on looks him in the eye and he thinks brother , and a whole other centuries-long lifetime slams into him like a freight train.
Curufin sucks in a breath, hands braced on his knees, and says, “How did you know where to find me?” Because now that he’s assessing the situation, this encounter was very definitely manufactured.
“Frankly, once you announced that you were Iron Man, it was ridiculously obvious,” Ambarto points out.
“Who else have you found?”
“I’ll explain on the way.”
She does. Admittedly, there’s still a lot that the explanation doesn’t seem to explain, even when she delivers him to Atya and they go over it all again, but in the end Curufin decides it doesn’t matter. They’re here and it doesn’t seem like there are any immediate threats, and that can be enough for now, even if they’re mortal and nobody looks quite right and Maitimo is somehow even more traumatized (all right, they’re all traumatized, but Maitimo’s letting it show, which means it’s bad) and little Ambarto is somehow female now.
“Does it bother you?” Curufin dares to ask her at one point, since it seems like someone should. “Being, you know, different?”
She just fixes him with a look, before giving a slight head shake. “It might have, once. The person I grew up as here doesn’t have the capacity to care. My body’s a weapon, one that I know how to use. That’s all that matters.”
That still strikes him as depressing, but he leaves it alone to focus on the problem of designing the perfect armor for her and the rest of his rediscovered family so far.
Nobody knows yet where, or who, Tyelko and Carnistir are, or if Macalaure is even here. Opinion is divided on whether or not he’s still alive in Arda. One thing everyone else agrees on is that Tyelpe isn’t to be found here and must be in Mandos.
Curufin is insistent; he knows his own son’s fëa, estranged or no, and he knows Tyelpe was flung through space with the rest of them. He thinks about JARVIS and he wonders, but the only eyes JARVIS has are a multitude of cameras, and Curufin’s stared into those any number of times with nothing happening.
It’s fine. One thing at a time.
*******
Celegorm
Betty probably thinks that he left her because of the Hulk. Bruce did no such thing; the Hulk is a problem he can actually more or less control.
He left her because of the dreams.
They’d always sort of been there on the periphery, vague dreams where he was someone else--someone fair-haired and strong, always hunting or fighting with every evidence of enjoyment, always with a dog by his side, someone quick to violent anger.
Someone, in short, all too like the father who kept leaving bruises on him.
Bruce assumed the dreams were some kind of psychological damage control, and tried not to think about them, except in terms of making himself as unlike that man as possible. He avoided the outdoors and nature at all costs. He went vegetarian. He ignored the succession of family dogs (even though they just kept after him all the more). He dove into science and found, to his relief, that he had a gift for it--the ways that bodies and the workings of the world functioned, they seemed to sing to him, or speak to him in a language only he knew.
Except that then there’s the accident, and the dreams get sharper, more easily remembered in daylight. And for the first time, they feature someone he knows: he wakes up gasping from nightmares of finding Betty (somehow gone beyond beautiful into downright breathtaking) in the woods and snatching her and riding away. In the nightmares, she’s trying desperately to get away from him, and he doesn’t care.
Bruce would dismiss it, because everyone knows dreams and reality are two completely separate things--except that being the Hulk feels several unnerving steps closer to being the man he dreams of having been, albeit with far less brainpower. He has to put distance between him and Betty before that part can seep into the waking world, too.
(So in that sense, perhaps it is true that the Hulk is why he leaves her. He never used to have these problems before the accident ripped into his life.)
He avoids stress, avoids everything except for useful distractions. Calcutta is very good for that.
He has something resembling a life when a government agent comes sniffing around for a gamma scientist or a monster, either one, and instead manages to unearth her brother.
It’s some minor comfort, in the turmoil of his identity being turned inside out and upside down, that Ambarto seems almost as blindsided by this as he is. “How are you Tyelko?” she demands.
Celegorm
Bruce doesn’t know how to explain that he’s spent this particular lifetime trying to be as not-Tyelko as it’s possible to be, not when despite everything there’s that undercurrent of surprised delight to see him in her voice.
Ambarto immediately tries to convince him to come back with her, not just to deal with their gamma problem, but to see the rest of the family they’ve recovered so far. “We’ve got everybody except for Carnistir now,” she says. “Well, and ‘Laure, but we don’t know for sure if he came with, and Kurvo’s running out of famous musicians to present as candidates.”
Bruce’s initial instinct is to give a firm no . But the abruptly returned memories are starting to settle into place in his head, giving context to the fragments that haunted his childhood. He hadn’t been a good man, by any stretch. He’d been a kinslayer twice over and a schemer, and he’d tried to kidnap Lúthien. But not everything had been darkness. He could remember racing through Tree-lit woods on the fastest of horses behind Oromë, the love of a loyal more-than-dog at his side, a father who’d been worth leaving behind everything for, being part of a group of brothers who loved and were loyal to each other in a way that only centuries of desperate war could forge.
“Kurvo’s there?” he finds himself asking.
Ambarto smiles understandingly. “Yeah, he is.”
Bruce goes.
The helicarrier is unnerving all on its own, and there’s a beat when he first walks in on everyone else when no one quite knows what to do or say, but then there’s a fierce rush of welcome, and he’s home and it’s all worth it.
“You’re not like you used to be,” Pityo mentions at one point when the hubbub has died down a bit.
Bruce glances around at their father the intelligence agency director who reportedly hasn’t had time for his secret lab in weeks; Maitimo, more whole physically than he’s been in centuries and yet weighed down by an extra war; Kurvo, still clever-tongued but with all his old diplomacy long stripped away; and the twins who are no longer twins, who can’t mirror each other quite like they used to because the body that grew up as Clint Barton simply can’t do some of the things NatashAmrod’s body has had to learn to do.
“Are any of us?” he shoots back mildly.
*******
Caranthir
One moment, all Loki knows is his burning rage and desperation and resentment, hammering against the hard, cold wall that the scepter’s made in his mind, and then he locks eyes with what seems like a barely-above-average soldier and knows .
The knowing shatters any other holds in his mind ( cognitive recalibration , his second lifetime’s vocabulary chimes in helpfully), and a whole unknown chunk of his past spreads out before him.
He’s getting very tired of having to adjust his entire view of his identity with little to no warning.
There’s not much time to grouse about it, because Pityo’s face breaks into a grin and he exclaims “Carnistir!” in a jarringly wrong accent, but with such delight that it’s impossible to wish away the thing making him happy.
And then Atya (will he never be done with tripping over new fathers? At least this instance is less likely to end in bloodshed) is at his elbow, herding them into a private room and making excuses for the bewildered mortals and explaining everything for what is apparently not his first time.
Loki (for the time being, he’s keeping the name that he’s had for a few thousandish years longer) has his own news to share, and he gets it off his chest as soon as he can get a word in edgewise. “There’s an army coming,” he says flatly. “Better equipped than the orcs, but they’ve got a couple of useful weaknesses that those didn’t. We need to prepare.”
“Well, then,” Atya says, folding his arms, “I suppose it’s good that we’ve already found most of everyone else.”
*******
“We can’t pass up this chance--”
“The cube is bad news. Maybe worse than the Silmarils--those never came close to leveling a city.”
“No, we did that for them.”
“Shut up. Regardless, I’d rather not be on the same planet as that thing. We shouldn’t gamble on whatever let us be reborn here--”
“--for a given value of here--”
“--happening a second time.”
“...
...all right, already.”
*******
...and yes, finally,
Maglor
Darcy hums as she hefts the latest box of sciency equipment, the door to Jane’s new Stark-funded lab coming in sight. She’s not sure where this particular tune is coming from; it’s not any of the tracks on her newly-reclaimed and overloaded iPod. This happens sometimes, a song getting stuck in her head that she doesn’t remember the origin of, but usually it’s kind of sad.
Today, for some reason, the mystery song is downright chipper.
It cuts off abruptly in an ungainly squawk, though, when she tries to walk into the lab and smacks straight into The Tony Stark. Smacks into him hard, to the point that the equipment in the box she’s carrying rattles ominously.
“Hey! oh, I’m so sorry--” she starts, and then for just a second her eyes lock with Tony Stark’s and--
WHHOMMMM
--like the world’s most fateful power chord, memory and being thrum through her, and in the wake of the hitherto undreamt-of music suffusing her, Darcy loses her grip on the box entirely.
It hits the polished concrete floor with a mighty crash. Jane yelps. DarMaglorcy can barely hear her.
Tony--no, Curufin, Kurvo --swears fluently in three languages, only one of which is native to this world. “‘Laure,” he manages at the end of it. “How--we didn’t even know if you were--but the music --how are you a science intern? ”
“Political science,” Maglor mutters in a scattered kind of way. “Parents weren’t big fans of the arts as a career, and the only other things that made sense were the military or politics, and I sure wasn’t enlisting.”
“Of course you were the only one of us that managed to stay out of a fight,” Kurvo says under his breath. Then, “Come on, we’ve gotta call a family meeting. JARVIS? Code gold, get everyone to the penthouse.”
“Everyone?” finds its way out of Maglor’s mouth. “You’re--you’re all back? And here?”
“Yeah, Atya kind of made it his business to track us down, and the Ambarussa helped.”
“Wait, what about--” Jane cuts in, sounding like she might be losing her mind. “What’s going on? The backup drives--and what’s code gold--and...?”
“I’ll shell out to replace whatever got broken,” Kurvo says half-absently, but Jane’s still looking at her.
But there’s too much surging in Darcy’s head right now--light and family and music and war and thousands of years of solitude and regret and relief and the first notes of a searing headache--and explanations even to her best friend in this lifetime are not a thing she can deal with right now.
“I swear I’ll tell you all about it later,” she says, and then Kurvo’s hauling her away, half-running.
He’s gripping her a little too tightly--everyone does, when the eight of them are all together at last--but it’s okay. It’s good. She doesn’t have to be alone anymore.