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Elrond was striking a pummel aggressively down his sword, a sword which he should not have had that night and Thranduil was very confused as to how he’d hidden it under such a sheer gown. He did not acknowledge Thranduil’s presence instead continuing with his task while staring out at the lights that flickered in the city below.
‘Do you have any idea of what you did in there? My father is not going to let something like that go, there will be repercussions for your king, why I’d be surprised if he didn’t fire you from his staff for this! Why you decided it was anything but egregiously offensive to wear that brooch tonight I could not begin to fathom, but the least you could have done is show respect to Ada’s perfectly reasonable response rather than lose your temper like that!’
Elrond acted as if he had not heard a word of this tirade and when he spoke his voice was soft and clear with a sharp cut to every carefully enunciated word, punctuated by the rhythmic slam unto his blade, a far cry from the passionate indignation that had bled through his words while speaking to king Oropher. ‘You know,’ his face was concealed by a curtain of black that must at some point have been pulled out of its braid, ‘when I was younger I thought there was something wrong with me. That there was some reason that I wasn’t deserving of the kind of love that children are meant to get, the all encompassing love that comes before all else. My parents may have been good people, and I cannot judge their decisions, but I find it hard to believe that someone who considered their children their highest priority would have left them in the position my brother and I were left in. I know I couldn’t have done that to any children of mine even if it were the right decision.’
He turned now and his voice began to shake with anger while tears began to slip past his lashes and onto his cheeks, ‘I try to understand and be aware of other people’s experiences but I was six and I would have died if I wasn’t lucky that Maglor was in a charitable mood and that he found us first. I should have died at six because my life and the lives of countless other innocents were considered collateral damage in a war over a fucking shiny rock by my own mother when she held onto that silmaril. And I still try to empathise with and love her and my father because they might have been right.’
‘I loved them to! I loved the kinslayers! They were monsters but they were there, they raised me, taught me, loved me but I still came second to those rocks! Because I’m never going to be enough! For anyone. I’m going to keep trying to be every age of this world, but people will always leave me. Because I’m never quite enough to be a reason to stay. And don’t you dare try to tell me you know shit about how I should feel or deal with any of that because you don’t. You don’t and neither does he. And neither do I but I have more of a right to make a mess of it than he does.’