Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The tower is empty save for her and the seabirds that nest under the roof. She wishes there were child laughter and Eärendil’s warmth and the smiles of their friends and those she used to call family. But Eärendil is away, as always. And everyone else is dead. So, she is alone.

People rarely visit the tower, even re-embodied kins. There seems to be a silent agreement that she is not to be bothered, and it suits her, to a certain extent. She doesn’t want the pity of others and the meaningless consolation offers. Nobody understands. She doesn’t want people to tell her she was right to not yield to the Feanorians demands. And she doesn’t want people to tell her she should have given them the stone. There was no right answer and there was no happy ending under Morgoth’s rules, only bitter memories following bitter choices. 

There is a little settlement south of the tower, mostly younger elves born during the Second Age and fresh from Middle Earth. They are simple and kind. They don’t ask questions. Some barely know what she went through. They like her and she likes them but they also keep an odd respectful distance with her, like they do with the older elves from Valinor, those who still have the light of the two Trees in their eyes, like they are the stuff from legends and not regular people like them. She is Eärendil’s wife. She is the stuff from legends. She is lonely but legends never are.

Eärendil should be back in the morning. She is waiting with all the windows open, to hear the birds cries as they tell her of his arrival. Maybe she should sleep instead but she can’t so she draws and paints instead, the view from the window and Eärendil from memory and the people from the market and one of the seabirds that nest under the tower’s roof and a pair of small twins she can never get right.

Eärendil is coming back sing the seabirds and she spreads her wings, not alone, at last.

Chapter Text

It was a perfectly normal journey until the weird elf happened. Well, no. It isn’t fair. It started to go awry a little bit before that. It was a perfectly normal journey, if only for the strong wind tossing around Vingilótë and, as it happened sometime, one of the ropes snapped leaving the staysail deflated. They had to land on sea, not far from Middle-Earth’s northern shores, so they could replace it. It turned out they had to stay there for a while as they replaced a fair amount of the ship’s rigging. It wasn’t their first time and neither Eärendil nor his crew were worried. 

And that’s when the weird elf happened. 

Which was new and unusual.

He climbed on board dressed in rags, leaving a trail of water in his path like some big wet seaweed and made a beeline for Eärendil in all his shining silmaril glory as the rest of the crew was busy with frayed ropes and a broken pulley. Nobody noticed until he was right in front of Eärendil, thrusting a small package wrapped in oiled skins hazardously kept together by rough strings. Then he threw himself back into the sea like some sort of collective hallucination only made real by the strange package left behind in Eärendil’s arms and wet footprints on the deck. The mariner took a foggy peek at its content and instantly recognized the washed out cover of the very old journal with little seashells stucked on it. He could feel them through the oiled skins under his fingers, two in the top left corner, three in the bottom right. It was for Elwing and he would bring it back to her at all cost.

❦

She carefully opens the package on the dining table, while Eärendil is taking a bath, and she can’t help a sob when she sees it. It’s her journal, the one she started when she had the twins to record their growth and their life. She did it because she already knew Eärendil would often be away and she wanted to tell him everything on his returns. He wanted it as well. She recorded their height and their weight as they age and stamped little hand and foot prints. She wrote their favorite foods and their first words and when they started walking. She drew their sleeping faces and their smiling faces and when Elros had tried to wear his father’s coat and disappeared in the pile of blue fabrics, only a loop of dark hair visible. She had pressed flowers they had brought her and kept indecipherable drawings, supposedly of her and Eärendil. 

She cries. It’s pages after pages of memories, of her babies’ childhood, of the most beautiful years of her life. She thought the journal lost to the fire of Sirion, along with everything else, but it’s there, beaten up and a little bit damp, but still legible, almost unnaturally so for an artifact so old.

Her writing stops abruptly during the twins’ sixth year. A half-blank page is looking at her, perfect witness of the tragedy, and she can’t bear looking at it a second longer. 

She turns the page. 

It should be blank. 

There is writing on it.

It’s very loopy and dramatic Tengwar where she was using small and sharp Cirth runes. It looks like vines crawling on the pages. It talks about little twins. One of them is always crying and the other is eerily silent. She wants to hold them tightly against her chest. That’s where they should have been, safe and loved. The vines talk of other twins, dead. Some characters are blurred, water must have fallen on them in little droplets.

She turns the page again, to more Tengwar. And so is the next page. And the next. 

The silent twin tries to kill the writer with a knife. Evidently, it didn’t work as he is still writing.

It takes five pages for the writer to learn the name of the twins. Well, he knew them from Elwing’s writing but it is only after a week that he understands the crying twin is Elros. Poor child always was the more expansive of the two. Elrond is quieter, but it would be a mistake to assume he feels less than his brother. The writer seems to be aware of that. Good.

Elros has bitten the writer. Also good.

The twins make a valiant effort at resisting their captors, but they are children, only six years old, afraid and missing their parents, missing Elwing that should have been there. She has to remind herself that she left them to protect them, hoping to divert the Feanorians’ attention to her and the silmaril so they can spare her sons unlike her brothers. She has to remember that it worked, to an extent, and her sons lived even if in the hands of said Feanorians. Bitter choices with bitter consequences, again and again.

The writer is worried because Elros doesn’t eat. Elwing is too.

Elros has fallen from a wall. The writer thinks they tried to escape. Elrond has spoken for the first time, asking for help for his brother and saying it’s his fault. The writer hasn’t punished them and he sings Elros’s bruised knees and sprained ankle away. He is only happy Elrond talked to him and Elros is eating again.

Elros is barely leaving the writer now, to his delight. And Elrond keeps watching over his brother, still wary of their new caretaker.

The writer talks about other people in the fortress. Elwing carefully avoids any mention of the cliff monster Maedhros Him.

Elrond tells the writer “I hate you”. The following night, he falls into his arms, crying as everything becomes too much to bear. He is merely six after all. And what can a six year-old do other than depending on the adults around him.

Elwing reads the diary obsessively page after page, going through the childhood of her babies in a Feanorian fortress. Each page, she misses them more. She also finds herself accidentally rooting for the writer. She wants her children's happiness and he does too. And there is something soft and fragile in the way he writes about the twins, so full of love and yet with an underlayer of guilt. She smiles meekly as he talks about the twins badgering him for nighttime stories and when he tries making them a cake despite limited supplies. 

And she feels sick when he says that the twins called him “Atya”. 

How dare he ! HOW DARE HE ! 

He stole her babies and now he tries to replace their father, sweet and brave Eärendil, who sacrificed so much for peace and a good future for his children.

How dare he.

She is so incensed that she gets up, away from the journal and she realized that she was so absorbed in her reading, she missed her husband going to sleep. Surely he did kiss her on the forehead before doing so, as he always does. She has half a mind to go wake him up and tells him about the injustice. She looks at the page again, on the following line, the writer says he has asked for the children to not call him that. The next line is about the cliff monster Maedhros Him so she avoids it. 

She keeps reading.

Sometime, between the pages, she finds a drawing or a pressed leaf, the same kind of little treasures gifted by her sons she used to keep in the diary. There is also bits of music scores written in the margins. 

One double pages contains a full print of each of the twins left hands, so much bigger than the one she had previously made.

Hours have passed when she reaches the end. The writer was a couple of pages short despite not writing as much as he was at the start of it and had to add some loose sheets of paper. The writing is blurry, to a point Elwing wonders if he tried to write under the rain. He talks about sending the twins away to the High King. Not once has he called the twins his in all of the diary and that last page is where he slips, calling them his little stars, his babies, his most precious treasure… Everything is stricken off but Elwing can still read it.

The journal ends with two locks of hair tied to the inside of the back cover, with her babies’ names under them. She knows how weird the Noldor are about hairs. This, more than anything else, makes her cry. She has received a priceless treasure, one tiny portion returned of the stolen childhood of her sons. She has received a poisoned gift. It was easier to hate the Feanorians when she could imagine them cruel and uncaring.

There is a lukewarm tea cup on the table. And Eärendil is awake again, looking at her drawings. He is softly caressing the paper and she wonders if she should learn carving and sculpting for the days he won’t see anymore. Maybe she should glue seashells and sands on the beach and little puffs of cotton in the sky. 

She goes to him, folds herself into his arms, talks about the diary, about her feelings, his, and the monsters. He tells her about the weird elf. They agree it must be the missing one, out of all the monsters. 

And the writer as well. 

Maglor.

Soon, Eärendil will sail away again and she will be alone once more. Only the paper will listen to her ranting so she will write it all and put it in a bottle, throw it into the sea, as far away from her as possible, all those ugly feelings, the hatred and the injustice and a small thank you at the end of it.

Chapter Text

The story says that Beleriand sank after being too damaged by the War of Wrath and the fall of Ancalagon. Maglor personally thinks it might actually have been him crying too much. He can’t help it, it never stops. He’s not even sobbing or wailing, the tears are just falling from his eyes without any sign of stopping, leaving the skin of his cheeks and under his eyes raw and irritated. It’s alright though. He keeps falling into the sea and who can differentiate tears from seawater. 

Everything is a rightful punishment, the silmaril burn on his hands, constantly hurting and preventing him from playing the harp, the infinite tears, living as an hermit, far from any settlement, the storms and the guilt, the ever-lasting singing and giving the diary to Eärendil. 

Well, maybe that last one wasn’t supposed to be but it does feel like one.

It was the last remnant of his life with the twins. His little stars. His babies. His most precious treasure. The last memory when his is so prone to failing these days.

He also knows it was the right thing to do. And it removes just a little bit of that all consuming guilt plaguing him all the time, worse than the oath ever was (that’s a lie).

It is a grey day and a grey sea and he is singing the Noldolantë again. He has reached the part with all the dead’s names. The list is so long yet he knows it is incomplete. He can’t afford to forget any more of them so he keeps singing it. Maybe he should write a song about the twins and sing it between the infinite litany of names, just so he does not forget them, too.

The waves are roaring in a familiar way, announcing either a storm or the sea ready to spit out that fucking stone again. He hopes it will be a storm. 

It is neither, just a light rain and a bottle.

Having been living on the shores for centuries, Maglor has seen the sea regurgitates a lot of things, from seashells to woods to glass shards polished smooth by the waves. Storms, especially, bring a good share of treasures, with full shiploads lost at sea. Bottles aren’t unusual, although most of them are already broken by the time they reach Maglor. 

This bottle is intact and it is still corked, which is even rarer. And it does not contain any kind of liquid, but rather some kind of folded sheets of paper. Maglor would have taken the bottle either way (having a bottle is always useful) but this compels him to open it right away. 

It is five pages, written in Sindarin, of every variant of “I hate you” one can think of. It also cites every bad deed Maglor ever did, from kinslaying to kidnapping. There is no doubt he is the intended recipient of this letter in a bottle. He is also fairly certain he knows who has written it. There is no signature but the writer did write a tiny “thank you for the diary” at the end of one page. She also asks for her children’s childhood back.

He doesn’t think he can do that, not because he can’t rewind time but because he is selfish like that. Maybe he can find something else to give.

He rummages through his few belongings hidden in a little cave on the cliffside, a couple of threadbare tunics, cheap earrings and hair accessories valuable only for the memories tied to them, a harp he can’t play with several broken strings, a pretty pile of music scores he is struggling to keep safe from humidity and Maedhros huge coat that his brother had the good taste to leave behind before jumping. It is trimmed with fur and useful as a blanket during the colder night. He leafs through the music scores and settles for one of the lullabies he has written for the twins when they were still small. He can’t help humming it while folding it and rolling it inside the bottle.

He doesn’t have any ink to write her a message. She wouldn’t accept any apology anyway and she would be right. Instead, he goes back to the beach and searches for some seashells to make a melody with. Music has always been his favorite means of communication and centuries upon the seashore has taught him that seashells clicking together can make as lovely random melodies as anything he could have played on his harp when his hands were still working properly.

He carefully picks the sounds, filling the bottles with a dozen of seashells once he is satisfied with the resulting tune. It is a melancholic sound, just like the grey sea under a grey sky on a grey day, but two specific seashells, pale pink in color, add a little note of softness and peace when they meet. He hopes she will like it.

Once the bottle is sealed again, Maglor throws it back into the sea as the tide falls. Despite the state of his hands, he is good at that, throwing objects far into the deep water. He doesn’t know if the bottle will be able to reach Valinor again but Ulmo and his maiar must have had a hand in it reaching Maglor so they can play messengers again if they feel like it. And if not, well, for once he had something else to do other than singing the names of the dead. 

The bottle dances into the waves for a little bit before disappearing from Maglor’s sight. The rain is still falling and he is singing again. The water on his cheeks could be rain as much as it could be tears.

Chapter Text

Eärendil has once again hit his hips on the corner of the little cupboard near the kitchen’s entrance. It used to worry her, thinking that if he was as clumsy on Vingilótë as he was at home, he would end up falling overboard. Then, her husband’s crew had assured her that he had no such problem on board and while it had comforted her, it had also brought to light an uncomfortable truth : her husband is so little home, he barely knows the layout of each room. She could always move the cupboard but she is hoping that one day, he will remember it’s there.

For now, he is sitting in the living room, massaging his sore hip like an old man. Seeing him grumbling makes her laugh. She wishes he could stay longer but he will be gone in a couple of hours. She tries not to think about it and shows him some of the watercolor paintings she did while he was away. She went on a walk inland and saw beautiful hydrangeas blooming in shades of blues and pinks and the roundest little birds. Eärendil smiles as he looks at each picture before asking for details, the kind of birds and what is behind a flower (a butterfly), things that could be interpreted as mere curiosity and drawing innacuracies if she didn't know better. She tries not to dwell on it and rambles to him about the birds.

Birds make everyting better. She can focus on them, share little facts about their diets and nesting habits and how intelligent they are. Did you know that an eagle can spot a rabbit 3.2 kilometers away ? Unlike you, beloved, and your declining vision. You once again hit the little cupboard because you keep forgetting it's there and you don't see it. One day, I'll be the one you won't see. Birds are great. I can listen to them and talk to them and why would I be lonely in their company.

There is something wet on Elwing's cheek and Eärendil sees it. He brushes it away with his thumbs. He hugs her. Soon, he will have to go and she will be alone again. Elwing hates it.

Eärendil is gone and she is taking a walk on the beach, picking up seashells, when she hears it. It's a little collection of muffled tinklings forming a sad melody. She follows it and finds an oddly familiar bottle stuck among the rocks at the foot of the cliff.

Inside, there is none of the raging and crying she first put into it, there is just an old music sheet written in half-faded ink and a bunch of seashells, the source of the melody. It is very odd that seashells could produce such sounds when knocking each other and she has half a mind to string them together into a little melodic garland to hang in front of the tower. She takes everything back home.

It takes her some time to decipher the music sheet. The lyrics are quite straight forward, written in the same loopy tengwar as the diary, some kind of children song, maybe a lullaby. The music notes are something else. Elwing learned to read them millenia ago, in Sirion, but she has half-forgotten them by now. She sings them out loud, sometimes going through the whole scale to remember which note it's supposed to be. By the time she can sing the whole thing right, night has fallen and she has forgotten to eat. She hums the lullaby — it's definitely a lullaby now that she has heard its melody — under her breath as she cooks something up.

And she still sings it by morning, waiting for Eärendil's return on the windowsill.

The following days, the bottle stays empty on the little cupboard. (Eärendil doesn't hit again although he still sports a silly little bruise on his hip.) She should probably put it to a better use in the pantry or bring it to the market to have it filled with something nice.

She goes to the market on Orgaladhad. And on Orbelain, for the little cakes one of the stalls is famous for.

The bottle stays empty.

She is still humming the lullaby.

How unnerving.

She strings the seashells into a garland she hangs between two old worn-out wooden posts next to the tower's entrance. The little strange melody they make helps her forget the lullaby.

Eärendil comes and goes.

The bottle is still on the cupboard.

Every time she sees it, the lullaby comes back. Did he sing it to them ? Did he write it for them ? Does she even want to know ?

Give me back my children, she wants to say.

What were they like, she writes. And she throws the damn bottle into the sea.

The lullaby stays behind.