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There is a story, probably some overdramatized bard’s tale or misrepresented puppeteer’s show, where Durin never comes.
(He thinks too hard about this many years later, when Celebrían explains why Elrond must be coaxed to sleep.)
There is a world where Celebrimbor’s spirit rages against Arda.
(He knows this because his father’s ring is sullen, craving the triumph owed to its master.)
There is a tale where Elrond is beaten down, tired, defeated, left to die but still digging in his heels, the stubborn fool refusing to give up just because he’s got too many role models who survived worse so he’s got a lot of catching up to do yet.
This is that story.
It’s the one Durin hates, even though he tortures himself to believe there’s still good coming from it. The one Elrond’s got to live with, because it’s the only outcome they know and there’s no miracle of rings or spirits offering a better path. It’s the one where he finds the Elf long after Eregion is abandoned, after the Orcs are slaughtered, after no one should be found living in these cells that reek of half-decomposed corpses and bloated rats and filth, and Elrond’s not only hanging on (not that he’s got much choice given the chains, granted), but he’s snarling about deception like he’s still got the nerve to scold Durin for being late.
(He can scold all he likes. No one expected to find his bones after Gil-Galad admitted their companies had been forced apart. Durin can shoulder a little censure this once.)
Sometime in between taking his axe to the chains and plucking the skinny Elf off the floor, Elrond gets it in his head that he’s not hallucinating. And then he can’t stand at all, even if those twiggy legs could’ve held him. Shivers turn to wracking shudders as ghostlike fingers trace Durin’s beard.
“D-Durin?”
It’s all he says. Durin nods with a soft, “Aye,” and that’s where his own words end.
No flowery prose or apologizing can put sense to this.
Elrond doesn’t make a big show of it. He just sort of collapses, skeletal face mashed into Durin’s shoulder, shedding enough silent tears to make him a proper Dwarf. (Not like those stodgy Elves who couldn’t even look properly miserable when they admitted they lost a full squadron when Orcs broke the line.) Durin scuffs his filthy, matted hair and weeps with him, because that’s what a brother does, and he’s ashamed to realize he could probably carry Elrond himself and the Elf would be scarcely more burdensome than his battle armor.
(He won’t, because they have a travois, and even if he’s probably lighter than Gerda and Gamli combined, Elrond is still a spindly tree with floppy branches and they’ll both land on their faces before Durin takes his first step.)
They leave the cell behind them; dishonored, wretched grounds strewn with gnawed bones and fat, sassy vermin and the hollow songs of lost hope. (Sauron can’t have left his prize behind for good reason. He’s coming back. By then, the Dwarves will be long gone.)
Durin ought to take Elrond back to his people, but he won’t. He’s the one who plotted the rescue, he gets to be the one to reintroduce Elrond to the sense of friends, hearth and home. (Besides, it’d be shameful to return an Elvish prince in such an awful state, anyways. People might start frowning like it was the Dwarves’ fault all along.)
Even before the travois is set down, Disa showers Elrond with enough tears and kisses to make him forget his own mother. Then she’s a hellion hollering for hot water and clean night shirts and blankets and enough hot tea to make an Elf lose the memory of thirst. (She slips something in the brew to make Elrond woozy, because he’s hurting and it’s not right to make him feel shamed as well when he’s bathed and dressed by healers who are just alike to strangers after twenty bygone years.)
When Elrond’s hair is washed and combed and he’s dressed in clean linens (the sleeves are too short and the trousers too wide but he’s not romping around anytime soon and there’s plenty of time to measure a new set against the rags they cut off), Gerda and Gamli are allowed to sit close by and watch him, so Disa can make stew and Durin can meet with his council and everyone can make sense of this sole survivor who was banished up until he was found alive thirteen hours ago.
They’ll have to fess up to the Elven King eventually.
(The Elves didn’t look hard enough. They don’t deserve to rest easy now.)
“Celebrimbor deserves to know,” Disa snaps later that evening, when Durin grumbles his reservations. “Think what kindness he showed to our wee Gamli and Gerda! Do ye really think he’d stop hammering on Mahal’s doors if he thought there was a chance to bring Elrond home?”
They send a raven (and only one) to Mithlond where broken spirits are sent to heal.
Elrond wakes the next morning with a start, believing he is trapped, and Gamli cries more than his sister when the Elf scrabbles away from them in terror.
“You cannot know them! I never gave them to you! I will not be manipulated by mere figments stolen from those you slaughtered!”
When it becomes clear the vision is real he weeps again, burying his face in Disa’s shoulder, until he is too exhausted to speak. He craves forgiveness and it is meted willingly. Wonder softens hollow grey eyes when Gamli and Gerda plop onto the bunk, chattering to their uncle about the pond dug under his tree and the tadpoles they’re raising and the white flowers growing in new fields around the Bruinen, and Durin looks on with silent tears.
They can’t send him back to cold halls where he won’t be cherished.
Disa makes watery stew that night; the sort that can’t put meat on a cricket’s bones. (It’s good, she definitely lavished the herbs enough that it’ll taste like food without Elrond folding over with post-starvation cramps, but it’s still mostly broth and Durin needs meat. He’ll muster a compliment and scuttle off to the kitchen later.)
It’s all well and good until Durin stuffs pillows behind the Elf’s back to sit him up, and then they both stare at the mug he offers until Elrond’s ears burn hotter than the hearth. Durin swallows a curse, remembering too late that Elrond was hanging by his arms long enough that the shackles corroded and painted his wrists nearly black. Disa sweeps in with keen gaze, clapping for the children to hurry up and go play in their room, and then she sends Durin on a nonsensical kingly errand so Elrond doesn’t have an audience while she braces his pitiful, shaking hands around the weight of a half-full mug.
Forget stone cold halls. They need one of Elrond’s kind (just the one) to hug the shakes out of him and reassure him that he’s not broken.
Celebrimbor doesn’t read two lines before he saddles Legin; Elrond’s poor mare who was left behind while he played commander. He tells no one, anticipating a trap, and arrives as lathered in perspiration as the poor beast he rides, his scarred hands wrapped around her reins as he halts just shy of the doors and shouts, “Friend!”
When he scoops up Elrond, coverlets and all, he bawls like any proper Dwarf who just realized the honorable dead meandered back for a second round. Elrond is startled awake, lost and terrified, and Durin sees the moment when he believes he’s still dreaming and claws both hands into Celebrimbor’s robes to keep him there.
Then he realizes it’s not a dream at all, and he cries until he’s sick, and then he can’t stop sobbing and heaving in turn until he passes out. Celebrimbor carries him to the fire, keening over his wasted frame and fluttering heart. He begs Durin to send word to Lindon, for the High King would not have abandoned his herald willingly and they have healers who will shake this illness when mere herbs cannot.
Durin knows that when the king’s emissaries arrive, he’ll lose these precious moments.
He doesn’t have a choice.
The black mare arrives first. The tempest who rides her nearly shakes the Balrog awake with his furious strides. He badgers Celebrimbor to let him have a peek, goes ashen, and glides out with unnerving silence, vowing to hurry along the rest of the party.
The Elves which beg entrance are dressed in enough frivolous silks to buy off a geode stand, but there is chaffing in their stride as they are forced to keep pace with Narvi. When Disa lets them encroach on their halls, Gil-Galad trails off mid-greeting, riveted on the shadow who had just turned about to continue his fireside pace. Celebrimbor’s smile is brief and uncertain. He cradled his cousin with the ease of rocking a bairn, scarred hands never once jolting him from a healing trance.
“Ereinion,” Celebrimbor breathes — a request, an entreaty — and the spell is broken.
The distance is too great. Gil-Galad sprints to his side, sliding his arms around Celebrimbor’s burden without so much as a breath for permission. Lamentation splinters dark eyes as he breathes over Elrond, evoking Elvish words which are more tender than any tone Durin’s ever witnessed from this stoic king. When Elrond blinks awake and is helpless to conceal his relief, Galadriel swoops forth to brush away his tears, murmuring affirmation over him like a song as she kisses the shadow from his brow.
Elrond struggles then, crying out for Celebrimbor, as if he is afraid to trade one dream for another. When he clasps his cousin’s hand and sees around him three shining faces he faints, overwhelmed with such conflicting joy and distress that his aching, lonely heart stops beating. Celebrimbor wrestles him back in despair, crying out against the Valar’s injustice, and will not be consoled until the frantic coaxing of rings steals breath back into shivering lungs.
“We will convey our gratitude,” Gil-Galad promises at length, pressing a hand to Elrond’s brow with a possessiveness that breaks Durin’s heart. (For they won’t let him out of Lindon now, not until he stops shivering at the slightest breeze, and another twenty years is too long to wait.)
“Tell him we won’t be far behind,” Disa insists. Whether they like it or not, she inviting herself to Lindon, and woe to those who stand in her way.
A mystified expression flashes across Gil-Galad’s face, as if he never believed Dwarves would return a mere courtier’s loyalty. Durin plants his feet and raises his chin and dares him to say something about trees needing earth instead of mountain rock. Instead Gil-Galad inclines his head, one king honoring another, and says in a vaguely misted voice, “Your people will always be welcome, for as long as peace endures between us.”
He is forced to lead the way out, for Celebrimbor will not let go of Elrond twice, not even when ordered by his king. (His exacting retort, even in the Elvish tongue, is spiced enough to make Disa hiss between her teeth and glare at the wee’uns not to repeat any words they don’t understand.)
Galadriel lingers behind, luminous eyes shadowed with passing grief. “We believe Sauron veiled his keep from all Elvish sight,” she admits with a heaviness she will cling to for years to come, accepting all blame. “Many came this far seeking any sign of the lost company.”
For closure, not hope.
When Galadriel smiles, Durin can’t help but believe Elrond is going towards goodness, and nothing less will be accepted by his watchers. “Thank you, Durin,” Galadriel echoes the High King’s praise. “For all of our sakes. I know Elrond will wish to see you soon.”
“I’ll be there,” Durin swears.
Maybe somewhere in fables and misconstrued ballads there’s a story where he stayed behind. Maybe hope left Elrond on that battlefield where athelas now grows. Maybe his father’s ring sulks because it wanted a future where the dead stayed dead and hope was built on dishonored cairns and broken oaths.
That’s not this story, and Durin knows it. He’ll be there afore the summer solstice, when the leaves are shining in their full glory and the trail is warm and Elrond has to be shaken out of a nap by one of at least three friends hovering to guard his dreams. Before two weeks pass Durin and Disa and the wee’uns will surprise him, and then there will be tears all around, and introductions to this skittish rabbit of a mapmaker and the lurking fox and spindly archer, and instead of joining Gil-Galad at another dubiously polished table they’ll sit in the meadow until Elrond is laughing so long and merrily that he falls asleep in Camnir’s lap, and then they miss luncheon so Celebrimbor hunts them down with three apprentices bearing tea, and they act like proper lords and ladies until the sun sets and that lolloping, scheming stork sets out with his recalcitrant comrade and carries Elrond home to sleep within the healers’ easy reach.
It’s not how the story should end, the lord of many rings seethes, but this isn’t that tale and the Valar don’t wrangle second chances and even if they did Durin wouldn’t trade one bleak day for a thousand hopeful endings.
Eregion might be lost, but Elrond is alive, and he won’t ask for more.
(Except if the Valar were really clever, they’d stop a certain star traveler from setting foot on his hoity-toity sky ship, and that would be a story worth talking about.)