Chapter Text
Elros remembers his mother. She was noble in brow and kind as spring, and her eyes were often sad. She cast herself from the precipice when the Sons of Fëanor drove her to her death.
(Sometimes in his dreams he remembers a shadow beside him, but the next blurred memory is Vorohil’s strong arms bearing him to safety.)
He is young enough to grieve and old enough to know that tears won’t bring Naneth back. Instead of being shuffled off to other distant relatives, he is carried to another city with waterfalls and rivers, where he is told he is now the ward of the High King.
(It should be an honor, Elros gathers, given the awe of those who hear his new title, but it’s really quite dull. He is given toy soldiers instead of soft toys and his playtime narrows into evening spurts that are permitted after he is plagued with tutors that criticize his letters, maths, languages and lore. He is told that as Peredhel he has a choice to make, and he is not to choose wrong. Elwing did not choose the wrong path. Therefore, he cannot follow the ways of Men.)
Elros still has time to decide — thousands of years if he can put it off — and so he dallies and chooses neither.
It’s one of many decisions that Gil-Galad disagrees with.
Elrond knows he had birth parents, but he can’t remember their faces. Sometimes there is a shadow in his dreams, reaching for him before he slips from the rocks and the river drowns him. (He doesn’t remember surviving, so his dreams fill in Maglor’s face as his rescuer because this is what he has been told.)
Atya and Atarinya are patient when he is too frightened to sleep alone. One of them is always there, shuffling maps or talking with the captains about winter supplies or practicing with swords or just sitting. (Elrond likes those moments best, for if he creeps up and snuggles in then Nelyo will read to him or Káno will sing and the entire castle will feel warmer for it.)
He’s expected to be a captain himself someday, so everyone who has the time turns their chores into lessons. The cooks pinch dough into letters and the guards make him stand straight and watchful and his favorite tailor quotes Rumíl while correcting his battle stitches and the gardeners tell him which herbs heal and in the next breath explain how Eru created the worlds. Elrond is never bored because his hands are busy and his mind is full, so much so that sometimes he sneaks into Atarinya’s room and hides in the back of his wardrobe so the noise will stop. (He stayed there for a full day once and frightened all of the staff.)
Elrond learns all their names and smiles because they can’t help but smile back, and then Atar and Atarinya start to smile, too. They call him their little star. He stops asking what happened before the river.
(It’s not until much later that he realizes the Sindarin textbooks Maglor makes him study sound very different in other regions.)
Elros grows up with many friends of different sorts. There are the useful friends he needs in his company: Camnir the mapmaker, Mellírin the bird whisperer, and Loreláthon who can infiltrate a troll cave without being crushed. There are the friends who will stand alongside him in battle: Vorohil, Daemor and Rían. Then there are the friends who need watching, like Nüelon who smiles when he wants to unravel a secret and Yenneth who will grab his ear if he’s too busy to bandage the thorn scores on his shoulder. Finally there are the ones who are interesting, such as his dear cousin (who would stamp her feet if she wasn’t oh-so-mature), and Lindir who knows where everyone is at every time of the day. Elros knows half of the palace staff by name, particularly those who owes whom a favor. He’s likable, chivalrous and clever, and he’s going to keep it that way because trust is earned and he has a shining example of the worst sort of commander to emulate.
(Vändel looks more pinched and irritable every season he makes his report. The High King only reflects pride when Elros is introduced as his heir.)
Sometimes he wishes he could be free of it all. To sail beyond Middle Earth or even explore so far as the Bruinen.
There is only one heir currently in training, so Gil-Galad refuses him every time.
Elrond is tall enough to choose his war horse when they cross the Bruinen into Eregion. There he meets his cousin, this affable lord who refused affiliation with the High King and thus was cut off from all noble Elvish trade. (Eregion thrives all the same, and perhaps more for the disassociation.) Celebrimbor embraces his uncles and then his cousin, tugging Elrond around the city to show him the market and the crafters and the kitchens and his own forge. (Elrond will have learned the names of nearly an entire city by the end of the summer.)
Then Atya and Atarinya leave on an unnamed quest.
They do not return.
Celebrimbor holds Elrond when he weeps, intimately familiar with the searing ache of a lost father.
Nelyo is gone, but Káno still wanders. Elrond musters his own search party and flays the shorelines, a ghostly rider riding the mist.
(He rides too far one day and loses his way, falling from his horse at full sun. He wakes to fair hair and a water-skin that he drains most desperately. Galadriel believes him to be a friend until he thanks her, and then she asks him for his name in an accent so melodic and untarnished that he springs away, riding until he loses her. For weeks afterwards his party is pursued, until they are exhausted and finally lose their hunters by hiding in a sea cave. It’s the same sea cave where Maglor took refuge, thus the Noldor inadvertently ensured Elrond one good turn.)
He never learns how close he came to inspiring a war. If Celebrimbor did not hide all evidence of a young prince and throw open the gates for golden soldiers to search his keep, Eregion might have been under siege upon his return.
(One peril is mystifyingly altered — Galadriel stops throwing herself into the hunt for Sauron, and searches for Eärendil’s missing child instead.)
It is centuries before Elros is allowed to lead his own company. He is assigned a small patrol which flanks Vändel’s troops, until the two commanders duel and nearly slay one another over accusations of horse whipping. Then he is sent to Mithlond, where he is nearly irretrievable as the sea stirs a great wound in his fëa. Camnir talks him around long enough to promise that he will hold out until there is another viable heir, who will succeed Gil-Galad should war find them.
(They don’t divulge this plan to Gil-Galad.)
It is centuries before Elrond survives his first plague. Thousands are afflicted when a trading wagon unloads crates of living ferrets — poor, half-starved things riddled with fleas. It is the only explanation why fever and chills accompany spotted bites. Elrond works tirelessly with the healers, changing out one bed to the next as the afflicted either walk away on their own or are carried out for burning. He falls in a swell of fire and wakes to Maglor’s song washing over him, again and again until he cannot move or even swallow tea.
When the fever breaks he must be carried outside, healed in increments by Anar’s light until he can swallow and then turn his head and then sit up on his own again.
(Every winter thereafter, he falls prey to the fever. The Men of the Southlands are barred from all further trade.)
Elros has mastered crisply-accented Quenya, Sindarin and Adûnaic when he learns that his father was not a prince, and yet he is worshipped. He stares often at the starlit expanse, wondering if he is judged by the one who oversees the tides, and then he is angry because he was not considered worthy to sail with him.
He starts to build his own ship in secret. He will not be pinned to Mithlond’s shores forever.
Elrond is not even twenty when Maglor sings the story of Gil-Estel. Each night it is the first star he seeks. Sometimes when he walks he imagines he is following his father’s ship to a tall cliff face, where Eärendil will disembark and they will speak of many things before amicably parting ways again.
(Sometimes he is afraid that his father will not recognize him, or be angry because he chose different parents. When he is old enough to confess his doubts freely, Celebrimbor embraces him and kisses his hair and insists that if Eärendil stepped down from his ship for two seconds he would not wish to leave, therefore he left Elrond with only the kindest guardians who could emulate a fraction of his affection. And then he tows Elrond to the forge and does his best to make him forget about Silmarilli and stars and ships. It almost works, and yet it is infinitely more clear that Celebrimbor is afraid of losing Elrond to myths, and so he does not pursue learning anything more about his nameless mother and unknown heritage. Surely there was a reason all records of the Noldor were buried below the keep.)
When Elros first meets Durin son of Durin, grandson of Durin, he is greeted with insults and then nearly banished for no sensible reason, as if he was supposed to recognize the Prince of Khazad-dûm. It happens again, and again, until Durin gets his name right and starts glaring shrewdly until Elros walks closer, and then he shrugs him off.
“Yer boots are louder than the star cave’s,” Durin explains gruffly one afternoon, before brushing off the High King’s proposal and explaining that all of the mountain’s ore is reserved for Eregion.
Elros starts to get the impression that someone else is trading with the Dwarves. (Gil-Galad starts writing particularly cross missives to Lord Celebrimbor, whose herald manages to weave as many subtle insults into poetry as well wishes for the High King’s health, wealth and continued absence.)
It would be considered an act of war if it wasn’t so funny. (Elros sputters and Gil-Galad is not amused.)
Durin spouts off after the first “incident” that he’s writing Elrond off for abandoning a solid friendship. It takes weeks of hiking the foothills every day, chasing off three trolls (three, with a bow), and finally scheming with a delightful singer on how to net a Dwarven prince, for Durin to believe that Elrond hadn’t just pranced into the forest to insult him by pretending they’d never met.
He starts watching the foothills more closely after that, and is both rewarded and alarmed for his efforts.
The other one is as alike to him as if they had the same father. He dresses in Noldor silk, with the king’s crest high on his shoulder and a golden circlet brushing his vaguely rounded ears. Sometimes he is accompanied by others, who laugh merrily at his side and jostle his shoulder. Sometimes he is followed swiftly by the same golden-haired warrior who chased Elrond all the way to a sea cave. Often he is alone.
Elrond holds his breath and begs the trees to hide him, following in silence whenever this tall warrior with a king’s bearing passes by. He allows himself to wonder what it would be like to see what lies beyond the Lhûn. He finds himself listening as the sojourners speak, framing their words and adopting the Noldor’s accent to his Sindarin.
Wouldn’t it be a merry game if one day he just clipped on those golden silks and wandered into Lindon’s forests.
(He knows better.)
Elros knows better.
It’s never stopped him before.
He spots the flicker of Eregion’s teal helms in a birch tree one sunny afternoon, when he is arguing with Durin about whether Gamli is a proper name or the monicker for a half-troll. (He nearly gets an axe to the lower half of his tunic, but he’s smarter and faster and Durin can’t follow him up a slippery elm bare-handed.)
The elm whispers to her brother, who argues fiercely before a compromise is reached, and golden leaves part just enough for Elros to see his own face. A glimpse is just enough for his mind to whirl through possibilities.
Silver eyes, regal brow. We could be twins.
This could be his passageway into Eregion, to see this mysterious cousin whom Galadriel confessed. (And whom the High King will not discuss without gritted teeth and a thousand mundane chores suddenly requiring Elros’s wretched penmanship). He only needs one night to slip past the guards, and from there to follow the river all the way down to the nearest port, after which he will never be found until he wishes it so.
Though this humble guard from Eregion believes himself invisible, he’s about to be offered a promotion he cannot refuse.
Celebrimbor frets whenever the quiet spells hit. Elrond cannot blame him. Sometimes the nights feel long and the winter carries on forever, and he can no more tow Celebrimbor back from the melancholy than he can save himself. Maglor isn’t any better, and so they are three dismal mourning doves until Mirdania and Theloneon chase them down with tea from dried summer flowers and crystalized honey, forcing them to mingle like civilized people.
The fire is hot when Elrond admits he never knew his mother. Celebrimbor valiantly changes the subject.
Maglor describes her.
Her hair was silver. Her eyes shone as fiercely as the star around her neck. She flew.
“That is not your path,” Celebrimbor says darkly.
Elrond is swift to reassure him that he will never seek to escape Middle Earth. (He will never confess that when he climbs the cliffs surrounding Eregion, he still reaches out his hand and imagines that his father will catch him up to his ship — just for one night.)
Dreams never hurt anyone for the longing.
Galadriel is insufferable on her worst days, and entertaining on her best. She bullies Elrond into dueling and rants at Loreláthon and forcibly cheers up Camnir and stomps from the king’s study when he will not give her leave to besiege excavate Eregion’s hall of lore.
“I’ll lead your party,” Elros murmurs from the safe confines of the missive he is holding upside down.
They ride out at dusk: Galadriel for her nameless prince (who probably besotted her with mystery more than his favorable looks), and Elros for his lookalike in plainclothes. They bring with them an offering of peace — the finest lemon crumbles which the Lord of Eregion cannot resist, and a crackling tome on the lore of Fëanor’s foreparents.
Surely Celebrimbor would be ecstatic to discuss a lasting peace.
Celebrimbor is outraged that the Noldor would dare imply a lasting peace. It is a trap, he rants, one inspired by Loreláthon who knows the weakness of every heart in all of Arda. Elrond finally slinks outside after an hour of watching his cousin pace, donning a guard’s uniform so he can retreat honorably into the forest and beg to spend the evening with Durin’s (incomprehensibly) quieter family.
He waits until the golden-haired huntress is badgering the gatekeepers before slipping out, only feeling safe once she is far out of hearing. Then he tugs off his helmet, shaking out his braids — and promptly skids on a wet stone when the prince in golden circlet nips out from behind a scheming elm.
Grey eyes flicker up and down before the boorish buffoon snorts. “You’re not much to look at, are you?”
Elros could pull off that helmet and cape better. He doesn’t get the chance to say it, because said helmet is thrown at his face and swords are drawn.
It’s a needles and exhausting battle, two warriors well-matched in height and stamina, only the guard fights dirty. He switches hands and jabs with his elbows and bites, and the only reason Elros calls it off is because he’s afraid he’ll get rabies. (There’s a reason everyone steers clear of Loreláthon.)
“You’re here to kidnap me and spy on Lord Celebrimbor!” the guard snarls.
“Not even close,” Elros growls, pouting when his sword is acquisitioned by the guard who looks like he could easily swing both without losing stride. “I’m here to kidnap you so I can meet Celebrimbor, and then hightail it to Númenor where the High King and all of his sauntering Elf Lords will never find me.”
That at least makes the guard pause long enough for Elros to explain his excellent plan.
“You want me to be the Noldor’s prince?” the guard spills out in poorly-accented Sindarin.
“Not talking like that, you won’t,” Elros groans, pinching his brow. “Were you raised by wolves? Obviously we need to plan better. All I need is for you to pretend to be me for one day, and then you can run back home and no one will think to look for you. By then I’ll be halfway down the coastline.”
“You can hardly outrun the cavalry,” the guard says wryly.
“That’s why I have a ship waiting in Mithlond. We switch uniforms, you get treated like royalty for a day and I sail for freedom. Fair enough?”
“That sounds like a terrible waste of my time.”
“That’s before I tell you about the gorgeous Elleth you get to pretend is your cousin.”
The guard is hardly swayed by Elros’s description of Galadriel (so what if she was married once and probably is still loyal to the memory?), and he similarly brushes off all bribery of food, finery and secret intelligence. It’s only when Elros throws up his hands and blathers about the library that the guard folds his arms to listen.
So maybe he exaggerates a bit, then. They don’t exactly have shelves as tall as siege ladders. Too late, the guard is hooked. He looks back to Eregion’s wall (where fair cousin is still quarreling with the guards) and sighs.
“One night, and then I’m riding home.”
“Excellent,” Elros begins. “Then we’ll start with your appalling slouch —”
“But first you’re explaining to Durin how I wasn’t the one who ditched his wedding invitation.”
(To be fair, ravens weren’t exactly trained to tell doppelgängers apart. And Elros had been meaning to forward the letter to Eregion — just as soon as he got around to asking Camnir if “Star-Cave” was a Dwarvish alliteration or a reference to old Quenya.)
When two Elves show up together, Durin sits down hard. He sulks for all of five minutes while Disa smiles at Elros through her teeth, and then he grumbles, “That takes all the fun out of badgering Elrond for skiving off.”
The guard named Elrond fairly squawks while Disa cackles, clapping her hands before squashing Elros in a bear trap of a hug.
“You let me think I would never be forgiven!” Elrond gripes, kneeling without pause to let Gerda and Gamli climb onto his shoulders. “You know I never would have missed your wedding, Durin!”
“Aye, and I’m still mad about it!” the Dwarf snaps. “Ye still haven’t brought us a present!”
“Then what, pray tell, is that fine emerald silk on your table?”
“Elf lies!”
The nagging goes well into an hour. Disa pulls Elros and the children away, introducing him to Dwarvish mead and mole-tail stew. He’s on his third pint when the children decide he can be trusted to play the entire warg army to their boar cavalry, and he makes more noise than Elrond and Durin as they raise their voices accommodatingly to shout at one another.
It all ends as quickly as it started, with Disa flicking ears and telling Elrond to set the table, and normal conversation ensues like the trio has been friends for decades. (Probably they have. Elrond seems to know more Khuzdul swears than Quenya.)
They don’t tell Durin and Disa the plan, because it’s not going to matter long enough to affect them. Elrond admits the reason for his contingency anyways — he had to judge Elros’s character around the children.
“If you’re going to represent me for a day, then I’m not letting you trample all over Celebrimbor,” he grouses.
“So teach me to be a proper Fëanorian guard,” Elros says, snorting when Elrond’s eyebrow flickers. “Can’t be that hard.”
“Of course not,” Elrond drawls. “Except you’re the… personal guard to the Lords of Eregion, so you’re going to master a few tricks of your own if you want to survive a single day without being thrown in the dungeons.”
It’s clear he’s as eager for this opportunity as Elros, or he wouldn’t be discussing it at all.
“All right,” Elros says with a thick Fëanorian drawl, leaning his weight back on one leg in an exaggerated slouch. “Teach me how to loom like a bored peasant and I’ll clean up your rubbish accent.”
The eyebrow quirks even fiercer and Elros grins.
This could be the start of an exceedingly useful friendship.
They agree to return home and meet at halfway point between kingdoms at unpredictable intervals, to practice their subterfuge and exchange tricks. This swiftly devolves into burrowing underground, for the trees have divided loyalties and they would tell.
Disa is delighted to host them both after they admit their scheme, and she proves to be an invaluable tutor; coaching accents, correcting forms and catching Elros’s ‘character slips.’ Durin prefers to sit back and watch, smirking and offering unnecessary feedback when Elrond tries to mimic Elros’s aggravated cape swirl and talk like he wasn’t raised in a hostile Fëanorian camp.
Then Elrond demands names. Names and descriptions so he won’t accidentally insult the herb gleaners by forgetting which clan they belong to and how they braid their hair. (And then he throws a hissy fit when Elros reminds him that he’ll have to lose his own elaborate braids.)
Elros never realized how many layers of civilian life he’d absorbed without trying. The more he explains the more he realizes he’s going to miss them — Vorohil and Rían and Odínel and Galadriel and so many others — and so he talks even faster to shore up his fluttering resolve, until he’s giving Elrond all of Lindon’s secrets, from the name of tje head pastry cook to the gardening apprentices. (This is treason and he knows he ought to turn himself in for execution, but Elrond gets that wistful, wondering look as he tilts his head like Elros is about to reveal he’s the son of Lúthien and Beren, and somehow he can’t help but tell him everything. And then Durin has the gall to smirk like he knows something about crafty Fëanorians making one spill everything from their family names to the mysteries of Khazad-dûm’s deepest caverns.)
Days turn to weeks and then into seasons. Gil-Galad stops hovering suspiciously when Elros is too busy to court insurgence, starting to pull him into council meetings as if he can finally be trusted. He finds himself utilizing the names he casts out so nonchalantly, and the gardeners start acting peculiar, like his opinion matters. (It does, Elros realizes one day with a start. He cares about his people. Their predictable routines and familial emblems and the pride they lend to their work. He wants to lead them, and they… they’re acting like he’s more than the High King’s heir. It makes his frequent absences more difficult to account for, and his permanent departure less desirable.)
Then Elrond shortens their sessions starting that very winter, explaining in a flustered rush that Celebrimbor and Maglor are both worrying over his absence and he can’t lie to them for much longer. Elros shoves off his apprehensions, reminding him that one guard is entirely expendable if the deed is honest, and Elrond sullenly goes back to not telling him important little things.
It’s two years of lies, of skirting around Galadriel’s suspicions, of shuffling guards so no one follows him out of the palace, of fending of Lorel’s smirks (as if the stable-sweep has any idea what is going on), of readying the ship to which Círdan offers a selectively blind eye (and generously ladens with maps and Elvish rope and supply barrels, encouraging Elros to follow the will of the Valar and let him answer to the High King), before Elros believes they can get away with it for one day. (Any longer than that, and someone will get suspicious.)
He doesn’t know they’ve spent so many days copying each other’s mannerisms that they’ve started to adopt them as their own. That he tugs a sleeve when he’s nervous and drawls when he’s annoyed and has started hankering for sweeter wine. Then again, he couldn’t know that Elrond never used to scrunch his nose after sneezing or reach for a quill with his right hand or swirl his cape and stalk when Celebrimbor is acting unreasonable. He doesn’t know that Elrond’s fathers are fretting over such mannerisms foreign to Eregion, just like he doesn’t notice Camnir blinking in mystified pleasure when he stops long enough to clap his shoulder and compliment his work, because that’s something Elrond does to the Dwarven bairns all the time. Galadriel twitches like Elros is a problem she can’t understand, and Glorfindel searches him like he’ll witness the unfolding of some noble warrior, and Elros knows he has to leave before he wants to crawl out of his skin and expose the lie.
He finally decides they’re ready. (Whether Elrond is or not, he’s doing this.) They trade uniforms in Disa’s pantry, without warning the Dwarves, and saunter out with the firm guises of each other. Elros relaxes his shoulders while Elrond drops his perpetual half-smile.
They fool Durin for all of five seconds before Disa grins.
“It’s no one’s fault but yer own,” she snickers when Elros gawks and the tips of Elrond’s ears turn scarlet. “Elrond has that wee glint of mischief and ye walk like ye’ve got seawater in yer boots.”
”Also, the hair,” Durin snorts, pantomiming Elrond’s braids.
The Dwarves are merciless, dragging their children into their chortling, but Elrond only shakes his head ruefully. “That means we pass,” he says softly, for Elros’s ears alone. “If it was too obvious, she would say so. Alas, we cannot help but be ourselves.”
“It’s just one night,” Elros sighs.
“Remember, I will hunt you down and feed your ears to an eagle if you raise one sharp word to Celebrimbor,” Elrond warns him. “Maglor will suspect nothing as long as you say you’re tired and ask for a song —”
“And if I decline tea they’ll assume I’m dying,” Elros grunts.
“If they think something’s amiss, just cough twice and they’ll worry too much to natter you,” Elrond adds. Scrunching his nose, he grumbles, “Meanwhile, I’m the one who has to attend council meetings and ask for double helpings of sea bass and survive close proximity to the Blight of Arda.
“Pretty sure half his reputation is an exaggeration,” Elros admits with a shrug.
The glower sent his way reflects the opinion of Eregion’s finest lords.
“Don’t let Celebrimbor bully you into strolling with Mirdania, and Maglor fusses more if you stay out after dark,” Elrond cautions. “You’re only there for one day. Do not make me grovel for forgiveness upon my return.”
“You’re only there for one day,” Elros snorts. “Don’t start a war.”