Work Text
When you are not fed love on a silver spoon, you learn to lick it off knives.
Lauren Eden
Four-year-old Eldarion exclusively eats honey-cakes and wears Estel's crown as a necklace. He will not wear shoes.At Arwen's insistence, he’ll sometimes wear his bedtime slippers out and about, but even that is a battle. The boy has an uncanny ability to avoid sharp rocks and deep depressions in the ground, and any time his terrible twin uncles scatter marbles on the ground to try and teach him a lesson, he walks on them like they were never there.
"You had a two year period of hating your night time braids," Elrond tells his daughter. "You used to undo them before you slept, no matter how tightly your ammë tied them. You stopped doing it once you started waking up with snarls and tangles, and once it started bothering you - not before. Let the boy be."
Soon, Eldarion loses a front tooth while bouncing his heels off the slippery banks of the Bruînen, and decides that shoes might not be the enemy after all. He tugs at Elrond's sleeve afterwards, and places the little scrap of bone carefully, firmly in his palm, and frowns as his grandfather gasps at the blood."See, Daeda ," he lisps, never having mastered the word Daer-ada , grandfather. "See my toof."Elrond kisses the boy's forehead and does not say I told you so . Six thousand years in Arda, and he still cannot understand how Elros could resurrect a thousand times over.
_______________Though nobody dares to actually ask him about it to his face, Elrond's decision to postpone his final journey to Valinor until Eldarion comes of age sparks lively discussion amongst the remaining elves for years. It confuses and grieves Arwen to no small degree - after all, she knows exactly how much it would upset him to watch her shift slowly into colourless, grey decreptitude, how he would view each silver hair and age line as a personal wound inflicted on her by the world. Her family, however, have no end to theories, each more ridiculous than the last.
"I'll tell you what it is," Elrohir raps on the dinner table as if delivering a lesson. "He doesn't want to leave the little brat with us, that's what it is. He doesn't trust his own sons. He probably thinks we'd take him waterfall surfing or lose him on the way."
"You did once try and take me waterfall surfing," Estel reminds him. "And thankfully, you did lose me on the way."
When she asks Glorfindel, he only laughs at her.
"Yes Arwen," he says, mock-serious. "It is of course inconceivable that Lord Elrond of Imladris — an elf so insufferably overcommitted to bureaucracy he once tried to create and risk assess a regional policy for the baking of Lembas until Galadriel told him where he could shove his bread — might ever decide to stick around and micromanage the upbringing of his grandson."Galadriel knows better, or at least shoots closest to the real reason. It is simply another manifestation of her son in law's relentless tendency to view the race of Men as a series of enduring facsimiles of the twin he lost. Eldarion would be his final Elros - his very last one. And knowing it is that grieves Arwen further, not wanting to watch her father tear himself away from yet another incarnation of Elros, so much so that she begs Galadriel to make him sail with her and the other Ringbearers.
"I will do no such thing," said Galadriel. "Had I grown up as your father did, snatching little morsels of love from the shadows of whichever towering titan of history had some to spare, I too would want to ensure a child born to this new world is raised with all the kindness it deserves. There is a saying, my dearest - those who are not fed love on a silver spoon learn to lick it off knives. And Elrond's mouth is full of scars."And so Arwen drops her insistence that her father sail before he wants to, because how can she blame anyone for wanting her son to grow up with a mouth full of stars?_______________Once, Arwen walks into the room as Elrond is singing the boy to sleep and she sits beside them on the window seat, listening to the low, slow croon of
can you count, can you count how many stars shine in the sky? Can you count the clouds that float by? She falls asleep on his left shoulder, as her son sleeps on his right. The song is so ancient and so Elrond ("Trust Ada to turn his lullabies into arithmetic lessons", Elrohir once said) that it lulls her smoothly into a deep, dreamless sleep, like water gliding over stone.
_______________Your father spoils the boy, says Estel to his wife, a small calico cat clinging to his hair. Arwen nods like he is telling her something new.As if Glorfindel didn't complain about the exact same thing last year when Elrond lets Eldarion spend an entire day perched on Glorfindel's shoulders (and not his own, mind you, fumed the warrior). As if Elladan and Elrohir didn't present her with a list a few months ago titled "Things Ada Has Let Eldarion Get Away With That We Were Punished For", many points from which she vaguely remembers being directly copied from their eerily similar list bearing Estel's name just under a century ago. As if she did not just yesterday walk into their quarters to find Celeborn sitting quietly with a cat in each hand." Daerada , what's going on?"
"It seems Eldarion wants a cat," muttered her grandfather.
"Yes, he's been whining about it for months, you know this."
"Yes, I do," Celeborn had said, gingerly pushing the animals off the more delicately embroidered part of his robes. "Your dear father arrived yesterday, had one conversation with the boy, and returned from who-knows-where with five cats."
Arwen supposes Estel (and the rest of them) may have a point. She takes his hands in hers, presses them to her lips and says sweetly: "if you wish to tell the Lord of Imladris, former bearer of Vilya and greatest healer in Arda, that he is spoiling his grandson, my dear heart, you are very welcome to do so. In fact, you not only have my blessing, but my prayers for when the inevitable lecture you receive ends in an archival list detailing every single time he let you have sweetbread before dinner as a child."
Estel reconsiders. Eldarion keeps his cats, though it is the unfortunate Glorfindel who is resigned to litterbox duty.
_______________Fourteen-year-old Eldarion stays up all night because his terrible twin uncles (with whom any fourteen year old would be obsessed) offer to take him night-riding in the forests south of the city. They go careening around hills and over rivers, and he falls four times, each time more exciting than the last. He even hears wargs , though Elladan said they couldn't go after them because Arwen has sworn to thrash all three of them if they so much as looked at one . The next day he has stars in his eyes and the colour of adventure on his cheeks, and tells everyone who will listen about how he wants to spend his entire life on a horse. A week later, his grandfather arrives from Imladris with a new saddle for him, the boy throws his arms around his Daeda and kisses him on each cheek, and Elrond surreptitiously wipes his eyes when they pull apart.Arwen watches knowingly, and when Eldarion speeds from the room to try out the saddle, she is saddened though not surprised to see her father put his face in his hands. She doesn’t ask for clarification - she knows whom he sees in the high flush on Eldarion's cheeks, whom he hears in the giggling, stammering thank you, Daeda, thank you, you're the best . She walks over and simply places her arms around him. He shakes his head, apologising.
"It's all right, it's all right," she tells him. "I'm here. I only wish for you to be happy.""I am happy, my dove," he reassures her. "It is only, I'm only —""When are you ever going to stop looking for Elros, Ada?" she sighs. "When will you rest from this undying quest?""I am not looking for Elros, Arwen, I am only seeing what is there - and it is him.""You will wear yourself out like this, right down to bone. My son is not your brother. My son is not his father, his mother, or his uncles. You know just as well as I do who he is, who he's like, who he loves most in the world, though you refuse to acknowledge it. You know , Ada."She could break his heart. Oh, Arwen. His comfort to the last. She is a steeple standing in the middle of the lightning storm. She could be struck with pure electricity, right through, and she’d say it's all right, I'm here, I'm here . She is why he stays, though he would love her anywhere. Imladris, Eregion, Valinor, and beyond.“Look at him,” she says, turning his head gently towards the courtyard below, from where laughter drifts. "Look at my son."Elrond squints at her. “Arwen, I look at him almost every day.”“No, you don’t. Not really. Not like this."Elrond looks down at Eldarion strapping the saddle to his favourite horse, his face animated as he tells Glorfindel all about the midnight ride, as though Glorfindel had never ridden a horse in his life. The glint of his eyes, the wave of his hands. “Look closely - just for a minute. It’s all right, Ada.”Eldarion's hair is stealing from his careless braid, his brows a heavy, expressive shelf over his eyes. His hands, stroking the grey horse's mane, are gentle and steady, unwavering in their comfort.
“Arwen, oh my daughter, he looks like —” Elrond's voice is strained. “He looks like–”“Like he has only ever known joy. Like he has never walked across a cruel world. I know, Ada. I’ve always known.”Eldarion has turned towards his uncles, coming up to marvel over his new saddle. And he is proudly explaining the purpose of each little belt buckle, in the same excited, pompous way Gil-Galad's young herald used to explain each little punctuation mark, each weighted pause in each and every royal speech."He has only ever known — oh, Arwen!”Arwen is smiling as she looks up, her eyes reflecting the sun.
“Like tomorrow,” she clasps his hand in hers
“Like all you have ever wanted for this world, all you have worked towards. Not Elros, Ada — Eldarion.”_______________Elrond had hundreds, maybe thousands of stories to tell, and what he didn’t have in expression he could make up for in eloquence. He could contest the grisliest tavern storyteller for most frightening monsters, every bard for the most epic love story. There are morals, too, because Elrond is the kind of person who threads a lesson into everything, a trait that used to amuse and vex his wife.
After Eldarion is born, Elrond — having raised his parents — knew he only had a set time until the boy got too old for bedtime stories, or stopped believing them. So each night he is in Minas Tirith or Eldarion is in Imladris, grandfather and grandson settle together on the bed and Elrond tells him a thousand stories in one. Sometimes Arwen joins them, sometimes Estel. Sometimes, to Eldarion's delight, his terrible twin uncles turn up and provide sound effects for every battle. Once, Elrond even made Glorfindel (who at this point deserves laurels for astounding tolerance) re-enact the Balrog fight, starring poor Erestor in a bright orange cloak resembling fire.
“Your Ada,” Elrond tells the boy, ending a story about Nazguls and rings, “is the bravest person I have ever met, and I once met Bilbo Baggins.”Eldarion, who is seven years old, murmurs Daeda , and promptly falls asleep.
“Here I was,” Estel says from the doorway, grinning. “Thinking you were going to tell him about the time I fell off a tree for the first time, and cried for eight hours straight. "“What’s this you’re telling our child about, Ada?” Arwen pokes her head over the door, all sleepy-eyes and soft edges.
“A fairy-tale,” he winks.
Later, when Eldarion wants to know how things work, how hearts beat and stop, Elrond tells him. He grits his teeth and tells him about arteries and circulation and elf lifespans and human death, and Eldarion stares at him with big eyes. Estel leans against the doorway of his son's bedroom and remembers exactly how it felt to be in awe of the great Lord Elrond's immense capacity for self sacrificial kindness.When Eldarion asks “why is the sky so blue?” Elrond launches into an explanation of reflection of light, and then later says “or maybe because a big bad water monster spit on it and turned it that colour.” Eldarion laughs, delighted, skinned knees and careless hair, a mis-matched amalgam of reality and half-spoken dreams.
Until he is twelve years old, his grandfather sits at the edge of his bed and tells him watered down tales about Barrow Wights and Balrogs. And every story ends with “and they lived happily ever after,” especially those that didn't.
_______________It ends when Arwen dies. When broken and unbreakable and no longer convinced by his own immortal capacity for grief — Elrond does not.She dies silver under the stars. She dies in winter, in a forest he had first seen in spring, four thousand years ago, when it was wide and green and golden. She dies though her father and son love, love, love her.She is buried near Minas Tirith in Estel's tomb, and her people build her a statue almost as tall as his. He doesn't speak at her funeral because he cannot think of a single thing to say. And he does not agree with carving immortality out of stone. At the memorial, he sits patiently with his hands on his knees and waits for the miracle she always quietly assured him was possible, the future she had always wanted to see. It does not happen, so he lets his sons cry into his shoulders and composes a letter to Cirdan as the weariness sinks into him at last. Eldarion looks at him with tear-dimmed eyes, though he does not ask him to stay.
Elrond asks to see the monument the day before he and the twins sail, and he looks up to meet her eyes but finds he cannot recognise the face wrested out of marble. For a moment it is something of a relief, a way to pretend that the figure cut into the cliff was somebody else's daughter.
Even after six thousand years he still cannot understand Mannish customs like burials, does not understand things that die and get put under earth, so he asks Eldarion how far down they bury the bodies."Six feet, Daeda ," says his grandson, cheeks glassy. Elrond nods, frowns. It is nothing at all, and the farthest apart they have ever been. At least the Numenoreans had given Elros a sea-burial, his daughter lies but under a sliver of earth. He kisses Eldarion's silver temple and they lie side by side under the statue until dawn.
Elrond did not speak at the memorial but now he speaks for hours and hours, telling stories he is certain he has told a hundred times before, writing worlds without end to his six-foot tall grandson and the six feet of earth around his penn tithell . As the sun breaks through on his final day in Arda, he sees that Eldarion is finally asleep, hands curled into fists under his chin like he used to as a child.And Elrond presses his cheek to the ground and sings into the earth for the very last time. Quiet, more like a poem or a prayer than much of a lullaby — can you count, can you count how many stars shine in the sky? Can you count the clouds that float by?