Bits of Elven Glass by Himring

Chapter 5

Celebrian makes up her mind to sail; her arrival in Valinor.

Posted elsewhere as "Taking the Bruise".

Originally written for B2MeM 2013 (for details see end notes)

Celebrian is having a good day.  And so, reluctantly persuaded by her brave smiles, her carers permit her to remain alone by herself on the terrace, propped up in a comfortable chair, swathed in blankets. She blinks warily in the watery autumn sunshine and looks out over bare thorny rose beds.

Celebrian is having a good day. The orchestra of fear and pain that plays at all times in her mind and on her body today plays a little more softly; today she can actually hear herself think above the shrilling of the pipes and the pounding of the kettle drums.

Celebrian is having a good day and so it is time—without any well-meaning well-wishers talking at her, assuring her again and again that she will soon be all right again, hollow assurances that on bad days she is only too willing to cling to—it is time today to face a few hard truths:  she has reached the point at which she is liable to inflict more damage on her family by staying with them than by leaving them.

She considers them each in turn—her children, her husband, her parents—and the thought of them is bitter. What has happened to her is warping their lives. They have revolved around her, attempting to lend all kinds of aid and support within their power and seeing their best efforts evaporate until her state of health has become like the centre of a black whirlpool, gradually sucking them in after her.

Mummy is trying to get well, Arwen. Mummy is trying really, really hard to get well. And her family are trying really hard to believe it.

They cannot understand, not even Elrond—maybe Elrond even less than the others, because he is so locked in his continual struggle with the ways her body and her mind are failing her, with each individual symptom, that he seldom finds the space to breathe, let alone step back and consider the larger picture. Elrond is a healer and she is refusing to heal. His growing self-doubt is harder to bear, in the long term, than those few fleeting moments when he almost seems to blame her.

They cannot understand and she cannot explain, for she does not understand either. How can all that loving care fail to make up for… But here that train of thought comes to a jarring halt.

Celebrian, who is having a good day, looks out over thorny rose beds and considers Valinor. It is not to her, as to her mother, a home she once left, a home to return to. No sea birds have ever called to her, promising her enduring bliss beyond the horizon. She had few dreams beyond Middle-earth before disaster struck, and Valinor to her means exile, a bleak alternative. But it may offer release from her daily round of horrors.

Elrond thinks so. In moments of despair, he talks of Irmo and Este, of Lorien. Because his healing powers descend from Melian and because Melian hails from Lorien, he believes that they would succeed where he failed.

Celebrian is less sure of this. What she remembers most clearly about the Gardens of Lorien from her history lessons is that Miriel went there and never came back. And if even her family cannot comprehend how those brief days of capture could shatter her beyond repair, what can the denizens of the Blessed Realm know of that?

Except for one.  The thought comes unbidden and surprises her. What Valar and Maiar might understand of her plight seems uncertain at best but there dwells one in Tirion who knows what she went through because he went through it himself: Finrod Felagund, her mother’s brother, who died in captivity in Tol-in-Gaurhoth and returned to the living, they say, to walk beside his father in Aman.

He knows what she went through but what would he think of her, the great Felagund? For he suffered his captivity because he ventured on the greatest and most dangerous of quests, she was merely waylaid on what should have been a safe journey. He fought a great duel with Sauron; she had her glaive twisted out of her hands early in the fight. He withstood torture to defend his companion’s secrets; her torturers did not have the wit to ask any questions. He died to rescue Beren; she was rescued by others. And then I failed to be worth rescuing.

‘No’, she says firmly. ‘I’m going to Valinor to see my uncle Finrod Felagund.’

And she insists on that thought with all her might. It lends her a sense of purpose. It is better than merely running away.

She looks out over the rose beds, over the whole valley of Imladris, and touches the green stone on her breast.

‘I did help to make you bloom, for a while’, she says to the valley.

The stone is for Arwen. She will give it to her mother to keep it for her and also ask her to keep an eye on Arwen. Elrond does not know much about handling girls; Arwen can twist him around her little finger.

And so her plans are laid.

***

But the next day is a bad day, and her carefully made resolutions and plans are forgotten. The maelstrom has her again. There is still much anguish to come, many doubts, much toing-and-froing, before Celebrian finally boards the ship at the Grey Havens, deserting her post. By then, she barely remembers that lie she told herself about her uncle—there are so many lies she told herself and others at various times.

And yet when the ship approaches the harbour, he is there, waiting for her. Clinging to the gunwale, she sees Finrod and recognizes him instantly—oddly enough because he is the only one among the crowd on the quay who seems furious, hopping mad, incandescent with rage. In all the portraits of him she has seen he looked noble and serene but maybe she has picked up on subtle hints of temper in her mother’s tales.

She totters pathetically down the gangway on the arm of a sailor and asks him shyly—she did not use to be shy but that was before she lost all sense of worth and purpose: ‘Are you expecting me?’

‘Of course’, he growls. ‘You called me, didn’t you? Come along!’

‘You’ll have to slow down’, she says, immediately. ‘I can’t walk that fast.’

‘Not yet’, he says and wraps his right arm around her waist so that he is supporting most of her weight. ‘But we’ve only just begun.’

Chapter End Notes

Written for the two B2MeM 2013 Challenges: Wildcard: "Go where the stars are strange" and Wildcard: Final Challenge: Dwimordene's additional element: "She just smiled and laughed at me and took her bruise back again"

I would also like to acknowledge inspiration from Celebrian stories by CuriousWombat and Erulisse.

The story won a Honourable Mention in the category Story Featuring Elves in the 2013 Tree & Flower Awards on the Many Paths to Tread archive.

[ETA: Arwen appears to be younger in this piece than she canonically should be. But at the time it was more important to me to emphasize that for Celebrian to leave her children might be an unavoidable necessity than to stick with strict chronology.]