All Hues and Honeys by Dawn Felagund

This Is It?

Elwing awaits Eärendil's rising each night. A double drabble for Jubilee instadrabbling, for the challenge Restoration and Rebuilding: Fleetwood Mac's Landslide. The opening quote comes from that song.

Oh, mirror in the sky
What is love?

The stairs in the lighthouse turned tight upon themselves. Elwing climbed, hating each one. Hating the lighthouse. She shouldered through the too-small hatch into the lantern room. The mechanisms that turned the immense lens creaked and moaned. The chemicals used to clean the lens and lamps stunk. The wind punched the lighthouse and pitched her toward the hatch and the steep, winding stairs, and she stared down the possibility of Death and thought, I fucking dare you.

Outside on the walkway, the wind hid the dyspeptic groans of the lighthouse's inner workings. The light swept silently overhead: a five-second flash pattern. It portioned her day into five-second intervals of longing. The wind buffeted again, but she knew its tricks and was already clutching the railing. "Stupid wind!" she mocked aloud. The wind took her voice.

The sun westered. She watched for him, in a viscera-pink sky rotting to gray twilight. Once, in Tirion, they'd watched the inferior sun sink into the west, and she begged, and he spoke nobly and loftily of sacrifice. How they'd both rise to it.

This is marriage, she thought, as he eased from the night.

This is affection.
This is love.
This is
it?

Chapter End Notes

This double drabble uses the idea from the Felakverse (an idea that mostly exists only in my head, so far) that, while Eärendil did his whole star-ship thing, Elwing was a lighthouse keeper on one of the far Twilit Isles. Elwing's characterization as a traumatized child (turned adult here) was explored in my story The Ship of Light.