Full of Gorgeous Life by StarSpray

One

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…this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin
over and over again,
full of gorgeous life.
- Mary Oliver, "Starlings in Winter"

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Carnistir comes on a bright spring day. The sun is warm and the breeze off the hills cool and fragrant with pine. Nerdanel stands in her courtyard with dirt under her fingernails and the flagstones all torn up and stacked haphazardly to the side. She looks up to find him standing in the gateway where there was no one a moment ago, clad in the soft undyed robes of the Returned, his dark hair loose about his slightly hunched shoulders, an uncharacteristically tentative look on his face.

She has tried not to imagine this moment, what she would do if one of her children appeared on her doorstep—whether she would rage and scream or weep or laugh or something else entirely. She has never expected it to really happen. "Ammë," he says, and pauses. There is too much to say, and Nerdanel can see the moment they both decide not to say any of it at all. "What are you doing?" Carnistir asks instead.

Nerdanel looks down at the messy, uneven canvas of dirt that is her courtyard. "The flagstones were too dull," she says, "so I made mosaic tiles instead. Will you help me lay them?" Carnistir smiles.

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When Tyelkormo appears the courtyard is long finished, and the summer berries are ripe for picking. Carnistir is in the garden; new-returned to life, he wants to be with living, growing things, with warm dirt in the creases of his palms and the smell of green in his nose. Nerdanel is in her workshop gathering materials and sketches for some glasswork—a commission from Tirion, where glass is, somehow, quite a fashionable medium.

Nerdanel is thinking that those commissioning such fragile sculpture-vases do not have rambunctious children at home when her own most rambunctious child comes to the window, appearing soundlessly and suddenly. "Ammë!" he says, with a bright smile under a halo of sunlit silver hair. Nerdanel shrieks and sends her papers scattering. Tyelkormo laughs, and it is the loveliest thing she has heard since the spring.

"Tyelkormo!" She abandons her table and ends up hanging half out the window to embrace him. Like Carnistir he is clad as one newly Returned, but he has leaves and twigs in his hair, and his feet are muddy up to the ankles. Behind his laughter there are shadows in his eyes.

Nerdanel is very late in finishing her commission.

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Outside the windows the wind is blowing the leaves from the trees, and the smell of frost is in the air. Carnistir and Tyelkormo bicker amiably as they work together to set up a tapestry loom near the hearth. Nerdanel sits nearby, laughing at them and sorting skeins of wool—red, blue, pink, yellow, green—and relishes the warmth that does not come from the fire.

The knock on the door surprises them all. Nerdanel goes to open it, and is not so surprised to find another barefoot, loose-haired son on her doorstep. Curufinwë smiles tentatively, and then more easily when she pulled him into her arms. "Hello, Ammë," he says, muffled, into her shoulder.

"Come in out of the cold," she replies, and shuts the door against the wind.

"I like the courtyard," he says. The shadows in his eyes are darker than his brothers'. Nerdanel can guess the reason—she's heard the tales of Eregion.

He sits beside her when they return to the fireside, and says little as his brothers fill the silence with cheerful chatter; he leans against Nerdanel, and she marvels at the three miracles in front of her, solid and warm and alive.