Bits and Pieces Under 300 Words by sallysavestheday

Vinyamar’s relative warmth is a pleasant change for Turgon’s craftsmen. Barad Eithel’s towers were built in winter, and the finer details were omitted, as chilled hands and delicate stonework were fundamentally at odds. But the softer seaside air makes their fingers nimble, and the decorative flourishes the exiled Noldor have so craved come tumbling from their hands. Spires are drawn out to needles; arches interlock in lacy concatenations; windows of prismed glass split the light into a million brilliant jewels, adorning their hair and faces as they work. Almost they might be at peace in Tirion again, swinging aloft on their delicate scaffolding, wrapped in the ancient songs.

Nerdanel has never seen a chain with links so fine. The silver is drawn to a hair’s thinness; it slips through her fingers like water, glimmering in the shadowed hollow of her palm. Fëanor’s eyes shine, likewise, with a light in their grey depths that she has never noticed – it is warm, and uncharacteristically soft. He has caught his bottom lip between his teeth and worries it, unthinking, as he waits for her response. Nerdanel winds the chain around her fingers, relishing the smoothness of it, the clean streak of silver against her skin. A fair binding. Stronger than it seems.

Celeborn chivvies his horse along the road with an urgency he had never expected to feel. His sudden reversal means that he has very little time: the Last Ship had planned to sail without him and the tide is rising. They will not know to wait. He can feel the strain in his mount’s haunches; her breath comes as fast as his own, chasing the scent of the water, the light on the waves. Never Valinor, he had said, and meant it, but he longs too much; the ache of their separation has worn him down. He shifts his weight forward and urges the pale mare on, his mind already full of the arrival, of the welcoming fire in Galadriel’s eyes.

Maedhros loves to watch Fingon eat. His cousin approaches food with the same sensual exuberance with which he embraces everything: a deep, curious exploration of tastes new and old, a frank indulgence in texture and scent and flavor that he expresses with an easy joy. Fingon selects his portions with eager eyes and finds no shame in eating with his fingers. His teeth flash white as he bites; the strong column of his throat ripples as he swallows and smiles.

Of little appetite himself, Maedhros fills Fingon's plates for the pure pleasure of watching that beautiful mouth move in enjoyment, those dark eyes sparkle at an unexpected treat or an old, familiar joy.

Salt, sweet, fat: the triad of those simplest delights makes Fingon moan. He wriggles in glee at the taste of roasted corn, buttered and salted and spiced from a stand in Himring's chilly market. He sighs and breathes deep of the fragrance of a perfect handful of fried potatoes, crisp and hot from a kettle in Hurin's camp in Dor-lomin, before eating them one by one, rolling them delightedly over his tongue.

In private, Maedhros plies him with sweets. With each bite, he remembers the airy pastry, sprinkled with salt flakes and filled with chocolate cream, that clung to Fingon's lips on the sunny morning in Tirion when Maedhros finally surrendered to his own longing, his craving to be so unashamedly tasted and appreciated, so lovingly devoured.

They watch one another stealthily in the flare of torches on the Ice, each savoring the smoky flow of shadow over the other’s cheekbones. Warming, secretly, at the way the fire’s sparks catch in the depths of his eyes.

In starlight, the yearning is more tender. Each finds himself drifting more and more into that stillness, outside the circle of the tents. An unplanned wandering, but not, perhaps, unmeant. Every time they find each other there is less of a surprise. The pale stars create a dome of gentle intimacy, a space for sharing secret fears and murmured hopes. For imagining worlds beyond the snow: their visions overlapping, but not yet fully shared.

When the crossing ends, the moon brings its own mystery. Seven times it appears and fades, drawing them together in its luminous glow and then releasing them into the dark. Each night’s silver beams pull them closer to each other with an inexorable drag.

The tide of their hearts is at full flood when the sun flares over the horizon, and they crane and stretch to find each other’s faces in the throng. Their palms touch in something more than reassurance, there in the midst of the singing crowd.

They stare and stare at each other as the new light gilds their faces and their shoulders and their heads. After so many years in the dark, they have nearly forgotten color. Glorfindel’s eyes are so brilliantly blue. Ecthelion’s lips, so red.

Chapter End Notes

For the Love Actually challenge quote: "The Eldar wedded once only in life, and for love or at least by free will upon either part."

Raised on Maedhros’ wistful tales of black hair braided with gold, how can he not answer, when that dark, glittering head turns to him out of the torchlit shambles of the war? Maglor’s tender tunes and instruction in courtly manners have primed him to serve, to love, to honor and obey. Gil-galad indulges his lisp; his antique courtesies; his feral resistance to any who speak ill of those he loved (and loves, and will, until the seasons’ turning ends). Orphaned himself, the king knows the terror of abandonment, the perpetual drive to be good enough, brave enough, bright enough to be kept, to be wanted, to be loved. He holds all the sorrows of the world behind his lips, but still smiles, bright and bold and fearless, laughing into the night. The hands that wield Aeglos with such fierce skill are capable yet of infinite tenderness, and Elrond falls into them, yielding. He raises his lips to that beautiful mouth, tasting beyond all expectation the sharp, sweet flavor of joy.   

Chapter End Notes

I don't even usually pair these two, but it's Valentine's season...

For the Ancestors challenge. This assumes Gil-galad is Fingon's son (how, if Maedhros is still wistful? no tale tells...).

Even in Gondolin, Idril still shivers. The walls of her father’s city are smooth and opaque: Tirion laid over the Helcaraxë, shaped from his memory into pillars and columns and whorls of bitter, scintillating white. Nothing evolves here; they are frozen in time. Preservation-minded Turgon clings proudly to his tower, conserving the remains of their people in Tumladen’s bell jar: ever watchful, ever wary. Ever cold.

What heat was in him fled with her mother under the Ice. Now his chilly fingers mold and shape her to her duty: not a daughter but an architect’s tool, crafted to build, to shield, to defend. Her icy planes refract the captured light. She smiles and smiles, shining, but under the surface the fissures unfold, her frozen edges cracking as the weight of their long isolation bears down.

The threatened rupture is stayed by Tuor’s warmth. He is all sunshine, this Man, so simple and sincere in his affection that even her father’s fearful humors are assuaged. It is a small step, finally, from her still, cold room into the welcoming circle of his arms.

On their wedding night, Idril trembles as the cool column of herself turns under his warm, weathered touch. That rough heat smooths her fractured edges, wearing them down. His calluses catch in her hair as he draws it through his fingers, tugging the splinters of ice from her heart. So tender a caress, over and over, until she softens into something lush and tropical, sighing and surging under his hands.

Her bones melt, at last. She pours herself sweetly into his palms.

Chapter End Notes

For the Opposites Attract challenge (prompt pairs heat-cold and break-repair).

Erestor has always been fond of Dwarves. They are a blunt-spoken people, with a practical approach to problem-solving, quite unlike the elegant, deliberately-mystifying, knife-edged rhetorical wars of the Eldar. With eternity ahead of them, his own kin tend to play the long game in interpersonal conflict, through processes of delicate maneuvering and attrition that are as much entertainment as they are negotiation. Death by a thousand cuts of the tongue, Azaghal used to call it, watching the battles unfold.

Erestor himself has been known to savor a victory constructed over centuries when it finally arrives. He is not above planting the seeds of a minefield and waiting for the slow accretions and subsidences of time to set it off. Loremaster’s prerogative, he would claim, in Rivendell, when a tale spun to Elrond’s advantage, or that of the House of Fëanor. It was an appropriate corrective, in his opinion, to history’s slander.

Now, however, he must watch his pen, and his tongue, and curb the urge to always hold his own people in the light. It is the lover’s bargain he and Pengolodh struck: they will argue, but with honesty, and kindness, and care.

And when words fail them in Quenya and Sindarin, there is Khuzdul to turn to: that frank, Dwarvish tongue they share that is native to neither. Its spare, strong architecture offers a neutral meeting place, when they have wandered apart, and a straight road home. They step toward each other from boulder to boulder, confident in the bedrock, with no farther to fall.

This love is a new thing they are growing between them; a strange seed. It is tender yet, and the blossoms have only started to open, but it roots well in stone.