The Loneliness of the Fishermouse by Clodia

---

Dragonfly

---

 

 

A/N: Once again, many thanks to my ever patient beta-reader, Ignoble Bard.

 

~o~

 

 

Once we slept for a hundred years, and when we woke up, the world had changed...

He drew a snatch of melody from the harp and grinned. The children waited breathlessly, three pairs of bright eyes intent. Their father's eyebrow was sceptically raised. No, you're right, he said, I tell a lie. It was only a year. Maybe two. Maybe twenty. The world changed all the same. It was a long time ago. We were very tired...

... drowsing, her dark hair soft in his face. Light slanted through the curtains, light and a salt breeze blowing off the sea. In the distance, seagulls screamed, their cries intermingling with the shouts of the Falathrim sailors. She frowned in her sleep. She was so warm beside him. He yawned and closed his eyes and turned over... time slipped away. A month, two months, a year or more, curled up together on Círdan's isle. Sometimes he woke and sometimes she did, or they shared morsels of food, or washing-water, or whispered dreams, or memories: fragments carried out of the smoke and ruin of Doriath's fall, scavenged from the rubble of Tol Sirion and the skeletons of Gondolin. The friends they'd lost, the few they'd saved. Círdan's pieces of unhappy news. She twisted her fingers into his hair and ran her nails down his chest, hard, and holding her close and closing his eyes, he fell through the chilly dark into a tattered bed of cloaks on the icy banks of the River Sirion...

The lid of the chest knocking against the wall awoke him. He was alone. Darkness filled the room. He could make out only the shape of someone crouching over the chest in which their travelling gear was kept. In his head, he was still in their bed on the Isle of Balar, dreaming away the long nights and longer days. But Melinna had got up. He lay there and looked on blankly while she rummaged through the chest's contents.

He only realised it was not Melinna when he caught the starlight glimmer of her eyes. He raised himself on his elbow. "Lúthien?"

She jumped. The violence of her surprise was not like Lúthien at all: but it was Lúthien's face shining in the dark, Lúthien's arched brows and chin and sweeping cheekbones. She might have worn a cloak of hair; he could not tell.

"What are you doing?" he asked. "What are you looking for?"

"I need a knife," she said tightly. "I know it's in here. Melinna told me."

Erestor shook his head, bewildered.

"What?" he asked. "Why did she do that? Why would you need a knife?"

"She told me in case I ever needed one," said the woman, who was not Lúthien, because Lúthien had gone out of the world long ago. The set of her shoulders expressed determination. "And I do. Go back to sleep."

His head was full of an older tiredness and a different dark. He might have been struggling through the webs of Ered Gorgoroth. He pushed himself up against the pillows, rubbing his face. "Why?" he said helplessly. "What are you going to do?"

She shut the chest. "I'm going to find my mother. She needs me. Don't try to stop me."

It was not until the second door shut that he understood what she meant. He was still more than half in another world, another place, long ago and far away, and the abruptness with which he left his bed did nothing to dispel that. She was already at the far end of the corridor; he caught her on the stairs, which were deep in shadow, since no one had been round to light the candles. "Give that back!" he said and seized her wrist. "You can't go after them!"

Her fingers were white around the knife's bone handle. "Let go of me."

"No!" he said furiously. "Don't be absurd!"

She was very pale, but she spoke steadily. "My mother needs me. You call me Lúthien. She would have gone. Let go."

"I would have stopped her." He said it without thinking. "I would never have told her where to find the knife. You can't go. I won't let you."

He wrenched the knife out of her tight grasp. It was warm from her fingers and still in its sheath; as she lunged for it, childishly, he held it above her head and kept her from jumping with his other hand on her arm. "I won't," he said. "I will not. You aren't going, Arwen. Your father wants you to stay here."

It was a long moment before Arwen ceased to strain against him. Patches of angry colour glowed in her cheeks now and she was breathing rather quickly. "Let go of me," she said again. She bit her lip in a way that Lúthien had certainly never done. "Let me go."

He stared down at her. They were both, he realised suddenly, very close to tears.

When he released Arwen, she leaned mutinously against the wall, rubbing her wrist. Erestor could see the marks left by his fingers even through the gloom. He put a hand on the banister, carefully, and lowered himself to sit on the stairs. He had stumbled into bed without undressing; he could smell the warmth of ancient dreams dissipating from the crumpled cloth into the cool night air. He thrust the knife through his belt. In another moment or two, he thought, he would be able to place himself properly in time and space, and then he might be able to talk some sense into the child.

"You can't stop me," she said, although her voice wavered. "Melinna wouldn't."

He almost hit her. It was an instinctive, irrational impulse, though, and when the dizzy rage subsided, he could take a steadying breath and tell her, "I don't care what she'd have done. She'd have been wrong. She was wrong. You can't have her knife."

This time she said nothing. Melinna, he thought.

"I'm going down to see her," he said aloud. "Don't you stop me."

It was dark all through Imladris and very quiet. Starlight glimmered in the high arches of the windows as Erestor passed by. Distantly, he was aware of Arwen following soundlessly a few steps behind on her bare feet.

The doors into the Hall of Fire were shut and barred. "Glorfindel ordered it," said Arwen, from a safe distance. Her voice was small and echoed oddly. Erestor looked over his shoulder and saw her standing in a patch of moonlight, her face crosshatched by the lead between the window panes. Her feet were very pale on the grey stone floor. "He said we could weep for the dead once we'd done what we could for the living. You taught him that, he said."

Erestor turned back to the great oak doors. Light and shadow stippled the carvings. He seemed to be seeing them for the first time in a hundred years. Birds peered out at him, and squirrels that had once been bushy-tailed and were now smooth, their whittled fur rubbed flat by countless fingers. He traced a grey wing, wonderingly.

"Will you go back now?" she asked behind him. "Erestor..."

The wood was silky under his hands. He set a palm against it, and then his arm, crooked, so that he could rest his forehead in the bend of his elbow and only the tip of his nose brushed the door. He remembered the tree from which it had been made. He remembered the dust and confusion of Imladris rising from the valley, and slipping away from the work for a day or so, or possibly three, and Melinna tracking him unerringly to his leafy vantage-point. The carvings were his. He had lost that knife long ago.

He closed his eyes.

The curls of wood shaved away from beech leaves and sharp-edged feathers were falling around his feet. A fire burned between them. Nightingales, she said, and smiled, and he smiled too. He was there and here: there long ago, where Imladris was a jagged mess of rising walls and war beat Middle-earth like a drum, and here, where time had blunted the edges of the carvings pressed against his fingers. Melinna was on the other side of the great oak doors. He could feel her there. He thought she must be standing there, as he was standing, leaning against the sculpted wood and knowing that he leaned there too.

His shoulders ached. He rested all his weight against the barred doors, which stood as solid and unmovable as that old oak had done. Inch by inch, he slid downwards, his sleeve catching on twigs and talons, until he knelt on stone.

"Erestor?" he heard Arwen say uncertainly, on the cusp of some distant horizon.

"Go away." The words were faraway, as though someone else had spoken them, or as if he only remembered speaking them or imagined himself speaking them in some far-off future. "Just go away. Please."

He could see Melinna kneeling on the other side. His eyes were still shut, but he could see her clearly, her arms folded against the doors, looking up at him through a curtain of glossy black hair. The darkness of her eyes and the twist of her lips. He knew how she would be smiling: sharply, her amusement keen enough to draw blood.

He stayed there until the urgency of that other world became too insistent to ignore.

It began as a murmuring that fluttered and stirred around him like windblown leaves. He was aware of it, vaguely, but only as a peripheral disturbance that might concern some other person, somewhere else and at some other time. The wood was as warm as skin and Melinna's heart was beating. He could feel it. Her laughter brushed against his mouth. When a hand grasped his shoulder, he felt it as an intrusion and reacted unthinkingly, knocking it away. As soon as it was gone, he forgot it. "Leave him alone," Arwen was saying. "Just leave him alone!"

She sounded fierce even from a distance. "Please," he said, almost to himself. "Just go."

Someone pulled him away from the doors. It felt like being woken from deep sleep. He was shaken into morning: aching and cold and utterly furious, his rage a living thing that broke through the stiffness of his frozen limbs. He tore himself free. "Go away!" he told them. "Just go away!"

Sunlight lay dustily on the polished flagstones. Lindir was there, and others crowding round, and Arwen clutching a grey patterned web of a shawl around her shoulders. "Come away," Lindir said. He looked as grim as any of them: he was hollow-eyed and hollow-cheeked and the liquid smoothness of his singing voice had cracked, which Melinna would have said was a tragedy in its own right. He tried to grasp Erestor's shoulder again. "This won't help –"

Erestor shook him off. "Don't tell me that!" he said. "What would you know about it?"

Lindir was looking at him with a curious sort of dignity. "Alvellë," he replied simply and set his hand against the carven wood.

It took a moment for Erestor to remember who Alvellë was. He stared at Lindir, seeing streaks that might have been dried tear-tracks in the creases of the boy's face, until Alvellë came back to him too: a silly, pretty child with the longest eyelashes he'd ever seen, who spent half her time batting them at Lindir and the other half cooing at the songs Lindir composed for her. In a hundred years or so, they were bound to be married. You didn't need Galadriel's mirror, Melinna said, to know that.

A match made in poetry, Erestor had said then. "Ride out, then!" he said now. "Write a song for her, do whatever you think she'd want. Find a waterfall and weep under it. Whatever makes you feel better. But don't try to tell me what will or won't help!"

He was being unkind and did not care. "Just leave me be," he added bitterly. "You've never lost anyone before. Savour it. It'll give you something to sing about."

"As you wish," said Lindir, quietly, after a long moment.

He turned away. Erestor waited until they had all gone before he sat down on the floor and leaned back against the doors, closing his eyes again. Silence settled over him. He knew when Arwen crouched beside him and tugged his sleeve, very gently, although he did not look at her. "Lindir was right," she said, in a soft little voice that was nearly a whisper. "This won't help. Won't you come away now?"

"No."

He heard her sigh. "I'm sorry," she said. "I shouldn't have woken you..."

"Just hush," he said wearily. "Just leave me be."

She sat down instead. Because Erestor knew how stubborn she could be, he opened his aching eyes and let everything come slowly back into focus. Arwen was sitting there with her bare feet tucked under her, leaning sideways against the barred doors. By the shadows in her face, she had not slept either.

"You could come with me," she suggested. "We could both ride out."

"No."

"I didn't really think –" She broke off. "Are you hungry?"

"No."

"Do you want –"

"I don't want anything. Just leave me alone."

"No," said Arwen. "I could get you some cushions."

He exhaled. "If you must."

It bought him a space of solitude, if nothing else. He was weary beyond the point where sleep had any appeal and ached for something other than comfort. Arwen's shawl fluttered like grey feathers as she went off to find cushions. He watched until she had gone, without really seeing her, then let his eyes fall shut. The ripples of Lindir's unwanted intrusion were smoothing out now, leaving him blank again, his mind an empty pool. The point of a carved beak dug into his back.

Time slipped away. He let it. He was deep in another world and the days and nights moved differently there. No one troubled him, although from time to time people drifted past and murmured concerned things to Arwen, who had dragged an armchair under the arch of the window and sat there with a spindle and a basket of red wool. He glimpsed her occasionally, distantly, through his lashes. She had brought cushions and then blankets, and sometimes water or food, and now she sat and span ferociously, in silence. He saw the shadow of the spindle turning and saw Melinna there, perched on her weaving stool in the afternoon sun. With his eyes closed and his forehead pressed against his knees, he knew she was restlessly circling and quartering the Hall of Fire instead, trapped in the dark among the carven pillars and the ashy hearth.

He was listening to her footsteps when the stillness holding Imladris broke. A distant babble of voices bloomed into a kind of vivid alertness that the white halls had not known since their master had ridden out. The footsteps in Erestor's head grew louder and sharper until he could hear echoes reverberating in the stone arches. Then a clatter as Arwen's spindle fell to the floor. "Mother? Have you – is she –?"

She was out of her chair. Erestor opened his eyes, slowly, and saw the spindle first, lying abandoned in a tangle of red thread. Glorfindel stood there, fully armoured, carrying his helmet in the crook of one shining arm and a cloth-wrapped bundle in the other. Arwen danced before him, visibly torn between eagerness and dread.

Glorfindel was looking past her at Erestor, though. "I told you to keep an eye on him," he said to Arwen. He sounded particularly grim. "Why's he here?"

"I am keeping an eye on him!" Arwen snapped back. "That's why I'm still here! Glorfindel, tell me about my mother! Where is she? What's happened, is she –?"

"Your father has her, and your brothers. She's injured, but alive. Roswen too. Thindaew was – beyond help."

"Where are they? Tell me!"

"I believe they carried your mother to her room."

Arwen nodded, gathered up her skirts and dashed off without another word. Glorfindel remained standing there a moment longer, looking down on Erestor; then his mouth twisted and he sat down in the chair so recently vacated by Arwen, his armour gleaming in the dusty light. He set his helmet on the flagstones at his feet, although he held the bundle carefully in his lap.

"You look terrible," he said frankly. "How long have you been here?"

"I don't know." Erestor's voice was rusty. He cleared his throat. "How long were you gone?"

Glorfindel put a hand over his eyes, then seemed to realise he was still wearing his leather gloves. He stripped them off and dropped them absentmindedly beside his helmet. His hair was pinned up to go under the helmet and a few stray wisps streaked gold into his face. "You shouldn't be here. I don't know why they didn't drag you away."

"Lindir tried. I didn't want to go."

"I suppose I should commend him for making the attempt. A brave thing to do."

Erestor said nothing. Glorfindel shook his head. "What can I say to convince you to leave?"

"I need to see her."

"Later."

"No, now."

Glorfindel grimaced and pushed himself out of the chair. "Now, then," he said tiredly. "Though I wish you'd leave it."

The bar across the doors was heavy enough to need both of them to take it down. Glorfindel hauled Erestor to his feet and waited for him to steady himself against the wall. The sudden altitude was dizzying. "You're in a terrible state," he heard Glorfindel say. "If that child of Elrond's had any sense –"

"You had the hall shut up, she said."

"Yes," said Glorfindel, after a pause. "I was afraid you wouldn't wait."

"Well, then."

They set their hands against the bar. It was a hefty piece of wood and working it loose was an awkward task, made all the more so because Glorfindel had only one arm free. The key was a big, ornate piece of ironwork. Glorfindel produced it from a pouch and rattled it in the lock. "This should be oiled," he remarked. "The hall isn't locked often, I suppose."

"Never. That I remember."

The doors swung open. They went into the dark.

It was colder than Erestor had expected. There was no light at all, other than that slanting in through the open doors behind them. The hearth was empty. He had to stop and wait for his eyes to adjust. Then he could see pools of black cloth and the still, white faces floating in the folds of the shrouds and piled-up hair. They should have been dreaming. Alvellë's absurd eyelashes made her look like a child's ceramic doll.

The smell of old blood filled the hall, but not that of rot, as it would have done if the dead had been mortals. Erestor could not see Melinna. "Here," said Glorfindel, making his way between the pillars and bodies. "She's over here."

He knelt by a pillar. A long, covered form lay there, slightly apart from the rest. The shroud was undisturbed, which made Erestor's throat clench: she alone had been laid down and forgotten. "I should have seen her," he said. He pressed his knuckles to his forehead and slumped to the ground. "You should have let me."

What little brightness there was so deep in the hall glimmered in Glorfindel's face and hands. "No. You shouldn't have."

He reached out, very carefully, and drew back the shroud far enough to reveal slashed leather and the wreck of her neck, a truncated ruin of bone and blackened flesh. "No!" he said again, when Erestor's breath hissed in, as if punched in the stomach. He grasped Erestor's wrist and held tight for a long moment, during which Erestor leaned back against the pillar and tried not to think at all. "We recovered – various things..."

He set the bundle he carried on the floor, where her head should have been. "I hoped to spare you this," he added. His gaze was frank and full of light. He began to unfold the layers of cloth.

There were still pearl hairpins in her hair. Erestor saw that and nothing else, because everything was blurring. Her black hair had been washed and combed and braided into perfect glossy coils, then pinned up with pearls. He reached out helplessly to touch the sleek tassel of a braid, and then the matching pins lost in his own tangles.

He closed his eyes. He did not want to see what had been done to hers.

"What happened?" he managed to say. "Why – none of the others..."

Glorfindel sighed.

"I don't know," he replied. The steadiness of his voice was slipping now. "But they found her – Elrond's sons said they found her body on the Dimrill Stair with a few dead Orcs and a broken knife. And – her head – when we found Celebrían and Roswen, and what was left of Thindaew... I don't know what happened. Knowing her, I can guess. Anything more than that will have to wait until Celebrían's talking again."

In the silence that followed, Erestor saw her again, clambering through a different pass in a darker age. He could see the flirt of her cloak and her hair in the wind, but not her face. Overhead shone stars, sprayed end to end across the endless night.

This time, he felt Glorfindel's sigh more than heard it. "Come on," Glorfindel said roughly and put a hand under his elbow. "Staying here won't do anyone any good. Let's go and get drunk. I mean, a drink."