When the Hurly-Burly's Done by sallysavestheday

When the Hurly-Burly's Done

Read When the Hurly-Burly's Done

Elrond climbs the seaside cliffs of Balar when the world becomes too much; when the intrigues of court and the tensions of their people’s uncertain futures prick sharp points beneath his skin. The sheer stone walls block out the noise of politics, narrowing his focus to the shift of hand and foot, the sharp scent of stone and the musk of nesting birds, the heat on his back as he searches for the next prop or hold.

Elros never understood his love of heights: the dropping away of misery as the air thins; the clarity of vision when the eyes seek only the next place to grasp, and the next, and the next. It was their first separation, in Amon Ereb, Elrond seeking the battlements in pain or grief, and Elros the stables, the warm beasts, the quick lives flitting through the dark. Now he is bound to more of those brief sparks, gleeful, soon to be gone. Yet Elrond loves him, still. How can he not?

He climbs.

He does not fear falling. The kittiwakes and gannets watch his progress with friendly eyes – they are kin, of a sort, and the soft crooning from their roosts only soothes him as he clambers up and up. The stone welcomes him, child of the ancient builders of Tirion, and the sea air lifts and reassures. Some part of him knows that he would never reach the water, were he to let go: the itch at his shoulder blades whispers of shapes that he has never taken, of possibilities, of wonder in the fall.  

He climbs, singing lightly to himself, reaching, sprawled against the wall.

Gil-galad waits at the top, guarding the workman’s picnic he has spread out on the grass. He, too, finds the air of the western cliffs consoling. The liminality soothes; it is less defining than the tangle of the town, the camp, the martial urgency of decisions needing to be made. Flat on his back in the glare of the sun, he can squint into its flash and feel the world recede. The promontory’s edge is a space apart, a dance of light and air.

He remembers Finrod drawing him into the silent tunnels of Nargothrond, shielding the lamps, laying a quieting finger over his lips as the darkness settled. Helping him to hear the humming life so deep within the ground. The clifftops turn that awareness inside out, but there is a long line between them, a balance in inversion. Who he was; who he is: utterly different and yet still very much the same.

Artanáro would have loved the light on the water, Gil-galad thinks. His gentle brother’s paintings had leaned ever toward the blurring of margins, the shimmering, the airy and fine. Against Gil’s sturdy practicality he had been a much-loved wash of tenderness in the tower, in the caverns. As much as anyone can, in their present state of change and bitter endings, Gil-galad keeps faith. He believes his brother walks lightly in the West – that fair hair mingling with the earth under Haudh-en-Elleth now only an offering, a gift to the land.

Gil's crown echoes Artanaro's erstwhile glory: that diadem of golden braids. His own self has changed shape to bear it, duty-bound, unforgiving, unafraid.

The sun swings west as Elrond climbs and Gil-galad dreams. Celebrimbor stands on the cliff-edge, watching the bright orb as it makes its way in splendor through the sky. He feels the plumb-line of gravity cut straight through him: face to Aman and the long, bright sweetness of his childhood; back to the call of the wild world, the East, the stones. His heart in the center, split and aching. He is grateful not to be alone.

They three form a strange community: rich in transformations, steeped in the varieties of suffering and of love. Each has shifted, pushed and pulled by life’s currents: maid to man, Man to Elf, Amanya to Exile to some strange new shape of longing, built of air and Song and earth.

They know the secret curves and hollows of each other’s hearts. On drunken nights, warm in the King’s rooms, they have traded their abandoned panoplies: gowns and wings and gilded pauldrons tangling as they dance, all the gaudy longings of the House of Finwë and the House of Elwë, the wildness of Melian and the swift, fierce pride of Men spilling forth in their unsteady voices; braiding, folding into something new and fine. The earth shakes beneath them and the oceans rise, but this is a time of tenderness. A stone to build from, on the edge of the new Age.

Elrond’s hand catches the lip of earth at the edge of the cliff, scrabbling for a hold. Celebrimbor leans to grasp his wrist, pulling steadily as he rolls onto the grassy surface, gasping. Gil-galad laughs at the dust in Elrond’s hair, the wild light in his eyes. Come back to us, little bird-cousin, he sing-songs, tearing a heel of bread and drawing a trail of crumbs from Elrond’s seeking hand to the edge of the picnic blanket. Come back, come here, come home.

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Chapter End Notes

Headcanon here is that the Haladin buried Artanáro, believing and reporting that he was Finduilas. In the absence of other leadership in an annoyingly male-primogeniture-oriented line, Fin-galad stepped up. The extent of transformation necessary or desired is left to the reader.