Blend, Bond, Blaze by sallysavestheday

Blend, Bond, Blaze

Written for the It Comes in Threes challenge, using the prompt three strands in a braid.

It is the great frustration of their childhoods that they do not match: FingonandAngrodandAegnor, close as brothers; three flashing, crackling sparks of the same bright fire.

They share eyes that mingle blue and green, nimble fingers, quick and sometimes thoughtless mouths. No one of them is faster or stronger or wilder than the others. What accident of form is it that makes Fingon’s locks so dark, when they should quite obviously be fair?

Noldor, all, they experiment with change. Angrod crowns Fingon with a mop; Aegnor braids his curls with hay. Fingon holds his cousins in a fearsome grip and coats their long, bright hair with mud: all three are black of mane, then, until it dries and cracks.

For a while, they wear identical scarves to hide their dissimilar hair – if they cannot match in outward seeming, let none look at them and know them somehow strange. But scarves slip. They cannot be worn in water. They catch in tree branches and are torn free in the wind of a gallop. They are impermanent, when FingonandAngrodandAegnor will always, always be the same.

Finarfin finds them in the laboratory, deep in argument over the merits of stripping dark from light or weaving shadows into gold. What chemical marvels might they blend, to align their three fine heads and make them all alike? A chemistry lesson bleeds into genetics, and then into metallurgy: if they may not dye (as their fathers categorically forbid), how might they otherwise embellish and adorn?

All their energy pours into anodizing, plating, hammering thin and fine. Managing weight and durability to shape jewels that represent their bond. Fingon’s dark braids gleam with ribbons of gold; Angrod and Aegnor weave theirs with zirconium and blackened steel.

They are tiger-striped; lightning-struck.

Three wild spirits, finely alloyed.