Signs of Healing by AdmirableMonster

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Fanwork Notes

MAD thanks to Saelind, for letting me play with her OCs Maerel and Nethril from her Leaves of the Dúnedain series, and for beta-ing this fic!

Equally strong thanks to Flora-lass (HelenFloralW) for helping me out when I was stuck-er on a title than I have ever been (and having a rough week on top of it).

Fanwork Information

Summary:

Pengolodh chances upon a young human girl who has been brought to Rivendell for healing. He soon discovers they have more in common than he expected.

Major Characters: Pengolodh, Original Female Character(s)

Major Relationships: Pengolodh & Original Character

Genre: Hurt/Comfort

Challenges:

Rating: General

Warnings: In-Universe Intolerance

This fanwork belongs to the series

Chapters: 1 Word Count: 2, 488
Posted on 28 January 2025 Updated on 29 January 2025

This fanwork is complete.

Signs of Healing

Read Signs of Healing

Autumn crept in at the edges of the valley of Rivendell, nibbling with orange teeth on the green trees.  The Sun shone brightly, but the air had taken on a slight chill, and there was a faint scent of ash on the wind.  A perfect picture of Middle Earth, Pengolodh thought in frustration as he made his way along a well-worn stone path at the back of the main compound.  Patience, Elrond had counseled again.  Pengolodh had heard such counsels before, from the mouth of a ruler of a secret refuge, reassurances given days before that refuge in the mountains vanished in flame and treachery.  He had been sure that Elrond would act now, send out Elven warriors to support the Men still living in the wilderness, alone.  It had not been long since Estel had returned with a cousin and brother-in-arms who had been put to torture by a former Dunádan in vengeance for his having been captured by Orcs.  Estel had half-killed himself keeping Halbarad alive, and two other victims of the same incident had been mortal children, one dead and the other grievously injured. But patience, again.  It is not the Age of Elves.  It is not for us to lead the battle this time.

Damn Elrond and his wisdom.  Turgon had been wise, too.  So had Gil-galad.  

Usually, after such a fight with Elrond, Pengolodh would hide himself in the library, but today he was too restless, the fate of Gondolin too present in his mind.  Instead, his steps took him toward Celebrían’s favorite garden—he was willing to wager that Elrond would avoid it rather than gravitating toward it.  Besides, it was tranquil and beautiful, and before it had been her garden, when it was still a little wild glade in the woods, Pengolodh had brought Lofar here.  With his spouse, he had whiled away many happy hours reading and arguing.

He had not expected there to be anyone in the garden, which many Elves avoided like they avoided memories of pain and darkness, but he was wrong.  A skinny form sat with her back against the willow tree, eyes turned to the pool that was fed by the sparkling cascades that foamed down rock by rock from the ridged mossy stones.

She was all angles and edges, this child, with knobby elbows and knees, like a colt that hadn’t yet grown into its limbs, and, as she watched the riotous water surging over stone, she had a wondering, big-eyed look that made her appear even younger.  Her evident youth stood in ugly juxtaposition to the healing injuries on both hands and her collar-bone, injuries that Pengolodh knew had been inflicted with meticulous, deliberate cruelty.  This, then, was the Dúnedan girl—with a chill, Pengolodh wondered if she was even old enough to have had her first blood.

A part of him considered ceding the garden to her immediately, tiptoeing away before she noticed him.  But Pengolodh liked children, though he had never had any of his own, and his sharp curiosity was as active as ever.  He cleared his throat to get her attention, but, to his surprise, there was no response.  Maybe he had been too quiet—as volume was hard for him to judge, it had happened before.

Yielding to an unusual impulse, he slipped his feet out of their soft-soled shoes and continued to the edge of the pond in bare feet, stripping his kerchief from his head as well.  There was hardly any reason to remain in a Noldorin outfit, and it was not a tradition the Dúnedain cleaved to, so he worried he might be too intimidating for a young girl who had been so ill-treated.

She looked up when he reached the pond and started badly.  “I’m sorry!” she blurted quickly, her lips clumsy as they formed the words.  “I didn’t expect—your ladyship, I’ll go right away.”

Pengolodh hid a smile.  Even other Elves had sometimes made this particular error.  “I don’t want to drive you away, child,” he said, the movements a little rusty.  He had learned the speech of the Rangers long ago in the bloody aftermath of the Angmar War—a fine language, if a little workaday.  Substantially more complete, though, than the original hwermë had been.  Men were ingenious in such things, and they had narrowed in swiftly on efficient ways to communicate with their hands.

The girl stared at him, eyes widening, and he hoped she knew the hand signs.  And that, if she did, he hadn’t just made an embarrassing misstatement.  “Do you understand me?” he asked.

She nodded quickly.  “Was I staring?  I’m sorry.  I didn’t know there were any Elves who knew our signs.”

“I know many different systems of signs,” Pengolodh told her, after considering how best to translate mátengwier into the Dúnedain style.

The girl blinked at him, sitting up.  Slipping into sign herself—with clear facility, despite the injuries she bore on her wrists and hands—she continued. “There are others?”

“Several.”  Pengolodh seated himself cross-legged on the grass.  “Many Elves use a simple system of gestures to supplement their verbal speech—not really a language, but it makes a base from which one can extrapolate—and the Dwarves have a system of their own, which is used to communicate when silence is necessary—more complete, though still missing certain grammatical forms.  The original was probably derived for conversation in certain religious spaces that admit no speech—” he hurried on, aware that he was treading perilously close to secrets he was sworn not to share, “—but has been used in warfare and in other situations where sound might precipitate danger.”

She was staring at him intently.  “Do many Elves know how to make signs?  I haven’t noticed anything like that since I’ve been here.”  Her face closed up slightly.  “I guess I might not have.”

“Many of them use simple gestures.” Pengolodh shrugged.  Hwermë has fallen out of fashion lately, to an extent, but for someone used to the sophisticated language of the Dúnedain, I would not consider it so surprising not to notice even the more consistent usages.”  He sighed, weary of the situation himself.  “Elrond signs with me—either a gesture of politeness or a matter of pride.  Glorfindel signs with me as well—an older version of the Quenya signs.  Many people will sign with me if I ask them to, but I lip-read well enough, and they understand, and to be honest, it gets tiresome to have to ask.”

The girl’s eyes grew rounder than ever.  “Wait!” she exclaimed, flinging up her hand dramatically in the gesture.  “Can’t you hear?”  

“No,” Pengolodh said, a little ruffled.  Reminding himself that a Mannish child could not know that the reaction was one he by now found somewhat tiresome, he shook off the irritation.

“I thought all Elves were—” She signed a word that Pengolodh was unsure of, but guessed to be “uninjured,” used a little clumsily in this context.  Unmarred. 

Deliberately gentling his first reaction—something he would have struggled with when he first came to Rivendell, but he had learned some patience, if not enough to agree with Elrond’s current set of pronouncements—he told her, “It is not an injury. I was born this way.  Once, it saved my life when I would have died.  There is no shame in it.”

A bright flush appeared on her cheeks.  “No,” she said, shaking her head, then pointing to her own ear.  “I don’t hear well, either.  I got sick when I was little.  I didn’t mean to be rude.”

It was Pengolodh’s turn to blush.  “I’m sorry,” he said.  “I didn’t realize why you were asking.”  No wonder she was so conversant with the signs and so curious as to whether others in Rivendell used them.  “None of the others in Rivendell have signed with you?”

She shifted awkwardly and bit at her lip.  “Not the Elves.  I do hear, I’m not completely—” another word, interestingly, that Pengolodh did not know but which clearly meant deaf.

“But you find signing comfortable?” Pengolodh hazarded.  “Perhaps even more comfortable?”

A hesitant nod.

Gods above, Pengolodh had not expected to be enraged today.  Were the healers completely incompetent? Surely one among them knew enough of the Mannish signs to make an attempt? “If you like, I could teach you some of the Sindarin and Quenya signs,” Pengolodh offered.  “More of the folk of Rivendell know those.”

Her entire face lit up, and she nodded eagerly.  “You said Glorfindel knows those signs?  He helps train me sometimes.  Maybe we could talk that way.”

Yes, Pengolodh thought, Glorfindel would be more than willing.  Pengolodh’s old friend was one of the kindest people he knew, though sometimes he had a bad habit of not thinking situations through.  Such as this one.  Pengolodh was going to be quite insulted with him the next time they had dinner, for not telling him of this child.  

“There are books in the library that may also help.  I’ll take you there, if you like,” he suggested.

She hesitated.  Pengolodh wondered if he had frightened her too much.  He knew he could often be intimidating without meaning to, and he wondered if he had already been too forbidding for her to be comfortable around him.  Then she smiled.  “May I know your name, my lady?” she asked.  “I am Maerel.” Her hands moved as she introduced herself in turn, lips forming the syllables at the same time.  Pengolodh laughed at himself.  They hadn’t exchanged names, had they?

“My name is Lendalwed Oróntelos,” he said, his hands forming the Sindarin sign and then the Quenya.  “Those first sign is for a prosperous journey—Sindarin in origin—and the second means sunrise in Quenya.  I am also sometimes called Pengolodh—that is loremaster in Sindarin.”

Maerel nodded and copied the hand signs.  “Lendalwed Oróntelos,” she signed carefully.  “And Pengolodh.”  Then her smile widened into a proper grin.  “I’d really like to go to the library and learn more signs, if you don’t mind.”

“I don’t,” Pengolodh told her gently.

* * *

Where was Maerel?  Nethril had been looking for her for nearly half an hour with little success.  After Lord Elrond had convinced her to stay in the valley, to rest and recuperate after long years of leading the Dúnedain in Aragorn’s absence, she had done her best to set down some of the burdens she had brought with her.  Save this one.  For too long, she had avoided Maerel, stinging from the reminder of her difficult relationship with the girl’s father.  Even bringing her to Rivendell to be healed of her injuries had not fully assuaged Nethril’s guilt, and she found it hard not to know where Maerel was.

She tried not to burden the girl with it.  Their relationship was mending, but it was no easy thing for a young woman to have an older one fussing about like a mother hen.  Mother hennishness did not suit Nethril, in any case.  But she did like to know where Maerel was, and today no one seemed to know. Glorfindel had seen her in the morning, as had the healers, but she had vanished—apparently into thin air—sometime around noon.  She was still healing.  Nethril was growing more and more uneasy.  She read a little and walked a little more, but her heart wasn’t in it.

By sheer happenstance, she was walking—maybe pacing would have described it better—past one of the larger of Rivendell’s libraries, when she heard Maerel’s laughter, clear as a bell and merry as a running river.  With a soft exclamation, she followed it and finally located the girl.

Maerel was seated beside an Elf that Nethril did not recognize, slim and androgynous, whose dark hair was shot through, oddly, with silver.  Silver hair in Elves, she knew, did not indicate age the way it did in Men, but she had never seen this mix of different colors, moonlight on a shadowed river.  As she watched, the bent head bent forward a little more, almost conspiratorial, and Maerel copied him.  Nethril was almost offended.  True, Nethril had made mistakes where the girl was concerned, but how had an unknown Elf managed to get her to open up so quickly?

A page turned.  Maerel pointed to something, raised her hands and made some clumsy signs that Nethril didn’t recognize.  The Elf nodded, pointed to one of her hands, and returned the gestures in a much more familiar manner.

Nethril did not use the sign language of the Dúnedain, but she recognized it when she saw it, and her breath caught in surprise.  “Maerel,” she said out loud without thinking, and evidently she said it loudly enough, because Maerel looked up in surprise.

She smiled shyly at Nethril and got up awkwardly from behind the table.  “Did you need me for something?  Lord, um—” She glanced to the side and made some rapid hand gestures, which the Elf responded to with a series of small motions.  “Pen-go-lodh, I think,” Maerel continued after a minute, as if sounding it out.  “Lord Pengolodh was just teaching me some of the Elven sign languages.”

That name was familiar.  Why was that name familiar?  Nethril’s mind took her back to her days as a girl, faithfully trailing the Elven lady loremaster, her hands tracing a set of worn pages.  The History of Beleriand and the Ending of the First Age, being an arrangement of facts collected by Pengolodh.  Nethril looked up again, a wash of tingling sensation traveling down her spine. This slim, unimposing Elf was one of the greatest loremasters in all history, and here he was, tucked conspiratorially away in the library with the injured girl Nethril was still not sure she knew how to befriend.  She choked a little.

Pengolodh caught her eye and shook his head imperceptibly.  Don’t tell her.  Nethril took a long breath to compose herself, her hands automatically smoothing down her skirts.  “I just wondered where you were,” she told Maerel.  “But I don’t want to interrupt a lesson.”  She managed a grin.  “It’s rare not to have to fight for a student’s attention.”

Maerel rolled her eyes and pointedly went back to the book.  Nethril curtseyed to Pengolodh, who gave her a quick, grateful nod, and then hurried back out of the library, where she leaned against the wall and laughed for a few minutes.  A tight knot beneath her breast eased a little as she picked herself up, wobbly on her feet.

Maerel was healing.


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