April Fancies by AdmirableMonster

Gather

Pengolodh reunites with their spouse.

Prompt:

♥ laugh, valley, path, stay

♥ word: gather

♥ a time to cast away stones and a time to gather stones together

Pengolodh hasn’t laughed in a long time, and this isn’t a mirthful laugh, but it’s something perhaps better—a joyful one.  They never thought to see Lofar again, after their hasty parting in the wake of Eregion’s fall—not in Lofar’s current incarnation, at least, and the Dwarvish idea of reincarnation is strange and foreign to them, even after years of staying in the mountain.

“My journey,” Lofar’s hands say, their eyes twinkling as their feet take them down the first steps of the path to Imladris.  “My sweet sunrise.”

Pengolodh has cried more recently than they have laughed, but they wonder if they have ever done both together before.  Not in a long time.  Their hands catch at their spouse’s, pulling them close, kissing their mouth and nose and eyes and rubbing their face against that beautifully-cultivated beard woven with pretty stones and shells and beads.

“I have left behind the stones of my people and come to gather stones with you,” Lofar says in Khuzdul, mouth and hands shaping the words so there is no mistaking them.  An ancient Dwarvish saying, Pengolodh knows, but not one they fully understood before this.

“I greet you upon the stones of my hearth,” they reply, and they bend over again to kiss capture Lofar’s lips with theirs.