In My End Is My Beginning by Lilith

The Boy

Galadriel remembers Celebrimbor after his death.

Prompts: death via the prompt generator. It might also be loosely read in terms of the March 8 prompt “the aftermath of a disaster” if one wants to read the fall of Eregion as such a disaster.

Chapter Text

She had felt the moment he’d died, at the hand of the one he’d trusted and chosen over her. She had felt it, despite the distance, as she had felt the death of her brother. She felt it as a fading of the light, a loss of it and of warmth, not unlike the days following the death of the trees, the world suddenly gone cold and dark.

He had been one of her childhood companions. She was the youngest of her family. Her brothers were older than she and her cousins, particularly those of his family, far older still. More often than she liked to remember she spent time trundling in their wake. Findaráto was more likely than the others to stop and to wait for her, but, sometimes, even he forgot and she was left to catch up. Years later, when she’d grown tall and strong, she’d enjoyed the fact that she was able to run farther and ride faster than they. 

Tyelperinquar was only a little younger than she, only a little more than ten years. His grandfather had married and had children young and his father had done the same. She’d been expected, as the youngest and as a girl, to care for and to play with him at the rare but lengthy gatherings when Finwë’s children and their children had gathered. She had resented it. His father had adored him and had not understood why someone would not want to look after his child. His uncles, Nelyafinwë in particularly, had understood better and had intervened and taken the boy as often as they might. But, sometimes, they too were busy, Nelyo maintaining the peace among their clans, Kanafinwë often singing with Findaráto, Turcafinwë occupied with Irissë, and no one would have trusted a child to the other three, and so she often found herself trapped with a little boy following at her feet.

She was not the best choice to care for him. She was impatient and she wanted to be anywhere else and doing anything else than to have to wait for his smaller and slower legs to catch up to where she was. She tried, frequently, to escape from his notice, to leave him surreptitiously with a servant or two, but she seldom succeeded, and, somehow, he never seemed to noticed. He trusted her, completely and implicitly, his wide grey eyes, so like his grandfather’s, following her intently, his little hands, already clever, attempting to do what she did.

She’d been angry once, angry that she’d had to watch him and angry that she’d been told he was to join her lessons that day and angrier still that he, a child of not more than ten to her young woman of twenty, had been more skilled at the task — drawing her horse — than she. He’d then tried to help her with her own. Her instructor had encouraged him. At that, her frustration had flared and she’d snapped at him, told him to quit and that her day was ruined and that it was his fault. Then she’d watched in embarrassment as his grey eyes had gone wide and sad, though there were no tears, not from him, and he’d gathered the pencils carefully and put them away.

“Stop it,” she’d ordered.

“But we’re to always put our things away,” he’d said. “I’m supposed to.” 

“Leave them,” she’d said. “Just get out and leave me alone.”

He had stood quietly, leaving everything else as it was, and left. At the door, he turned and asked softly, “What did I do? To make you angry?”

She hadn’t answered.

Not long after her brother had come, Nelyafinwë and Findekano with him, and asked her why her little cousin had been found alone in the branches of one of the highest of malinornë trees.

“He could have fallen and hurt himself badly,” her brother said.

“He’s fine,” Findekano said when she’d looked surprised and horrified. “He’s not hurt.”

“He said he’d done something wrong and you’d sent him away,” Nelyafinwë said. “If he did, you might have sent for us instead. We would have addressed it and he needn’t have been left alone.”

“Did he?” asked her brother, it was clear from his tone that he knew the boy hadn’t.

“No,” she said, “he didn’t. I didn’t want to watch him and I was angry that he was to be in my lessons. Then he drew better than I did and I ...”

“Sent him away.” The disappointment in her brother’s voice was only too clear.

“I suppose it wasn’t fair to expect you to care for him so often, Artanis,” Nelyafinwë said. “We won’t ask it of you again.”

“Where is he now?” she asked.

“Asleep,” his uncle said. “With Kanafinwë. As I said, he’s fine.”

“Tomorrow, when he wakes, you’ll apologize,” her brother said. “If you don’t, I’ll tell our father and grandfather about this.”

She had apologized, awkwardly, but she’d known she was in the wrong. He listened gravely, his small face serious and his eyes fixed upon her own.

He had nodded once she was done and said that he was fine. But, as she stood at the door, he said, his child’s voice quavering slightly, “I am sorry that I made you angry. I didn’t mean to. I knew you didn’t want me there and were angry. It was my fault because I had asked if I could stay with you today, instead of with my other cousins, because I like you the most. I knew it was my fault that you were mad, so I was trying to draw the best I could to make something to give you, to try to make it up to you and make you happy.”

She had not been asked to watch him again, but she had watched, from the distance her misbehavior required, as he grew older, the serious little boy becoming a serious young man. He sought her out sometimes, at the same gatherings, a gift of some kind in his hand. Never a drawing, but a rare stone he’d found, flowers sometimes, and, later, when he’d been allowed into the forges with his father and his grandfather, other beautiful things he’d made with his hands, a brooch shaped like a malinornë leaf, a delicately-made circlet of flowers, a spindle for her thread, a knife for hunting. Each gift had been offered hesitantly, as if in recompense. 

He had never stopped, she supposed. Later, after they had been reunited in Beleriand, he it was who had made the things her household needed, working quietly and feverishly to see it done. When she’d left and he’d heard she’d married, another gift, this one a necklace made of golden and silver leaves intertwined had been offered. Even after their last quarrel and last estrangement, even at the end, he had sent a gift to her, a ring of mithril with a white stone in the center, with a note in it telling her that he was sorry and that it was his fault and to use it to make the realm of which she’d dreamed. She hadn’t answered because this time, this one time, it had been his fault and he should be sorry. But, now, when she would speak to him, when she would thank him and tell him that he had not been the only one to make a mistake, to be fooled, she could not. There was no one to answer or to come bearing another gift. This time the boy she’d known was truly gone.