Unable to shut up

more arwen ghost fic because I am literally in the middle of writing a portion of it (no im not procrastinating why would you say that)

“You will die and the buzzards will sing with a song that sounds of you, they will sing like you with your flesh in their beaks and they will dance on the grave your father buries you in and they will dance with your limbs. So it is that your choice will matter little in the workings of this world, for still the city will hear you in the trees.” So said the Elder in the tent, hunched and laughing.  I thought little of this, for I knew the Song was heard only by the few; Dancing Tulkas and weeping Nienna. Manwe and Ulmo in the veins of the sea and the gales of wind. The old woman would not know my death, my future or my time to come. It was silly, and it was yet violent in my mind.  When I returned from out the curtain, the fabric shaded the woman’s form in a shroud of sun-darkened purple. My son and daughters held on to me. “What did she say, mother? what fortunes did she speak?” they said in the language of their futures.  I heard the old crone's laughter now from afar, deep and haughty like when your stomach has gone sour. It was no laughter of joy, but of pity, of which I could hear now that I was a distance from the origin. She laughed because she had to, I assumed, for to spend her days weeping over death, which comes always, would break the thickest stem in the grove.  “I will have a splendid day,” I said at last to my children. “With my little lovelies in this summer air.” 

It's been a good while (half a year in fact. oop) since I did one of these so there are quite a few lovely people who tagged me in the meantime: @sallysavestheday @thescrapwitch @angamaite-der-ritter @melestasflight @amorbidcorvid @starshadeemilyart @endless-natterings @antlered-vixen @mircallaruthven @balrogballs @seaemberthesecond @gaydhros @ecofutural @motherfuckingnazgul @elevenelvenswords (there might be more that I'm failing to unearth from my notes, I'm sorry if I missed you)

I was trying to get something done for Russingon Week, but alas, life has been busy. I hope to get this done sometime in July though, so have some re-embodiment Russingon:

Fingon lives by the coast these days, south of Tirion and Alqualondë, down where Ossë is free to whip the sea into frenzies. Maedhros enjoys the journey, riding slow and savouring the silence. With every mile he settles more into his own skin, breathes easier without the weight of eyes on him, watching closely while he tries to drag his mind through centuries of molasses. It have been centuries, he has been told. It is easy to believe, with the way everything feels disjointed and grating. He arrives on late morning of the third day, and finds a larger estate than he expected. Stables span a wide area behind the white-bricked farm house that crowns the top of the cliff, and it continues inland into sprawling fields that are dotted with idle horses. Old trees line the cliff side, and it all looks so terribly like Fingon that Maedhros does not know how he could have expected anything else. He leaves his horse, and follows the path that curves around the main house, part curious to see as much as he can before Fingon might rightfully send him right back on his way, part deep-seated familiarity with Fingon’s habits making him certain that he will not find Fingon inside, on a day like this. He is proven right when he rounds a corner and finds training grounds in the opening courtyard, a simple sand pitch with some straw-filled figures, a weapon’s rack, and Fingon in the centre, spinning like silver in the sunlight. His chest and arms are bare, his hair braided in a simple style, similar to the one he used to wear in Beleriand’s unending battles. Maedhros recalls the familiarity of reassurance, seeing the golden thread flash in the light. Remembers what it looked like mud-caked and trod into the ground, and grips the wooden fence with his left, until his knuckles turn white. Fingon must have noted Maedhros’ approach but he stops not in his dance until he turns naturally. He is close by then, and he stops only when the point of his sword comes to a halt, mere inches from Maedhros’ throat. “Last time the Noldor found themselves in such a display, you and yours were banned into exile, and then set the world aflame. What shall it be this time, then, Russandol?”

Tagged by @lady-of-imladris, @neeeeeeeeeklaus, @crimsonlyinglilly, and @cringewritinginprocess

This is... the last sentence I wrote. It is +300 words because I haven't cut it into small bits yet. It's for Wind Around the Willow my Bonlena Sapphic Week fic where instead of being cursed to sleep, Kai kills Elena and Bonnie has a The Departed-style goodbye when it’s time to destroy Hell.

...

Bonnie has never known how to love a thing without wanting to carry it back to Elena alive—has never once seen something lovely and not thought, at once, Elena should have this, Elena should have this in her hands—and love has been like that since before she could name it, the oldest growing thing in her, her first joy and her one steady strength, the root she stood on when every other ground gave way beneath her and it is a terrible love, she knows that now, holding Elena's warm and living hands here in this green, it is a love that cannot leave a thing in the ground where it has fallen, a love that kneels at every ending and starts, helplessly, to dig and what she wants—God, what she wants, the wanting so old and so enormous it frightens her—is to press her own breath into the cold of every Elena she has lost and feel her warm again, to call up out of the dark the girl in the wet grass and the girl gone still in the earth and the girl beneath the quince tree forever sending her home, to wake them, all of them, to wish them living the way a child wishes, with both hands and no caution and no belief at all that the world will refuse her and she would, she would wish it again and again and again, would stand in this same garden through a thousand returns and wish over every cold and finished version of the girl she loves because she cannot make herself believe that out of a thousand tries, a thousand Bonnies and a thousand Elenas, a thousand desperate insistences pushing up through the soil of every ending, there is not one—surely there is one—one version of them steady enough, lucky enough, loved enough to hold and that is the wish she cannot put down, the wish she will go on making until her own roots fail: for the single impossible Elena who warms beneath her hands and wakes and knows her and stays—the one who makes it, finally, out of the cold, out of their ending, a life where they are allowed, at last, to live.

...

Thank for the tags @cringewritinginprocess, @lady-of-imladris, and @neeeeeeeeeklaus!

Another snippet from "Wind Around the Willow" (my Bonlena Sapphic Week fic where instead of being cursed to sleep, Kai kills Elena and Bonnie has a The Departed-style goodbye when it’s time to destroy Hell) because I'm trying really hard to finish it :(

...

They are so close now that Bonnie can feel the warmth coming off her skin, can feel Elena's breath move soft and even against her mouth, and she lets her eyes fall shut and breathes her in—the warmth of her, the green and living smell of her, rain and leaves and something underneath it that is only Elena, that has always been only Elena, that Bonnie would know anywhere. Their mouths are close. So close. Close enough that the whole wide breaking world has narrowed itself down to this—to the small bright trembling distance between Elena's lips and her own, the distance Bonnie has carried unkissed across her whole life, has guarded and ached over and refused, morning after morning, year after year, through every doorway girlhood ever opened beneath their feet.

She does not cross it now either.

She lets herself have this much—just this, just the nearness of her, just once. She memorizes it the way she once memorized everything Elena. Elena, here. Elena, warm. Elena, after all the cold years of wanting, after all the grief, after all the long dark distance Bonnie crossed on her knees just to reach this single fragile minute beneath their tree—and oh, she thinks, oh, she could stay here forever, she would give the rest of her life to stay here in the soft rain with Elena's breath against her mouth and never, ever have to learn what comes after.

"I was born in June and you were already here—there was a whole time you were here without me," Elena says. "Months and months of you, before I ever opened my eyes on the world. You were already here, Bon. You were already yourself. You were already so much, all on your own, before you ever knew my name."

"Don't," Bonnie says.

"You existed before me." Elena's thumb moves slow across her knuckles, gentle, gentling. "You can exist after me. You'll be all right, Bon. I promise. You will."

And she says it so softly, so kindly, the way you tell a child that it’s time to leave their first grave, and Bonnie wants to weep, because she is being shown the roots again, she is being shown the dying again—

She does not want to be all right.

She does not want to learn it. She does not want to be the Bonnie who comes after, the one who walks out of this garden alone, who knows how to live in a world with no Elena in it and rise anyway and dress anyway and go on living anyway, day after ordinary day, carrying the unbearable everywhere she goes and somehow, horribly, surviving it.

She does not want the long years. She does not want the slow crawl of them, does not want the grief that softens. She does not want to be let go of. She does not want a single morning that Elena is not in.

She does not want the children she might one day have who will never once have met her—who will never know the depth of the feelings that Bonnie once experienced, who will hear Elena and think only of a name, only a story, only some woman their mother loved a long time ago. She does not want to be the one who tells it. She does not want to be the keeper of Elena instead of the holder of her.

She does not want to meet the version of herself who survives this and loves again.

She does not want to be the Bonnie who moves on from this, from her. Who learns, slowly, the shape of some other happiness. Who lies someday in some other warmth and feels her heart, traitor that it is, lift toward something new—because that Bonnie will have done it, will have lived through this exact unbearable minute beneath this exact tree and come out the other side still breathing, still wanting, still able to be glad. That Bonnie will have let Elena become a bittersweet ending—

Bonnie would rather stay here forever, ruined and unhealed and faithful.

...