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Another excerpt from my WIP 'Gil-galad rebirth in Valinor/malicious compliance with son-of-plothole' fic from after Celebrían has arrived in Valinor and is struggling having left those she loves most behind in Middle Earth. Luckily her husband's dearest friend is there too, and that makes them ... something.
Also for Tolkien Disability Pride as Celebrían is in the throes of PTSD.
Third Age 2510 - Tirion - In the House of Finrod and Amarië
Celebrían once again screamed herself awake. She lay there for a moment, breathing rapidly, in an unfamiliar bed, in the unfamiliar room of an unfamiliar house surrounded by unfamiliar Elves. She regretted leaving her family in Middle Earth.
She heard rapid footsteps approaching, and one of the few familiar faces appeared in the open doorway. He slid to a halt, unbound hair swinging. He hesitated at the door.
Celebrían sat up, and found her voice.
"You may come in, please."
He stepped inside.
"Should I shut the door?"
He was trying so hard to be gentle with her. She felt a rush of affection, a reminder of why her husband loved this Elf so dearly.
"Please do," she replied. "I am comfortable with you, please do not think that you could frighten me."
Gil-galad did as she asked, and crossed the room and sat on the edge of her bed, taking her hand.
"I would ask if you are alright, but I know you are not," he said softly. "So instead I will ask if there is anything I can do to help."
His kindness made her begin to cry. Again. She was so sick of crying. So sick of the tempest of emotions that roiled within her. She had fought the orcs every day of her captivity. Even disarmed, she had bitten and scratched, punched and kicked. She had not got a chance at their necks, but remembering tales of her uncle Finrod she had killed one by ripping open an artery with her teeth. She had guessed correctly that Orcish arteries were in the same places as Elvish ones, and she knew where those were from centuries of listening to Elrond gush about his beloved craft. She had fought the orcs every day. As soon as she was returned to her family however, the fight drained from her and this horrible despair began.
Gil-galad scooted closer.
"May I hold you?"
Celebrían nodded, and he pulled her into an embrace. She clung to his tunic and sobbed. She missed Elrond. Her children. Her parents. Imladris. Lothlórien.
She missed not having the memories of orcish hands on her body. Tearing into her flesh. Torturing her. Violating her. She missed not hearing their laughter in her ears, and having their scent in her nose. The taste of their blood in her mouth, as vindicating as it was…
His embrace reminded her of being held by her father. Gil-galad was a tall and broad Elf, and it made her feel small again, in a comforting way.
She still never felt truly safe, even here in Valinor. But she did feel considerably safer in his arms.
She would rather be in Elrond's arms. Or those of her parents. Her children. But she had made her choice.
Gil-galad was not a bad alternative.
She had never been as close to him as Elrond was, but the bond between her husband and the King was deep indeed, forged through millennia of trials. She knew Elrond would trust Gil-galad with his life, and with the lives of all he held dear.
That was good enough for her.
"Would you stay with me? I keep dreaming of the orcs, and waking alone makes it worse."
"If that would help you, of course I will."
Celebrían nodded and pulled him down onto the bed. She was too tired to remain upright any longer but did not want to leave his embrace.
He made a somewhat surprised noise, but repositioned himself with ease and pulled the blankets over them both.
Celebrían had feared this might be awkward, but it was not. She felt safe, she felt comfortable, and lightly brushing against his fëa, he felt comfortable as well.
It was very different from being held by her husband. Gil-galad was significantly larger than Elrond, and being held by him was comforting in a different way. Curled protectively around her, he dwarfed her in a way Elrond did not. His arms were holding her loosely, but she could feel the great strength within them. He was softer too, and warmer. Peredhel that he was, Elrond's skin was always cool to her touch, unless he was sick. Their children were warmer, but still less so than full Elves.
She missed them all so much.
But.
She felt soothed. His breath and heartbeat were a steadfast rhythm. She could let down her guard, she was safe.
Celebrían let her eyes unfocus, and her mind drift. She missed her family, and she missed her home, but this could be enough.
She desperately wanted to heal.
She was feeling safe enough to sleep, and felt herself beginning to drift off.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Celebrían woke in an unfamiliar bed, in an unfamiliar room of an unfamiliar house, surrounded very protectively by a familiar Elf. As unfamiliar as it was to wake up in the arms of anyone but her husband, this was nice.
"Good morning," he said softly. "Did you sleep well?"
She rolled to face him, and he pulled his arms back a little, adjusting to accommodate her. She missed the closeness immediately.
"I did, thanks to you. I do not think I have slept this well since arriving in Valinor."
"Then I am glad I can be here for you, when Elrond cannot. I am honoured that you feel safe with me."
"I know you are honourable," she said softly, and quirked a little smile, "and thoroughly uninterested."
Gil-galad smiled as well "Indeed. To the detriment of my bloodline. Almost to the detriment of Elrond if he had not so skilfully dodged the crown after my death."
"He never would have accepted it."
"I know. It is the one failure of mine I feel no remorse for. To both wilfully break my bloodline and then choose an heir of my cousin who I knew would never continue the line of kings."
Celebrían giggled a little, and it struck her how long it had been since she laughed. She suddenly felt glad to be alive.
What an odd reason for that.
Gil-galad was smiling at her, and brushed a silver curl behind her ear.
"Whatever I can do to help you," he said softly, "I will. You have been strong for so long, it must be exhausting."
Celebrían wasn't quite sure what to say to that. He was right though. She was so, so tired of having to be this strong. Fighting every day.
"I have found healing here in Valinor under the care of kind Elves." He continued, "I hope for the same for you in time."
"You said that you chose rebirth when you left Mandos. Tell me of it?"
He smiled, and she could see his gaze become distant in memory.
"It was exactly what I needed," he said fondly. "It was the first time I had ever truly been free. Free of the crown, and free of the expectations and danger that came with it long before it was ever placed on my head."
Celebrían knew a little of that herself, born to her parents and growing up in Lothlórien. She could not imagine the intensity of scrutiny Gil-galad had faced, scion of kings that he was.
Gil-galad rolled onto his back, and let an arm stretch out, like he was basking in the sun of a remembered meadow.
"I played in the forest, in the stream. I watched insects crawl and birds hop. I sang and I danced. I had safety and no concerns or responsibilities.
Celebrían found his other hand under the sheets and squeezed it. He turned his head and smiled at her.
"It was what I needed. I did not remember much at first. I just felt - compelled, to savour life. To savour the freedom. To savour every carefree moment. And I did. Even if I couldn't remember it, I felt the stress from my life in Middle Earth unspooling around me. It was exhilarating. I have never been so happy."
"I am so glad you had that. And Amathorn found you? He came to Imladris after you died, and stayed until our children were grown. We knew he had been feeling drawn to Valinor, to you, for quite a long time before he actually left."
"Yes. It was a gift, to have him beside me in childhood again. I have never found the right word for precisely who he is to me, but it was good to grow up in his love once more."
"We do not always have words for our relationships, but all our words for love stem from the same root."
Gil-galad grinned at her. "We will have to go through Finrod's library today and see what he has that you have not yet read on your beloved topic of philology. It is quite exciting to have millennia of writings preserved here in Aman that are new to those of us coming from Middle Earth."
Celebrían could tell why he got on so well with Elrond.
Third Age 3020 - News has come that Elrond and Galadriel are planning to sail.
"Well, I'm sure you're looking forward to trading me out for your actual husband soon," Gil-galad told her over breakfast.
Celebrían blinked at him.
"Who said anything about trading you out?"
Gil-galad raised an eyebrow.
"I mean, as long as you are comfortable with it, I see no reason to change our arrangement." She continued, "I know you've slept in close proximity with Elrond before. He told me about how you used to fret about his Peredhel constitution on cold nights in military campaigns and you would push your bedrolls together and wrap around him to keep him warm."
The tips of Gil-galad's ears started to blush, and Celebrían had to hide her smile. "Cute" was not often a word that could be ascribed to a High King of the Noldor.
"We did, and it was... keeping him warm was a nice lull in the harsh reality of war. It also mutually assured we would rest, holding us both accountable for not pushing ourselves too far."
"Well, assuming your comfort with him has not changed, I do not see why the three of us cannot share a bed. Whenever you want."
"Won't you- surely you will want some time alone together?"
"When I knew you in Arda, well, I did not really know you all that well. It was Elrond who you were fëa bonded melotorni with. Now that you and I have been close for some five hundred years, I believe you will fit into our lives just fine."
"That is not what I mean. I mean that you haven't seen your husband in five hundred years. Surely you will want to be... amorous."
"Oh! Well, we are adults and can be aware of when and where we are affectionate past what you would want to witness. But the time of children is well past us. Truthfully Elrond's desire faded before mine did, he would have been content to stop after we had the twins. He was always enthusiastic to use his vast knowledge of anatomy to use pleasure me when I initiated, but his own drive had decreased and his mind had already turned to other things. I learned I had to jump him between academic hyperfixations. Otherwise his attention was quite split, still mulling over his latest problem and then he would feel bad for not being fully attentive." Celebrían caught the look in his eyes. "And you are quite uncomfortable with this level of detail, my apologies."
"It's fine," Gil-galad's voice had jumped an octave from his usual baritone.
"The point is," she continued, "I'm not trading you for Elrond. My relationship with you is different from my relationship with him, but my guess is that we will both be wanting to smother him in affection and care after, if even a fraction of the rumours are true, further trauma and wear on his fëa. I do not see any reason for this not to be a group project."
Gil-galad blinked slowly, and seemed to be processing the thought.
"I would like to remain a significant part of both your lives. I do not want our relationship to change because Elrond has returned, and I am glad to well, not be cast aside, I suppose, now that you have a better option."
"My dear Ereinion, if I did not know that there was a deep childhood fear of abandonment that you harbour, I would be offended," she teased. I am no more likely to cast you aside than Amathorn is, and we know that Elf will literally follow you off the ends of the Earth, now dragging his cosmopolitan husband out into the wilds with him."
Gil-galad nodded, smiling a little shyly, and raised his cup. Celebrían waited until she was sure he had the maximum amount of hot tea in his mouth.
"And besides," she said sweetly, "I cannot wait to tell my mother that you've been sleeping with me."
Watching a High King of the Noldor sputter and choke on tea did not get old.
The fic will eventually be part of this series if you'd like to subscribe to it now so you get an email when I finally start posting it!
This is for Day Three; it can be both for Gray Spaces and Fealty.
Inzilmith would never have ended up on Elendil's ship except for her entanglement with a relative of Elendil's executed by Sauron. But in the new Kingdom of Arnor, some rules are entirely rewritten.
‘You cannot be serious,’ said Inzilmith. She had never got used to finding herself on the fringes of the court of Arnor, such as it was. She supposed Elendil’s family regarded her as charity case inherited from their deceased relative, which evoked mixed feelings…
‘My lord, you seem to have forgotten that I am a seamstress from the gutters of Armenelos! You cannot ask me to make your coronation robes.’
‘The gutters of Armenelos no longer exist, no more than Romenna’ said Elendil. ‘You forget I have seen your work. You deserved better then. I would choose nobody else, now.’
Originally written for an Insta-drabbling session on the SWG Discord; previously only posted under lock.
for the record im not technially 100% anti-AI, in the sense that its a broad category of tech being lumped under one umbrella term so it feels over-zealous to say i hate all of it all the time forever. but i also think trying to discuss what it actually IS good for is difficult right now when i cant take one step without something trying to convince me to use chatgpt to summarize my life and speed up my hobbies and turn my friends into chatbots and optimize my life into oblivion. i am certain there is nuance to the topic but can we stop cramming the square peg into the round hole before you start trying to sell me on the legitimate benefits of the square peg. please.
Neural Nets have existed for decades and are genuinely useful. It's a form of AI that recognizes patterns, and can do stuff like identify cancer cells, tell whether an egg is fertilized or not, detect fraud, and optimize routes.
Those are Expert Systems, tuned to do exactly one thing. If you (say) ask a medical expert system a question about financial law, it's useless. The autopilot that flies a 787 has no idea how to drive a truck on the freeway. A Coulter Counter is excellent at identifying lymphocytes in a blood sample but can't predict the next card in a blackjack game.
And so on.
The problem with so-called generalized AI (AGI) is that we don't have that yet. It doesn't exist. It MIGHT some day, but AGI has been "10 years away" since the 1980s. The goals keep moving as we learn more about how people and machines process data.
But the current crop of AI techbros have been selling generative Large Language Model AI (LLM) as AGI because generative systems do a good job of faking it. There's no actual thought going on, merely the illusion of thought via predicting the next word in a sentence accurately.
If you let a human toddler listen to 800 hours of YouTube car influencer videos, that toddler might end up sounding like a car influencer. They'd parrot horsepower numbers and 0 to 60 times, mention EV range and MSRP numbers.
But they wouldn't understand any of it.
That's ChatGPT.
And yeah, it's worse than useless because it doesn't even know when it's lying or hallucinating. It just babbles convincingly until you stop it.
But for techbros to make money selling that as "AI"? It's the perfect scam, especially if you don't understand how it works.
Rewatching the prequels this week was NOT supposed to make me emotional about the jedi order but it was just the way obi-wan walked into the youngling's class and they all paused and said hello and yoda used it as a teaching moment and took the kid's answer seriously and gently poked fun at obi and the fact that jedi masters go by their last names with politicians and dignitaries but all the other jedi including the padawans and the younglings call them by their first names and how when the temple was attacked the younglings ran to the council chambers to find the wisest most powerful members of the order to help them fully believing they would find protection and instructions-
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Text of tweet under the cut because it is loooong.
But... Stochastic Parrots.
Timnit Gebru was fired from Google in December 2020 for refusing to retract a research paper, and every single warning that paper made about large language models has now happened at a scale the industry spent 4 years trying to make people forget about.
Her name is Timnit Gebru.
She co-led the Ethical AI team at Google. She co-wrote a paper called "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots" with Emily Bender at the University of Washington and two other researchers. The paper was 14 pages long. It was submitted to a top AI ethics conference. And it was the reason Google decided that one of the most senior Black women in AI research could no longer work there.
The story Google told publicly was that she resigned. The story she told, confirmed by 2,695 of her colleagues in an open letter, was that she was fired by email while on vacation because she refused to either retract the paper or remove her name from it.
The paper had not even been published yet.
Here is what she actually wrote, and why every prediction inside it has now come true.
The first warning was about scale itself. Bender and Gebru argued that training ever-larger models on ever-larger scrapes of the internet would produce systems that appeared fluent but had no actual understanding of language. They called these systems stochastic parrots because they would repeat patterns from training data with statistical confidence and zero comprehension. The paper predicted that this apparent intelligence would fool both users and developers into trusting outputs that were structurally incapable of being reliable.
This was 2020. GPT-3 had just come out. The paper predicted the hallucination problem before anyone had a word for it.
The second warning was about bias amplification. The paper documented in detail that internet-scale training data contains systematic overrepresentation of dominant viewpoints and underrepresentation of marginalized ones. The models would not just absorb this bias. They would amplify it, because the optimization process rewards confident outputs, and confidence in language patterns tracks frequency in the training set.
The prediction was that hiring tools built on these models would discriminate against women. That healthcare triage tools would underperform on Black patients. That loan approval systems would entrench inequality while presenting their decisions as neutral algorithmic judgment.
Every one of those things has now been documented in deployment.
Amazon's hiring algorithm penalized resumes that contained the word "women" in any context. Healthcare risk scoring algorithms used by major US hospitals were found to systematically underestimate the medical needs of Black patients. Apple Card's credit algorithm gave wives credit lines 10x lower than their husbands for the same financial profile.
The third warning was about environmental cost. The paper calculated that training a single large language model produced emissions equivalent to the lifetime output of 5 cars. The prediction was that the race to scale would create an environmental footprint that would eventually rival entire industries.
In 2024, Google's emissions were up 48% from 2019, and the company explicitly blamed AI infrastructure. Microsoft's were up 29%, same reason. Both companies have now quietly abandoned the climate commitments they were publicly celebrating the year Gebru was fired.
The fourth warning was about documentation. The paper argued that the training datasets being assembled were too large for anyone to actually audit. Nobody at Google, OpenAI, Meta, or any other lab could tell you with confidence what was in the data their models were trained on. This was not a temporary problem to be solved later. It was a permanent feature of the approach.
In 2023, researchers discovered that the LAION-5B dataset, used to train Stable Diffusion and other major image models, contained thousands of images of child sexual abuse material. The companies that had trained on the dataset had no way of knowing. The paper predicted that category of failure 3 years before it was found.
The fifth warning was the one Google cared about most.
Bender and Gebru argued that the deployment of these systems would centralize linguistic and cultural power in the hands of the small number of companies that could afford to train them. The internet would become a place where the dominant voice was a statistical average of dominant voices, presented as a neutral assistant. Languages underrepresented in the training data would degrade over time as more web content was generated by these systems and fed back into the next training run.
This is now happening in real time. A 2024 study found that 57% of new web content in English is AI-generated or AI-assisted. Researchers studying low-resource languages have documented active degradation in translation quality, because the synthetic content fed back into training is itself worse in those languages.
The paper Google fired her for predicted the model collapse problem before model collapse had a name.
The mechanism behind why this all happened is the part of her work that nobody quotes.
Gebru's argument was not that AI is dangerous in some abstract sci-fi sense. Her argument was that AI is dangerous in a very specific structural sense. The technology was being built by a small group of researchers who shared similar backgrounds, worked at similar companies, and were rewarded for shipping products faster than competitors. The incentive structure made it impossible for safety, ethics, and bias concerns to slow anything down. Anyone inside the system who raised those concerns was either ignored, sidelined, or removed.
She was making that argument from inside Google.
Then Google proved her right by removing her.
The team Google had built to make sure their AI was safe was dismantled in 90 days because they did the job they had been hired to do. Margaret Mitchell, the other co-lead of the Ethical AI team, was fired two months after Gebru for searching through her own emails for evidence of how Gebru had been treated.
Gebru did not stop. She founded DAIR, the Distributed AI Research Institute, in 2021. The mission is to do AI research outside the control of the companies that have a financial interest in not hearing the answers.
Every prediction in the Stochastic Parrots paper has now been validated by deployment. Hallucinations are an industry-wide problem the largest labs cannot solve. Bias amplification has been documented in hiring, healthcare, lending, and criminal justice. Environmental costs are larger than entire small countries. Training data audits remain impossible. Model collapse is an active research crisis at every major lab.
The question worth sitting with is the one almost no one in the industry will say out loud.
Every researcher with the technical credibility to call out these problems watched what happened to her in December 2020 and made a calculation about their own career. The number of people willing to speak publicly about safety and ethics issues inside the major AI labs collapsed after that firing and has not recovered.
The researcher Google fired for warning about exactly what is now happening was right.
The company that fired her is now the second-largest deployer of the technology she warned about.
And the people inside that company who agree with her are not allowed to say so.
A snippet from my fic of Gil-galad rebirth in Valinor/malicious compliance with son-of-plothole that is still a WIP, but this flashback in the War of the Last Alliance stands alone nicely. Amathorn is my OC chief of Gil-galad's guard, and their relationship is some blurry line between that of family and friends.
"You are not coming."
Amathorn scoffed and continued buckling his armour.
"I am quite serious."
"I am your guard."
"Not this time."
"Ereinion, if you think I am letting you go up against a Maia by yourself-"
"This fight is for Elendil and I alone. We have designated our survivors. For him, it is Isildur and Elendur. I have chosen you, and Elrond."
"Sauron is going to kill you."
"If that is so, then why would I bring you with me?"
Amathorn shot him a cold look.
"Death marked me the moment I accepted this crown. The fact that I have lived thirty five hundred years is a testament to the fact that you have done your duty well. I will not have you die needlessly for a sense of duty to me."
"I swore to protect you."
"I can order you away from me."
Amathorn muttered something under his breath that Gil-galad did not quite catch, but it made him smile. He stepped towards his eternally loyal guard, and took his hands. Kissed his forehead before angling his neck down to rest his own forehead against Amathorn's.
"Watch over Elrond for me, please. Especially if Elendil and I fail."
"Taking Elrond and I with you would lower your chance of failure," Amathorn grumbled.
"I want you both to live. If we succeed this will bring us a new era of peace. The Noldor will need Elrond to lead. And I want you to have a life that doesn't centre on protecting me. You deserve to live for yourself."
"Protecting you has never been a burden. It has brought me great joy watching you grow. And I could say the same for you, I wish for you to have a life that is not centred on leading the Noldor."
"You would have to take that up with my father, whoever he is. Perhaps I will know soon."
Tears leaked from the corners of Amathorn's eyes.
"I do not want you to die."
"I do not wish to die. Least of all do I wish for you to witness my death. But Sauron must be defeated. There is no other hope for Middle Earth." Gil-galad pulled away, and squeezed Amathorn's hands. "Let us not part in sorrow. I will see you again someday."
They stood for a moment, both unwilling to be the first to let go.
"Have you told Elrond this yet?" Amathorn asked, a hint of a smile in his eyes.
"I have not. I expect that conversation will go poorly compared to this one."
"I will watch over him for you."
"Thank you," Gil-galad murmured. "Please remember to live for yourself as well."
"Same to you. If you die," Amathorn's breath hitched. "When you are reembodied, I hope that you can live for yourself. I know you cannot say no to duty but-"
"I hope that in Valinor there will be no shortage of kings and I can retire somewhere for other pursuits."
What other pursuits he may find, he did not know. He had never had time to develop a craft of his own. He enjoyed many things, astronomy, music, reading, but never quite found time for them.
This was not the place for those thoughts. Whatever regrets he had in his life… they were personal. He was proud of what he had done leading the Noldor. If he were to die today, he could do so with confidence he had done all he could. He was leaving Elrond with a bit of a mess regarding succession, but it could not be helped. Elrond would figure it out.
He would see them again someday, and that was a comfort. He could not imagine the conversation that Elendil must be having with Isildur and Elendur. Leaving his child and grandchild to go beyond the world to Eru and the unknown was very different than Gil-galad leaving the Elves he loved behind. He loved them no less, but there was certainty in his future if he died today. Gil-galad hoped the Gift of Men was as much of a comfort to Elendil as the knowledge that this was not his end was to him.
He kissed the top of Amathorn's head again.
"Thank you," he said softly. "For everything. I will see you again in the West."
Amathorn opened his mouth to speak, but the sound he could make was not words. He just shook his head, eyes full of tears.
Gil-galad wiped his eyes gently.
"Do not cry for me. I go willingly to one last act for these lands, and then my rest. And hopefully answers. My fear will be brief, and my sorrow will pass knowing I will see you, Elrond, and Círdan again eventually. There are many I love who are there already, and I can hold this parting with their reunions."
Amathorn nodded, and found his voice.
"I know you will find your parents there, at long last-"
"They will never replace the love I have for you, and for Círdan."
Amathorn took his hands again and squeezed them. "Nevertheless I believe you have outgrown me calling you my little star for millennia now."
"Perhaps in stature, but it will always bring warmth to my heart. Live well until we see each other again."
With that, he tore himself away and left the tent. He had to, if he were to have time to speak with Elrond and Círdan before the battle and then settle himself for what was coming. He truly went willingly for all Middle Earth, but for those he loved personally it made the path towards death easier. He was doing this for them, and he would see them again.
If you would like more with these two, there is another fic here, and if you are interested in the rebirth/fun with who's his father concept, the series is here if you want to subscribe for when I really start posting it!
A snippet from my fic of Gil-galad rebirth in Valinor/malicious compliance with son-of-plothole that is still a WIP, but this flashback in the War of the Last Alliance stands alone nicely. Amathorn is my OC chief of Gil-galad's guard, and their relationship is some blurry line between that of family and friends.
"You are not coming."
Amathorn scoffed and continued buckling his armour.
"I am quite serious."
"I am your guard."
"Not this time."
"Ereinion, if you think I am letting you go up against a Maia by yourself-"
"This fight is for Elendil and I alone. We have designated our survivors. For him, it is Isildur and Elendur. I have chosen you, and Elrond."
"Sauron is going to kill you."
"If that is so, then why would I bring you with me?"
Amathorn shot him a cold look.
"Death marked me the moment I accepted this crown. The fact that I have lived thirty five hundred years is a testament to the fact that you have done your duty well. I will not have you die needlessly for a sense of duty to me."
"I swore to protect you."
"I can order you away from me."
Amathorn muttered something under his breath that Gil-galad did not quite catch, but it made him smile. He stepped towards his eternally loyal guard, and took his hands. Kissed his forehead before angling his neck down to rest his own forehead against Amathorn's.
"Watch over Elrond for me, please. Especially if Elendil and I fail."
"Taking Elrond and I with you would lower your chance of failure," Amathorn grumbled.
"I want you both to live. If we succeed this will bring us a new era of peace. The Noldor will need Elrond to lead. And I want you to have a life that doesn't centre on protecting me. You deserve to live for yourself."
"Protecting you has never been a burden. It has brought me great joy watching you grow. And I could say the same for you, I wish for you to have a life that is not centred on leading the Noldor."
"You would have to take that up with my father, whoever he is. Perhaps I will know soon."
Tears leaked from the corners of Amathorn's eyes.
"I do not want you to die."
"I do not wish to die. Least of all do I wish for you to witness my death. But Sauron must be defeated. There is no other hope for Middle Earth." Gil-galad pulled away, and squeezed Amathorn's hands. "Let us not part in sorrow. I will see you again someday."
They stood for a moment, both unwilling to be the first to let go.
"Have you told Elrond this yet?" Amathorn asked, a hint of a smile in his eyes.
"I have not. I expect that conversation will go poorly compared to this one."
"I will watch over him for you."
"Thank you," Gil-galad murmured. "Please remember to live for yourself as well."
"Same to you. If you die," Amathorn's breath hitched. "When you are reembodied, I hope that you can live for yourself. I know you cannot say no to duty but-"
"I hope that in Valinor there will be no shortage of kings and I can retire somewhere for other pursuits."
What other pursuits he may find, he did not know. He had never had time to develop a craft of his own. He enjoyed many things, astronomy, music, reading, but never quite found time for them.
This was not the place for those thoughts. Whatever regrets he had in his life… they were personal. He was proud of what he had done leading the Noldor. If he were to die today, he could do so with confidence he had done all he could. He was leaving Elrond with a bit of a mess regarding succession, but it could not be helped. Elrond would figure it out.
He would see them again someday, and that was a comfort. He could not imagine the conversation that Elendil must be having with Isildur and Elendur. Leaving his child and grandchild to go beyond the world to Eru and the unknown was very different than Gil-galad leaving the Elves he loved behind. He loved them no less, but there was certainty in his future if he died today. Gil-galad hoped the Gift of Men was as much of a comfort to Elendil as the knowledge that this was not his end was to him.
He kissed the top of Amathorn's head again.
"Thank you," he said softly. "For everything. I will see you again in the West."
Amathorn opened his mouth to speak, but the sound he could make was not words. He just shook his head, eyes full of tears.
Gil-galad wiped his eyes gently.
"Do not cry for me. I go willingly to one last act for these lands, and then my rest. And hopefully answers. My fear will be brief, and my sorrow will pass knowing I will see you, Elrond, and Círdan again eventually. There are many I love who are there already, and I can hold this parting with their reunions."
Amathorn nodded, and found his voice.
"I know you will find your parents there, at long last-"
"They will never replace the love I have for you, and for Círdan."
Amathorn took his hands again and squeezed them. "Nevertheless I believe you have outgrown me calling you my little star for millennia now."
"Perhaps in stature, but it will always bring warmth to my heart. Live well until we see each other again."
With that, he tore himself away and left the tent. He had to, if he were to have time to speak with Elrond and Círdan before the battle and then settle himself for what was coming. He truly went willingly for all Middle Earth, but for those he loved personally it made the path towards death easier. He was doing this for them, and he would see them again.
If you would like more with these two, there is another fic here, and if you are interested in the rebirth/fun with who's his father concept, the series is here if you want to subscribe for when I really start posting it!
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getting characters into world-endingly intense codependent queerplatonic relationships is literally what life is all about. it is literally what we were put here on this earth to do
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Okay, I really hope I’m not ruining your post further, and I don’t claim that this is a particularly original thought, but hear me out:
In ANH, Leia has a British accent when she’s still trying to bluff her way through Vader and Tarkin by pulling senatorial rank, and drops that accent when she becomes so agitated that the bluff falls apart, and she doesn’t pick it back up again.
I’d argue that this implies that Coruscant’s social elite tend to speak with a crisp British accent, and Leia adopts it when acting as a senator, because when in Rome and beat them at their own game and all that, but it’s not her normal accent.
And since Mara Jade is my fandom speciality, I can’t help but bring her into this by pointing out that she grew up within that Coruscanti elite - the Emperor’s own court, the most elite of elite, even - which would imply that her natural accent is British.
Now, she certainly had speech training that would allow her to speak naturally in any number of accents, because she often acted as an undercover agent where her own natural accent would be a dead giveaway, and she left Coruscant not long after the battle of Endor and then, in her own words, spent nearly five years “sloshing around the rotten underfringes of the galaxy”, surely places where she would want to conceal the upper crust accent that could potentially put a target on her back. Arguably she would continue to do so even after she joined Karrde; she would often be working with people and in places where such a social marker could be to her detriment. So probably by the time of HoT, Mara is so accustomed to speaking without it that her natural accent has effectively been replaced (presumably with the general American accent of the Big Three, which seems to be the accent equivalent of Basic within the GFFA).
But when Mara is really agitated, I’ve always imagined her slipping back into the crisp British accent she was presumably raised with, much the same way that, when she was really angry with her father, Hera Syndulla slipped back into a Ryloth/Twi’leki accent.
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Hi, my name is James Webbony Dark'ness Dementia Raven Space Telescope and I am a telescope in space (that's how I got my name) and I have a five-layer aluminum-coated Kapton sunshield protecting my instruments and gold-coated hexagonal primary mirror segments like limpid tears and a lot of people tell me I look like Lady Gaga (AN: if you don't know who she is, get the hell out of here!). I'm not related to the Hubble Space Telescope, but I wish I was because he's a major fucking hottie. I'm an infrared telescope but I am much larger than Spitzer. I have 18 primary mirror segments. I also study exoplanets, and I go to a telescope school in L2 where I'm in orbit (I was launched in 2021). I can see distant galaxies (in case you couldn't tell) and I wear mostly gold. I love space, and I take all my photos there. For example, today I was taking a photo of the Cartwheel Galaxy, which is about 500 million light years away. I was using my NIRcam, NIRspec, MIRI, and FGS-NIRISS. I was walking outside L2. It was around 1 million miles away from Earth and there was no sun, which I was very happy about. A lot of preps stared at me. I unfolded my primary mirrors at them.
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