#wo2024

“And you are here, instead of battening down the hatches alongside them because?” Fëanor huffed, pulling across a towel, clicking his teeth in mild disapproval (not because he didn’t want Elrond there, but because Elrond clearly walked all the way from Tirion to the sea in this downpour, which is not something the average Normal Elf would do). He shoved Elrond down into an armchair and began towelling his hair vigorously.

“Ouch — Daerada!” came the muffled voice. “Leave it! I can — ouch! You’ve just pulled out a —“

“Get a grip, Elrond. I had seven sons and none of them went bald,” said Fëanor shortly, ignoring Elrond’s protests with the practiced air of, well, someone who had seven sons. “Now, tell me why you’re here.”

“Because your house is salty.”

Fëanor blinked, ceasing his ministrations with the towel in his confusion: “apologies, but what did you call my house?”

Elrond considered explaining that it wasn’t because the beach house on the shores of Aman Fëanor and Nerdanel had taken up in order to avoid said seven sons (well, the three youngest and quickest to re-embodiment), their progeny, and their irritating little problems, was salty. Not directly at least. It was only that the saltiness of it reminded him of Maglor’s cottage by the Havens in Middle Earth, where he still lived.

Everything in that house had been sharp, brined by the air itself. Salt crusted along windowpanes, dusted the floors like an uneasy frost, and clung to the cracks in the wooden beams. Anything left too long — shoes, tools, books, Elrond — was kissed by it, worn and bitten as if the sea had reached in to mark its territory. The air stung with it, tasting of sweat and tears, and the walls seemed to sweat as the house endured the Ages. Nothing in the house by the sea was soft; even silence had an edge there. And that was why Maglor had read him stories on the stillest nights even on visits when Elrond was six thousand years old — to take the edge off that silence, dull it enough to lull him to sleep.

He didn’t know how to explain that was what he craved: that he hadn’t slept in days, and he wanted to hear one of Maglor’s stories. Even though he was seven thousand now — young and spry enough to walk from Tirion, but too old to long for beaches and bedtime stories. No, not just any bedtime story but that one. The one with the best line which crept in towards the end, when he and Elros were closer to sleep than wakefulness. He didn’t know how to explain this to Fëanor, mainly because it wasn’t exactly the done thing to suddenly grow a grandfather after six thousand five hundred years, let alone ask him to tell you a story. Still, it would be better than Fëanor assuming that Elrond walked for a day and a half to lick his walls, like a very persistent goat.

“I only wished to know…” Elrond began, flushing as Fëanor finally put down the towel and shoved a piping hot mug of cider into his hands, almost growling at how cold the half-elf’s fingers were. “Whether you knew that story. About the animals. The children’s story. Maglor used to say you knew it, that — that it was you who first told it to him.”

Fëanor shook his head, somehow even more confused by the explanation than the situation. He sank down next to his get-one-free grandson, wondering whether insufferable eccentricity ran in Thingol’s line or whether it was a learned trait. He decided to humour him.

“What story?”

Elrond smiled across at him, and put on a deep, maleficent voice, like what a tiger might sound like had tigers possessed the power of speech:

“Ye choose, and ye do not choose!” he cried, causing Nerdanel to poke her head in from the next door, roll her eyes, and slink back. “What talk is this of choosing? By the bull that I killed, am I to stand nosing into your dog’s den for my fair dues? It is I, Shere Khan, who speaks!”

A sudden lump rose in Feänor’s throat. Oh, Elrond.

He didn’t say anything of it. Fëanor sat in silence, looking at the slow disappointment crawl across Elrond’s face, until it got too much for him to bear. Fëanor jumped up from the couch, spread his arms before the fire, casting a long, dark shadow across the room (Nerdanel, watching from the doorway, stifled a snort).

“And it is I, Raksha The Demon, who answers!” he all but roars, striding back and forth, all six-foot-three of him turned into a snarling she-wolf. He bared his teeth, snapped them. “The man’s cub is mine now — mine to me! He shall not be killed. He shall live to run with the Pack and to hunt with the Pack; and in the end, look you, hunter of little naked cubs — frog-eater — fish-killer — he shall hunt thee!”

Elrond’s eyes widened. Lips trembling all of a sudden, he buried his head in his hands as his grandfather, panting and laughing a little, sat back down beside him. Fëanor waited patiently as Elrond sat very still, waited and watched the fire roar ever higher until he finally sat up, wiping his face on his sleeve, clearing his throat.

“What sin have I committed, Eru, that not one person in my very large family has heard of a handkerchief,” sighed Fëanor, dispelling the tension by dropping one in Elrond’s lap. “Please blow your nose before I cut it off your face.”

“Sorry,” Elrond said thickly, laughing as well. It’s funny — he knows Fëanor has been called every adjective under the sun, accused of everything from arrogance to zealotry, but few touch on his biggest descriptor: a perpetual father of seven. “Sorry, I was only… impressed. That you remembered that by-heart.”

“Of course I know it,” Fëanor shook his head. “I know every damn bedtime story there is to know, and a thousand others that haven’t been written yet. It’s not impressive, it’s an occupational hazard of having seven sons.”

“Still, it’s impressive,” Elrond said, and then paused for a long moment. “Though I cannot believe you know all of this. Absolutely not.”

“No?” Fëanor frowned sharply at Elrond, before his face softened in understanding. “Is that what you think, then? What if I… demonstrate? Though no prowling around the room again, my bones are too old for such nonsense.”

“Do I look five?” Elrond looked mortified. “Did I ask you to prowl anywhere? But… yes. A demonstration, perhaps. I’d like that.”

“Just to make sure I know it, hm?”

“You can never be sure.”

Fëanor settled back on the long couch, watching Elrond sip his cider. And then he closed his eyes, and began reciting the story he had told seven thousand times to seven boys, one of whom clearly told the same story to his two boys: now Rann the kite brings home the night, that Mang the bat sets free!

Elrond listened to the story for the first time in, oh, how long has it been? Since he sailed, yes. Since Maglor. Fëanor’s voice surrounded him like warmth rising from a hearth. It wasn’t the story he heard really, but the cadence, that familiar lift and fall, wrapping around him in a way no fire could quite manage. The rain lingered on his skin, insistent, but his grandfather’s voice smoothed it away, filling the space with bears, wolves, tigers, alive, alive, alive. It was almost like it was with Maglor, in the cottage by the sea. How even between the words, the silence held its breath, no longer oppressive but tender, until Elrond himself melded into it, another animal crouching low to watch the jungle tell its story. He sat still, unmoving.

It was not a stillness that waited for a shattering, but one that lulled him to the half-asleep state he was in when Fëanor got to the part he and Elros used to wait eagerly for Maglor to get to. The part where Fëanor pressed his hand to his own chest, and then Elrond’s, and said very softly and intently: we be of one blood, ye and I.

And as Fëanor’s voice went on and on, Elrond fell asleep right there on the couch, safe in the knowledge that even if the story stopped, the echo of his Daerada’s voice would remain. Of course it would, woven as it was into the walls, into the cottage in the Havens, into the air, into Elrond himself, into the stories he told his own children, and into the stories they told theirs.

Fin.