Glorfindel and I often agreed that we could easily write entire sagas in ode to Elrond's endless patience with us. I was told that before my arrival, Glorfindel, who had a mind like a shattered sieve, regularly tested the limits of our friend's forbearance. Not intentionally, of course. He was just… forgetful. No need for alarm. Such foibles as those happen in Elves, too, precisely like with humans.

My bouncing into the picture also expanded this trait into the realm of the Maiar, apparently, which doubled the workload of the long-suffering Elrond, now having two people he constantly had to remind of things.

"Now, after Happy Hour today, please, please remember to take your rocks with you," Elrond exhaustedly beseeched us a few afternoons after the night we had shown them to him and Bilbo. "Otherwise they're going to go among all the other possessions you two have abandoned in my nice, tidy study over the yén."

"Oh?" Glorfindel said with interest. "Where's that?"

"Is my missing shoe in there?" I asked urgently.

Elrond declined to answer, rolling his eyes and softly shaking his head in exasperation. "Just take them with you, would you?"

"All right, all right," I relented, holding up my hands like the henpecked friend that I was. "We will definitely remember to take the rocks with us when we go today."

Elrond squinted as he fixed us with a look of intense doubt, slowly slouching in his chair.

"Oh, Elrond! Such little faith you have in us," Glorfindel chided him playfully.

"I can't imagine why," he groaned as he rubbed his eyes with the fingers of one hand.

"Hey, unrelated, but how's that Bilbo settling in, then?" I asked, hoping to quell Elrond's despondency before a migraine set in.

Elrond, glad for the change of topic, sat up and filled us in. Bilbo was apparently having a lovely time here and had already won the hearts of quite a few children and adults alike with his gift for storytelling. In all, a huge net positive for Imladris, it would seem.

From there, the topics of conversation went impressively tangential, and it was only when the dinner bell rang that we realised how distracted we'd all gotten. Standing up, we went inside, making for the door into the hall. As my hand went for the door handle, Glorfindel hot on my heels, a distinctly snippish voice came from behind us.

"Excuse me, you two, but wasn't there something I apparently had little faith in with the both of you?" Elrond said, hand on one hip as he pointed at the rocks sitting on his good, varnished table.

Giving him our most winning smiles, Glorfindel and I bounced back over and grabbed the rocks.

"Oh, Elrond," I crooned at him, "Where would we be without you?"

"Drowning in administrative errors," Elrond replied calmly.

"Everybody should have an Elrond in their life," Glorfindel said sweetly as he put his head on Elrond's shoulder and looked up at him with huge eyes.

"Well said, beloved," I declared, putting an arm around Elrond. "What a delight it is to have one for ourselves."

"Flattery will not absolve you from the transgression of making a mess of my office," Elrond said to us in a less-than-certain voice.

"Humour us and pretend it does for now," purred Glorfindel as he wrapped an arm around Elrond's other shoulder. With him sandwiched between us, we dramatically marched out and to the dining hall, Elrond only half-heartedly protesting as we did.

As delightfully placid as we had made Elrond through our simpering and fawning, Glorfindel and I knew that it was only a temporary reprieve from his vexed sighs and tutting. After dinner, as we changed in our room for the evening round of training, Glorfindel commented, "You know, I don't believe we got all of those rocks back from Elrond."

I wrinkled my brow as I plunged my hand into my pocket, bringing out the handful of stones and holding them in my palm for us to see.

"I think you might be right," I murmured as I counted them futilely. I had no idea how many we'd started out with, but I had the feeling it was more than what we had now.

"We must have forgotten to get them all," Glorfindel mused.

"Mmm, I suppose so," I replied. "I'd rather leave their retrieval for another day, though, to be honest. I think one more close encounter with our forgetfulness tonight might just send Elrond around the bend."

Glorfindel bit his lip a little and nodded. "Come on," he said after a minute. "We'd better go, otherwise Elrond will think we've forgotten about training, too."

Checking the clock, I saw we only had half a minute to get out to the training yards on the other side of the house. With a shared nod, we dashed out.

Luckily for us, it seemed that fate had slipped the shoe on the other foot, because Elrond was nowhere to be seen as we reached our destination. The area where we three enjoyed sparring was abandoned because it was a dustbowl, the only thing in there of any interest being a gnarled old tree that hadn't produced a new leaf in years. Oddly enough, since many Elves loathed getting dust in their hair and Elrond refused to have it re-turfed ("It's perfectly fine the way it is! Nothing wrong with a bit of dust!"), it meant we invariably had it all to ourselves.

"My god, wouldn't it just be the most delicious thing if Elrond had forgotten to come to training?" I whispered to Glorfindel, who tittered noisily into his hand.

"Perhaps we should just start without him," he replied with a shrug after looking around him.

I shrugged back, drawing my sword. "Since Elrond's not here, do you want to throw in some hand-to-hand combat?" We were strictly forbidden from combining hand-to-hand combat with any weapon except for blunt or soft objects. Three guesses which shrieking authority introduced that rule after catching us rolling around in the dirt with our sharpest knives near each other's throats, laughing like hyenas as we did.

Glorfindel grinned as he whipped his knives out. "I'm ready when you are."

"Oh, the delights of the forbidden fruit," I proclaimed with relish as I dove at Glorfindel, my sword gleaming in the bright moonlight.

We were happily wrangling each other into odd and frankly dangerous positions, pointy things worryingly close all the while, for quite some time. After we had both sustained a few shallow cuts, I called for a pause.

"Elrond still hasn't shown up," I said to Glorfindel in surprise. "We've been sparring for half an hour now."

"That's not like him," Glorfindel replied with concern. "We'd better go and find him." He made to start walking back up, and I ran over and grabbed his arm.

"Let me just get these cuts off your face first, otherwise he'll know we were blade wrestling again."

His eyes widened and he nodded. "Good thinking. I wouldn't have liked to explain that," he said, keeping his head still as I murmured incantations and brushed my thumb over his cuts, sealing the skin back up. One constipated expression later, my own wounds were closed, and with that, we jogged back up to the house.

We checked the dining hall to see if Elrond was eating dessert. Nope. To the music room, on the off chance he was playing some chart-toppers on the flute: not a trace of him there.

"Maybe he's in his study?" Glorfindel suggested.

"Worth checking." We shot up the stairs and knocked on the closed door. "Elrond!" I called out. "Elrond, are you in there?"

No response. This was decidedly odd.

"Let's try his quarters."

Up another flight of stairs, we stood at the door that led into the set of rooms belonging to Elrond and his family.

"Elrond!" Glorfindel banged on the door hard. "Elrond, what's going on?"

Finally, we heard a noise from inside, and Elrond opened the door, looking ever so slightly frazzled.

"My god, Elrond, what on earth-?" I said as I caught his eye.

"We've been looking for you all over the place!" Glorfindel exclaimed.

"Yes, I'm sorry for the delay, but for some reason, I cannot seem to find my twin knives," Elrond replied, glancing behind us as if to check it wasn't mounted on the wall.

"Your knives? You usually keep those in your study or in the shed with the other weapons, don't you?" Glorfindel asked.

"I do, or I sometimes bring them up to my quarters if I won't use them for a while," he answered with a nod.

"And they weren't in any of those places?"

"None of them. I was so sure I'd put them in the shed, but it's been a while since I used them last so I thought I ought to check up here."

"We'll help you look," I said firmly "Where should we start?" With a nod, Elrond ushered us inside and gave Glorfindel and me a room each to look through.

I was assigned the morning room, which had long ago been the playroom of the children. It was as neat as a pin, and I couldn't imagine the knives being anywhere in here. Still, though, I opened a few closets, checked the racks inside, and inspected the large, wooden trunk under the window. Hell, I even got down and peered under the furniture. Not a sausage.

Stepping back outside, I saw Glorfindel come out of the reading room empty-handed. Seconds later, Elrond emerged from his bedroom similarly lacking.

"I simply do not understand where they could be," he groaned as he rubbed his forehead.

"I can't even remember the last time you lost something," I said, shaking my head. "Must've been over a hundred years ago now."

"Perhaps our absent-mindedness is catching," Glorfindel said, half worried and half amused by the concept. Elrond didn't look pleased with that theory at all, now agitatedly tapping his foot.

"You're probably just a little overworked right now, Elrond," I reasoned, putting a hand on his shoulder. "Come on. Let's leave arms training for the night and go swimming instead, hmm? You love the water, and it's good conditioning for the muscles. You might find after a short relax that you'll remember where you left it."

Glorfindel, a keen fish himself, nodded enthusiastically. "A break might be just the thing, meldir!" he agreed.

Elrond shrugged, nodded, and allowed himself to be steered out.

"Can forgetfulness be contagious?" Glorfindel asked me that night as we lay in bed.

"Nah," I shook my head. "If it were, Elrond would have been as bad as us years ago."

"He must be under incredible stress to have lost his knives, then," he pondered.

"Well, he is making a bit of a mistake keeping his knives in multiple places like that the way he does," I said. "If ever there was a time to have it happen, a stressful period like this would be it, wouldn't it?"

"Mm, I suppose so," he conceded. "Poor Elrond. He isn't used to forgetting things, especially something as important as his knives. He must be annoyed with himself."

Suddenly, an idea seemed to occur to Glorfindel. "Maybe we should teach him how to cope with being forgetful. It really can be quite enjoyable when you look at it the right way."

I laughed. "That's a fantastic idea, but I think he'd need to forget more than one thing to be in need of the sort of coping strategies that would help him manage something like this." I turned onto my side to face him. "Tell me what sort of coping strategies you'd show him."

"It would be mostly around looking at the positives, really," Glorfindel answered, tapping his chin.

"Yeah? Like what?"

Glorfindel beamed at me and proclaimed loudly, "I forgot!"

I snorted. "You've been itching for a chance to use that, haven't you?"

He nodded joyfully, and I burst out laughing in spite of myself. He wasn't usually able to tell a joke to completion because he'd start snickering unstoppably halfway through, so I was amazed he actually got through this one.

§

The morning saw a return to the blissfully normal. Wake up, eat. Zoom through a ream of paperwork, fiddle about with an idea or two for the next research project. Eat more. Eat a little more after that and then sit still for a half hour to prevent explosion. Train when mobility has been regained. Eat more. Train again. Bed.

And then the next day rolled along, looking deceptively normal on the outside. Breakfast, paperwork, lunch. Just your bog-standard sort of day. And then Glorfindel and I, wanting to do things a little differently, elected to arrive to post-lunch training five whole minutes early. That'd show Elrond and his la-di-da eidetic memory how forgetful we were for sure. Slipping out of the dining hall as soon as we'd eaten ("Sorry, Elrond, no time to talk! We'll see you soon!"), we hared off to our room to change into training clothes and then made for the training yards at similar speed.

Just as we arrived in the sparring area where we tended to train, we heard a voice from behind us.

"So this is why you were off in such a hurry before," Elrond said as he appeared from the weapons shed.

Glorfindel and I gaped at Elrond as he smiled at us smugly.

"Wait, but- how in god's name did you-?" I spluttered at him.

"We left you in the dining hall!" Glorfindel squeaked.

"Oh, the saved time of an organised mind," Elrond exulted, sighing happily. "Now, let's get to- goodness, my knives!" he exclaimed, pointing at something in the sparring area.

Glorfindel and I turned around, and sure enough, there they were, propped up against the tree.

"Huh," I said curiously as we all walked over to where the knives were.

"Those knives weren't there the night we swam," Glorfindel murmured.

"Nor were they here yesterday," said Elrond. "This is odd. I'm quite sure I didn't drop them somewhere inadvertently. And I certainly didn't put them here myself."

"Wasn't one of us, either," I said, gesturing at myself and Glorfindel. "I wonder how they got here."
"As do I," Elrond said, unsheathing the knives to check them. "They are still in perfect condition. I'm still quite certain I had stored them in the shed."

The lack of an explanation persisting, we shrugged at each other and stepped into the gritty yard to wage war on each other.

Glorfindel and I had been under instructions to have an early night tonight (a part of Elrond's new stress reduction programme- two nights off training a week). What Elrond had failed to take into account was our inherently lower need for sleep because we were much less inclined to worry than he was. Another bonus of being chronically forgetful meant being less likely to recall stressful events.

Predictably, at 7:00pm, we were still teeming with energy when we had been shooed off to our quarters, and falling asleep was only achieved after supplementary strenuous activity. Now, I'm not inclined to complain about being given the night off training for my spouse and I to have our wicked way with each other, but I will say this: earlier to bed means earlier to rise.

With this in mind, we suddenly found ourselves awake at about 2:30 in the morning and, as usual, were keen for refreshments. Wrapping ourselves up in our dressing gowns, we marched outside and down the stairs to the kitchens.

When we turned onto the main walkway, the kitchen a stone's throw away now, we clapped eyes on something I hope never to see again in my life. A familiar bright, scantily clad presence was shambling along some metres down the hallway, raven black hair swishing from side to side with each clumsy step.

"Fuck a duck," I whispered to an absolutely horrified Glorfindel. "Erestor's sleepwalking."

Just as I said that, Erestor turned to the right, making his way into the kitchen.

Sleepwalking is a bit of a misnomer in my books. It suggests that walking about is all that people do, which is most certainly not the case. They can do anything from household activities to shopping, to committing serious crime- all unknowingly, of course. Some even get in their cars and drive. I hadn't had many sleepwalking cases in my time as a psychologist because they were usually sent off to sleep clinics for treatment there. As a sibling, however, I'd had more than my fair share of exposure, my younger brother Oliver having had a very severe case of it himself that started in his teens. Before my parents had installed locks on his door, he often woke me, a light sleeper, with his crashing around, doing wild things like putting books in the dustbin, chopping up pieces of cheese and abandoning them around the house, and at one point he even evicted my other brother, Rhys, from his bed to take over there. Anecdotally hilarious, but concerning when actually witnessing someone clumsily wielding a huge chef's knife to slice up a block of cheese.

Fearing for Erestor's extremities, "Oh god," was all I got out before I bolted after him, Glorfindel close behind.

We skidded to a halt at the entry to the kitchen, where to my relief, Erestor was simply standing blankly. I held out an arm as Glorfindel made to run in and grab him.

"We need to be gentle," I whispered to him. "It might wake him; people can get violent if they're woken up while sleepwalking,"

Bringing a hand up to my mouth, I gently called out to him. "Erestor! Erestor, can you turn around, please?"

Erestor turned around, watching us expressionlessly. The view of him at the front was as unwelcome as in the back; he was only wearing enough to keep him out of a pornography magazine.

Steeling ourselves, Glorfindel and I went over and carefully steered him out of the kitchen.

"Where are we going?" Erestor mumbled to us. "Got lots of work to do, you know."

"You finished work for the day, you're going to bed now," Glorfindel said firmly.

"Oh. Well, all right," he conceded placidly. Erestor was a lovely fellow when awake, and fretted about as much as Elrond did about his job. I had a funny feeling Erestor had been working a little too hard at the expense of sleep.

When we had taken him to his room and put him in bed, we waited a few minutes until he was fast asleep and then closed the door behind us as we left.

"Well, haven't we got a hideously awkward conversation ahead of us tomorrow," I murmured apprehensively to Glorfindel.

Glorfindel did nothing except shake his head, eyes wide, and we both admitted to ourselves that we had seen far too much for tonight. Our appetites sufficiently quelled by that episode, we skipped the kitchens and went back to our room to try and sleep. Outside the door to our quarters, I felt something uncomfortable under my foot.

"Ow!" I yelped, bringing my leg up.

"What is it?" Glorfindel asked quickly.

"Agh, I stood on something," I said, bending down in the dark and swiped up a few small things.

We took them inside, where an oil lamp was burning, and gasped.

"The rest of our rocks!" Glorfindel exclaimed.

"I don't believe it," I said, glancing up at him. "How did this happen?"

My question was met with a shrug, which I returned. Then, just like in the movies, we slowly looked up at each other.

"You don't think…" I began.

"Like with Elrond's knives…" Glorfindel murmured back.

"Just taking things and putting them elsewhere after a while…"

"So odd, though…"

"God, hasn't everything about this night been strange?" I muttered.

Glorfindel nodded. "For all the soiling my eyes endured seeing Erestor in a state of undress, I must say that he doesn't have such a bad idea when it comes to sleepwear."

I raised an eyebrow as I looked him up and down. "I guarantee you won't have any complaints from me if you decide to do it."

"Please know you have my enthusiastic support if you decide to do the same," he replied with a soft smile.

"I don't think I'll be starting tonight, personally," I said, shuddering a little.

"Nor me," Glorfindel said.

We slept in both our dressing gowns and pyjamas that night, and even pulled on a pair of socks for good measure.