A/N: Was this chapter necessary? Yes. Did I put as much pain in it as possible? Also yes.
Music for this chapter: Duck Shoot, Rupert Gregson-Williams
Chapter 6: Seven Days
Fair Arien rises, falls, and rises again.
Dawn breaks behind the shining towers of Valimar, bathing the plain before the city's western gates with long bars of shadow and gold, across the great pillars and gossamer curtains of the Ring of Doom.
The light reaches the solitary figure knelt before the marble gates of the Ring of Doom.
The figure raises dry, red-rimmed eyes to the horizon, and closes his eyes against the glare as though it pains him.
"Elrond."
He raises his head a little.
Fingon is crouching beside him with a clay cup in his hand. The other is resting carefully on Elrond's shoulder as though afraid he will fade.
Elrond looks at the gentle swell of water in the cup, glimmering in the dawn light. He shakes his head and swallows past a throat completely dry.
"No, thank you," he whispers.
"Elrond," Fingon says, and there is something of desperation in his fair face. "Elrond, you must drink. And eat. This is a noble cause you have chosen, but if you continue–"
"I am a healer," Elrond says, and closes his eyes again, because the sun turns the ache behind his eyes to a red-hot lance. "I know my limits, and I have fought in battles far longer than this."
Neither of them mention the obvious: that even in those battles there had been water, and supply-masters, and shifting rearguards–
Elrond feels Fingon's hand tighten on his shoulder.
But Fingon does not press the matter, and Elrond counts it as a small victory.
The sun climbs slowly overhead. For the moment the air is cool, but in a few hours it will be harsh and unforgiving on his dry lips and aching face, and Elrond knows it. The press of the grassy soil into his knees has long gone past discomfort into pain, and the hunger in his stomach grows sharp.
Elrond takes a long, slow breath.
He lowers his head, midnight hair slipping partly out its flyway braids to fall about his face, and waits.
(:~:)
During his time in Beleriand, Fingon has often had to deal with what his father termed "that thrice-damned Fëanorian stubbornness".
But this particular instance proves to be the most trying yet.
Fingon is used to Caranthir's fiery temper, and Celegorm and Curufin's cutting words. He can handle Amrod and Amras's double-edged arguments, Maedhros's terrifyingly subtle diplomatic speeches, and Maglor's scowl and quicksilver tongue.
But this is the first instance Fingon has had to deal with Fëanorian stubbornness in the form of kindness, quietude, and absolute, bullheaded refusal to move.
Elrond has knelt quiet and composed and immovable as stone for three days now before the gates to the Ring of Doom, and seems to intend to kneel until Arda ends or he perishes.
Whichever comes first.
Fingon would laugh if he could. If there were ever evidence Elrond was raised by Maglor and Maedhros Fëanorion, this would be it.
As the sun rises properly into another long morning, Fingon eats the breakfast Elrond will not eat and drinks the cup of water Elrond will not drink. He sets the trencher down by the fire and surveys the little camp.
There is only one bedroll by the small cook-fire, instead of the two there had been the previous two nights.
Barring any delays, Finrod should have reached Tirion by the previous evening, and hopefully he might be able to–
Fingon notes a few curious Vanyar striding off the road towards Elrond.
Fingon stands up, and stares pointedly.
One of the Vanyar notice Fingon standing there, still and silent and challenging, and the next moment the Vanyar group are all bowing and murmuring apologies as they retreat back around the Ring of Doom towards the gates of Valimar.
Elrond does not move, even as the glare of the sun grows blinding. The air grows stiflingly hot, even for Fingon, who feels sweat gather on his brow despite his light travelling clothing.
The sun climbs agonisingly slowly.
A muffled shout to Fingon's left.
Fingon twists in place, gold-ribboned braids swinging.
Two dozen paces north, where the great East-West road runs from Valimar towards the Gardens of Lórien to the west, a group of mounted Noldor have halted by the roadside.
Fingon narrows his eyes a little in the glare of the morning sun. It has been nigh on six thousand years, but the leader of the group seems familiar – why, yes, that is Aerlind, who once rode with Maglor's cavalry over Lothlann long ago.
One of the Noldor is pointing urgently at Elrond, his lips moving too quickly for Fingon to interpret, and then suddenly all the group are staring and gesticulating. Aerlind in particular is staring between Elrond and the closed gates to the Ring of Doom, her eyes wide with horror.
Fingon follows her line of sight and sees the sunlight shimmering directly on the Star of Fëanor embroidered in silver thread on the sleeves of Elrond's robes.
Oh.
Fingon pivots on a heel and throws himself northwards towards the road, hand outstretched and a belaying shout on his lips, but the group of Noldor – Fëanorian warriors all, Fingon realises too late – have already leapt back into the saddle and are thundering away eastward.
He watches them fade into the heat-haze, riding like the very fires of Morgoth are on their heels.
Fingon puts his head into his hands.
"Ai, Illúvatar," he says.
(:~:)
Elrond breathes shallowly as the sun reaches its zenith.
He has no shadow, with the sun so high above. What little blessed wind there is caresses the dry skin of his face and hands, whispers through his hair.
He feels the wind catch the last of his braid clips with a neat little tug, and it falls to thud uselessly by the fluttering silver star of his left sleeve. Free of its last binding save for the circlet about his brow, his hair cascades unbound over his shoulders, drifting in the wind like willow-boughs from his lowered head.
Faintly, the sound of an approaching rider.
Fingon calls a greeting, the words lost in the wind.
Elrond keeps his eyes closed against the midday glare, striving to keep his breathing even. His knees and calves have long moved past simple pain, and every small movement he makes sends spikes of agony lancing through them.
Footsteps, drawing steadily nearer.
There is a shift of rich fabric to his left, and a voice says quietly, "Elrond."
Elrond takes a breath so sharp it claws its way down his burning throat, and his eyes snap open of their own volition.
The last he had heard that voice, it had been raised in one last shout of triumph alongside Elendil's– even as the flames roared anew with the crumbling of Sauron's form, cutting off that shout in the moment of its victory.
Elrond had hewed his way across the battlefield towards that last bitter flame, screaming the name of his king, even as the orcs fell away and a great roar of victory rose from the ranks of Elves and Men.
He looks up now into the face of Erenion Gil-Galad, and remembers that same face broken and burnt beyond recognition at the feet of Sauron's smoldering form.
"Elrond," Gil-Galad says again, his silhouette blazing at the edges against the sun. He is smiling, and somehow seems lighter than he had been in the waning years of the Second Age – no war on his mind, no kingship on his shoulders.
"My king," Elrond whispers, out of habit. The word catches in his dry throat, tears rasping coughs from his chest.
Elrond blinks, and there is a hand at his heaving back and another steadying his arm where Elrond has pressed a sleeve to his lips.
Gil-Galad is no longer smiling.
Elrond can feel his former king's eyes run quick and assessing over his kneeling form; he knows Gil-Galad sees the paleness of his skin in the sun, the too-quick rasp of his breath, the echo of pain in his fëa. There are things Elrond cannot hide, not from one who knows him as well as this.
"Elrond," Gil-Galad says, with horror in his voice, "Stop this."
Elrond closes his eyes briefly. The sun is far, far too bright.
"I am afraid I must decline," he says. He inclines his head respectfully, and feels one precious, crystalline drop of sweat roll off the tip of his nose to splatter against the wilting petal of a lily by his knee.
"That was not a suggestion," Gil-Galad says, and there is steel in his voice now – the voice of the last High King of the Noldor east of the Sea.
"I know," Elrond exhales, fighting against the clawing pain of his empty stomach.
There is a sharp intake of breath above him. Perhaps Gil-Galad has never seen Elrond refuse a direct order before – but then again, Gil-Galad can no longer claim kingship over him.
The snap of shifting cloth; so abrupt and loud it sounds almost like a strike. Gil-Galad's hand leaves Elrond's back.
Elrond does not flinch. He opens his eyes, and sees Gil-Galad standing there, silhouetted sharply against the sun, face grave.
"Why are you doing this?" Gil-Galad says, and there is the echo of Sirion in his voice and mind – the echo of screams at the quayside, blood in the water. "Why are you doing this for them?"
"For my fathers," Elrond whispers.
Gil-Galad's brow creases like thunder. "For their House–"
"For mine," Elrond says.
Gil-Galad's gaze flashes terrifyingly furious for an instant. Then the anger in his eyes turns to grief.
"What can I do to make you stop?" he says, sounding as though he already knows the answer.
"Nothing," Elrond says, and he smiles, a painful stretching of his cracked lips. "Nothing at all. It is no fault of yours."
Gil-Galad barks something that might be a laugh, draws the heavy cloth of one sleeve across his face, and steps away.
Elrond blinks slowly up at the unforgiving sun, moisture blurring his vision for the merest instant, and then lowers his head again.
His tears do not fall.
The gates remain closed.
(:~:)
On the fifth day, it rains.
The deluge is momentary bliss on Elrond's scorched skin and parched lips; then with the rain comes the wind, a lashing gale that turns the rain to needles and the grass to knives.
Slowly, he tilts his head back towards the weeping sky, and feels the gale tear the circlet from his brow. Freed completely at last, his hair lashes at his cheeks in sable whips.
Elrond feels weightless in his numb exhaustion. Perhaps if he leans further into the wind, it will take him away–
For a moment Elrond believes he sees Manwë's face in the clouds, flickering with lightning far above; but then he blinks and the sky is once more simply a sky – a storm, terrible in its beauty and thunderous in song.
His hands curl numb and bloodless in the sodden grass. His soaked robes grow impossibly heavy, and each breath brings with it a lungful of water – like the time he fell off the docks of Sirion as a small child, Elros's scream ringing in his ears, and each breath had been half saltwater until strong arms plunged in beside him and hauled him into sunlight–
Angry shouting behind him, voices snatched and lost in the gusting gale.
Elrond can barely feel his limbs in the cold, but he twists slowly, and sees, as though through a shattered pane of glass, Fingon throw himself between Elrond and a dark-haired Elf.
Elrond notes with some alarm that both Fingon and the other Elf have swords at their belts, though these at least remain sheathed. The other Elf is plainly Noldor, and wears a familiar crest at the clasp of her cloak – Maglor's crest, for the plains of Lothlann. Behind her, a cluster of shapes nearly lost in the curtains of silver-white rain; horses and elves, what must be three dozen of them at least.
The newly-arrived Elf and Fingon are shouting at each other, words lost in the storm, the wind unraveling both their braids; the golden ribbons slip gracefully from Fingon's tresses to tumble abandoned in the mud by Elrond's slack fingers.
Elrond blinks slowly at the rough satin of the ribbons that flicker by his fingertips. Perhaps…perhaps he should try to rise, and to stop this.
He is cold. He is so, so cold.
His fingertips are blue, Elrond realises. What remains of the healer within him sounds a warning note in his mind.
His fingertips are blue, and that should mean something.
Fingon and his opponent have not yet come to blows, but their fëa flash blazing and bright through the icy sheets of rain, dueling with words where their fists remain clenched at their sides.
Lightning, then bone-shattering thunder.
Elrond blinks. In the distance, illuminated by the flash of blue-white light before the crash of thunder, he almost thought he saw– Maedhros?
The song of the shouting beside him changes as a new voice enters the fray; a short, hooded figure materializes out of the sheets of rain, grabs both Fingon and his opponent by the collar, and forces them apart.
Fingon takes one step forward, eyes blazing, but freezes as he looks under the cowl of this new apparition. His opponent similarly halts, and inclines her head in greeting.
The hooded figure straightens, brings deft hands to its collar, and tears off the cloak.
Red.
A cloud of crimson hair around an almost familiar gaze, shining with the light of the fallen Trees–
A warm, dry cloak wraps around Elrond, the hood coming up over his sodden hair, and his breath hitches as it turns into wet, hacking coughs that almost seem to shatter him from within.
Strong arms are holding him steady, murmuring words of comfort through the cloth.
Elrond gasps in a breath that is more water than air. He turns his face into the faint warmth, the crash of the rain about him muffled at last, and aches so much for his foster-fathers in that moment that the pain of his knees and his back and his calves are nothing, nothing at all compared to the keening of his fëa.
This stranger with red hair holds him tighter as the storm rages on; until the rain slowly lessens and Elrond's shuddering abates to the occasional shiver.
He raises his head, knees digging painfully into sodden ground, and comes face-to-face with Nerdanel, daughter of Mahtan.
Elrond's first thought is that Maglor has her eyes.
Grandmother, he mouths, because he has no breath left to speak.
Nerdanel's cloud of red hair is windblown and soaked through, but her eyes are brilliant and piercing, kind and warm, as the clouds break overhead to allow golden light to lance through to the plains around them.
"Elrond, pityo," she says, and the term of endearment makes Elrond blink. "You are doing something very foolish."
"I know," Elrond whispers, voice like scorched sand. "But I must."
Her face is wet with rain, but now new moisture draws its way down her cheeks. She lifts a hand to brush his sodden hair behind his ear, presses a warm, work-calloused palm to the knife of his cheekbone.
"Why must all my children and grandchildren be so brilliant and stubborn?" she says, smiling through her tears.
"As we must," Elrond says, blinking slowly through his exhaustion. "As I must."
She stifles a sob – one that holds with it the weight of seven thousand years of waiting – and holds him close as he looks back towards the gates.
When night falls at last, on this day, the fifth, Nerdanel refuses to go until Elrond has taken half a cup of water and swallowed a few bites of waybread. He acquiesces without complaint, more to get her out of the damp and the cold than anything.
Fingon looks as though he is about to weep as Nerdanel holds the cup to Elrond lips, her other hand supporting the curve of his neck, and Elrond's guilt at that is another weight on his exhausted shoulders.
It is worse when the platoon – full three dozen Elves ahorse with Maglor's crest on their cloaks – make it a point to ride past Elrond as they take their leave at dusk, saluting him smartly as they do.
At least none of them are wearing armour.
Elrond and Fingon watch them go, riding east towards the moonrise with the long flowing stride of Maglor's preferred breed of horse.
"They offer you their allegiance," Fingon says, with something like wonder in his voice, and Elrond blinks up at him, leans to the side, and heaves up the water and the bread he has just taken.
He shudders to full awareness with a rancid pool on the grass between his hands, cold sweat on his brow, and Fingon shouting in his ear.
It is not often that his half-elven physiology reveals itself like so. But this is not normal circumstance.
"I am well," Elrond murmurs, as Fingon pulls him upright.
"You are not," Fingon growls, shaking him. "For once in your life, Maitimo, will you–" He catches himself.
Elrond allows himself a faint smile.
Fingon lowers his face into his hands, walks the few steps away to the little camp with its drowned fire, and sits heavily.
Neither speak. The gates are dark and silent before them.
So Elrond's wait passes into the sixth day.
(:~:)
Dawn breaks on the seventh day, as Arien's luminance washes over the Ring of Doom and the clusters of watching observers on the road, Vanyar and Noldorin both. They had started coming on the morning of the sixth day, and grew in number, despite Fingon's best efforts.
The light shafts through the gossamer curtains of the Ring of Doom, alighting on the solitary figure before the gates.
Elrond falls.
One moment Elrond had been kneeling there, head bowed, face hidden by his curtain of midnight hair; the next he is curled loosely on the grass, unmoving in the dawn light, his hair a long slash of black ink across his bloodless face.
There are gasps from the road, and Fingon is a streak of dark hair and dusty travelling tunics as he darts to Elrond's side. A few observers start forward, but before any but Fingon reach Elrond, a shadow falls over the gates.
The greatest of the eagles of Manwë descends upon the plain, the sound of his wings like war-drums.
It would seem Manwë has mercy on Elrond Peredhel, after all.
The murmuring begins when Fingon is observed to gather his cousin into his arms, and grows in volume when Thorondor lowers his long, brown-feathered neck. The murmuring turns to cries of wonder when Thorondor suffers to carry both Fingon and his charge, taking to the air above Valimar in a great, earth-shattering thud of thunderous wings.
Thorondor wheels overhead, turning East, and the plain falls still once more.
A few paces before the gates of the Ring of Doom, there is a spot of grass that remains brittle and dry where the plains around it are green and gold with dew.
(:~:)
"Elrond. Elrond! Stay awake."
Elrond blinks his eyes open wearily.
Feathers beneath his fingers. Warm cloth against his cheek.
He looks down at his hands loose in white-flecked brown feathers, at Fingon's arm wound tight around his middle, the other buried in the feathers beside them. The sky is very blue on either side; far below, the east-west road towards Tirion is no more than a ribbon among the trees.
It takes a moment for Elrond to comprehend his surroundings.
When he does, the tears come of their own accord – only a few of them, the last, bitter dregs of his endurance, drawn from a well scorched so dry he can no longer speak.
He had thought the Valar, in their wisdom and their care for the Firstborn, would see his plea for what it was and answer him.
He had not thought he would be met with silence, to the point of his last, utter undoing.
Elrond weeps – weeps until what little tears he has left are gone, and he can only gasp empty, silent sobs into Fingon's shoulder as Thorondor's head dips below them into descent.
The white towers of Tirion come up to meet them, shining and brilliant in the morning sun.
In the fair streets below, there are many who look up to mark the eagle's coming, and wonder. There are some who see the two figures the eagle bears, and remember a similar sight, near seven thousand years ago, when Thorondor had consented to bear Fingon and one other.
Thorondor makes a careful landing in the courtyard of the King.
Elrond closes his eyes.
He hears Fingon shouting – shouting Maitimo again at first, then Elrond, as there is the patter of many feet over marble.
Consciousness slips out of Elrond's grasp like Maglor's fëa from his fingers, that day before the burning forest at the valley's edge, and he knows no more.
I had to cut this somewhere, because there's more plot to be had next chapter.
Next up: Elrond's extended family have a little chat with him about precedent, and Maglor makes some unexpected friends.