A Pretty Toy, a lord of the rings fanfic

Disclaimer: Master Bombadil is Tolkien's, as are the names Haldad and Eilinel; the characters bearing those names in this, however, are mine.

Written for Otto's Goat. Many thanks and apologies, ma'am. (Please take 'unwake' as an homage.)

"Tom Bombadil chose for himself from the pile a brooch set with blue stones, many-shaded like flax-flowers or the wings of blue butterflies. He looked long at it, as if stirred by some memory, shaking his head, and saying at last:

'Here is a pretty toy for Tom and for his lady! Fair was she who long ago wore this on her shoulder. Goldberry shall wear it now, and we will not forget her!'"

- The Fellowship of the Ring

Tom looks at the world by closing his eyes; drawing down his innermost eyelid here and there, until but a little space is left open for him. For a long time he chooses to see Haldad and his lady only in their hollow, little pieces of them bent in and up about the edges.

They travel beneath the skin of history, pricked and shed without a fuss. They are not buried in the hollow. For a long time Tom does not notice where they are buried; he marks only that they no longer walk among their hills.

Though they are stooped over forges too often for many to notice, the men of Haldad's line are very tall. In his boyhood his father tells him that this is what makes them great smiths; their shoulders bump against the sky, and they are bent back down to hear the earth's whisper. It tells us, do this with my blood, he says. Do this with my bones.

For a while Haldad imagines that he, too, can hear the earth; if not well enough to understand its instructions, than at least well enough to identify the rushing of its unopened veins. He presses his ear against grass and dirt and stone, noting the sweet high piping of silver, the clear ringing of copper, the floating shrillness of gold.

He later learns that beneath their part of the earth there is only lead, or sometimes iron; once, before he was born, a thread of silver.

He also learns that the great smiths numbered amongst his ancestors are few.

When he is four and twenty, Haldad loves a maiden.

She is a small, bright creature, very unlike the stretched and faded women who have passed along his line of tall men. She is newly out of girlhood when he first sees her, and still seems unformed and forming; the bones of her face are almost tangled beneath her skin, a knot of starlight slowly unraveling itself towards age.

When he is five and twenty, Haldad learns her name.

They sprawl together in the space between three hills, which seem to have been pulled up by the hollow's sinking, as wrinkles in pinched cloth. Voices here are rich with the song of copper; words float sideways and linger in a manner uncommon to the well said.

They always drape themselves apart, unconsciously careful not to repeat the other's pose. She lies on her back, with her hands lost beneath her dark head and her eyes full of sky. He turns his ear against the grass and hears nothing.

"These hills are full of gold," he tells her once, when they are half-asleep with summer.

She springs upright, dismayed. "You mustn't tell anyone," she begs. "You mustn't let them tear up this earth."

"They won't." He tugs at her forearm until she sits, folding herself carelessly, knees knocking past each other. "There is no gold. I was only dreaming."

She fixes him with a strange and tender look, and clasps his hand, and leans down to kiss his forehead as if kissing a dying father. "It must be very unpleasant to dream in gold."

III

Blue greets Eilinel every night and in every dozing; she cannot remember ever dreaming stories. No one ever stars in her dreams, no event ever unfolds; there is only blue, sliding from shade to shade.

She manages to find nightmares within the color, nights when the hue is too brilliant for her, and burns her through and through.

She decides at an early age that she does not like gold, for she can find no shades within it. She tries to imagine it stretching everywhere in her sleep, and knows it would be too bright by half every night.

So she turns her gaze away whenever she glimpses gold, afraid to let it stay too long in her mind, and is glad every night when she unwakes to find blue.

Eventually, even the burning shade looses its horror.

When Eilinel is two and twenty she loves a smith.

He courts her for a year; he never gives her flowers or letters or the things of his hand. They learn to love through the touch of other things, to stretch themselves flat across separate hills and feel the skin of the world shiver taught between them.

When she is three and twenty he brings her a lover's token, at last, and she knows that the skin of the world is shrinking.

Even held still, the color blows back and forth from hue to hue, as if water rushes within the stones, or as if the flame of the surrounding silver is guttering.

The movement of the sky against the earth flickers over her fingers.

She smiles. She does not look at him.

Husband is an edgeless word, its syllables rounded; married is sharp and thin and shrill. And so she says to no one that she will be married. She tells her mother merely, "I will take a husband."

Children and grandchildren wrest the brooch free from her sleeve, time after time. They hold it up to candles to watch the light shake apart the blue; they fly it on their fingertips like a captive bird; they pin in into each other's tangled hair. She winces when she sees it tumble free, but eager hands always catch it before it can strike the floor.

The indulgence in her smile wears thin as the years pass, but she never halts the game.

She dies with it under her fingers.

She moves her eyes over these sons, this daughter; she cares not who bears it after her so long as they bear it under light.

"This must not be buried with me."

Her daughter shapes her hands over hers. "We promise," she says, with all the grave dignity one would expect of the dying.

"Nor with you."

Her daughter says nothing.

And now it lies unearthed with Tom.

He opens his eyes all at once, and sees their lives wash in and out of the hills; he turns his gaze at last beyond their coming and their going away.

The pieces of their lives blow back and forth upon his palm, bent upward and inward about the edges; folding and collapsing and rebounding, fragile as sky.

Fair was Eilinel, and lovely is her brooch, and it has more power than rings, for this is one thing Tom will not draw into nothing and out again.