Hi there! Saw you reblogging the post about Arwen and Aragorn in my dashboard. Saw the post below it (the DoFP plane scene, also reblogged by you). Then I read the Arwen/Aragorn post. After I finished reading, I was thinking, that if all 'Aragorn' in the text was replaced by 'Erik', all 'Arwen' by 'Charles' and all female pronouns replace by male pronouns, that post could be an XMFC almost-fanfic. :D
So, I gave it a shot just to see, and yeah, it comes out pretty adorable! :D LotR AU where Charles is an elven prince and Erik is the exiled King of Gondor… [ original post here ]
erik decided he was going to marry charles when he was like, six.
and everyone thought it was just the cutest thing, baby erik with his little crush on the great immortal evenstar, and everyone would tease him about it relentlessly and he would get so mad, and pout, because how dare they doubt his word.
(charles spent a lot of time biting back smiles and nodding very seriously when erik brings this up with him. no, erik, I do not know why they are laughing perhaps they have remembered a particularly funny joke.)
and then erik grows into this gangly teen and oh my god can you imagine being a pimply greasy teenager around fucking elves it’s a wonder he has any self-image left. His voice breaks every other word and the laundresses are beginning to wonder if something is wrong with the sheets because erik keeps washing them himself and erik wants to die, god, charles is never going to marry him if he stays all elbows and skinny knees and he can’t even look him in the eye anymore without blushing, eye contact is probably something to look for in a husband—
(charles, who never had to go through puberty because elves don’t do anything so undignified, tries to comfort him by saying he likes erik’s blemishes. erik gives him a look of such utter, miserable despair that charles starts laughing.)
(this is a mistake. erik spends the next three weeks nursing his wounded ego and refusing to see charles.)
erik is twenty when he asks for charles’s hand. he is lean, slender and fair as a new tree, and so charles does not feel guilt in kissing his cheek and gently refusing. he is still green, he will weather greater storms than this—and erik takes it as he should, clasping charles’s hand and swearing to ever be his loyal friend.
they write to each other—when charles is in lorien, when erik wanders with the rangers of the north, fights alongside gondor, travels to distant lands. it is an inconstant tie—erik is rarely afforded time enough to put pen to paper; charles is reserved so as not to encourage what may not be. (he signs his letters always, your friend. He likes erik too well to be cruel in this.)
the years pass. Erik’s weariness and strife creeps onto the page, and charles sends him tokens to fend off the darkness—leaves from lothlorien, the ribbon from his hair, snippets of poems. it is not enough it is never enough I am sorry, he writes.
Erik’s reply is gentle: you are enough. do not stop writing.
(charles carries that letter tucked inside his sleeve for a long while, like a talisman—though against what evil, he does not know.)
charles is in the house of his grandmother when a familiar voice calls out to him: my lord prince!
this is when charles looks up, sees erik—broad of chest and rugged, still wearing his battered mail, with one hand balanced lazily on the pommel of his sword. All the trees of caras galadhon are gold but he is shadow and silver, kingliness resting lightly on his shoulders—
and charles thinks, oh fuck
