another one of my ‘i cut this out of something a while ago for reasons idk but i like it a lot and it can be read perfectly well as a standalone vignette so i’m going to share it anyway’ little scraps, featuring Elrond’s Very Normal little monologue about his past to Arwen in the Fourth Age, after she asked him why he couldn’t stay at least a little longer. enjoy/suffer! 😈
Animals run on whatever fuel you give them, Maglor had told me once, salt-spattered and half-drunk upon a remote peninsular beach, even though a Noldor prince and the three kinslayings jingling on his belt was probably the last person to take advice from in this area. Which is to say, he continued, that if you choose to give your donkey a diet exclusively made up of cheese, changing who feeds the thing doesn't stop it from spewing shite.
You know that I wish to sail to Aman, to my Celebrían, your mother. I need not waste words on the obvious. But nobody ever asks why I wish to sail from Middle Earth, why I refuse to watch the dawn of this new Age. Here is my answer. Because I am a child of war. Because my parents were displaced thrice. Because when my first war ended, I found that my brother had chosen to die, and when this one ended, found that you have chosen the same. I am almost seven thousand years old, Arwen. Living through history and remaining intact requires defenses that time often undermines. Eventually, one realises their existence is mere endurance wearing the face of resistance. There are so many cruelties that function through simple persistence, through outlasting your capacity to keep fighting them off.
Do you understand me? I cannot survive another dawn. I cannot stay in this gleaming white city and this wondrous new world and my radiant grandson, because six thousand years ago, my birthplace was burned to the ground. The hardest thing for a child raised in the wreckage of war is to see intact what might one day be destroyed. Second only to seeing someone else’s future take the shape your past should have taken, knowing that their future would never be shaped as it is if your past wasn’t shaped as it was.
And I flee from cruelty. For there will be cruelty and destruction in this new Age, as glorious as its dawn paints the sky. I swear to you, there will be cruelty. Remember that I more than most have cause to know that a new dispensation is but another form of exile. That the distance between Ages is never so stark as the distance between promised and permitted peace. Sauron was vanquished. Morgoth was vanquished. Fëanor will never see a Silmaril until the day he is bid to destroy it.
And yet, because Fëanor and Fingolfin were brothers as were Manwë and Melkor as were Maedhros and Maglor, because they were all fathers and sons and brothers and we were also intwined thus with them, loosening the grip of the Darkening and Exile upon Arda required that the very knots of our own belonging were undone: bonds that had flourished in opposition revealed themselves as contingent, evaporating once the common enemy withdrew. Certain possibilities expanded while others contracted so completely they seemed never to have existed: Middle Earth appeared luminous from certain angles and defeat indefinitely deferred, but our own circumstances, the slog of existence, the way we drifted through lands that were supposedly ours, felt oddly diminished, drained of the significance we'd imagined the vanquishing of the Foe would confer.
The Foe came. The Foe was chained. The Foe destroyed the Trees. The Foe was destroyed. The Foe now languishes in the endless dark. Along with Fëanor. Along with the Trees. Along with my Sirion. Sauron is vanquished. Along with my children. Along with my very heart.
I will go on to answer to Ada for the rest of my life.
Never again will I answer right.
The last time this happened, Arwen, and the time it happened again, we went on living. Or we tried everything to make sure we went on living. We began to regard our prior convictions with something like embarrassment, as though the urgency of struggle had produced a kind of intoxication, temporarily obscuring the structure we were actually erecting. We no longer extended trust so readily to those we'd fought beside or to our own capacity for judgment. Thousands discovered their infants did not inherit the life they'd been promised. The songs and stories we'd authored in the name of the vanquishing read, in the cold light of seeming sovereignty, like ephemera from some other moment entirely, beautiful, fervent, and utterly inapplicable to the state of things now.
This time, if only this time, I must flee whilst the songs are trilled rather than keened. I must flee before the rending of my soul. Why must I sail? Why can I not wait a meagre handful of decades? Because I cannot take this again, Arwen. Ada cannot take this a third time. Let him leave, I beseech you. Let him flee from the blinding light of your life.
the hottest thing a guy can be is barely conscious on the floor while someone lifts his head up by the hair so that you can see his glazed out eyes and the blood running down his face
2087
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