thanks @berrysphase!
The Carpenter’s Son is actually one of my few ongoing fics! It’s more a collection of scenes featuring the same group of characters than a real multichapter fic with a plot. The WIP document contains bits of scenes that I never finished.
Anyway, The Carpenter’s Son is maybe the only fic I’ve posted for any fandom that doesn’t contain a single canon character. It’s set in Easterling-occupied Dor-lomin, and the primary characters are Dineth, a Hadorian woman who was born several years after the Nirnaeth; Gregan, an Easterling carpenter who wins Dineth from a friend of his in a game of chance; and Ardan, their son. Dineth and Gregan have an ongoing sexual relationship that is not consensual on Dineth’s part, though she goes along with it because there’s really nothing else she can do. When Ardan is in his early 20s, he and Dineth run away and escape to Sirion.
I came up with these characters in a very backwards way. Back in 2014 I decided I wanted to write about the Third Kinslaying as experienced by an Edain family living in Sirion, and started coming up with characters. I decided that one of the parents in the family was born in Sirion, and one was from somewhere else. Dor-lomin seemed like the interesting choice, and then I thought I’d like to write about a character with one Hadorian parent and one Easterling parent, who had escaped to Sirion with his Hadorian parent. That character became Ardan, and because I am the person that I am, I needed to know everything about HIS parents, and thus I got Dineth and Gregan. Of course, I immediately became fixated on those three characters, and the story about Ardan’s family during the Third Kinslaying was never written (though there is a chapter on AO3 about Ardan meeting his future wife).
Anyone who’s ever talked to me about Greek mythology knows that i’m VERY invested in stories about the kind of relationship that Dineth and Gregan have: long term non-consensual relationships with fucked-up power dynamics that are also socially sanctioned, in which the disempowered person has to learn to cope with their circumstances in order to survive. Most of the scenes in the fic are related to that, or about Ardan grappling with the circumstances of his birth and his relationships to his parents. If any of this sounds interesting, the completed scenes can be found on AO3 here.
An excerpt from one of the incomplete scenes is posted below (warning for implied non-con):
