Hi! I loved your Nolofinwean headcanons. 💛 for Arafinwean familial relationships? — @emyn-arnens
Thank you for the ask @emyn-arnens, I'm glad you enjoyed the Nolofinwëan ones! Here are some Unusual Arafinwëan familial headcanons:
orodreth is his mother's favorite, bar none. this is not a secret.
finarfin does not have favorites. this is a lie.
angrod leaves little of himself in history, but he is the happiest of them all, for as long as he does live.
he is the one who dies first, and the one who had been most certain he would die first. his last years are full of smoke creeping in the corners of his eyes, a paralyzing urgency. if only fingolfin had heeded him - if only their cousins could be bothered to stir from complacency -
he dies very bitter, bitterly satisfied. one things all chronicles agree on: he did tell them so.
finrod and finduilas share a love for sculpture. many of the carved colonnades of nargothrond were made by her hand; the style shows up, with some variations, in the avenues and streets of lindon.
aegnor and angrod go on a five-year adventure trip on the Ice with fingon. it takes eldritch beasts, five toes lost to frost burn, a long quest for rare healing ingredients for idril's recovery based on old, old songs from the Crossing for their friendship to be renewed, after alqualondë. they remain each other's dearest friends and among their most important people until the end.
galadriel thinks very little of nolofinwë's wishy-washy political approach to achieving power. if she had been second-in-line to finwë's throne, with the backing of the vanyar and well-established in the city, none of her brother's would have been able to keep her from orchestrating her rise to power.
finrod might have. but in the end finrod won and lost a realm well before she had one of her own, and there was little satisfaction in being the last, the wisest, the most enduring.
gil-galad and finarfin meet three times. this is long enough for them to discover they share the same eyes, the same sense of humor, the same principles of leadership. this does not improve anything, and in fact makes it considerably worse.
gil-galad and celebrimbor do not talk about nargothrond. the whole of their relationship consists of very pointedly not talking about nargothrond, while basing their political and personal stances on everything that once happened in a kingdom now long under the sea, where the only lady of the king's line spoke long into the night of philosophy and craft and unmarring the marred with the most promising young goldsmith of the noldor.
celebrían smells it, something. the ash, the smouldering stone dust. her nightmares are all of the bragollach; but she does not often remember them.
galadriel, whose mind perceives all, even the seeping dream-stuff of her daughter's sleep, lies awake in her talan many nights through, remembering what she does not.
celebrían does not see them, in captivity: finrod is made anew, aegnor chose enclosure in the dark of mandos till the end of the world. but she hears him, at times. her first-dead uncle, angrod the iron-handed, whispering to her through the fever of her torment - here the links of the chain are weakest, there the steel of her captor's mail might be rent by a sharp stone, clawing fingers, teeth.
a spark of her nails on the walls of the cave, and if she is clever, she can use a cut of her hair as fuel to feed a spark. orcs fear flames more than anything, more even than she does.
the queen receives many guests, but there are no spare rooms in eäwen's private quarters.
