Under the Elen

Title: Under the Elen – Part 2: Fathers (a sequel to In Earendil’s Light)
Author: Gloromeien
Email: swishbucklers@hotmail.com
Pairing: Glorfindel/Elladan, Legolas/Elrohir
Summary: On the eve of war, the twins must find their chosen path.
Rating: NC-17
Disclaimers: Characters belong to that wily old wizard himself, Tolkien the Wise, the granddad of all 20th century fantasy lit. I serve at the pleasure of his estate and aim not for profit.
Author’s Note: So many people enjoyed In Earendil’s Light – none more than I myself writing it – and that tale left so many threads unknotted that I decided to explore the aftermath in terms of the actual Lord of the Rings narrative. I have been looking up select incidents in the book, but I am no master at these facts and it should be noted that I have twisted them for my own purposes, stealing from both book and movie cannon. Thus, some parts are still considered a bit AU. Would probably be best to read In Earendil’s Light before this, as little will make sense to you. Here goes nothing!!
Feedback: Would be delightful.
Dedicatioo tho the lovely and gracious Eresse, who here receives (though she didn’t really ask) and whose fics enthrall me. Go read hers first!!

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Part Two

Quellë, Yen 3018, Third Age

As he drifted into consciousness on this hazy morn, Glorfindel felt the telltale fingers twined into his hair, the winsome face tucked into the fold of his neck, the rib-cracking arms caging his chest and knew his husband was unconsciously fraught. Only when wrecked by worries beyond the means of his warrior’s spirit – a rarity for Elladan – did he return to the sleep habits of an elfling in a lightening storm, though the elf charged with coddling him remained the very same. Many thunder-quaked nights had he burrowed down the coverlet with his dear one and weathered the cacophonous squall above, tiny fingers knotted in his swaths of gold, even tinier body wasting not a scrap of space between them. Though this new trouble overcast his slumbering mind and not the dawning s of of their valley, Elladan was ever-bewildered by an adversary he could not strike, stab, or slay: the delicate balance of family affairs.

As he caressed his beloved’s cheek to wake him, Glorfindel regretted that this morning’s rise would not be as most others they’d shared, groggy, groping, and somewhat giddy from last night’s loving. On such occasions, Elladan was often at his sweetest – a considerable testament for an elf-warrior of his hardened and elemental disposition, lazily surrendering himself to Glorfindel’s more playful fancies. Just the faint birchbark scent of Elladan’s morning-after skin was enough to pique his own, as were the aftershocks of feeling that echoed through him as his husband writhed himself awake, against him.

A muffled groan bespoke of his treacherous mood.

“I must go to my brother,” he announced, as through a clogged throat. “Something sits wrongly with him.”

Concerned by his haste on such a soundless morn, Glorfindel loosened his grasp, but would not release him. “Are you certain all is well with you, meleth? You near balded me with your grip, this night past.”

“I am long-passed my majority, Glorfindel,” he quickly snapped. Marking first his husband’s scowl, then his own toneladaladan tempered. With a heavy-weight’s sigh, he pressed their faces together and wove their arms tight as the links of a mithril vestment. “Though for all my stealth on the battlefield, I am easily winded by our current circumstance. In truth, I have not felt so ineffectual since…” Elladan and Glorfindel both winced at the recollection of his previous heartache. Though their union had been blissful for hundreds of years, neither could ever truly allow themselves to forget the marital strife that preceded it, caused by the inexperience and the steel-hearted worldview of both blundering partners. “My attempts to shield Elrohir from the on-coming fire have proved… feeble, at best. I know not how to comfort him.”

“He is the cool rush of water,” Glorfindel agreed. “You are the wildfire.”

“Indeed,” Elladan grunted, with palpable bitterness. The image did, however, allow his thoughts a moment’s respite, considering the many times he had suitably enflamed his beloved. “Yet I know not how to warm him.”

Glorfindel adjusted their position to meet his avid argent eyes. Elladan was frustrated, but his silver irises still glinted with flint-spark resolve. He was, as ever, undaunted by calamity or by the artlessness of haturature. If anything, his instincts hit the most blameworthy mark with deadly acuity.

“May the Valar forever curse Thranduil and his crude, scheming heart!!” Elladan spat suddenly, routing out the root cause of a valley’s worth of elven distress. “Were he the elf of his own legend, let alone worthy of his noble line and king’s mantle, not a laurel in all of Arda could be found, as Legolas would bear them all. Never have I known such a son to be so cruelly tricked by his sire! It burns me to cinder, to see my bond-brother so dishonored, to see my own twin’s binding frayed…”

“Yet Elrohir has hearkened to Legolas as never before,” the guard-captain noted, in quiet counsel. “It is the archer’s own shame that keeps his bonded aloft.”

“And what warrior of noble birth would not cling to their shame, as to honor itself, in such straights?” Elladan insisted, as Legolas’ actions mirrored those he himself would take if so provoked. “Banished from his homeland wood, disowned by his Adar-King, left errant with half his people, begging for sanctuary… and having betrayed… his most beloved…” The elf-warrior struggled to center himself, though he evidenced a cutting sympathy for his bond-brother.

Glorfindel’s brow, however, took on the shrewd angle of both a master diplomat and a longtime ambassador to the Mirkwood realm. His voice, soft as a caress, ventured forth its own, alternative interpretation of Thranduil’s recent action.

“Though you are right to condemn him, melethron,” he considered. “Might I, for a moment, weave the bristled, disparate strands of the affair into a more intricate tapestry?”

Elladan frowned at him, wondering. His husband’s wisdom, though often perplexing, was always welcome and he was, as ever, a rapt audience to this vital exposition. He laid back on the gathered pillows and bid him weave on.

“Let us map out the players as key soldiers on a warfield,” Glorfindel expounded. “For we are, my brave one, at war, and Thranduil is both father and King – never simply one or the other. Both. Always. Why was Legolas born? What is his destiny? To face the armies of Sauron at the last alliance. What practical use will this destiny take on? He will be among the Fellowship to bear the Ring to Mordor.”

“It is certain, then,” Elladan whispered, humbled by his forthrightness.

“Aye,” Glorfindel acknowledged, then pressed on. “Whether out of hubris or out of somsguisguided love for an adopted land, Legolas was conceived for this purpose alone, bred and trained with only this task in mind… and bound to the mate most likely to support this action and his participation in it. If you fault Thranduil in this, Elladan, you must also fault Elrond.” Silenced by this pure statement of fact, Elladan sighed anew. “And let us now speak of fathers and sons. Elrond is an Adar of far superior mettle than Thranduil, for certes. Elrohir has ever-known of this destiny, of the burden he will face as Legolas’ mate. He is not now troubled by his own part, but by Legolas’ disheartened spirit just months before departure. Is it not so?”

“It is,” Elladan conceded, by now fascinated with the clarity of his husband’s vision.

“Thranduil is, as you say, crude,” Glorfindel continued. “I who have known him since elflinghood know the truth of this. And how might the heart of such a crudely-formed father suffer the destiny of a dearly-held child? His opposition in matters of state? His deceiving? His betrayal?” When Glorfindel paused, Elladan could hear the subsequent words forming in his very throat. “His *loss* at the hands of a lifelong enemy? What would the father beholden to a King’s rule not do to bear this loss? Estrange himself from his child? Banish his son away, so that his purpose is set and his path clear? What would such a father, faced with such a sacrifice, not steal, or scheme for,secrsecret away, in hopes of retaining some small shred of his most beloved child’s glorious self? Think you that his grandchild’s provenance is some accidental consequence of a madman’s devising, or the intended result of a father’s longing to see his own child’s spirit live forever on?”

Elladan, awed by this revelation, merely gaped at him.

“He behaved rashly, aye, and without the honor of his title… but not without reason,” Glorfindel added thoughtfully. As Elladan ed oed over the meat of his argument, the guard-captain gathered him close again.

“I could not make such a sacrifice and be sane ere-after,” the elf-warrior mused. ”Not of a brother, nor husband, nor child.”

“Nor I,” Glorfindel agreed, then pulled his beloved into a tender embrace. “But we have not struggled as the Silvan people of Mirkwood under Sauron’s evil eye.” The feeling effortlessly rising between them, he thought better of indulgence on such a fretful morn. “Thus you must go to your brother and gift him with temperance. Dam his more tempestuous waters back and allow his grief to flow through you, not his world-weary husband. Elrohir must not be allowed to err as Thranduil has.”

“So am I charged,” Elladan replied, with renewed fortitude and with an inspired kiss. “By *my* most wise and knowing beloved.”

*****************************

Her belly bulged out in a half-oval from her limber, yet lithe, frame, the taught skin reflecting a puckered glow, like the brown shell of an egg. She watched, with a serenity reminiscent of the most gracious in elfkind, as Elrond’s healer’s hands carefully depressed the firm surface, accepting the touch as inquisitive, not intimate, as some might mistake it. The slenderness of her form was deceiving; the peach-lush skin, dancer’s limbs, and thoughtful brow forgot the harshness of her nomadic existence, the battle-fatted muscle folded beneath her hearty, meat-fed bones. Her face, though plumped by pregnancy, was heavily indebted to her Noldor ancestry: silver-flecked eyes, sheer sable hair, an aristocratic countenance. She looked, seated before Elros’ twin, more his human-mothered daughter than the mother of his grandchild.

Yet, in few months time, mother to a peredhil she will be.

Shroud in the elliptical arch of the doorway, Elrohir observed Neyanna’s examination with equal parts wonder and disquiet. At even the most casual of motions from his father, a flurry of questions more harrowing than a flight of Legolas’ most lethal arrows shot forth, though he managed to catch them all on his silence-stung tongue. In days past he had become well acquainted with Neyanna. Though there were no secrets nor resentments between them, he still kept counsel by the entranceway, if only to allow Elrond some peace. Indeed, the generosity of spirit with which the Dunedain lady had accepted his part in her child’s life continued to awe him; at times they seemed a more fitting, and certainly enthusiastic, couple than he, or she, with Legolas. The archer’s absence at this near-vital event further tugged at his already threadbare hold on patience, but he would not let this… if he was honest, predictable turn scrap this moment for him. Not when he could wring his fingers raw in anticipation of his father-healer’s conclusions.

After murmured permission from the preternaturally calm mother-to-be, Elrond lay his head against her burgeoning stomach and sung a note of pure, gorgeous tenor; the echo of which should marry to the baby’s heartbeat, if Elrohir properly recalled. Even the seasoned Elf-Lord could not mask the flash of sheer delight that crossed his face, when the proper echo resounded from within. Neyanna herself laughed, though wisely schooled herself. The chord of longing that was struck within the usually even-handed elf-knight, however, was evidenced in his shimmering mithril eyes. Forgetting himself, he stepped a few feet into the room, before a solid, if too knowing, clon hon his arm eased him back.

When he swirled around to face the bold elf that held him, Elladan’s bemused countenance irked him all the more.

“Peace,” his brother smirked. “Ada will soon beckon you forth. Give him time with the little one.” Though Elrohir scowled, he could not long keep his eyes from Neyanna’s womb and thus acquiesced with uncharacteristic ease. Relieved by his twin’s fond company, he allowed himself a first, quiet smile.

“She weathers this like a long, balming bath,” Elrohir groused good-naturedly. “I cannot fathom how she maintains such…”

“She is of our line,” Elladan remarked appreciatively. “The hush colors of twilight favor her. The Mirkwood may have chosen such a comely field for deception’s sake, but the seed therein will reap the fairness such a beauty sows, harvesting the best elements of both parents. It is as if you yourself would bear Legolas’ child.” The elf-warrior noted the sorrow that creased his brother’s eyes, and bit his over-eager tongue. “I forget myself, Elrohir, I did not mean-“

“One need spill his husband’s seed to bear his child,” Elrohir muttered to himself, though Elladan marked him clearly.

Weaving an arm around his troubled twin’s waist, Elladan gestured towards the waiting corridor. With visible reluctance, Elrohir let himself be ushered away; he had vowed to keep his marital woes far from Neyanna’s knowing, least she suffer them too acutely. She was, after all, hardly their cause nor their instigator. Once cautiously out of range, Elladan opened his inquiry as if a glass menagerie; delicately, yet with surety.

“I admit that at first I was confounded by your… glee, gwanur-nin,” the elf-warrior ventured. “It heartens me to know that, though the circumstance of the conception is somewhat fractious, our little peredhil will be triply loved.”

“I cannot measure a child’s worth against its grandsire’s machinations,” Elrohir replied, his ever-present diplomacy returning with a vengeance. “Whatever the circumstance, we are faced with the advent of a new being and the little one, as you say, deserves our reverence.” The elf-knight considered the matter more closely, then pressed on. “I have not forgotten the manner of our child’s being.ing. I will never forget it, not for my husband’s unwitting action, but for his Adar’s lunacy! It will serve as sobering example, in the more trying times of my parenthood, as our own Ada’s fine example always shall. But how could I forgo loving my Legolas’ child? I am not that creature.”

“You would be no creature, nin bellas,” Elladan quietly observed, knowing this particular point to be difficult. “Merely a elf whose heart has worn some.”

As Elrohir weighed this against the balance of his feelings, a panoply of emotions played across his regal features. He came to a frightfully quick resolution.

“My heart is whole and hale as ever, gwanur,” he assured him, his face almost beatific with long-kept affection. “It is so full and ripe with this news I feel it might burst and flood my entire being with its heady pulp. Even when I related the tale to Ada – whose scorn in this I mightily feared – its swell smothered out the more noxious fumes of my worry and nearly choked me with feeling when he… he sung a blessing, to bounteous Elbereth…” The moment lived again on his beaming features, as argent eyes shimmered with pride at the recollection. Only a hint of sadness rippled beneath their sheen, when he revealed a close-held wish. “Since before our binding day, I had so longed for… I knew not how it might come to pass and would not forgo a moment of Legolas’ loving for the privilege of fatherhood, but… I had always thought, you see, to have children of my own. How could one with such parents as ours not think on this? But I loved an ellon and was content in that love, until… the Lady herself blessed us.” Elrohir huffed mightily, overcome by his startlingly strong emotions and embarrassed by his lack of decorum, even before his own twin.

“You have never before spoke of such things,” Elladan essayed, rather startled by this revelation.

“How does one…?” Elrohir mused, still flustered. “We live in a time of war. We are warriors… I knew not how… I still do not know how, with Legolas already lost in the foothills of his impending quest… yet I must. And I *will*. For love of him, I will.”

“His love has not forsaken you, gwanur,” Elladan counseled softly. “He is merely…”
th ath a near-growl of frustration, Elrohir launched himself down a different, yet equally affecting, path of revelation.

“He acts as my slave,” he blustered, though obviously forlorn. “As if I were some elf-maid and not the archer who taught him to string a longbow!! He will not counter me, nor argue, in every matter or thing he bends to my will. He lies with me out of duty. He will not take his pleasure, will not allow me to pleasure him, only diligently kneels to my own until I spend of sof sheer spite!” Elladan gasped despite himself, the memory of his similar, past frustrations with Glorfindel painfully summoned back. “Where is my heart-husband? Where is my mate? War is upon us and I… I fear we may never…”

Elrohir’s litany of heartache was then stifled by Elladan’s crushing arms, as he hearkened his twin to him. Even as he burrowed himself further into his brother’s iron-held embrace, he sucked back peals of vital air. Neither the elf-knight nor the diplomat’s pride would withstand the sting of tears. Holding strong against the tide of sickening emotion, Elladan’s warrior-instincts had their own ideas and methods of dealing with Legolas’ foolish choices, but he also remembered Glorfindel’s counsel and proceeded to give some of his own.

“Ah, gwanur-nin,” he almost chuckled. “Has your beleaguered mind so swiftly forgotten how Legolas first came to love you? The timid, wide-eyed elf that beheld us after the goblin battle in Mirkwood and trembled at our very presence? Are you not the elf who taught him his bed-manners, eased him through his first majority with the gentility of touch and the breadth of feeling only the most skilled of lovers possess, and thus forever earned yourself not an intended, but a beloved?” Elrohir broke free of his brother’s arms, his face wondering at his true meaning and his eyebrow arched defiantly. “You are his chosen husband and most cherished lover. Seduce him!!”

After a brief moment’s astonishment at his brazenness, Elrohir trilled with laughter and relief.

******************************************

The day was ending. The solemn trees of the mountainside - ederwood, elm, birch, and pine; wintering, leafless trees - stilled the blithe susurrations of their bare, spindly branches and laxed their bows in deference, as if the very forest thick knew of his choice, of his charge. The late autumn sun, cool and pale as a specter, haloed the stark trunks of the trees with brume, in preparation for her nightly rest. In the West, to where the light of the Eldar was passing. To Valinor’s dull tranquility.

Yet some would linger still, Legolas thought to himself, as Virgor clopped over the gnarled roots and the sheer stone shelves of the high mountain. Astride the horse’s undulating back - who knew the way better than he - and after five hours of journeying, the archer was lulled into a near mesmeric state; free to ponder, with lungs full of untainted air and a head cleansed of bickering, the circumstance of his slow path up the hillside. Now that the quake of the Ring’s first revelation had seized him and he knew of its onerous intent, he sought to reconcile with the one he had so thoughtlessly offended these last, precious nights, out of pride, out of doubt.

Legolas had r ber before truly known doubt; not as the youngest, misbegotten son of raging Thranduil, nor as an archer of preternatural talent, not as the lover so gently woken by the revered brethren son of Elrond, nor as this peredhil’s peerless mate. As he had earlier stolen down to the stables, in the wake of Elrond’s valorous Council and a whispered message from Erestor, he had recalled a similar, yet brief, moment of doubt on the morn that long ago followed his binding night. Bliss-drunk from their relentless coupling and longing to spirit themselves away to their honey-cottage, he and Elrohir had staggered through the hay bales, giddy, besotted, to await Elladan. When an hour had passed and his missing pressed on, Elrohir had concluded, with a terrific struggle for resolve, that he would not join them. As his new husband had readied the horses, Legolas had somehow come to realize, in a moment of warped, near-clairvoyant serendipity, the truth of Elladan’s predicament. His keen mind had totaled all the twinges, the muffled groans, the sighs, the dimming iridescence of his quicksilver eyes and the doting manner in which he’d coddled his twin the night before. As if it had been his last.

He’d found his husband’s flirty, eager gaze across the barn and had doubted his ability to shield him from the coming blow, from the grief that might well have sundered him. Moments later, as they cantered through the gates, Elladan himself had ed ted to them and Legolas had regained vital breath. Yet the memory roused itself anew, this evening, as Virgor again galloped towards the same cottage above the Rivendell valley as on that telltale morn, though now his fretful and forlorn husband awaited him there. Awaited assurances he could not provide him. Awaited his answer.

/ I give you my bow./

The doubt seeped up his spine like witch-weirded sap, but he staunched its treacly up-pour with thoughts of that same golden morn. Too long apart, the lovers had allowed Legolas’ horse, Yewith, to amble along behind, as both rode stately Virgor. Pressed tight to Elrohir’s lazy back, with a nosefull of fragrant, tousled hair and half-cradling his fatigue-dizzy husband, the elf-knight had babbled endlessly on, the matter of which Legolas little remembered, as the images he had painted were only half-formed and the tales he had told often left unfinished. The melody of his sultry voice alone had been enough to woo his continued attention, the tone as light as ale froth and the cadence as buttery as Shire cream. He’d never heard that luring voice raised in anger against him, could not now imagine the horror of such a sound, or how he might bear its dreadful ringing through the cottage of their honey-time.

Legolas would not have chosen such a place for their reckoning, but he would defer, in this as in everything, to his husband’s hush wisdom. He hoped this learnedness would keep him well, whether while Legolas was questing or in Mandos’ frigid halls. Though he doubted not the valor of his chosen quest, nor the worth of his humble Fellowship, none were certain of triumph, nor of their safe return. In a lonely two-month, he would depart for the blackest realm of this land, his only hope of survival the lessons of his husband’s care, bed, and battle skill.

When he will ride down the plain of Gorgoroth, bow strung for slaughter and thatheathen hordes in his sights, he will not cry ‘Death!’ as the fearless Rohan, nor ‘Victory!’ as the arrogant steward-sons of Gondor, but ‘Life!’ and ‘Home!’, but ‘Elf-knight! Star-Rider! Let your boundless heart hearken to me!’ He will call to Earendil above, for the beacon of his Silmaril’s light amid the smog and brimstone at the foot of Mount Doom, as he will slice through orc bellies with his slit-knives and will spill their bilious entrails on the rock face. When in thit oit of merciless death he will pummel their skulls in and snap their gnarled spines with his bare archer’s hands, he will sing, across the slay-fields, to his nascent child, of the lilting trees of Greenwood the Great, of the lush hollows of Arda, of the life of peace he will lead and of his far-gone Ada’s boundless love.

For he had finally known, in the breathless moment of his vow of fellowship, how dearly he loved his child. For this he had doubted most of all. Child and husband dearly both, and duty bound he would serve them. Gift them Arda hale and peaceful, if he could not live that life with them.

If the Shadow would not spare him.

**************

As the evening gave way to a crisp, starless twilight, Virgor trotted along the last of the frost-swept path, his rider grasping thatches of his billowy black hair to steady him. The silver bell slope of the cottage roof was already fringed with ice and laced with a spatter of snow, though the walk had been recently cleared. Through the obsidian glass of the window panes emanated the glow of the hearth fire, which beckoned weary Legolas towards the entrance when hesitation kept him aloft.

After seeing to Virgor’s care in the small stable nearby, he crunched his way through the courtyard and hopped, like a jackrabbit, up the still-creaky wooden steps to announce himself. He need not have concerned himself with surprising Elrohir, for the comely peredhil, red red in little more than a velvetine sarong and slippers, waited, with a hairsbreadth smile, in the doorway. Legolas came under the tender lure of those resilient gray eyes and knew there would be no quarrel between them this night. Before drawing him into the cottage, Elrohir drew him, snow-dappled cloak and all, into an embrace so needful, so eloquent in its silent message that he could do naught but return the gesture force for force.

“You’ve come,” his husband murmured into his collar, still unwilling to release him. “Then it is done.”

“Indeed,” Legolas sighed, but could not say more. There were, after a journey’s worth of wandering and wondering, simply no proper words to tell him of it.

“Are you settled within?” Elrohir inquired, slipping back somewhat to consider him. His eyes, placid as the Icebay of Forochel, regarded him with unsullied affection. “Readied and foresworn?”

“I am,” Legolas stated plain, meeting those fjordic eyes with his own gemstone gaze.

“Well, then,” the elf-knight smiled unabashedly, his noble features beaming with a trueheart’s boundless pride. “Let us leave the unfathomable future out in the cold. Come inside, maltaren-nin, and think of naught but indulgence.”

Brushing a teasing kiss over his blue-tinged lips, Elrohir guided his beloved through the threshold and made swift business of shedding his ample cloak. As the remainder of his raiment suffered a similar fate, Legolas took in the homely comforts of the thoughtfully prepared room. The quiescent gloom was stayed by a panoply of bowl-hooded candles and pewter lanterns. In their midst, a fresh-sheeted bed waited-out the night’s promise. A handful of aloedil petals was spread across the doe-hide coverlet, as on their first visit within; their blooming scent merged with the faint wafts of paraffin to woo him close. Elrohir himself smelt of mist and of sea spray, of ederdown, from his sensuous raven hair to his sheathes of sinuously wrought skin. A stew warmed in the hearth, a steaming bath cooled in the corner, but suddenly Legolas would have none but his beloved’s sweetness to steal his mortal thoughts away from errantry, from questing, from fellowship, into ecstasy.

None but his peerless elf-knight to take his pleasure with.

*****************************************

Coirë, Yen 3019, Third Age

Winter had not abated, as it should, since the dawning of the year. Though Vilya’s invisible aura staved off the intemperate winds and the glacial cold that hounded down from the Misty Mountains, even this one of the three elven rings could not force the Spring to burgeon through the snow-blanket, nor leaf buds to crack through branches cased in ice. A party of Rangers had brought word that the Golden Wood, despite its proximity to Dol Guldur, was not so beset as Imladris, but then Galadriel did not yet know of Arwen’s choice.

While his Adar chose to weather his closely-veiled grief attending to the mortal woman Neyanna and his grandchild in her womb, Elladan doubted that the valley would still be so late-shroud if Elrond were at his fullest capacities. As spindly tendrils of frost crept over the window before him, so had the chill of mortality slowly sapped the Evenstar’s otherworldly brilliance, until her hands were cold to elven touch, too human to be clasped without regret. The daily dirge of waiting for word of the Fellowship became weeks of haunting the crypt-like halls, while Elrond doted over a child that wasn’t yet as a reprieve from mourninchilchild that would soon be no more.

That morn, this dispirited existence had spent the last of the elf-warrior’s patience; his and Elrohir’s both, if truth be told. No longer would they sit idly by while their brother Estel faced the wolves of Mordor, no longer would their sister’s honor go unmatched by her warrior-brothers. No longer would Elladan sleepwalk through his nights in the Hall of Fire, sipping flask upon flask of miruvor, besting Erestor in yet another round of the Battle Game, as Glorfindel feigned interest in their begrudging rivalry and mounted yet another argument to present before inconclusive Elrond. Though, now faced with revealing the result of their campaigning to his ever-heart husband, Elladan almost wished he had not bee qui quick-witted in the face of his father’s reluctance.

Almost.

Turning from the now frost-bitted pane, he wondered at the tenor of Elrohir’s thoughts in the wake of their Adar’s permission to join the war effort. The elf-knight was gathered beside him on the window ledge, his gray eyes melancholy, yet settled withinladaladan knew not how effectively his twin managed to dismiss thoughts of Legolas, at large in the wilderness, though his hallowed diplomacy had been in full evidence since his beloved’s departure. There simply was no alternative to hope, the elf-warrior judged. He would have to recall that particular point later, when facing down Glorfindel’s withering, brokenhearted glare.

“They have reached the Golden Wood,” Elrohir spoke suddenly, as if to the winter itself. “They will sleep beneath the mallorn bows tonight, in the cradle of the White Lady herself.” Then, as if he need explain his relief, Elrohir foist his quicksilver eyes upon him. “It is a comfort.”

“She will suckle them,” Elladan acknowledged, clasping his solemn brother’s hands and surreptitiously taking the temperature of his flickering fea. The fingers and palms were hot with elven light; there was no need to fear of him fading. “Bequeath them with cryptic counsel and renew their fractured spirits through her mysteries.”

“Aye, she is nearly *too* wondrous, at times,” Elrohir smirked, recalling the many occasions on which their grandmother had given them strange counsel. “I await tim timely predictions, when we shall soon be sheltered there.”

With a snort, Elladan unwound his legs from the ledge and turned towards their father’s study. To his surprise, though not unaccustomed to such stealth from his dearest one, Glorfindel waited in the doorway.

Himself caught unawares, the hard-won husband averted his gleaming eyes from the nostalgic scene; momentarily drawn back through time to snow-capped afternoons of old, when two over-eager elflings would press their noses against the glass and beg to be freed from their lessons. Glorfindel knew, then, that he would never again behold them thus, that the last of their innocence would be smote by the steaming carcasses strewn across the writhing fields of the Pelennor. Though the brethren themselves would return to him - or so, if the brothers were not parted, Elrond had foretold - the visions of sweet-cheeked elflings that would, at times, be reflected in a gesture, a wink, a glance, these would be lost before the Black Gates. Sauron’s wrath must have some claim on them.

Better their youngling spirits than their immortal lives.

“Espionage does not become you, Balrog-slayer,” Elladan teased, as he beckoned him forth. “Though the mist in your eyes tells of your remembrances.” His husband was, apparently, already far too keen as to his many moods. “What memory held you in its thrall? Might we recall it, as well.”

“No particular event, in truth, has been recollected,” he confessed, as Elladan drew him close. “I merely wondered what new memories might be forged in winters yet to come, with a new little elfling to peer through the frosted glass and pray to be dismissed from mapmaking.”

“Mapmaking!!” Elladan protested. “We were never so dully occupied in winter, Glorfindel. You ever saved such slavish labor for summer, when Arwen would dance by the window fishing for butterflies.” Whether Elrohir laughed at this or at the thought of the little elfling to come, neither partner knew, but both were glad at his raised spirits.

“Have you not considered, meleth,” Glorfindel remarked with affected sobriety. “That the lengthy task of mapmaking was kept for summer so that a guard-captain might finish his own chores and later frolic in the glades with his quick-sprouting elflings? There were only so many summers in your infancy, lirimaer, and I cherished every one.” He finished this declaration with a kiss so blithe and tender that Elrohir was soon on his feet, muttering hasty excuses and scurrying out into the hall, long-accustomed to Glorfindel’s more genteel overtures.

Their passion, however, was short-lived, as Elladan eased out of their embrace with a penitent look to his husband.

“Neyanna has had word from her Dunedain kin,” he quietly explained. “They await us in Lorein. They will soon set off for Rohan, to meet with Aragorn and face Mordor in his charge. A small party will spirit her to Galadriel’s lair, where the White Lady will care and confine her. Elrohir rides along…alone.”

Glorfindel raised an eyebrow in consternation. “You would forsake your twin, Elladan?”

With an ageless sigh, Elladan considered: “I would not forsake him so. Yet I would cleave to my husband.”

Slow to reply, Glorfindel appraised the elf-warrior’s warm mirthil eyes, but met no reluctance therein. “He rides to Legolas. He would stand with him.”

“He *will*.”

“Your father has made his wishes plain.”

“He has.”

Glorfindel slipped delicately from his husband’s arms, ambled over to the hearth. Haloed by the fire’s glow but his noble face in shadow, he whispered: “T’was I who so counseled Elrond. Not your husband, melethron-nin, but the guard-captain in his charge and the Balrog-slayer that lives out his second lifetime here. I alone know of Gondolin’s fall, so I uniquely know of the stakes being played out to the South, their unruly nature and their visceral consequence. Though I am struck to the soul at the thought of your sundering, I long to see new elflings whimpering at the window pane and would have the well-lessoned elflings of old find their most deserved glory. How can two of Arda’s most hallowed and relentless warriors be kept aloft in the Rivendell valley, when the bloodiest war their kinsmen have ever knoagesages to its zenith? For you are not merely of elven ancestry, but are cousins to the race of men and to the proud Dunedain. You are Peredhil sons, soldiers pure, and you must make your stand.” His voice broke, then, but he swallowed it down as easily as oarberry juice. “Though my husband’s heart would hold you here, and will hold you ever-dear, my Elladan.”

Gentle arms threaded around his torso. The hot press against his back twinned with the blazing hearth before him, as Glorfindel was enveloped by the soothing heat of his mate’s soul-fire.

“The end of our struggle may encroach, meleth,” Elladan assuaged him. “But our togetherness will know no end. Either we will linger here in Arda, or the Shadow will best us both and we will wait out our time in Mandos. In a hidden alcove of thotatitatic halls, I will laze my head in your lap and you will brush your sharp-shooter’s fingers through my hair. We will wait out the centuries so entwined, our souls alight with memories of our golden time, until Mandos sees fit to release us anew and we will reunite with our betters in Valinor. This is no end to us, maltaren-nin. Either to the vile Shadow or to Arda’s bounty, but our love is immortal as the Valar above.”

With a soft prayer to those guiding spirits, Glorfindel turned from the callow flames and sunk himself into his brave one’s dread-blighting embrace.


End of Part Two