The Rescue of Celebrian

His brother needed his mate. Now. There were no two ways about it, Elrohir realized. His own aimless drifting was nothing compared to the depths of melancholy he knew his twin would find if something were not done. Bookish, quiet, reflective, it was not that their mother’s spark had somehow passed over Elladan, only that it took extremes to wake it. He looked at their mother across the hall, surrounded as she was by lamps and candles and flickering firelight, and realized with a start that he’d heard her laugh more recently than he had his twin. Now, instead of his mother or his father, it was his brother he feared would fade.

“We should bring Arwen home,” Elrohir said when their father next passed his way. “She has not yet seen Mother restored, and her worry has been deep.”

“It is not safe to use the pass,” Elrond replied, as though the obvious had escaped his son.

“We can loop southward with a troop of guards, and bring more back with us from among Grandfather’s men. He will certainly not begrudge us that, considering.”

“Knowing your grandfather, he’d send half of his Wardens here to get you if he suspected you were thinking of riding off there. But I find myself wondering why, suddenly, you feel the need for a journey?”

“Restlessness,” Elrohir replied honestly. “I am not considered fit to slit the throats of Mother’s captors, and yet I feel I must do something. Arwen is the only other woman I have to love and look after, and she wants to know her mother is safe.”

“It is not that you are unfit—” Elrond began, but Elrohir cut him off with a wave of the hand.

“It is that we are too precious to you to be lost, I know. But the knowledge does not always feel so affectionate, Father. You must know this.”

“And the journey would help your brother, I think,” Elrond added.

“Yes. He is high on my list of concerns as well.”

“I will ask your grandmother,” Elrond concluded, patting his son on the shoulder. “It may be that she will want to come too.”

A fortnight and a bit later, a party was requested from among the people of Rivendell, and traveling companions were chosen. No women, but good, sturdy fighters from among the men, which angered more than a few of the female wardens that wished to see kin and friends among Galadriel’s people. But, in light of what Elrond and his sons had nearly lost, little more than isolated grumbling was heard. Twelve set out six weeks before the midsummer, and rode fast and hard by day to keep careful watch by night, even in the safe places where fear had faded like the past summer’s grasses.

Elrohir felt an improvement within himself almost immediately upon their departure, but for the entire length of their journey, still Elladan gave off the brackish melancholy feeling of a stagnant pool. Summer was passing them by, and swiftly; whatever caused this mood, Elrohir knew, must be shaken from his brother before the cold came down from the mountains again. Neither Elladan nor Celebrian herself had ever been fond of winter with its crystalline whiteness and isolation. They were not spirits meant to endure the cold, but to rejoice in the sun. And yet, even the sunlight held no cheer for the youngest son of Elrond, not until they arrived at last at the river running round their grandparents’ land and crossed side by side on twin ropes, racing each other across the rushing water and arriving, in spite of their best efforts, perfectly in step. In the back of his mind, Elrohir thought he heard a familiar, indulgent laugh, and knew that their grandmother was aware of their arrival. The twins exchanged looks; Elladan felt it too and finally found it in him to smile.

Months of worry and fear had deepened the lines in their sister’s brow and around her lips, but her eyes still were exactly those of their mother, even shining with tears of relief and joy. The Lady Galadriel’s features, of course, remained as careworn and ancient as they had always been, their light, rather than dimmed, simply shaded. But it was to Celeborn that Elladan turned after the formal greetings were made and into his embrace the younger twin fell. Odd though it might have seemed, Elladan had always felt a stronger kinship to his grandfather than his own father, though he loved both dearly. Another quiet, observant sort surrounded by those of quick minds and smiles, or hot tempers and irrepressible urges to act, Lord Celeborn knew better than most how it was to stand and measure and judge before acting… and he knew the burden of a lonely soul deprived of something a part of it, but separate and unknown. While Elladan held tightly to his grandfather’s still solid frame, Elrohir went eagerly from their grandmother to their sister, sweeping both from their feet with into great, spinning hugs, and held longest to his sister with her head tucked tight against his shoulder.

“You are weary, and should rest,” Galadriel said after embracing her other grandson tightly. “But how best to take that rest, I wonder? I think more idleness will not do either of you much good.”

“We’ve been idle long enough,” Elrohir said, squeezing Arwen close against his side again. “Though staying still long enough to eat, I think, we could tolerate.”

“Always thinking of your stomach first, brother,” Arwen teased, jabbing her elbow at his ribs.

“Only here,” he said, smiling to see Elladan walk away in quiet conversation with Celeborn. “Only in Lorien.”
~*~

“Can it be tempered?” Galadriel said far into the night when finally the festive air of the party’s arrival had slowed its tempo toward restfulness.

“I think it can, with time,” Celeborn said across their bedchamber. “But he takes much on himself that he should not.”

Galadriel chuckled to herself at the irony of that statement from that man, but shook her head fondly all the same. “And how do we teach him to release this burden, or at least set it by for a time? He is too young to feel so worn. Always, our young ones grow old before our eyes, and never a way to slow the march of time and heartbreak.”

It was then Celeborn’s turn to smile at the irony of his lady wife begrudging time its toll. To her, even Celebrian was still a youngster, though her thousands of years had been well spent as scholar, teacher, wife and finally but greatest to her credit he thought, mother. Their grandchildren, he realized, seemed still as toddlers playing in the trees to his wife.

“We cannot fight time, dearest. You know this,” he said, removing a layer of robes in preparation for a short sleep.

“One can wish to, can she not?” Galadriel replied over the carved wooden comb she still used some thousand and more years after he made it for her.

“It is not the passing of time we should address, but the loneliness in which he spends it. Even with his brother, he says, he feels separate.”

“His guilt,” Galadriel agreed, nodding in the mirror before her. “Elrohir seems to think it is time his twin had a mate, as though they are as easy to find as deciding which wine cask to tap.”

“He was lucky. For him, like myself, there was no choosing. You have put away her jewel? It would not do for him to know of it, I think. His own mood seems strangely fragile as well.”

Galadriel nodded, her hair finished, the lights dimming as her own energy flagged at the end of the night. To fall asleep in her husband’s arms was a joy she had never forgotten to appreciate. That he had once been forbidden to her had made him all the more desired, but once custom was flouted, desire became too weak a word. Her poor children— all of them— so alone in this aftermath. True, only a small number of lives were lost, but to a fading race, each was as precious as adamant. And to her identical grandsons, it seemed, one in particular was more necessary than the ring on her finger. They could not share a mate, in a sense, but Galadriel understood to a degree how the twins shared each other’s joy. By seeking the match to his brother, she knew, Elrohir was trying to heal himself.

“Very well then,” she sighed aloud, tucking her feet under the bed linens. “We will simply have to see that they meet all possible candidates. Elladan cannot hide himself away.”

“And Elrohir cannot hide behind his brother,” Celeborn added as he snuffed the last lamp.

“It will not be Elladan behind whom he hides,” Galadriel decided after the room grew still. “He has missed the company of women. Arwen will have one of her brothers, at least, glued to her girdle.”

“Well, she already has them both around her little finger,” Celeborn said, yawning. “She should be able to manage him.”
~*~

Somewhere around midday a few days later, Galadriel called her quiet grandson to her and gave him an errand.

“We will have more guests this night,” she said over a book. “They reached the eastern boarder last night, and the guardians bring them hence now. Go, take our welcome with you, and bring them here in gentleness. They have been sorely harried, and have need of warm welcome.”

‘Harried’ did not begin to describe their journey from the Greenwood, from what Elladan got out of the party’s archers. First spiders in their own lands, then wargs at the forest’s edge, then goblins from the Iron Hills, and still more goblins had beset the travelers on the open lands between the hills and Lorien. The party of over two dozen had shrunk to just 15, with few enough archers left to attempt the return to Thranduil. They would need reinforcement, after a time of rest in the Golden Wood, before any even thought of attempting to reach Rivendell. For these were not just travelers: they were the first of Thranduil’s people to make for the Shipwright.

“The darkness in that forest grows ever thicker,” a captain with a fresh slit in his eartop declared. “After this journey, I will not be returning to the east, and may my father and sisters forgive me. I am no coward, but the unknown monster of the sea seems a better choice than the known and barely survived monsters spat out by the north.”

“No, you are no coward,” a female voice replied. “And one may suffer only so much before the spirit takes hurt. Even the largest boulders sometimes crack, Sardo. There is no shame in going.”

“From you, Nindé, I take that as a compliment,” the guard said, and spared the only dark haired woman among the party a small smile. The child, obviously, was linked to her, for when he was not high atop the cart, he was wrapped around her torso, feet nearly touching at the small of her back. He was perhaps ten summers old, and very frightened. Elladan, feeling pity, sought the boy’s eyes, and got instead the steely gray ones of his keeper, Nindé, she’d been called. His smile earned only a faint softening of her frown, and he bowed, then turned away.

“Enough then,” Elladan said as the talans came into sight through the trees. “We will talk more tonight after dinner. We are visiting, my brother and I, to take my sister home. Festivities were planned long before word of you reached us, but you are welcome to attend, or not, as you choose. I feel safe speaking for my grandparents when I say that you are welcome to your ease here for as long as you should need it.”

Very softly from behind him, Elladan heard the child whisper, “Dancing, Auntie Nin?” and an even softer, “Yes, my heart. We shall go if you wish,” and his own heart was warmed.

~*~

“Honestly, it’s just a dinner, with dancing after,” Arwen sighed. “Why must you insist on every show of finery every night?”

“I’m putting on a brave face for our brother, you know that,” Elrohir retorted while Arwen wove elaborate braids into his hair.

“I think you just want to be prettier than me,” she replied with a snort, tugging the plait she’d just finished.

“Not that I could, ‘fair Luthien Reborn’,” he said laughing as Arwen rolled her eyes yet again.

“Stars, help me outlive the reputations of famous grandmothers,” she sighed, but got no further when the padding of feet was heard beyond the balcony. Looking down, the siblings saw a very familiar guard walking at the head of a small, bedraggled party of people, obviously worn with the pace of their journey. All in green, Elrohir noted, and several of the men among them the strapping blond archers of Thranduil’s domain, and all of those injured.

“Look there, the lad,” Arwen said softly from the shadows of the drapery. “I have not seen a child since… home.”

Like Arwen, many others had noticed the youngster among the party, perched high on the back of a two wheeled horse cart, and murmured softly among themselves, most in tones of pity. There was no missing the bandage wrapped around his head, or the patch of blood where an ear should have been. The party, it seemed, had been waylaid.

“We should go down,” Elrohir said, making for the stairs. “There may be news we should send to Father.” Fast enough on her feet, Arwen caught him up on the decent and stayed near his heels as they circled again and again around the great tree, while all around them, the rest of the people of the Golden Wood did the same.

At the foot of the talan, Elrohir pulled up short.

“What’s the matter now?” Arwen hissed, freeing her hem from beneath her brother’s boot.

“Somewhere in that party is Elladan’s mate,” he declared. “He’s already seen her. He already knows.”