The Rescue of Celebrian

“Absolutely not, Brother, do you hear me?”

“She won’t find out,” Elrohir said, tugging his twin toward the part of the garden overlooked by their mother’s balcony. “It will pass almost as soon as it is said. And if this brings Mother back to herself…”

“She’ll find out,” Elladan insisted with a stubborn shake of the head. “Niphredil will find out and she is already so put out with me she’s not spoken to me in two days. I will not chance it.”

“Then you do love her?” Elrohir asked.

“I… could,” Elladan replied softly. “I could. I do not know. But, I could.”

Disgusted, Elrohir sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “Then, trust my word on this Brother, you don’t, and you’d be better off ending things anyway. Now, hit me.”

A part of Elladan, a large part of him just then, wished to reply “gladly” and pull back for the swing, but the more temperate part of him refrained. It was foolish. It was useless, wrestling about in the mud, flinging punches at someone with whom he had no real quarrel. It would not-

All thought was cut off by the jaw cracking thunk of his brother’s fist smashing into his face.

“You hit me!” he yelped, hand to his mouth. Already he could feel heat pooling on the right side of his lower lip.

“Damned right I hit you, calling me a coward,” Elrohir yelled, turning his head toward the balcony where Celebrian’s doors stood open, curtains peeking through as a breeze passed.

“You hit me, you immature little worm!” Elladan retorted again.

“I see Father’s brains must have skipped over you, Brother,” Elrohir replied, grinning with all the contentment of a cat in cream. “Is that the best you can come up with? What will you do next, Book-sniffer, run to Mother and cry in her lap?” With a growl and menacingly narrowed eyes, Elladan fixed his brother with a deadly stare, but still did not move. “Or will it be your little doxy now? The serving maid that’s joined you for your baths these past few weeks?”

“I TOLD YOU not to bring her into this!” Elladan thundered.

“Well really, you always have been easy to needle when it comes to women. But it does nothing to prove you don’t like boys—”

With a roar of rage and frustration, Elladan threw himself at his brother, hooking him around the neck with one arm and beneath the shoulder with the other, bootheels digging into the mud of the courtyard as he threw him sideways. Elrohir… laughed.

“Come now, you can do better than- OOF!” he taunted until a doubled fist jammed his breakfast up toward his lungs and his brother’s equally hard forehead smashed into his nose with a crack that sent colored stars in front of his eyes.

“Ai! Low blow, Little Brother!” Elrohir growled and tried to lift a knee to shift his twin aside, but his legs were pinned by his brother’s weight and his hair ground hard into the mud under a fist. He couldn’t lift his head either, though one of his arms was free and he put it to good use with a couple of quick blows to Elladan’s rib cage and left kidney. It was his weaker arm, though it apparently hurt enough.

Once into it, there was no stopping either of them but to pull them apart, and usually no more than a few blows were landed before someone— historically their father and Erestor— were there to grab them by collars and belts and haul them away, blistering their ears with lectures about the proper decorum expected of Elrond’s sons. But, while Erestor stood gazing open-mouthed at the brouhaha in the back garden, he made no move to step in, even when one of the identical combatants pinned the other to the dirt and leveled a devastating punch at an already bleeding nose. They were like two wild cats set on each other, and the librarian had lost any advantage of height and experience he had ever had over the twins some centuries before. Best to let the boys sort this one out on their own, he decided, crossing his arms and leaning against the door frame while a thicker and thicker crowd gathered beneath Celebrian’s window.

“No!” someone shrieked, startling all but the fighters from their daze. “Stop it! Boys! Stop it this instant! You’ll kill yourselves, and just look at your clothes! Elrond! Glorfindel! They’re at it again,” and with a disgusted sigh, a white and blonde streak left the balcony, followed shortly thereafter by the slamming of a door and a feminine growl of rage echoing through the stairway. At the sound of his name, Elrond had gone to the balcony where he had sat watching his wife for so long, then hearing blows, looked down.

“What in…” Erestor heard him mutter, before he too turned and bolted down a set of stairs and into the courtyard, coming face to face with his wife over the recently churned mud of the garden. Shocked, he stopped, eyes round and fixed on Celebrian’s still too gaunt face.

“Well?” she snapped, hands on hips, looking so much like her mother in a rage that Erestor almost laughed. “Do something! Don’t just stand there gaping like a frog!”

For a moment Elrond still stared, then shot a look at Erestor, threw up his hands, and caught one of his sons by the back of the pants, dragging him off the other one with a grunt. Once separated, Celebrian caught the other by the arm and hauled him to his feet, propelling him toward the recently moved pine tree with surprising strength.

“Which one do you have?” Celebrian called, staring at the son before her with snapping grey-blue eyes.

“I… How should I know? I can never tell them apart when they’re this out of sorts!” he shot back, forgetting, in the moment, that it was the first time his wife had actually spoken to him in months. “Which one do you have?”

At the question, Celebrian leveled a stare at her child, jaw set, head cocked to the right in a gesture Elrohir had never before realized his sister mimicked exactly.

“Papa has Elladan, Mama,” he said quietly. “And I’m very glad to see you out of bed. Would you like to take a walk with me?”

“Walk? Out of bed? What in the world are you talking about?” she snapped, catching him by the sleeve and dragging him toward the courtyard again. She studied the other twin for a moment before fixing Elrond in her stare. “That’s Elladan,” she said, then turned to first one twin, then the other. “Who started it this time?”

“He did,” Elladan said sullenly just as Elrohir raised his hand and snorted blood from his nose onto the ground near his boot.

“Why?” Elrond barked. In reply, Elladan set his jaw and cocked his head to the right, staring Elrohir in the eyes.

“We were trying something,” he said finally, looking at Elrond somewhat sheepishly. “And it worked.”

“Trying something?” Celebrian said, the point missed entirely. “What madness were you inventing now? Really, Elrohir you are far too old for this sort of foolishness.” And that quickly, she stopped, looking at the battered face of her eldest son as if for the first time. “Too old for… Wait, how old are you, Son?”

“As of today? Two thousand, three hundred and forty…” he looked at his twin.

“Forty-two,” Elladan said. “Arwen’s two thousandth begetting is not quite a year past.”

Looking bewildered, Celebrian studied first one son, then the other, and finally turned again to Elrond. Her lip quivered.

“Two thousand, three hundred and forty-two,” she murmured. “Then it… it was not a dream?” She watched Elrond, stared into his eyes, and waited; he could only nod, and put out his hand for her. She took it, clung to it, pressed it tight against her chest, above her heart.

“We came for you,” Elladan said. “Both of us, and Father, went looking for you, and brought you home.”

“You’ve been here five weeks,” Elrond said, finding his voice finally, wrapping his other hand around his wife’s, and rubbing the thin skin along the back of one.

“I’m home,” she said in a tone somewhere between a question and a statement. “It was not a dream, but I am home.” Those closest saw Elrond shudder as her arm slipped around him and her head fell heavily onto his chest, hiding her face there in the curve of his neck. He pressed a kiss to her temple, their hair, the black and the blonde, catching their tears while Elladan’s ran unchecked down his filthy face.

“All right, so it worked,” he grumbled when his brother threw an arm around his shoulders. “But did you have to hit me that hard?”

“You wouldn’t have hit me back otherwise,” he said, unable to chuckle past a split lip to match his brother’s. “We should go clean up. The pools or tubs?”