Delicacies by sallysavestheday  

The Pleasures of Childhood

Five true drabbles, five young Finwean cousins, exploring their world. Uses the diagonal prompts Sod, Metal, Free Space, Paper, and Hemp from the Material World board.

Finrod’s tongue is caught between his teeth as he carefully, carefully levers the sharp edge of the stolen spade. The handle is too long for him and the angle is wrong. The blade drags where it should slice smoothly; it judders in his hands. But he has watched the builders in the palace grounds: he knows he must remove the turf before he digs. So he works away at the roots, carefully piling the grasses to the side.

Until the passing gardener shrieks.

Sent to bathe and regret his trespasses, Finrod rather daydreams, building his imagined palaces beneath the sod.

*****

The taste of metal is maddeningly delicious. Curufin wants to lick it, to stuff it in his mouth until his cheeks puff like some mechanical squirrel, to swallow it dangerously down. His caretakers must keep watch for loose screws and bolts and the random scraps from the forge that are tracked across the property on everyone’s boots and hems. His favorite place in the world is Fëanor’s lap, where he can chew on his father's tunic buttons, tongue the bright gold of his necklaces, and suck the scorch and tang from the fingers of his lean, strong, clever, delicate hands.

*****

Papercrafting comes easily to Maitimo. He grasps quickly the relationships between fibers and liquids, the adjustments to proportions and materials for producing this grain, that weight, this shade. He blends and refines in the corner of Nerdanel’s workshop, turning out plain, sturdy papers for her sketches; finer weaves for Fëanor’s treatises; and crisp, clean pages on which Maglor’s music gleams. But he best loves the making of paper lanterns: fine rice paper soaked to translucence, framed to hold a single candle. He lights them for his brothers in the silvery twilight, to rise and travel eastward, carried on the flames.

*****

Turgon is first among his generation to discover the other properties of hemp. He apprentices in the ropeyards, learning the elegant twists and loops required for the making of hithlain, working the ropewalk amid the singing laborers, his body graceful in the twining dance. Around the supper-fire, there is more music and mulled wine, and the air fills with a pungent tang that dizzies him. Foreman’s special blend, they call it – grown in a hollow at the end of the hemp rows: a cousin with a stronger kick. Knowing something of kicking cousins, Turgon grins. And pockets buds to share.

*****

Given the keys to the storeroom for his thirtieth birthday, Caranthir responds as if handed the crown. Flushed with excitement, he hurries to unlock the great doors, basking in the glory of the barrels and bins and shelves and racks stuffed full with supplies, in the fine dust that shifts in the redolent air and the ledgers for drawing order out of chaos.

His fingers twitch, canvassing and counting, proud of the plenitude. Determined to keep it so.

He makes his rounds daily, serious and careful as he inventories. He knows his calculating mind is worth his weight in gold.