here we go again by lonelyvisitor  

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are you the hero of my dreams

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The innkeeper of Ellairë shuffled weepingly to the root cellar, aiming to muffle his sorrows among the potatoes before he composed himself and found his son, which had been his errand in the first place. Naturally this is where he encountered Celegorm and Curufin again, sorting onions into hempen sacks.

This was the last of many final straws. Orodreth sank disconsolate to the earthen floor. 

“Why are you still in my house.”

Curufin knelt to pat his cheek. “There, there, ‘Resto. You did let us in.”

“And Finduilas was showing us out.” Celegorm scrutinized an onion for blemishes, then placed it among a harvest of flawless specimens. “But then after seeing what a fine order we made of the linens, she recalled you’re rather short-staffed in the kitchen as well.”

“We’ll keep a very low profile,” Curufin assured, all the many gemstones on his person glittering in a slat of sunlight. “Remember, we come in humble penance to make you recompense.”

“The only thing you’ve made me is miserable.” Orodreth raked his hands through his hair. “All of you who keep showing up uninvited—and your son’s in on it, by the by—”

He flailed a hand toward Curufin, who frowned in inscrutable silence. Celegorm gave his brother a significant glance.

“Celebrimbor’s here! How interesting.” “And Finrod,” moaned Orodreth.

“Finrod’s here?” Self-satisfaction crept back into Curufin’s mien. “How even more interesting.”

Orodreth wiped eyes on the sleeve of his blouse. “Fingon too.”

Celegorm shouldered the sacks of onions. “Well, he’s not interesting at all.”

“Tedious, frankly.” Curufin sighed. “We had enough of him during the Trees, always lurking about our father’s house—”

“Eating the good snacks,” said Celegorm.

“Why.” Orodreth shook his head. “Eru all-mother-all-father, why me? It simply must be divine intervention, that one Elf’s life should be so ridden with disaster.”

“Oh, get up.” Curufin hefted him from the armpit. “Taking the Doom of the Noldor a bit personally, are we? I wouldn’t worry about your being the most accursed person in this family.”

“Fifteenth or sixteenth most accursed.” Celegorm flung open the cellar doors. “At most.”

“And don’t you get tired of weeping and trembling all the time?” Curufin led Orodreth, as he wept and trembled, out into the sun. “I seem to recall you doing enough of that during the First Age. Sing a new song, Artaresto.”

###

On his way back to the granary with four glasses and a bucket of sparkling miruvor—on precious ice that would have to be reused for the oysters—Gil-galad discovered that his potential fathers had escaped. Finrod, Fingon, and Celebrimbor were now milling solemnly about the inn grounds.

It seemed they were in search of an exit. Panic bolted up Gil-galad’s spine, and he rushed toward them with a gait that steadied to authoritatively nonchalant on close approach.

“Hello.” He flashed a smile cultivated over millennia of courtly dispute in Lindon. “Where do you think you’re going?”

Fingon seemed about to say something, but Finrod had elected himself spokesperson. “Your father’s hospitality has always been questionable—but this.” His great-uncle’s speech rang with terrible gravity. “Beyond the pale.”

Gil-galad pursed his lips. “You saw Orodreth?”

“And he saw us.” Celebrimbor came forth winkingly, and clasped Gil-galad’s shoulder. “I think it’s best we see ourselves off.”

“Oh, come now.” Fingon took the miruvor. “We can stay for one drink.”

The next thing they knew he had drawn a dagger from his belt and sabred the bottle open. Sweet liquor frothed forth from the seamless cut, and Fingon served it expertly into four portions, nary a drop lost to the dirt.

Before Gil-galad could weigh the consequences of this suggestion, he was raising a toast. “To...”

The truth of the matter stalled on his tongue. My father, he seemed to wish to say, though this would largely be taken to mean Orodreth, and did mean Orodreth, if not at present. My fathers? Gil-galad decided against making the admission just yet. He styled this pause as a happy sigh.

“Family,” he said. “To family.”

“And beyond the immediate!” Finrod drained his glass. “Gods, I needed that. Off to the harbor, then—there’s lots more on the boat.”

###

The hour that followed was among the most extraordinary of Gil-galad’s lives, though nothing of great consequence took place: simply a sail around the island with a great quantity of fine wine and several dozen oysters, which simply had to be eaten given the scarcity of ice. Fingon shucked and tossed the shells overboard while Finrod ran with the wind, laughing and expounding from the tiller, barking orders to Gil-galad—what was Círdan teaching you in his havens, you’re going to lose half your hair to the winches! When they laid anchor Celebrimbor acquiesced to making a demonstration of his wings, analoging their aerodynamical properties to that of the sails with an effortless lack of condescension, even when Finrod started acting as if he had the stronger grasp of physics. Fingon, growing restless in the course of this discussion, lept up and somehow produced two rapiers, which is how Gil-galad found himself drawn into swordfight, leaping from deck to mast to gunwale as Fingon fought with one hand behind his back—I’m going easy on you, you know—and Gil- galad laughed and said the same, and then routed Fingon over the bow so he splashed ass-first into the water.

No Elf had ever looked happier to be soaking wet in his finery. As Fingon climbed the ladder back aboard, Gil-galad lent a hand, seeing that irrepressible hope returned to the other man’s eyes.

“You do remind me of him, you know.” Fingon wrung out his braids, speaking with a strange distance in spite of his gaiety. “My cousin.”

Gil-galad knew there was only one person he could possibly mean. Yet cornered as he was— Celebrimbor and Finrod had devolved into a discourse on the particulate streams of the Moon and Sun and how they impacted air currents—he found once again that he was not yet prepared to have this conversation, in spite of having engineered its ideal conditions.

He poured them both another drink. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to be much more specific.”

“Maitimo.”

Without meaning to Gil-galad must have cringed minutely at the tender epessë. Fingon coughed.

“Maedhros. He could be like that—gentle and unassuming, in spite of his size. Until he went for your spleen.”

Gil-galad certainly remembered the size, and the sabotage—for the decades of the War of Wrath the Fëanorians had been uneasy, necessary allies, up until the day that Maglor and Maedhros scorched their hands on the jewels. Yet Gil-galad remembered no gentleness in that mountainous presence, nor sentimental insinuation that he might in any way bear significant relation to the young High King.

He nodded into his wine. “Are we still talking about swordfighting?”

Fingon laughed. “Excellent metaphor, isn’t it? For so many things. Ah.” But his look turned grave again. “Gil-galad—Ereinion, if I may—I was hoping it might continue my earlier line of inquiry. Why was it that you asked me here?”

A maritime atmosphere only intensified the piercing blue inquiry of his eyes. Gil-galad felt a rise in his chest. Fingon had spoken only of Maedhros, but only one of them stood here now, and in spite of Gil-galad’s supposed semblance to the latter, it was the former whose combative grace he had seen dancing across the deck. Until the end Fingon had anticipated Gil-galad’s every move as if they were extensions of his own.

Regardless of what was widely said, he had never before believed he could be Fingon’s son. And while it was impossible for him to be the biological child of both Fingon and Maedhros — neither man had had a womb — nor did it seem conceivable that they might be his parents in any spiritual sense. They were both like creatures out of legend, one flame bright and fell, one smoldering in the rent earth, while Gil-galad had been as a steady-burning oil lamp, a star shining dependably over the entire Second Age.

And yet. As Fingon waited for his answer Gil-galad felt the closest he had come to the cusp of admission. Apart from feigning his own fall into the Sea it seemed he had no way out of this one.

Until suddenly the wind turned, and Finrod was clamoring for him to aid the gybe. “Pardon me.” Gil-galad leapt up gratefully. “And perhaps we might discuss over dinner!”

He could not bear to look back on Fingon’s disappointment. His great-uncle occupied him well enough with his directives, alternating easily between stern and good-natured as together they wrestled the sails. In Finrod too Gil-galad saw himself. Many in Nargothrond had said so when he was a child, and in finally meeting him in Aman Gil-galad had come to agree. Yet to believe the implication of Orodreth’s diary—that Finrod was in fact his father—was to give credence to unspeakable horror. Had Gil-galad in fact begun his life as some cursed lab experiment? Would Finrod even have known what had come of his body—what had been made of it, perhaps even after his death?

Watching Finrod in command of his craft, vibrant and golden and grinning, Gil-galad could scarcely bear the thought. Moreover, gauging by the angle of the Sun, he guessed that he ought to have started his braids half an hour ago.

“Better be off.” He began descending the ladder. “But I’ll expect all of you at sundown, yes?”

“Naturally, my lad, naturally!” Finrod seemed to have completely forgotten the insult he’d taken earlier.

Fingon at first said nothing, though Gil-galad managed to elicit a nod when he caught his eyes.

“Sundown. Of course.”

Then Celebrimbor approached, his hands entwined with spare sail-line he’d been using to model a nine-crossing knot, in attempt to prove some molecular structure to Finrod.

“Will Orodreth not be offended? Your father was very clear in his desire that we leave the island.”

There was a subtle longing to his look—and skepticism, which Gil-galad knew could be a prelude to the stubbornness belied by his affable nature. How often they had disagreed, once Celebrimbor came to know him as a man and not a child—how differently they had ordered their realms, Gil-galad rejecting the evil that Celebrimbor had come to harbor. (Though had Annatar’s arrival in Lindon been a family reunion? This thought too he perished.)

It was for this reason that among a host of implausibilities Celebrimbor seemed the least likely potential father of all. Though Gil-galad was still known to call him uncle, they had been peers and friends and allies for a thousand and a half years in Middle-earth. Celebrimbor had forged the Ring of Air for Gil-galad’s hand.

Still: If only Tyelpe knew, he’d read in the diary. Knew what? That Orodreth loved him, or that he had reason to love him beyond his handsome looks—that he had been a father to Tyelpe in more than forging him a sword?

“Orodreth.” Gil-galad laughed. “I’ll work on him! Thank you for the oysters and the physics and the duel—see you all at dinner.”

With this he made a seamless dive into the Sea, and held his breath until he’d emerged near the surf, where coming up for air he saw who was awaiting him on shore.