THAT IS LIKE….700 WORDS….FUCK YOU…..and also this is like the most bald and exposition-y section, but whatever fine, I promised. >_o ❤ Link!

“I got them on the rigging. Better than a wound by a sword. Which reminds me, I must return you yours.”

Unless they had to separate, Elrond usually carried both swords, crossed over his back, knowing how Elros hated them. But the sword Elros had torn away on the battlefield was Narsil, forged
by Telchar at the first rising of the sun, the sword of kings; and
Elrond stilled and looked at him as he had before, almost blazing, if
the flame were not so soft.

just my observation: out of the two brothers, there is ONE who did NOT spend his life building the most peaceful human civilization in history, but instead was canonically proactively involved in several wars and even 6,000 years later was still
super-proud of his foster-son for killing a load of orcs and mooning about how glorious and fair the armies of the last
alliance and of valinor were. Guess which brother it was. Take a guess! 🙂 🙂 🙂 anyway in my own mental finagling of looping elros into harmony with the world-shifting turnaround of the end-stage edain -> early numenor involved headcanoning that he was ultra-traumatized by the bloodshed in Sirion and thereafter repelled by violence and weapons, but that this trauma wound up facilitating more sincere and non-lizard-brain beliefs too, and coincided with the edain’s mindset at just the right time.

Anyway I like Elrond trying to reterraform his brain around the new arrangement of the world around his twin brother, see the fic’s prompt phrase “one foot in another world” etc, which applies to multiple strands of the fic. I tried to weave without being too repetitive but it’s hard to tell from my perspective.

Also wtf pre-Elendil canon info on Narsil is surprisingly patchy for such a Significant thingamajig! 

“Aye,” he said again, and the word wobbled. “Far more fitting a glory, I
think, for your people, and your times.” He pulled Elros’s hands from
the sword hilt and pressed them to his own heart, so tenderly it was
like breaking. “Keep the sword. I think you have found a better use for
it than I.”

Elros sat and stared at their entwined hands until he felt like crying,
and told himself it was weariness, though he felt the knocking at the
back of his mind.

“I did not wield it.” His voice was choked.

“As I said, a better use than I.”

From the Unfinished Tales: “But no man wore a sword in Númenor, and for long years few
indeed were the weapons of warlike intent that were made in the land.” Anyway this snippet is just boringly snipped from Isaiah 2:4 – “and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into
pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither
shall they learn war any more.”

it’s kind of new to Elrond (and, at least consciously, to Elros), but their instincts say they are on the cusp of something. Elrond semi-consciously realizing that he and the world has changed around Elros and Elros semi-consciously realizing he can never go back, never step down, he will never be his brother’s equal again, he has lost something already without noting it.

Elros closed his eyes. Against his raw fingers, he felt his brother’s heartbeat. The first sound he had ever heard.  Loss. It is loss, came foresight’s unfinished cruelty.

“Elros?”

He lifted his head.

“Elrond, I have missed something,” he said, finally. “What have I missed?”

I guess there is no Nile River or Egypt in Middle Earth but uh. Though also an idea i had at some point is that from childhood e&e would confirm their own perception of reality by checking in with each other – the only constants in their lives.

Elrond looked up at him so strangely the hairs stood up on the back of
Elros’s neck. He was used to understanding what he saw in his twin’s
eyes.

“Do you not hear them, Elros?” Elrond whispered.

“Hear them?” Elros whispered back, almost holding his breath. “Hear
what? I hear the sea and the mountains, and the people calling for their
kin—”

“Listen!”

They stared at each other, wide-eyed. The voices of the Edain encircled
them. Elros heard again the Bëorian verses, raised in praise to the sky
and the earth, heard a new one to the sea.

He heard a name, Indilzar, that was star-foam.

“They are calling for you.”

The look in Elrond’s eyes burned deep, and Elros realized that it was pride.

“They are singing for you.”

I don’t……have anything to say about this. /)_o bamboo i know you said this was your favorite, but idk. Just that I am v satisfied with it.

Uh…I like Tolkien Language Fuckery. bamboo also surpassed my own thoughts while pillorying me via IM – the Edain experiencing arda which is music and sending back music. I did want the Dunedain’s sea-fever/longing/love to have roots in smth more fundamental and unknowable than Valinor.

“Did you mark when I put my foot in it?” he said finally. His voice cracked, and he laughed.

“I know not.” Elrond gave a rueful smile. “But dear heart, it was before the sea rose to hold you. For me, at least.”

Gift-receiving/responsibility-taking/binding-by-love-and-duty/etc that is semi-’accidental’/unplanned yet irrevocable is such a good tho! this ask’s selection references other passages a lot. The pseudo-flashback to earendil vs ancalagon, where Elros chews everyone out, etc.

“I know. I knew and would not see. I was with you. I was afraid, I am
afraid. I did not wish to be anywhere but by your side. Forgive me,
forgive me, I am so sorry. The war—” Elros felt more laughter bubbling
up. The dented swords held up in the glow of the land’s death throes, in
the flash of Eärendil — rags and bloodied hands and empty vengeance.  Now comes the night.  “They thought there was nothing more here on earth, on this side of the stars, but I know, I know,
in my heart, it cannot be that. It is not release without life before.
And it cannot be that we will be denied release. And I know I…”

I know that I am lost, the words came unspoken.

The problem with this fic is that it is almost entirely stitched out of canon references. /o But fatalism-resistance in arda marred, life as a term of suffering only released by death vs life as the only good path to death, and the spontaneous and like…instinctive conviction that life was given to men and life must be good. I don’t think elros’s choice was like, ~heroically sacrificing his chance at immortality for his people or anything else tangent to disingenuous internally-contradictory sour-grapes immortality discourse, but i think it was the edain and their own arc that ensnared him into being truthful to himself and the ‘nothing in the world holds its savor for long’ thing about humans, and accept that faith is exercised differently for himself vs elrond (“He knows not to what end he rides; yet if he knew, he still would go on.” says Aragorn, re: Merry – it applies to both twins.)

“They would go where you go, if you sailed over the rim of the world.
Do you not see? I have heard them say, a people for whom the  Narn i Hîn Húrin
is not a tragedy of their past, but the only true tale of their
existence, would accept no deliverance but that which tore them from
that tale’s doom and made a new ending. Have you not done that? Torn
away and remade the black sword, and the river, and the sea?

‘do i spell it out like an obnoxious dumbass or should i be more subtle’ I thought then remembered i have never heard anyone make this point before + pontificating like this is very IC for elrond and decided ‘fuck it, full meta.’

Anyway this fic wanted to be a story about the edain generally which wouldn’t fit the prompt, so i kind of had to reorient the scope into a ‘how the edain’s story interfaces with e&e’ and…it was p helpful in visualizing the unspooling. The silm scene that always haunted me most was the scene of hurin and morwen at turin and nienor’s grave, morwen’s death, and hurin waking up. The sheer yawning gap between that and the next time the edain emerge into the spotlight of the narrative, at the voyage to numenor….

There ARE other motives behind this fic than my eye-glazing re: fanon elros but uh. Idk.