Chapter Text
“It looks like it’s going well,” said Aunt Aredhel.
“FUCK,” said Tyelpe, as no one had informed him that Aunt Aredhel was in his house.
She stood about ten feet to the left, giving Tyelpe and his anvil the same distance one would give an especially touchy mare. She was suspiciously well-dressed, suspiciously clean, and suspiciously unarmed.
Aredhel was a person that made him more anxious to see looking put-together than distressed; dressed to impress, there was nothing she could be doing that he was fully comfortable with. She stood like a single white snowflake in the center of his sweltering forge, serene and surreal, illogically untouched by the grime around her.
“I can’t tell what it is, but it looks promising,” she continued cheerfully.
Tyelpe slowly set down the hammer with his right hand and lowered the red-hot band of metal into quenching oil with his left. “Yeah, great,” he said, fighting the urge to drop it in completely and cover the whole thing with a tarp.
“It must be an important project?” she asked.
After a moment to think, in which he didn’t, Tyelpe said, “No.”
Aredhel raised her eyebrows. “Hm. So it was an unimportant project that kept you from meeting up with me as agreed today.”
Tyelpe stared at her.
“Do you know what day it is?” she asked.
“I do not.”
“Do you remember agreeing to meet with me in relative privacy to discuss a sensitive matter?”
“I. Yes. What day is it?”
“It’s the second of April.”
“Ahhh, pits,” he sighed, pushing sweat and oil back from his forehead and through his hair. “Fuck. Yes, I lost track of the days. That’s my fault.”
“Well, you were working on something very unimportant.”
“How about we forget about that, I go clean up, and we can still have that conversation you needed to plan a fortnight ahead of time,” he said, edging slowly backwards.
“Well, that won’t be necessary now, as the ‘conversation’ in question is—wait—”
Tyelpe walked into a person standing behind him, whose presence he had not noted whatsoever and who had not made a single noise or movement as a remarkably large man slowly backed into him. Tyelpe jumped and shouted “FUCK” again, then wobbled on his heel in the least graceful about-face he had ever accomplished.
An odd, thin elf looked back at him, wide-eyed and unmoving. He held his arms crookedly in front of him, like he had thought perhaps to brace himself against Tyelpe but had not yet thought to move away from him. He had black hair which was cropped nearly to his skull and many holes in his ears and face for piercings, all at the moment unfilled. His face had the characteristic sharpness of a Noldo but his frame and complexion both made Tyelpe hesitate to categorize him immediately. He wasn’t wearing any signs or insignias except, potentially, for one thick coin-shaped pendant on a necklace tucked into his shirt, its unknown emblem hidden to the eye.
In an instant the man established himself as an incredibly awkward presence. He was completely frozen except for a bit of a tremble in his right hand. His face was flushed with anxiety, but he did not say a single word in the time that Tyelpe took to back away and then to stare at him.
Tyelpe glanced over his shoulder at Aredhel. She had a complicated and exhausted expression on her face.
Still, no one said anything, so introductions were clearly up to him. “Celebrimbor,” he said, “Tyelperinquar Curufinwe, if you need it to be that way. I’m exactly who you think I am. I’m s—”
“Yes,” the man interrupted, loud and abrupt. “Yes, I know who you are.”
“Most… do,” Tyelpe responded uncomfortably.
Aredhel sighed softly.
“That’s good,” said the man.
“Uh.”
“The thing you’re making. It looks good. But I can’t tell what it is either.”
“Uh,” said Tyelpe, who under no circumstances was willing to discuss the thing he was making.
“‘Good to meet you’,” Aredhel prompted, sounding exhausted. “‘And my name is…’”
“Oh!” said the man, and flushed from pink to red. “Oh. I am. Good to meet you. Sorry.”
“It’s—”
“And I’m Lomion,” he said, ducking into a mechanical half-bow, delivering the rest of his address with an upwards gaze through his black eyelashes. “Maeglin Lomion. I’m exactly who you think I am too.”
“Oh,” said Tyelpe. He looked at Aredhel again.
“My only son, of course,” she continued, “Recently returned.”
“That makes you a very late return,” Tyelpe noted. “Even later than I was.” Maeglin’s face did not even so much as twitch at the grim humor. “I think the only people left behind you are the Doomed.”
“I was also doomed.”
“That’s… not exactly…”
“He means the ones who took the Oath, pearl,” Aredhel said dryly. “Speak plainly with Lomion, he doesn’t understand subtleties. I was wondering—”
“Or ‘white lies’. Or ‘gentle phrasing.’ I particularly hate ‘gentle phrasing’ and probably won’t understand what you’re trying to say if you use it,” Maeglin informed Tyelpe.
“That will take some getting used to,” said Tyelpe, who had learned to phrase everything he said so that various explosive egomaniacs could accept it.
“I cannot change it, so you’ll have to be the one to adjust.”
“Oh.”
“As you may have guessed, I asked you to set time aside so I could introduce the two of you on a day I was sure you wouldn’t have other guests,” Aredhel said, “though, then again, you’re not really a ‘having guests’ individual, my dear nephew.”
Celebrimbor hummed and looked for a moment up into the rafters of the home that was, technically, legally, his.
One of the reasons Tyelpe rarely had guests was because he was rarely ‘at home’. He had only started using the house regularly because of his personal project, which no one could see. He had been working on it on and off for about half a year now and expected it to take at least that long again, so the nosier members of his family (and that scale skewed high) were beginning to catch on to the fact that Tyelpe was being unusually sedentary. The other factor in his recent seclusion, of course, was that with Osse’s assistance in soothing the pain Annatar had left him with, he didn’t have to run from himself so often; frankly, that was the larger part of the reason he was at home in the forge now.
The house, such as it was, had been built for him upon return, to his spare specifications that it be small and as much forge as house. Neither request was unusual for a returned Exile and the house, plain, unassuming, and modestly structured, appealed to Tyelpe as much as anything would. It was essentially a large front room, connected to one long hall that led back to bedrooms, a kitchen/dining room, and a storage room on both of its sides, and finally into a spacious forge in the back. It had been placed in a quiet, hilly part of the continent, above Tirion, closer to the Forge-town of Mahtan’s people than anywhere else but apart from them as well. When he did spend time there, unasked for and surrounded by the sound of calling birds and the whisking stream in the back, he felt nearly anonymous and more and more found himself acting as he would while unobserved and left to his own devices.
“Not typically,” Tyelpe agreed.
Aredhel hummed. “I was—Mae-mae, honey, go poke around Tyelpe’s possessions.”
“Yes, mother,” said Maeglin, and turned on his heel to do as bid. He drifted down the hall which led from the forge to the house, observing Tyelpe’s piles of scrap and eclectic decorations with neutral, unrevealing eye as he went.
“If he goes into the house, he is going to find phalli,” Tyelpe informed his aunt.
“Heavens, he’s never seen one of those before,” said Aunt Aredhel with utmost sarcasm. “Deerling, I’m at the end of my rope.”
“Now, why is that?”
“You sweet little spring pear. Because my terrible adult son, who is hated by nearly everyone in the world, has returned from the Halls and needs situated into modern society, which he does not understand and cannot navigate on his own, but almost everyone willing to help him is either already sick of him or has such a fraught relationship with him that it is nearly more difficult to have their help than it’s worth. My brother—Turuko, obviously—is tripping over himself to do anything he can for the man he still sees as his sweet little sister-son, and naturally—”
“—May I add, frightening—”
“—Frightening indeed—and naturally my son has managed to feel appropriate remorse about how he treated exactly one person, and that person is Turuko, and so he has a fit any time he’s around. Anyone who could just be a neutral party and watch him for a while while I, you know, breathe either is uncomfortable around him for their own and legitimate reasons or the fact that they’re a stranger makes my dear child completely panic, because he doesn’t like strangers. That includes relatives on his father’s side, none of whom he actually knows, and his two other uncles, both of whom he would get along with if he. Tried. Ha ha. Ha ha ha. I am this close to resorting to physical restraint and have started fantasizing about just jumping into the treeline and disappearing forever. Nothing has worked and I can’t leave him alone either because his abandonment issues are so severe he starts tunneling out of the house like a kenneled hound. I need a mere, measly three days—”
“No, thank you.”
“You son of a whore.”
“My—”
“I would never say such a thing about your lovely mother. I know who I’m talking about. You’re already forging. Just keep doing that. Make him keep the fires and fetch the water. Shove him around, I do not care. I know you’re going to keep working without a break for days anyway, just keep him busy. If you can get him to focus he won’t even talk to you. You’re quite similar in that way.”
“But—”
“Not asking.”
“Does it matter that I am working on a personal project that I’m not comfortable with anyone else seeing?”
“Start making something else.”
Tyelpe made a disgusted noise in his throat, threw up a hand, and said, “I wonder where he gets his pushiness from.”
“Shove it, deerling. I know you can push back. He needs someone who can push back, he basically can’t be around polite people, for his sake and theirs. Is that my fault? Maybe. Probably. I could push off responsibility and say he came out this way, which he did, by the way, but I can only see so much of myself in my son because I recognize how much my fault he is.”
Tyelpe put a hand over his eyes, and then scrubbed his forehead. “Alright. You do need a break. I am currently less hysterical than you sound, and that should never be the case for anyone.”
Aredhel beamed and clapped her hands. “Thank you!! He’s all yours. Don’t kill him, let him feed himself, tell him if he smells, put him in his place when necessary.”
“This really sounds like a job for Uncle Fingon.”
“And he was delighted to take it on, but Lomion had flashbacks to his gruesome death when he tried to spend time with him and started breaking things! MAE-MAE,” she bellowed to the back, “YOU’RE STAYING WITH YOUR COUSIN CELEBRIMBOR FOR A FEW DAYS! I’LL BE BACK, DON’T KILL HIM! HIS ATYA ISN’T AROUND TO AVENGE HIM, BUT HIS AMME WOULD SELL ME FOR A SINGLE OYSTER SHELL!”
“If it produced a good dye, yes,” Tyelpe agreed.
There came from the back room, into which Maeglin had disappeared, several beats of dead silence. Then, in a voice of sheer, discomforting dissatisfaction, he said “Yes, mother.”
Tyelpe shuddered. Aredhel beamed.
“That’s that! I’m going to go now before I start screaming.” With that, Aredhel turned on her heel, grabbed the door-handle, and showed herself out.
“Well, you’re welcome,” Tyelpe snapped at the door, turning his back. He grumbled, groused, and then stomped forward to throw open the back door out of the forge again. Aredhel was retreating fast, so he was forced to bellow “LOVE YOU, AUNT AREDHEL” at her disappearing back.
“LOVE YOU TOO,” she shouted, and was gone.
Tyelpe nodded and yanked the door shut. He stared at it for a moment, then let the reality of what he had just agreed to sink in. He put both hands on his face and cursed, inventively. He remained in that pose for a minute as he composed himself.
When he turned around, the skinny little villain was just standing there, barely a few steps behind him. Tyelpe felt like he should have expected it, and yet, he still jumped. “Well! Maeglin.”
“I prefer Lomion.”
“Lomion.”
“What are you making?”
“Ff—I will guess that you have already pulled off the tarps and looked at the work in progress,” he said sourly.
“Yes. I have no idea at all what it is. That isn’t common. It’s not a different type of something I have seen before, it is something I have not seen before. What is it?”
Tyelpe pondered, for a moment. If Lomion had already seen the project, there was no point in trying to keep it hidden. He did not want anyone else involved because of the nature of the work, but he knew that he was going to start being harassed about it just on account of his secrecy on the matter sooner or later. Despite his fears that what he was doing would be immediately recognizable and understandably appalling, it seemed it was, in fact, completely unrecognizable to the average person. Lomion probably wouldn’t figure it out what it was in a few days of grunt work, either, and in theory the skinny little bastard had been a master blacksmith in life—and though it was never his favorite metal, Tyelpe had turned to steel for this project. He liked ores, pure, better than alloys. Mithril, silver, gold, platinum; and jewels, dug up or hand-forged.
“I don’t understand silent cues,” said Lomion. “You have to tell me what you’re thinking.”
“I will if I like to,” Tyelpe replied testily. “Do you like rules?”
“Do I like rules?”
“Yes. Are you a person who likes having rules to follow, or do they only aggravate you?”
Lomion had to think about it. While he thought, his black eyes looked down at the ground, and he stood still. He looked back up and said, “Yes, I like rules.”
“Fantastic. I intend to be working for as long as you are in my house and these are the rules you are going to follow while I am working: Do not get between me and the work. Do what I say when I say, whether I tell you to bring something to me, tend the fire, or shut your mouth and leave me alone. Do not ask me what the project is, what it does, or what it’s for. Do not touch the project without explicit and current permission. Do not show anyone else the project or tell them about it. You may have general use of the forge for whatever you like, if I haven’t given you anything else to do and you aren’t in my way. Sleep, eat, bathe, relax whenever and however you like. I don’t care what you do here, but don’t touch my work, don’t try to fix my work, and don’t ask me about my work. Any objections?”
As Tyelpe had been speaking, he had been watching Lomion turn slightly red. He had assumed, based on what he knew about the man, that the telltale color heralded indignance; that was half the reason he had been so strict and forceful. He wanted to know right away if it was going to be intolerable to live with him. He was not sure, then, what humors mixed such that Lomion replied to the list of demands with a quiet, firm “yes, Lord.”
“Good! Then, that was enough of an interruption that I am quite thrown off of what I was doing. As you saw, there was some amount of gem-work going on in the project. I am going to return to working on that, and you are going to get to work turning that scrap into workable bars of steel, a hand in width by three feet in length, negligible in height. They’ll have to vary anyway.”
Lomion hesitated, then said, “I’m not dressed for work.”
“Then dress. Use some of my spare gloves or aprons if you need to—though I think you’ll look like you’re swimming in them,” he noted.
“You’re very big.”
“I’m aware. Get to work.”
So he did. Hopped to it, in fact. Tyelpe glanced up at him regularly for a while, getting the fire back up to the right temperature, testing tools, picking through his collection of scrap. But eventually, his work at making the very precise kind of stone he needed—globe-like, hollow, crystalline, able to reflect light but with metaphysical properties that trapped certain things inside—so consumed Tyelpe’s focus that he nearly forgot Lomion was there, except for the slow but steady hammering.