she had a january world (tolkien's legendarium | arwen/tauriel)

[fiachairecht]

she had a january world. tolkien's legendarium (hobbit movies + lotr books), arwen/tauriel. on witnessing and becoming and being swallowed whole as the world dies. 540w, rated t. for the prompt 'constellations'.

Middle Earth dies slowly, a long drawn out leave-taking marked by rattling breaths (always still one more after each thought to be the last, always still a longer and longer pause until the next one) and farewells that fall stumbling from cold lips (farewell to you who i never knew, farewell to you i always meant to see again, farewell to you who were always so good to me, farewell to you who will not die but will be lost to me all the same) and the slow decay of the unnatural as the old forests and rivers rise and shake off their slumber, slowly at first, and then all at once, rushing forward ahead of the world's ending.

Tauriel finds that she doesn't mind as much as she had thought she might: even as her friends leave to sail home she becomes ever more certain that this new-old world is meant for her far more than it was meant for any of the other elves, far more even than they were meant for her. She tries not to leave Lasgalen very often these days — the outside world is safer from physical things now than it was when she first roamed, orcs and their ilk falling with relative ease after the Sauron's own fall, but the land is a death bed now and the shadows know it — but she still finds herself in Lothlorien occasionally: though it's withering now absent Galadriel and the sea's magics trapped in her rings, she lies on beds of damp fallen leaves and breathes the smell of sharp dirt and old bark and sweet rot and watches the stars spin where they meet bare branches and remembers how to breathe differently.

She is not surprised when Arwen joins her some nights, older and mortal but still with unnameable constellations of starlight caught in her midnight hair and sparkling in her twilight eyes, as sweet as Tauriel remembers and sadder than she'd ever known her to be: Tauriel has known since she was a child taken by the forest and then returned to a family that was not quite hers that it was temporary, that she would be swallowed again by the end of the world but Arwen had made a choice to die and never quite expected that her death would be far enough in the future that she would still have to see the coming of death to her world first.

Tauriel calms her with an ease born of long ago familiarity, strips her old friend with warm hands and lies them both down on her cloak, greens and blues and blacks and her pale white skin above it all, stark in their contrast against the dull blurry reds and browns of the forest's death; Tauriel holds her close, so close together that their lips brush in echoes of shared kisses though those old intentions are far from both of their minds now: Arwen watches the stars fall above them while Tauriel traces constellations on Arwen's bare back, and watches her watch the sky, and thinks that for all she has loved dancing under the night sky it is the stars in Arwen's eyes she will miss most when Lasgalen finally collapses around her.

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[fiachairecht]

No u <3