the night is our fortress when we're tired of the day (tolkien's legendarium | nimrodel/mithrellas)

[fiachairecht]

the night is our fortress when we're tired of the day. tolkien's legendarium (silm + lotr books), nimrodel/mithrellas. five promises nimrodel and mithrellas make over the years. 655w, rated m. for the legendariumladiesapril prompt 'promise'.

The first promise asked for is stay with me and it is a child's promise, laughingly asked for and easily given in to and it floats light and airy as the spun-gold flecks that dance between the trees when the sunlight falls just so; it is a promise about Nimrodel and Mithrellas tumbling where they ought not go exploring, about girlhood love and elven time and futures that still seem possible, bright, malleable: it is a promise about forever from those too young to understand that that does not mean happy forever but also too young to think that matters.

The second promise asked for is come for me, and this one, oh this one is still easy and light because the forest is only too happy to show them paths hidden to anyone else, because Nimrodel spread flushed and naked on the ground is sweet and wild in ways Mithrellas sees too rarely but it's always worth it when Nimrodel's burning beneath her lips and clenching hot and wet around her fingers, because Nimrodel is always so happy, more than happy to lie between her legs and tease her with clever fingers and an even more clever tongue for hours, until Mithrellas is arching up to meet every inch of her body with her own and so incoherent with pleasure that she's not sure she remembers her own name.

The third promise asked for is run away with me and it is vast and terrible and about the emptiness where sea meets sky and forest meets plain and love meets love, and and jealousy and it carries with it more than dreams of futures to come; more importantly, though, it is the first promise broken, the first promise that shatters in hands and hearts that had previously been nothing but impossible in their tenderness, shatters so wholly that the shards of it take pieces of Nimrodel and Mithrellas alike as they spiral through the air and land in Dol Amroth, by the sea, in the forest, drowned and lost anywhere but each others' hearts where they had always found home.

The fourth promise asked for is find me and it is spoken aloud but spoken where anyone — anything, these days — could hear except the one they most wish would hear: Nimrodel sits alone and watches the mountains that burn with smoke from fires not lit by anything so comforting as a dwarf's hand and presses her ear to the ground listening to the pulse of hoofbeats and worse that bring so many futures to her forest but none that carry Mithrellas; Mithrellas wanders by the sea alone and she knows, she knows that the sea will only take her further from Nimrodel but it calls to her anyway, and when she feels the trees calling — Nimrodel calling — surging in her veins it is so much easier to pretend she is running from the flashes of teeth among the waters' shadows than abandoning her husband and children.

The fifth promise asked for is stay with me again and it is nothing like the first, because neither has laughed in years and nothing comes easy anymore and the air that wraps around them is thick and heavy with ashes, with shadows, with things unseen and unsaid, lives that never had the chance to be lived caught in the eyes of a forest fighting back against the magic of the sea, of Nimrodel who has watched the world take from her and now holds on so tight Mithrellas fears her fingers may claw holes into the things she loves that no kisses can soothe, of Mithrellas herself who chose absence over and over again but was really choosing Nimrodel every time; what they don't say, when they lie pressed so close together there is hardly room for breath, is that it is a promise about the ending of the world, but they say I will anyway.