Work Text:
Plain talking (plain talking)
Take us so far (take us so far)
Broken down cars (broken down cars)
Like strung-out old stars (like strung-out old stars)
[…]
Plain talking (plain talking)
Making us bold (making us bold)
So strung out and cold (so strung out and cold)
Feeling so old (feeling so old)
***
One.
When Richard was young, around four or five or so, he was absolutely convinced that he had a younger brother.
Children were known for their imaginations, his mother Margaret knew. There was probably nothing to be worried about. Yet she couldn’t help but fret: didn’t most children make up an invisible friend? Didn’t they get jealous of a potential sibling? Her husband tried to reassure her, saying that she was making mountains out of molehills, but he wasn’t the one who had to deal with Richard coming into the house crying and asking her for help because Frerin, his little brother, had fallen from a tree and broken his arm.
She had no idea how to bandage the wound of a child she couldn’t see; a boy who existed solely in her only son’s mind.
Sometimes she considered truly giving Richard a little brother, but those were fleeting thoughts. Times were changing, children were getting more and more expensive, and she and her husband couldn’t afford having more children, especially after Richard’s sister Susan came along. They weren’t rich in any way, and John’s job at the factory and Margaret’s odd sewing jobs could only pay for so much.
After Susan was born, Richard was insistent upon calling the new baby ‘Dis’ for a long while. It took Margaret some days to realise that her oldest was giving his baby sister a new name instead of being jealous and refusing to use her real name. It took her a few months to convince Richard that his sister’s name was Susan, not Dis, no matter how much he insisted. He obeyed in the end, but sometimes she still caught him looking at his sister with his head tilted to his side, eyes narrowed as if she was a stranger to him instead of a sibling. As if he expected her to look differently than she really did.
Margaret didn’t know what to think of that, and preferred not to.
Richard stopped talking about ‘Frerin’ when Susan reached a year old, and though Margaret was relieved, she couldn’t help that nagging feeling inside herself, like a part of her mourned the loss of something within her son that she couldn’t name.
But Richard was a good boy, worrying his parents less and less. As he grew into a teenager (how did the years pass by so quickly?), Margaret didn’t forget, but she started to dismiss the memories easier and easier. It was just a phase, she told herself; only a child’s overactive imagination at work.
Every child had their invisible friends, didn’t they?
*
Lee was born in the suburbs of the American South, and his father James had always blamed that fact on how his son always seemed so disconcerted by the deserts of Saudi Arabia. He blamed himself: it was difficult enough for two adults to uproot themselves to another country with such a different culture, but surely it must be even harder for Lee, who was just a child and for whom Chickasha, Oklahoma, was all that he had ever known.
That reason worked as well as any other, yet James couldn’t help but think that it wasn’t entirely accurate. Maybe it was because he was away for work so often, but sometimes James would look at his boy and think him to be a stranger. There was an age to Lee’s five-year-old eyes that made a cold chill wrap around his spine. Sometimes he would catch Lee standing at the large window of his own room in the early morning, dressed in his favourite ducky pyjamas, leaning on the sill and staring outside with eyes that seemed to pierce through the endless darkness of Saudi Arabia’s night skies, looking towards something that only he could see.
Once, just after they had moved across the world, James had set his son down and spread the atlas out for him, pointing Oklahoma out on the map and told him how far they had come. He had tried to make their moving into an adventure, but Lee had only looked at the atlas with solemn eyes. He asked James where northeast was, and when James pointed it out, Lee had followed the line with chubby fingers.
Mirkwood, Greenwood, Doriath, the alien words spilled out of Lee’s lips then, and there was an urgency to his tone that made James’s hands shake. He had never heard the names of those places before, and given the international nature of his work, the thought shook him hard. But when he told Lee that he didn’t think those places existed, at least not on the map, Lee had only nodded his head.
“That’s good,” Lee had said then, sounding far older than his four years. “If Mirkwood doesn’t exist, then Valinor doesn’t either. I don’t like that place.”
Lee had padded out of the room then, rubbing his eyes. Fifteen minutes later, he was back, tugging on James’s pant-leg and asking for his father to tell him stories of the places he had been to, the places that he did know. James had looked into those large grey eyes and recognised that a child was behind them, but he hadn’t been able to help feeling the heavy knot at the base of his stomach, pressing against his sternum and almost preventing him from breathing.
This was his son, he knew that perfectly well, but sometimes his son behaved as if he was no child at all, and the differences between the Lee he knew and the stranger he sometimes saw was so startling that James found himself wanting to back away and run until he found some answers.
When James told his wife Charlotte of his worries, she only smiled and told him that all children made up places. They had no gardens for Lee to find fairies in, so Lee created entirely new places instead. It showed that Lee had a strong imagination, she told him; that he was creative, and wasn’t that a good thing?
James tried his best to believe her words. Charlotte worked with children; surely she knew best about such things.
Yet he couldn’t help his complete lack of surprise when Lee was diagnosed with dyslexia when he was eight years old. He couldn’t read very well, Charlotte told him, worried and distressed. Maybe it was ridiculous, but James couldn’t help the creeping though that maybe, just maybe, it wasn’t that Lee couldn’t read, but that he was far more used to a completely different language system and set of symbols. That learning English was as difficult for him as it was for James to try to master Arabic.
It was a fleeting, slightly silly thought, and he dismissed it almost immediately. But sometimes in the dead of the night when he couldn’t sleep, when he got out of bed and saw Lee standing at the balcony door, hand pressed against the glass and mouth moving as if he was trying to speak to the sparse plants they had planted on the balcony, he thought about the time he had spent working in India. The Hindus believed in reincarnation, and even in English there were phrases that spoke of old souls.
Once, a friend told him this: the Greeks used to believe that the waters of the River Lethe removed all memories, so that when souls returned back to Earth to live again, they would not be haunted by what used to be.
James believed that all souls went to Heaven or Hell, for rest and peace or for punishment. But he was open-minded – he had to be, really – and he couldn’t help but think sometimes that maybe the ancient cultures were right and souls returned. That maybe the waters of Lethe failed at times, and souls returned to Earth still remembering.
It would be a comforting thought, but it remained that Mirkwood and Valinor existed nowhere in history. James knew that for a fact: he had searched, and searched hard. Even if Lee had lived before, it was in a place only the boy knew. Somewhere that James would never reach him.
The thought was absolutely terrifying.
So James preferred to believe, like Charlotte did, that Lee was a creative child with a green thumb; that he loved plants and nature because he was surrounded by them during the first few years of his life instead of in his last life.
***
Two.
Whenever Richard didn’t know what to do about a situation, the first person he turned to wasn’t his parents. It was his friend, Balin.
Balin was his secret friend, a friend only he knew, a friend he could keep all to himself without having to share, especially if he told no one else about him. Richard had learned his lesson by now: if he told people about his secret friends, eventually those friends would disappear and hide in places that Richard would never be able to find again.
Sometimes he missed Frerin. But it was alright, he told himself, because now he had Balin, and that made Frerin’s loss hurt less. Just a little.
His secret friend had wise dark eyes nearly hidden beneath bushy white eyebrows. He had a huge, long beard that nearly reached his waist, and that white too. His hair – still white! – did reach his waist, and looked really frizzy but was in fact quite nice to touch. Sometimes Richard thought that Balin looked like his grandfather, what with all the white, but Balin wasn’t anything like his grandfather. Grandfather had a way of talking to Richard as if he was a kid like Susan, and Balin never did that.
No, Balin was his friend. Sometimes Richard thought Balin was the only friend who truly understood him. Maybe the only person in the world.
(Sometimes, when Richard thought about the fact that Balin most likely wasn’t real at all and Richard couldn’t ever really talk to him, he would be incredibly sad and angry at the same time and didn’t like talking to anyone at all. There were worlds and people inside his head that he would love to share with his parents, but Richard wasn’t five anymore. One of his classmates liked talking about his Aunt Isabella and how she always said that people talked to her in her head and how everyone called her crazy.
Richard thought he knew what ‘crazy’ meant: it was something bad, and he didn’t want to be bad.)
When Richard told his teacher that he thought that his face and body looked wrong to him and he wasn’t sure why, she was all worried and called up his mother. Richard was kept outside the room, but he could hear words like ‘anorexia’ and ‘bulimia’ and ‘disorders’ being thrown around and he wasn’t quite sure what to make of all that, especially when his mother came out of the room looking angry and worried all at once.
Despite his mother’s worries, Richard knew that he wasn’t ill, not really. It was just that he disliked looking into the mirror because of the nagging surprise at the back of his mind. The height was right, but his body was too skinny – he should be bigger, more muscular, with a full beard like some of his dad’s friends who came to their house sometimes for drinks. It was a ridiculous thought, because he was only ten years old, and boys didn’t have beards. But he couldn’t help but think that he looked wrong without a beard, and shouldn’t beards have come in already at his age?
That night, he sat on his bed with his blankets covering his head and told Balin all about it. Maybe Balin was just a figment of Richard’s imagination like his mother insisted that Frerin was, but he was wise nonetheless, and he told Richard gently that he was a boy and it was all right that he didn’t have a beard just yet, and he could always grow one when he was older. One day, Balin continued, Richard would grow taller and start towering over everyone like his father, and that was alright as well.
Because he was Richard now.
Was that what being Richard meant? Balin was confusing, and there was something in his eyes that Richard didn’t understand: a look that hid secrets. Maybe this had something to do with how sometimes Richard didn’t respond to calls of his name because he didn’t realise that it was his name. He never had any other names: his parents had always called him ‘Richard’, never ‘Rich’ or ‘Dick’ or any other nicknames.
There was someone else, Richard knew. Someone who lived inside his head and went by another name. Someone who was stout and strong even though he was short; someone with long hair and a full beard and the same bright blue eyes as Richard. Richard had been trying to get Balin to tell him who it was and why that man didn’t talk to him like Balin did, but Balin never told him. He always only turned away with a sad look in his eyes, and Richard stopped asking after a while.
Maybe Balin would tell him once he was older and grew a beard. Richard didn’t quite believe in that, but there was nothing else that he could do.
(And he was sure, absolutely sure, that Balin was his friend – if Balin was only a figment of his imagination, then he would have told Richard anything he wanted to know. But friends couldn’t force friends to tell them anything if they didn’t want to
No, he knew that Balin was real. As real as Frerin was, even though the brother-who-was-not-really-his-brother went away in the end.)
*
When Lee was nine, his parents moved back to America. But they didn’t move to Oklahoma; no, Lee found himself in an entirely new place called Houston, in the state of Texas, and it was a place as strange as Saudi Arabia had been when he first arrived.
In Houston, Lee, his parents, and his brother and sister lived in a house instead of a flat. A large house it was, with an even bigger garden at the back where his mother grew blackberry bushes. In the summer, Lee would help her harvest the big, fat berries, and his mother would make sticky-sweet pies out of them. Summer was always his favourite season; not only because of the pies, but because his mother would let him sit in the gardens and prune the blackberry canes. Lee would take the stiff stems and tried to bend them, trying to follow an image in his mind.
But the canes were always of the wrong colour, and when Lee put the makeshift crown on his head, it never really looked as it should. His hair shouldn’t be brown, he thought; his eyes shouldn’t be grey. Maybe, he thought as he stood in front of the mirror, the colours were wrong because he was wrong. He tried to remind himself of that with the next crown he made, but his fingers seemed to follow different laws. The crown was still too large for him, slipping over his head and dropping onto his shoulders. He was still too small for it.
Lee kept the crowns he made every year ever he was eleven, the year when the bushes started to bear fruit. Sometimes he would dry the blackberries that his mother hadn’t made into pies and tried to thread them onto the edges of the crown, but that didn’t look quite right either.
Sometimes Lee thought that he saw the world through glass like a funhouse mirror even though he didn’t need spectacles. Wrongness draped over him, pulled so tight until he could barely breathe. (He wrote that in one of his essays for school, and his teacher said the phrase was good, so Lee liked using it in his thoughts.) The world didn’t fit quite right around him, and maybe that was the reason why Lee sometimes forgot who his parents were.
Or maybe it was because his father was away for most of the year, and he only came back in summer when Lee felt the least like himself and most like someone else, someone so much older than Lee’s small body felt far too small, as if it was trying to contain someone who was far larger. Maybe it had something to do with how he sometimes he felt so old that he wanted to crawl into the bushes and become a tree, one of those big oaks his mother had once showed him, the ones that were hundreds of years old.
(Hundreds didn’t seem old enough. Lee could count up to millions by now, but the numbers always seemed so far away, so ‘hundreds’ would have to do. It was safe enough.)
Summer days were beautiful, but on summer nights, Lee’s fingers would still be stained dark red with blackberry juice no matter how hard he washed them. He would lie on the bed staring up at his hands then, and his thoughts would inevitably shift, the aged voice inside him commenting that the stains looked like blood.
Lee loved summer mornings and afternoons; loved the scent of baking blackberry pies, of flowers in full bloom, of sunlight as it landed on grass and leaves, and even the sticky feel of sweat as it stuck to his skin because he had the excuse of jumping into the lake near the house and cooling off in the bright sunshine. But with summer mornings came summer nights, and those nights Lee always hated, because that was when the nightmares came.
Sunshine was replaced by red light, of the sun trying hard to burst through dark clouds and failing. There was always fire burnt to the back of Lee’s eyelids, and he saw a mountain rising dark and tall in front of him, belching dark smoke that darkened the skies even further. He knew from science class that it was a volcano, but it didn’t explain why he always felt terrified whenever he looked upon it, as if someone was watching him, always watching him from the moment he closed his eyes.
On summer nights when Lee was in bed, covers kicked off, he dreamt of blood and fire. There was a man with long golden hair he thought of as his father, though he knew his father’s hair was dark and short. There was blood was over his hair, over Lee’s hands, red staining gold. He would hear a sound, strange and low, and no matter how many times he had the same dream, he was always surprised to realise that he was making that sound.
When he woke up, he would be shaking in the humid air, the sight of glassy blue eyes stamped into his mind. Then, every summer night, he would drag himself out of bed, padding to the bathroom and staring into the mirror.
He didn’t have blond hair and blue eyes; none of his family did. And even though he knew he looked wrong, he found himself happy for the wrongness. He looked different, and it proved that his dreams were only dreams in the end.
Sometimes he had trouble remembering that. Once, when his father was helping them pick blackberries, he pricked his finger on a thorn and tore the skin. Blood had welled up then, and Lee had stared at the thick redness. He heard the winds then, and thought he smelled something like rotten eggs and fire mixed together. It was gone in a flash, but Lee couldn’t stop himself for running forward, holding tight onto his father’s leg as if he could stop him from disappearing if he just held hard enough.
He told no one of his dreams. Maybe it was a little silly, a little childish, but Lee couldn’t help but hope that if he said nothing, then the dreams would remain only that – and they would not come true no matter how real they felt.
***
Three.
Richard lived his life surrounded by metal.
His father was a welder – he learned the word by the time he was seven, to fill in the forms in school – and he always came home smelling of sweat, hot steel, dust and fire. Even though his father always protested that he was dirty, Richard couldn’t help but want to stand near him and breathe in the scent.
When his father brought him to his workplace when he was twelve, Richard had stared, wide-eyed, at the bright lights of the gas flames and lasers and a tool he was told later named the electric arc. The factory his father worked at mostly made automobile parts, but in the past, he was told, swords and axes and knives and guns were all made, though by different methods than now. Methods that used flames instead of electricity, and when his father told him that, Richard thought he was suddenly in another world, surrounded by familiar fire with anvils and hammers surrounding him.
Fire and metal always went together in Richard’s mind.
The first time Richard had sat on his father’s lap, peering over the edge of the table to watch him sketch, he was two and barely capable of stringing a sentence together. But he wanted to draw even then, and he learned how to make shapes even before he knew how to write properly. Square things he drew, full of angles and straight lines (he never really needed a ruler for those), and though he liked circles and curves, he didn’t think it was quite what he wanted.
There was a design he returned to over and over. The basic of it was this: a large square with a diamond in the centre, and tiny triangles at the side. Right in the very middle was a gem. He didn’t quite know how to describe it, because Richard had never been particularly good with words. His skill was with his hands, not his tongue, and so instead of telling, he drew it instead.
He drew it again and again, especially when Balin left and puberty came. Richard had been expecting that Balin would leave, because he was getting a little too old for invisible friends, but it still hurt, nonetheless, because now he had no one to talk to about the things that he saw in his mind. He knew he wasn’t mad, but no one ever truly knew, and he didn’t want to worry his parents all over again.
So instead of speaking, he drew. He bought a big sketchbook and a large bag just to hold it, and when school ended, he would walk down to the train station and take the subway. There was nowhere he particularly wanted to go – nowhere he could go, really, outside of Leeds where he lived – but he liked the movement of the train; liked the smell of people as they crowded in and the burning metal of the tracks as the trains moved. It was hot and the air barely moved, and that felt exactly like home to him, for it made him think of high mountains and cities carved within their insides. His feet always felt more comfortable when they could sink beneath the soil, and as he drew, seated on the metal bench of the subway, he imagined he could hear the heartbeat of the Earth itself, right beneath him.
It was rare for someone to like living underground, he knew. Humans preferred to live in large, open places where they could see the sky. But the stars and moon and sun had never given him much joy – he found those only in what came from underground, from metals and stones and heat. The beauty of nature was for someone else to enjoy, someone else whose name he always had on the tip of his tongue but could never form in full.
Sometimes, surrounded by people pressed together in the crowded subway, Richard thought that maybe he wasn’t human. He looked into the dark windows of trains and found that his long legs and arms – always spoken of in admiration by his classmates – were wrong. He should have been shorter, broader, built less like a creature of living blood than a boulder with a face and body made by the constant wearing of winds and rains and springs from mountains.
Like the Stonehenge down south, except even older; a creature who belonged to a world that no longer existed and only Richard remembered. A creature who was both Richard and not-Richard, yearning for a home that could be found on no map, no matter how far back in history Richard searched.
So he stopped looking and started making instead. He drew and drew, broke dozens of pencils and went through even more sketchbooks. Hexagons and octagons and squares and triangles, hundreds of designs that might one day find life breathed into them by the fires of his father’s welding shop.
In the middle of the ceiling, where he could see it when he laid in bed, Richard placed the design that had haunted his dreams for as long as he could remember.
*
Planted on the grounds of Lee’s new high school was a tall oak tree.
Sometimes when he felt lonely – when the ages he did not live but could still remember was almost impossible to bear – he would sit beneath the tree with his eyes closed and talk to it. Not out loud, of course; not even with his lips moving, because he didn’t want anyone to come over to tease him about who he was talking about. More importantly, though, he simply didn’t need to, because he felt that the tree would hear him whether or not he made a sound.
Maybe that was what people meant when they talked about their faith in God; maybe that was why they prayed whenever they felt alone. But God had always felt so far away for Lee, like he was not his God no matter what his parents believed. He found his faith in the crunching of the grass beneath his feet, in the blooming of flowers at mid-morning, in the setting of the sun and rising of the moon, and always in the awe he felt whenever he saw his family’s gardens and realised that the plants had grown even more, fed only by water and sunlight.
He should have been born ten to fifteen years earlier, he thought sometimes; he should have been born and grown during the time of the hippies, when the country loved nature and though people might think him odd, there would still be those who understood him. But even fifteen years was far too little for how old he felt, like he should have been born in the time before the history books were even written, before the Egyptians and the Greeks and the Babylonians, in the time so far past that none remembered it.
Lee might have felt at home then.
(No, he wouldn’t have, and he knew that well enough. But sometimes he liked dreaming that he was born in another time, in another place, where he would be comfortable and did not feel the constant weight of living pressed upon his shoulders.)
He read the stories of the past; histories they were called, but to Lee the lives of the people who lived in the times before was as unreal to him as the legends and fairy tales that they told. He read everything he could get his hands on even though reading was difficult for him, the words sliding away out of his grasp, the sounds alien on his tongue. But he persevered, pushing through it because he didn’t think he had a choice – he had to look, had to find somewhere that would make the names and places that came to him more and more often now make sense.
In the end, he had found nothing. He read every single fantasy story he could get his hands on, from the great epics like Gilgamesh to George MacDonald and C.S. Lewis to the latest ones, all the different worlds with strange beings. He read of Elves as written by the Norse, but there was something wrong with that too, because the ones in his head looked nothing like the ones described, whether they were Light or Dark. Their language was different, as clumsy as English felt on his tongue. No, they were even more alien, for at least with English he had his family and the world he lived now in and surrounded him even though at times he could barely feel it beneath his own feet.
Where was Greenwood the Great? Where were the large halls of its Kings, with caves with high arches, its air smelling of trees and wood and leaves? Where were Doriath’s forests? Surely he knew them once; surely they existed, for Lee could see them whenever he closed his eyes, with bright colours and solid ground and scents that he could never find in the waking world.
Maybe that was why he talked to the trees. They might have knowledge gained from the soil their roots had sunk themselves into decades ago. Yet no matter how many times he spoke to them, they had never once replied. Of course they didn’t, the sensible part of him said, because they were trees and trees had no language. But Lee knew that to be wrong, because there were people in the shape of trees once, named Ents, the tree-shepherds, and he knew them, had spoken to their leader before he crossed the seas.
(Was it really him who did all those things and lived all those millennia? Lee didn’t know, and answers were scarce to non-existent for him.)
He told the trees the tales he remembered and those he lived through, hoping they could understand, at the very least. (That was all he could hope for, these days.) But Lee couldn’t change images into words easily – they did not come naturally to him – so one day he brought a notebook to his oak tree in the school’s gardens, and he wrote down one tale, one of the most beautiful he knew, forming words with clumsy hands that wanted to write a language that was as alien to him as it was habitual.
Lee told the tree that story; read it in his mind. The oak made no answer, but the words were real and solid. Maybe he might not be able to find the world he sought so desperately, but he thought that he could try to create it in words.
And one day, if he was brave enough, he would try to share the story, to try to find if there was anyone in the world who remembered the beauty of Arda and Greenwood with its sprawling canopies and half-lights.
Once upon a time, there was a Kingdom named Doriath. It was a land of forests; of oaks and beeches and many other tall, old trees. Doriath was ruled by King Thingol the Silver-Haired, who was wise and strong, and Queen Melian the Sorceress, powerful and beautiful. The Queen protected the realm with her magicks, and the King ruled it with a firm hand.
The King and Queen have a daughter, the Princess Lúthien, and she was the loveliest creature in all the world, even more than her mother the Queen. This story is about the Princess, and how she fell in love with a warrior stumbled into Doriath, passing the Queen’s barriers with the gentle goodness of his heart. The warrior’s name is Beren, and he had just lost his home…
***
Four.
“The pictures don’t come to me one by one,” Richard tried to explain. “I see them all at the same time. I see a city under a mountain full of beautiful things made out of metal. They are not my designs, not really; they seem more like vague memories I try to recapture, try to make real.”
“A city under the mountain,” Annabel repeated in a murmur. She looked at him, eyes bright with a small smile on her lips. “Does it have a name?”
Richard looked at her. It was a gamble he was taking, to tell her, and though he had taken the first step, it would be easy enough to say that he was imagining all of it. But he had been dating Annabel for two years now, and was entertaining thoughts of marrying her (because his parents were nudging him about it, saying that he was getting older and should think of settling down). Besides, she might not be the daughter of a welder, but she appreciated metal and the smell of a welding shop, and she loved beautiful things.
If he couldn’t tell her, there was no one else he could tell.
“Erebor,” he said finally. “Its name is Erebor, or maybe the Lonely Mountain. There are many names for it.”
“It sounds like a beautiful place,” she said, leaning back and stretching her hands up until her palms were flat against the wall of Richard’s bedroom. The movement tugged at the covers until they fell down her breasts, exposing them. Richard pulled them back up, and Annabel laughed.
“Beautiful is pretty appropriate,” he said cautiously. “There are just so many things I see whenever I think of it, and whenever I’m trying to capture one specific thing, I have to concentrate.”
“Do people live in this city?”
Richard tipped his head up, staring at the design pasted onto the ceiling right above his bed. It had followed him from Leeds to London, and now Richard knew what it was: the setting of the Heart of the Mountain, the Arkenstone, when it had sat above the head of Thrór, King under the Mountain.
“Not people, exactly,” he glanced to the side, and found her still attentively listening. “They were Dwarves, short and stout and strong, and they lived under the mountain to mine it and to make beautiful things from what they found from it.”
“Dwarves?” Annabel gave a startled little laugh. “Do you mean actual short people or the Dwarves who live in shoes and such things?”
“Those are Elves,” Richard corrected. He ducked his head, fingers wrapping around the sheets as he sighed. “They’re… Dwarves. Not of the kind you can find in any of the mythologies. I’m not quite sure how to describe them, really.”
“Okay,” Annabel shrugged, dropping back against the pillows. “Tell me about the things they made?”
“Swords and axes and mattocks,” Richard said, and he laughed quietly to himself. “Things they actually used, really. But there’s jewellery too: chains and pendants, bracelets and anklets, and even metal beads that they braid into their hair.” And their beards, he almost said, but he kept the words back, watching Annabel from beneath his eyelids carefully. “They could make alloys of a dozen different colours out of metal, and the colours they can’t make, they use gems for it.”
He could see Erebor beneath his half-lidded eyes as he spoke of it, the city of stone decorated with polished metals and gleaming gems, its inhabitants decorated with tiny lights in their beards and hair; and some, like Thorin’s grandfather, with larger metal pieces that held the hair neatly in place. The throne room was the most magnificent; almost blinding in the noonday light that shone through the crystal-cut windows that broke through the mountain’s surface, built there to show off Erebor’s riches.
“There’s a gem in the centre of that, isn’t there?” Annabel asked, breaking Richard’s revelry. She raised her hand and pointed to the ceiling. “It looks like a giant diamond.”
Richard winced. He remembered the Arkenstone, the memory of it bitter like soot on his tongue. Thorin had lost so much for its sake, and though now Richard was older and knew the loss was not his own, he still felt it aching in his chest.
“It’s a big gem, like a clear opal, really,” he struggled to explain it in English, without mentioning the word Arkenstone. “All the colours of the rainbow are caught within its depths.” He paused, and rubbed the back of his neck. “It’s set in green metal and set upon the high chair, like a throne, and it’s bigger than my fist.”
Annabel whistled, tilting her head up. She formed a square with her fingers, squinting her eyes as she looked through it.
“It sounds like the Hope Diamond,” she said, laughter in his voice. “Why did you draw that? It’s probably never going to be made, because there’s no gem of that size.”
“I keep seeing it in my head,” he shrugged, staring down at the covers again. “Don’t you draw things sometimes that you never end up making?”
“Yeah,” she said. “But I’ve never pinned it up on my ceiling, or make up a whole story about it.” She glanced at him, eyes sharp. “I’ve seen it there since the first time I came in, you know. The whole story about Erebor… it seems to be about that jewel.” She nudged him, chuckling under his breath. “You should really write it.”
And Richard knew, at that one moment, that she wouldn’t understand. He might be giving up too easily, but the knowledge came to him, unbidden like all others, and he barely managed to swallow the sigh.
“I’m not a writer,” he said instead. “Besides, it’s not really a story. Just a place I see sometimes.”
There were stories of Erebor too, stories that he knew. But Richard’s knowledge of that world – of Middle Earth – was scattered, vague, because Thorin had been fixated on Erebor for the whole of his life, caring little else than his quest to regain his homeland. Maybe he should write Thorin’s story, but that was too much like writing his own, and Richard was never the sort to bare his soul like that, especially not on paper.
“Places have stories too,” Annabel mused. She leaned in and pressed a kiss on his cheek. “I won’t press, but if you ever decide to write about this, I’ll love to read or listen to it.”
“Thank you,” Richard said, sliding his hand into her hair. He kissed her full on the lips, devoured her mouth, but there was already something missing, and the place he kept for her in his heart turned cold and still. Eyes sliding closed, he found himself wishing that he never knew Erebor, that he never had those dreams.
It was a cruel fate, to be forced to be as lonely as Thorin Oakenshield had been.
*
“You should publish the stories, you know,” Matt was telling him through a mouthful of fries. “I’ll even ask for publishing contacts for you, once I get to New York. Or even a playwriting gig.” He grinned.
Lee picked at his food, dragging a soggy fry through a puddle of ketchup. He knew he should eat, because he hadn’t eaten the whole day; he had been far too nervous about letting Matt read the stories, in the vain hope that he would change his mind about leaving Texas to pursue his acting career.
The feeling of being left behind was so familiar that Lee hated it even before he felt it the first time. (He had always hated the sound of crying gulls.)
Peeking through lowered lashes at Matt, he shoved the fry into his mouth to give himself an excuse to not talk for a while.
“You really think so? You’re not having me on, are you?”
“I promise I’m not,” Matt said, eyes earnest as he leaned forward, arms folded on the table. “The stories are great. And look, I was thinking… If you get published and you become a famous author, then you can move to New York with me, the famous movie star.”
Lee snorted. “If you’re famous, then it’ll be better if I don’t come to New York.”
“We managed fine in Texas, didn’t we?” Matt gestured around himself with the fry, as if the diner was representative of the whole state. “Besides, one, the film and theatre industries are full of gay people already, and two, we’re only twenty, and it’ll take years before we become famous. Surely things would’ve changed by then.”
“Maybe,” Lee answered, pushing back from the table to lean on the chair. Not for the first time, he wondered what was so wrong with him that he never managed to believe in his own invincibility and the eternal hope that was supposedly inherent in youths their age.
But he knew the reason already, and despite all of the stories Thranduil had given to him, sometimes Lee couldn’t help but resent the Elf. He couldn’t help it, really, because he always thought that things would be far simpler and all of his problems would be solved if he didn’t remember.
(That was something childish, and Lee hoarded that feeling to his chest, negative though it might be. It was something wholly his own, and that was rare nowadays.)
“Promise me that you’ll try to send something if I manage to get you contacts, at least,” Matt said suddenly, and the solemnity in his eyes made Lee pause.
“Why do you want me to?” he asked, the question blurting out of him.
“I don’t think those stories should be kept hidden in an attic, much less in your head,” Matt stated, picking out a salad leaf with his hand and chomping on it. “Besides, it’s something important to you, isn’t it? It’s the world you’ve been living in even before I knew you, and if you publish it… maybe you’ll find people who’d want to live there too.”
Lee started. He had never thought of that. Writing was just a way of coping with his memories, of trying to make Arda into something real. Matt was the first person he had ever trusted enough to show any of his writing. He didn’t understand it, and despite Lee’s faint hope that Matt would react by telling him quietly that he had the same memories, this reaction made him happy enough.
“Do you want to live in it, now that you’ve read it?” he asked softly.
Matt shook his head. “It’s a nice vacation spot for the few hours I spent reading,” he said, grinning. “But you know me. I live too much in the real world. There’s enough to fight for here without trying to explore someplace else.”
Lee couldn’t help it: he burst out laughing at that.
“There, good,” Matt murmured, and he reached over the table, poking Lee on the nose. “I was wondering if you’d even smile today. Don’t make me worry about you all over in New York, alright?”
“I should be the one worried,” Lee shot back immediately, and this was easy, with Matt, the kind of banter built over their years together. “You’re going over to another city in a whole other state alone.”
“It’s either I try my luck or I end up in the Alley Theatre for all of my life,” Matt said, matter-of-fact though his smile had faded. “And that’s just not going to happen.”
“Yeah,” Lee said. “I know.”
He did know; knew, too, that this was coming. Lee was staying in Texas even when most of the people he knew were leaving. Maybe he was afraid; or maybe he had a masochistic streak in him, a small part that wished to relive Thranduil’s life in the best way he could, watching as everyone else left him behind.
Both, most likely.
“Anyway, aside from depressing things,” Matt waved a hand, breaking Lee out of his thoughts as he always did. “How’s college?”
“Full of science and plants and things that you won’t ever understand,” Lee drawled. He laughed under his breath, chomping on a fry.
“That’s because your major is boring,” Matt snorted.
“My field of study helped make the potato you’re eating,” Lee said haughtily. He grinned for a moment. “While you’re prancing around pretending to be other people, I’m doing something useful.”
Matt threw a fry at him, and Lee laughed. He would miss this, he thought suddenly. Not just Matt’s presence, but the comfort he felt with him and the steady, unwavering knowledge that Matt was his, wholly Lee’s and Lee’s alone. Matt had always been able to chase off Thranduil’s ghost whenever he saw it threatening to take over Lee. Though, for Matt, it was just ‘cynicism’.
“I’ll miss you, you know,” Lee blurted out suddenly, catching Matt mid-retort.
“You better,” Matt said, jabbing his fry in Lee’s direction. But he sobered almost immediately. “You better know that I’ll miss you too.”
Lee opened his mouth to reply, but Matt wasn’t finished.
“And you haven’t answered my question.”
“Which one?”
“Promise me you’ll send something if I manage to convince to get an agent to give me his number and email address,” Matt said, and despite the casual words, the look in his eyes was completely serious. “Sometimes I look at you and I don’t recognise the person standing in front of me. Reminds me of The Invasion of Body Snatchers, really, but I know that it’s just me, and there are bits of you I’ll never get.” He shrugged.
“You deserve to find someone who will understand all of you.”
And there was this too, that Matt could see through him so wholly, no matter what he said. Lee let out a sigh, rubbing his eyes hard. “I don’t know if I ever will,” he whispered. There were six billion people in the world; what were the chances that he would run into the one person as haunted by Arda as he was?
Matt smacked him upside the head.
“You can’t just wait for things to come to you,” he pointed out while Lee was still wincing.
“Guess so,” Lee said. He glanced upwards, but Matt’s expression hadn’t changed in the past few minutes, and he sighed. Maybe it was time for him to be braver.
“Yeah. I promise.”
There was something else that he shared with Thranduil too. Honour was an outdated concept in this world and time, but Lee still believed in keeping his promises.
***
Five.
“He waited in Valinor just for the years to pass,” Lee said, tapping his heels against the stone bench. He glanced over to Richard, eyes involuntarily trying to catch any sign of disbelief – it was habit bred over a long time, and he still couldn’t help himself. “It’s strange, really, because he had everything he thought he ever wanted in Valinor – his father and mother, his wife, his children… Yet he found himself waiting for the years to pass. After the third thousandth year, he thought he should have stayed in Arda instead of taking the ship to the West. At least the years would pass faster in the world of Men.”
Richard looked at him, his smile crooked. His hand reached up, fingers catching the small strands of hair at Lee’s neck, gently tugging.
“I don’t remember any of that,” he said quietly. “But Thorin remembers how it feels like to walk through Mirkwood. It was dark and dank and there were spiders, and sometimes I think that if he had lived longer, he would have nightmares about the gnawing feeling of hunger that was there at every moment.” He paused, his eyes fixed upon the ground. “Sometimes I feel like I’ll never be full, and at the moment…”
“You don’t know whether you are yourself, or if you’re him,” Lee finished for him, smiling wryly. “I feel the same way sometimes.”
He turned away from Richard, his hands reaching upwards as if trying to grab hold of the sky. The stars were bright tonight; there were no clouds to obscure their light, and the moon was a bare crescent in. Lee had always loved the stars, but he couldn’t help the urge to reach up and try to rearrange them, to nudge them into fitting into the configurations that he remembered them being in.
“Have you ever wondered where it is that they had lived?” Lee murmured. He could feel Richard’s eyes darting to him, but this was a line of questioning they had revisited before, as comfortable as an old jacket draped upon his shoulders (or a familiar sword, or the crown upon the Elvenking’s head). “I have been trying to look for any signs of Arda on the map throughout my life, but I’ve never found it.”
Richard leaned in, their shoulders nudging against each other and his heat familiar, so close to Lee’s skin.
“No, I don’t know,” he murmured. “I always thought that I made it up myself, in my own head, until I read your book and saw my fantasies there.” His eyes flickered towards Lee, and there was warmth there that made Lee shiver. “Reading what you wrote made me feel like coming home to a place I have never seen before and which I have always looked for.”
Richard paused. “That sounds ridiculous and contradictory, doesn't it.” It wasn't a question; they had seen themselves in each other's eyes, and Lee knew what Richard was looking for. Something only Lee could give.
“It is,” he acknowledged, half-shrugging. “But the way we are now is ridiculous anyway. Remembering a world that doesn't exist; trying to assert ourselves against two people whom no one but us had ever heard of.” He quirked a smile, his eyes flickering from Richard. “Don't most people believe they are Cleopatra or Alexander the Great in their past life?”
“I like it better this way,” Richard said, reaching out with hand. It hovered above Lee's cheek for a moment before dropping to his shoulder. “At least, I do now. It's something just between the two of us. A mythology that only we know. Isn't that a good thing?”
“Maybe. But I can't help but think of Semele. She knew Zeus like no mortal ever did, and she died for it.” Lee bit his lip, shaking his head. “I know I'm being depressing, but it is summer.”
He didn't need to explain; Richard knew what he meant. They had been speaking like this for a while now: with half-spoken words, hovering silences, and their eyes seeking each other. A code only they could understand, crafted by the hands of two men who knew what it felt like to literally not be human.
Across the skies, familiar alien stars danced. Lee looked upwards, and wondered wryly if the Star-Kindler ever knew her creations were mere gas and flame and light. There was a good reason why he wrote of Beren and Lúthien; of the two great lovers as a fairytale. That was how the world felt like to him, despite Mirkwood's darkness and the endless, sorrowful life the Elf he once was had led.
“It's a good thing,” Richard repeated when the silence between them stretched out. He fell silent almost immediately, but Lee only waited without saying a word.
“But sometimes...” Richard exhaled, nearly a sigh. “I feel a cage slam shut around me. I feel trapped, a piece of metal thrust into the forge and hammered into something unfitting to the alloy. Like I'm forced by something I can't help and has never asked for into becoming someone I have never asked or even wanted to be.”
They had walked down this path before. It was a dark one, without any answers, but the road was well-trodden and lines rehearsed.
“Do you think we're anything like them?” Lee murmured.
Richard glanced at him for a long moment. “We look like them, don't we?”
Lee shook his head. “Maybe superficially. But I'm human in a way he had never been, and isn't that the same for you?” He cracked a half-smile. “That might be an answer itself, right?”
“Maybe.” He raised his head, gaze solemn on Lee's. “Do you think we would have still been drawn to each other if they weren't there? If we were our own persons, without entire histories and other lives in our heads?”
Are these truly our own emotions? Or are we forced to be the second chance of two uninvited guests who have accompanied us from childhood until now? Lee could hear the questions as they hung in the air, and he stared upwards. The moon unveiled himself from behind the clouds, but Lee didn't notice.
“I don't know,” he whispered eventually. He knew the answer wasn't disappointing to Richard; this too was a familiar path. “I can't imagine myself without him.”
“Funny; neither can I.” Richard shook his head, long strands of hair falling into his eyes and brushing against the edge of his jaw. “We're talking in circles.”
“We always do about this,” Lee pointed out, wry humour in his voice. “Where else can we go when the world we should go to for answers no longer exists? Might not have ever existed?”
Richard heaved a sigh.
“My mother asked me how I met you,” he said finally, taking the conversation into unknown territories now. “I didn't know what to tell her. I didn’t want to lie.”
Again, Lee heard in the silence. He understood that too; much of their lives were spent lying to parents, to siblings, to friends. Just so no one would think them mad.
“What did you say?”
“That we met at your book signing, and I was passing by the shop.” Richard let out a sigh, heavy as secrets.
“That's not a lie,” Lee pointed out, trying to reassure.
“It's an omission of truth.”
“We're both used to those.”
“Yeah, but I still wish...” Richard trailed off. He shrugged, a helpless little moment.
Lee glanced over to him. “Mm. I know.” He sighed. “You know, the stars still look wrong to me, even after all this time.”
“For me, it's the architecture, no matter where I am.” Richard shook his head. “Let's go back.”
As Richard stood up to head towards his apartment, Lee followed him. They walked the roads of England that were still strange to Lee, but strangeness was something he had gotten used to. Like an ache at the base of his spine, an itching in the very depths of his mind – something so constant that he had stopped noticing it long ago, and would only realise it was there if, when, it was gone.
(There was just that once. But once was more than enough to change a person’s life; he knew that as well as the taste of his own sweat.)
When Lee stepped into Richard’s bedroom, he always felt like he was an intruder, no matter how well he knew that he was absolutely welcome. The non-human, absolutely Elven part of him twitched at the sight of the drawings pasted on every available corner – hexagons and angles and the King under the Mountain’s seal. The posts of the bed was metal, as were the legs of the armchair and even the nightstand, and the shapes in the drawing were given solid, three-dimensional form in the twisted and welded metals. Lee stood at the door of the bedroom and thought, as he always did, that it was as if Richard was trying to turn small room into Erebor as much as he could.
Lee knew that Richard might not be able to recreate the feel of the Earth stretching above his head or the constant scent of burnt metal, but his efforts tried to capture the small things, the things he could create and make believe were brought from another world.
It was easy to understand why, because Lee’s own rooms back in America were built along the same lines, though it focused more on wood than metal, with plants with every corner that he could spare. He didn’t have a proper house – he couldn’t afford one, and he had grown comfortable.
Maybe this thing he had with Richard was something he had grown comfortable with as well. Lee lidded his eyes and tried to convince himself to stop thinking so much as Richard nudged him onto the bed. He drew his pants down, nails scraping against his own skin as the hemline slipped off, and his eyes were fixed upon the ceiling, upon the giant piece of paper that tried to replicate the huge, high ceilings that he barely remembered.
He reached upwards, his hands spreading outwards. Richard’s mouth was warm on his throat, and Lee arched, toes grabbing the belt-loops of Richard’s jeans, drawing them off. The clunk of metal buttons and heavy denim hitting the heavy floors was incongruous, unfitting, and Lee drew that feeling within himself even as he pulled Richard on top of him.
Sometimes he couldn’t quite tell when he ended and Thranduil begun; sometimes he was consumed by the thought that maybe he loved Richard because Thranduil never had a chance to love Thorin. There were a thousand possibilities, and Lee didn’t have the time to try out all of them. He wasn’t immortal, and so had to choose what to believe.
That was okay; that he was used to. He had been doing that all this while, clinging onto his faith with white-knuckled hands, trying his best to believe that he was not a madman who had found another who was simply mad in the same way.
***
Zero.
The very first time Thorin, son of Thráin, son of Thrór, beheld the Elvenking in his grandfather’s throne room, he thought him beautiful. The Elf’s hair fell to his hips, a fall of living, liquid gold. Though Thorin already feared the gold sickness then – for he could not help but note the madness slowly creeping into Thrór’s eyes – he could not help but be enraptured by Thranduil’s flaxen hair and fair features, so unlike a Dwarf.
Later that evening, the Elvenking’s minstrels had played during the banquet to welcome the Elven party. As a tribute to the King under the Mountain, Thranduil himself sang a song of the long history of Elves. He sang of Thingol, the grand King of Doriath in the First Age, and his wife, Melian the Maia, who so bewitched him with her beauty that he stood still for years upon decades upon centuries, content to merely look upon her.
Even later night, in Thorin’s sitting room set in the very depths of Erebor where the moon’s light dared not to intrude, Thorin sat with his legs folded underneath him as he listened to Thranduil tell of the Lay of Leithian, of Lúthien Tinúviel, Princess of Doriath, and her mortal love Beren.
Thorin knew even then that there would be no songs made of them. There were songs made of Thranduil already, speaking of his warrior’s strength and king’s wisdom, though none had ever been sung in Erebor’s Halls. If Thorin was well-favoured by Mahal, he would have songs made of him as well; or perhaps chants formed in the Dwarves’ ancient tongue of Khuzdul, as was the way of his people.
But there would be no songs of them, of the love Thorin could already feel blossoming in his heart; of the answer he could see in Thranduil’s eyes. For they were Kings, and they were beholden and wed to their lands and peoples, a bond stronger than any love could ever be.
He had mourned then, in his youth. In that moment as he stood to honour Thranduil’s leaving from his chambers, his hands itched to reach out to him, to the Elf who by a cruel joke of Mahal was his fated one.
In that moment, Thorin wished he could hate the Elvenking. For though he was young, he already knew that hate came easier to the heart than love – it took little courage to hate, after all.
Years later, his wish would be granted. But Thorin would not remember his wistful dreams, not until the day he stumbled off the path of Mirkwood and came upon the sight of the Elvenking again.
By then, it was too late. Hatred was easier indeed, and it had already taken root in his heart, feeding upon the fertile soils made for love’s sowing.
End