Arwen falls in love when she is just ten years old, with the gardens of her father’s home. She likes the smells and the flowers and brushing her hand against the petals’ silk-soft flesh.
But autumn comes to Rivendell and with it, the gardens wilt, and the flowers fall dead at her feet until she cries under the withering trees.
“Galad,” her mother says, wiping the tears from Arwen’s cheeks like they pain her. “Why are you sad?”
“I do not want them to die,” Arwen says, cradling what is left of her first love; half-hearted blooms crumbling in her hands.
“Ah,” Celebrian hums, a melodic sympathy. “What a tragedy it is, to love what does not last. How fortunate that you and I will live forever.”
But what good is living, Arwen thinks, if it causes this much pain?
Her brothers bring her yellow flowers from Lothlórien, which do not die even as they rest on her window sill for many years, but it is not the same. She knows now, what loss tastes like, and so she is not the same, either.
Arwen falls in love again when she is two hundred, in the midst of adolescence, heart overflowing with a song she cannot name. She is in Lórien with her mother and her mother’s mother, and her grandmother’s guard Eregwen.
Eregwen is silver-haired with stern eyes that feel like frost on Arwen’s skin whenever they catch her. She is tall and strong and can shoot three arrows one through the other in the time it takes to blink.
“She is also old enough to be your mother,” Elladan laughs, plucking a golden apple from the tree above their heads.
“Or grandmother,” Elrohir adds, always quick to join in teasing her.
Arwen glares at them both. “What do you two know about love, anyway?” Her brothers have had no great loves of their own, more interested in things like war and glory, fingers inching towards their swords even in their sleep.
When she confesses her love to Eregwen and gives her the bracelet she’s made from a lock of her hair, a token of her affection, the guard accepts it, as graceful and stoic as always, and her refusal is not unkind.
And when Eregwen dies later that same decade in a skirmish with some orcs, Arwen weeps bitterly into her bed sheets though she hasn’t thought of the guard in some years.
Even immortal things are unsafe, she’s learning. There is no soft place to rest her love so that it may not break.
Arwen falls in and out of love enough times in her life to lose track. For she has such a very long life, and time is a difficult thing for immortals to keep track of. It moves differently for them, sometimes stretching languidly in a century that feels like one honey-sweet summer, and sometimes falling over itself in a jumbled up rush.
She is closer to three thousand years old than not by the time she meets the boy called Hope, the false son her father brought home to Rivendell for safe-keeping, as if he was some rich trinket rather than a child.
@fairkid-forever this is the Aragorn/Arwen fic and it’s super short but DELIGHTFUL and also I might write a version because I am madly in love with it.
also that whole tale of aragorn and arwen thing where he saw her in the woods at twenty and fell instantly in love and it’s very beren and luthien? lies.
aragorn decided he was going to marry arwen when he was like, six.
and everyone thought it was just the cutest thing, baby estel with his little crush on the great immortal evenstar, and everyone would tease him about it relentlessly and he would get so mad, and pout, because how dare they doubt his word.
(arwen spent a lot of time biting back smiles and nodding very seriously when aragorn brings this up with her. no, estel, I do not know why they are laughing perhaps they have remembered a particularly funny joke.)
and then aragorn grows into this gangly teen and oh my god can you imagine being a pimply greasy teenager around fucking elves it’s a wonder he has any self-image left. His voice breaks every other word and the laundresses are beginning to wonder if something is wrong with the sheets because estel keeps washing them himself and aragorn wants to die, god, arwen is never going to marry him if he stays all elbows and skinny knees and he can’t even look her in the eye anymore without blushing, eye contact is probably something to look for in a husband–
(arwen, who never had to go through puberty because elves don’t do anything so undignified, tries to comfort him by saying she likes his blemishes. aragorn gives her a look of such utter, miserable despair that she starts laughing.)
(this is a mistake. he spends the next three weeks nursing his wounded ego and refusing to see her.)
estel is twenty when he asks for her hand. he is lean, slender and fair as a new tree, and so arwen does not feel guilt in kissing his cheek and gently refusing. he is still green, he will weather greater storms than this–and he takes it as he should, clasping her hand and swearing to ever be her loyal friend.
they write to each other–when she is in lorien, when he wanders with the rangers of the north, fights alongside gondor, travels to distant lands. it is an inconstant tie–he is rarely afforded time enough to put pen to paper; she is reserved so as not to encourage what may not be. (she signs her letters always, your friend. She likes him too well to be cruel in this.)
the years pass. his weariness and strife creeps onto the page, and she sends him tokens to fend off the darkness–leaves from lothlorien, the ribbon from her hair, snippets of poems. it is not enough it is never enough I am sorry, she writes.
his reply is gentle: you are enough. do not stop writing.
(she carries that letter tucked inside her sleeve for a long while, like a talisman–though against what evil, she does not know.)
she is in the house of her grandmother when a familiar voice calls out to her: my lady luthien!
this is when arwen looks up, sees aragorn–broad of chest and rugged, still wearing his battered mail, with one hand balanced lazily on the pommel of his sword. All the trees of caras galadhon are gold but he is shadow and silver, kingliness resting lightly on his shoulders–
and arwen thinks, oh fuck
Arwen Appreciation Week: Day 4 ➵ Relationship with Aragorn
-Do you remember when we first met?
-I thought I had wandered into a dream.
(Source: coliens, via notbecauseofvictories)
