Okay. Keep your heart rate down, Marillë. Yes, this is the Prince Curufinwe. Yes, he's the most genius Elf in all Aman. But he liked your paper, he asked you to be here. There's nothing to be nervous about.
She knocks on the door.
"People work on their own stuff and occasionally look over your shoulder and have ideas? Yeah. If you need something explained to you you can just ask, but if what you're already working on is valuable no one's going to expect you to put it on pause to have a structured education. If he thinks you're wasting your time he'll point you at a better use of it, but if you're already doing something interesting then there's not much to teach."
"I've been managing."
(It should be weird that someone she doesn't really know is addressing her so familiarly even once you get over the royalty thing but he makes it work, somehow.)
"It was confusing, at first, but your brother Curufinwe explained things to my satisfaction and I've been doing fine since."
"I asked him if the ignoring was normal and if so what being his apprentice would look like and he said yes and described it. I don't think 'hates me in particular' crossed my mind at all--'thought it would be amusing to play a cruel prank by offering me the apprenticeship in the first place' did but I never assigned the possibility much weight."
"Well, I didn't assign it low weight because I thought he was a paragon of virtue who would never, I assigned it low weight because all the negative rumors I heard about him suggested that his issues were due to a lack of ability to--navigate people--not an inclination to wield the ability negatively, but while I would love to be able to say that I think most people would consider that when deciding whether or not to give him the benefit of the doubt, yes, you probably should."
Oh, wow, that dog is giant. Neat. And the guy is pretty.
...She can think of a way to make him prettier. No, she shouldn't do that.
But he's just lying there asleep and looking so cute and tempting and okay she's going to walk carefully over there and balance a vial of glittering powder on his forehead.
She offers her hand for the dog to smell.
...Okay.
(Accompanying the word is the context: she doesn't know what he means by that and she wants to, it itches at her, but he presumably has a good reason that knowing the meaning would reveal and it isn't actually any of her business so she can shelve the question and the curiosity somewhere in the back of her head and not make it his problem until it goes away.)
"Hey.
So--this thing we're doing? I like it a lot. It's fun. But, like, it is escalating--that's part of the point--and there's only so much it can do that before someone gets hurt. Speaking of which, sorry for stealing your stuff. That--could very easily have crossed a line, even if it didn't. And I was asking for my informant's help setting up my next revenge and they asked me what the endgame was and I realized I didn't know."
"...Although your family is significantly prettier than average, and also significantly less foolish...hm...where would you rate Marille and I in terms of prettiness? Maybe there's a relevant correlation we could rub in the faces of people who care about prettiness but not non-foolishness."
I never even told my own parents about my one experimental kiss. I mean, I don't think they'd get seriously upset over it--it was just once, and my dad's pretty chill, and that's--not the kind of thing my mom tends to get unchill over--but sometimes I wonder. If it had worked, if I had felt anything--and they had found out--
Would I have lost them. Because it would be losing them, if they dragged me to Lorien, I'd never be able to forgive them enough to fix what we had had--
"That they think they can just run our lives like that, and people listen--it's Eru's will, they say, and why does Eru will it and why should we hold that to be absolute--people don't say you should do whatever your parents tell you even once you're an adult--and people don't even ask why, they just ruin lives and scramble brains and hearts--"
"Stuck out the rest of the trip to see if I changed my mind. I prefer to give things a full try even if I don't like it at first. I have changed my mind about things in the past and I don't like the idea of missing out on something good because I gave up too fast."
That is really really stupid and what the hell now they have even fewer choices - and uglier ones - the one that she didn't tackle is as astonished as he is, turning around to see why the prey jumped straight at it - he can't even tell if she's been clawed open yet -
- he hammers the other one with the pommel of his knife, cutting it open won't help, and it snarls and turns and he does that again, base of the neck, twice more, and it shrieks at him in annoyance and bewilderment and claws him out of the way - he dodges -
Several hundred miles north and probably several months earlier Marille is throwing herself even more fervently into her work. She supports her twin's traveling-related decisions! But Ahya's absence is lonely and if she is thinking about a fascinating technical problem she isn't thinking about Ahya being out of osanwe range.
"...I mean, she talked to me about it beforehand, I told her to go. It isn't fair to either of us if we can never be apart--and maybe it'll be me who wants to travel next time," she tells him when it comes up. "It--matters more that this be a thing we can do than that I feel lonely while she's gone."
"None! I mean, theoretically this one could be used to push something off the ground but you wouldn't be able to get it very far off the ground under any reasonable circumstances and you'd have to have, like, specially treated iron right underneath it anywhere you wanted it in the air..."
"There's few enough of them that you wouldn't necessarily expect the level of variation that you can find in Elves or--come to think of it--Maiar, but I suppose if you selected fourteen Elves and fourteen Maiar at random you wouldn't necessarily expect them to be unusually similar."
"A bi-directional information imbalance, then.I suppose you could select only from people who were born in Endore and came to Valinor, but that limits the available pool rather sharply...of course, if we're saying we're selecting from all the Elves, ever, we could say we're selecting a future version of any given Elf who has in the interim acquired relevant information."
"Yeah. --I should probably stop thinking about this from this angle, for now, it's not generating any interesting insights and thinking 'but what if I were separated from Ahyadacil for Ages' is particularly--obstructive--when she is in fact not around, it's hard to think reasonably about it."
"Yeah, but--
Ahyadacil has kind of an enormous crush on your brother and she's not planning to, like, tell him that or anything, because apparently girls making a move on him because he's a prince is a thing that happens, but it would make traveling for a Year with her and him really, really awkward."
She does not comment on things she's heard about his lack of celibacy.
"Yeah, I dunno, if she doesn't get over him or something she'll probably bring it up eventually, but not until she's confident that he wouldn't suspect her of only liking him for his prince-ness, and I don't know how long that would take but almost certainly more than a Year."
"Of course. Take care."
And then--
Well, he wasn't wrong about throwing herself into her work and not socializing with people being a bad way to deal with loneliness and she should see her non-twin friends more often.
And after that conversation the choice of friends isn't hard. "Do you want a family" argh.
Vorondie's house is also closer to the palace than to the house of the Prince she's apprenticed to, so.
"The thing where instead of dealing with your emotions like an adult you do not do that. Optional features include unhelpful self-recriminations, deciding you can't do anything about the source of your negative emotions and should therefore pretend they don't exist, deciding you can't do anything about them when this is not in fact true, putting other peoples' needs above your own because their emotions are in their heads instead of yours and therefore less overwhelming..."
And the idea of going through with a Year-long separated engagement sounds like a huge hassle in and of itself, but if we were going to elope I think I would still want to have, like, a nice dinner for the occasion with my sister and parents and maybe a couple of other friends who would know not to make a fuss over it and could testify afterwards that it might have been hasty but it was definitely deliberate, that'd satisfy the people I care about satisfying and also I mostly don't care what people say about me but when I'm an embarrassment to society I do it on purpose and people thinking my potentially unwise marriage was an accident would be deeply annoying.
"Mhm. Her plan was a dinner beforehand--a smaller, private wedding party--with me and our parents and maybe a few other people who could be trusted to be discreet about it. If she actually does start arranging this or asks me to do so, should I see to it that you or any of your brothers are among the few other people?"
"Some of it is stuff she probably should talk to him about it but that stuff she's going to of her own initiative, the rest of it is mostly composing songs to the effect of 'blond hair is so much prettier when the brain under it is not a Vanya and other reasons Tyelcormo is great'."
"It's not just that--she doesn't care about the kind of thing Tyelcormo's gotten up to, and pretty much everyone else does. It's--she thinks that even starting with the assumption that same-sex attraction is as big a deal as everyone thinks it is, 'disownment and/or being pressured to see Lorien about it' is--not an acceptable answer.
I don't disagree."
Mmm. Lack of adrenaline continues to fail to impede your kissing abilities.
I wrote a couple of songs about you and Marille refers to one of them as 'Blond Hair Is Prettier When The Brain Under It Isn't A Vanya And Other Reasons Tyelcormo Is Great,' which is kind of clunky but not actually misrepresentative of the content, wanna hear?
...She's going to refrain from arguing with him about that for the moment. "You're you, and Marille's Marille, and a significant chunk of how she gets along with them involves her being smart--I'm not saying being brilliant is the only way to get along with your family but I think Marille wouldn't fit in as well if she weren't brilliant. Although I could be mistaken, it probably depends on the circumstances, it might be that she would get along with them totally differently if she were interacting with them for non-apprenticeship reasons."
They have a planned marriage, if not a socially acceptable one; they tell not just Marillë but all of both families, and they have a going-off dinner to celebrate a trip out to the coasts, and they come back from the trip married, and no one says a word.
(Some people say words. But they are not worth listening to, and they are not listened to.)
Ohh crap.
"I am almost tempted to accuse you of setting the whole thing up just so you could pleasantly surprise me," she says, because it would be a pleasant surprise under other circumstances. "...This is my friend Vorondie," because she's standing right there and it's way too late for her to sneak away, "I'm sure you already know her, you know everyone."
He has a story about some tedious argument between their fathers, when Findekáno was still a child and Maitimo mostly grown but not yet sure of which rhetorical weapons had replaced innocent cuteness and had decided to handle it by feeding his little cousin lines. Findekáno went off script, but all for the better -
- they travelled together down south, back before there was anything to worry about raising suspicions about, they found a runaway seven-year-old, here's what happened -
- there's a song they wrote together, does she want to hear it -
So respectable! And, conveniently, fun things to do with a friend even when neither of you is actually attracted to the other.
They should probably have their own versions of Ahya's Adult Conversations but that can wait until it would make sense for them to admit to discussing those kinds of things.
"It kind of would. On the other hand, maybe he's so friendly with everyone all the time that his expressing-affection instincts are miscalibrated."
I got permission to tell you the secret but it should probably wait until we get back to the house in case you react noticeably.
It wouldn't surprise me if he just enjoys drama for the sake of drama.
Eventually they get back to the house.
Do you remember when I said that if I had liked girls and my parents had dragged me to Lorien I'd never be able to forgive them, and you commented that it was lucky I was nice and appropriately attracted to boys?
"Well, true, but--most of the city doesn't know him as well as you do, I bet, or her as well as I do--and it's not that I have reason to doubt that they'd be good for each other, but..." she trails off. He certainly appears to be the most emotionally competent Feanorian, but he's still a Feanorian, and Marillë has--reminiscent failure modes--and that could either fail to be an issue or not that.
I don't know. Maitimo gave Marillë some very endearing anecdotes to pass on to me about you but that's not the same as knowing you and marriage is--
I've considered it something completely off the table and not worth the trouble of thinking about with respect to myself for for a while. Habits of thought are hard to break.
Yeah. Differently, though. ...I have so far seen no evidence that growing out of same-sex attraction is a thing people do, except inasmuch as 'was attracted to both to start with, gets married' counts like Tyelcormo did, so if Marille did grow out of it that would imply Lorien, and...she likes to think her parents wouldn't try to drag her there, if they found out.
The King thinks Maitimo should get married and have children before he takes the crown, since he can hardly do it afterwards, so absent a good way to do that I think he was just planning to - watch all his siblings marry and have children and grandchildren, make excuses, wait, wait, wait some more, eventually maybe the King would relent but maybe not -