An Errant Year

Posted originally on the Archive of Our Own at http://archiveofourown.org/works/59523775.

Rating:

Explicit

Archive Warning:

No Archive Warnings Apply

Categories:

M/M, Multi

Fandoms:

The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien

Relationships:

Celebrían/Elrond Peredhel, Celebrían/Elrond Peredhel/Ereinion Gil-galad

Characters:

Celebrían (Tolkien), Celebhîr (FTM trans Celebrían), Elrond Peredhel, Elladan (Tolkien), Elrohir (Tolkien), Elenwë (Tolkien), Turgon of Gondolin (Tolkien), Idril Celebrindal, Galadriel (Tolkien), Ereinion Gil-galad, Original Female Character(s), Celeborn (Tolkien), Elwing (Tolkien)

Additional Tags:

Trans Male Character, Genderqueer Character, Pregnancy Kink, Breeding Kink, Pregnant Sex, Domestic, Shibari, Eggpreg, a truly astonishing commitment to eggpreg, gynandromorphic elrond, Xenobiology, if you spend 2 years writing a tortured mpreg novel, you are entitled to 1 instance of deep dish mpreg porn

Language:

English

Series:

Part 14 of the years start coming and they don't stop coming

Stats:

Published: 2024-10-06 Words: 7,070 Chapters: 4/4

An Errant Year

by lonelyvisitor

Summary

Elrond and Celebhîr make another baby, and look for their home in Aman.

Notes

This is somehow both the most maudlin and the most horny thing that i have ever written, and if you have been following this series you know the rest of it sure holds a high bar!

Note for completionists that the final artistic and emotional flourish of the series is the last chapter of ‘Incarnation’ — this is just a fluffy, kinky lagniappe that i wrote for myself. A real galadriel giving galadriel the presidential medal of freedom of a fic. Particularly if you do not go for the kinks in question feel no obligation to read (one should never feel any obligation to read anything).

Due to sheer volume of text that was the last round of Incarnation i also did not make Aipi beta this one — all errors (and excesses) are my own.

quickening

Chapter Notes

See the end of the chapter for notes

The retreat is Finrod’s suggestion, a Lake Lórellin idyll far enough from the Gardens proper to dodge the somber atmosphere and near enough to make the day trip for a couples’ massage. Oh, it’ll do wonders—he and Amarië spent a half-yén in the area after his re-embodiment. By the end, Celebhîr’s uncle assures him, love had been quite thoroughly renewed.

Celebhîr remains uncertain. When they come to the country and establish themselves at the lakeside cottage, Elrond is still wan and weary, worn out by their sojourn to the Isle of Seabirds and by the year preceding, the child that was and was not there. He takes to bed, and not in a manner that invites his husband’s participation.

Yet Celebhîr too is in need of rest. He finds the cottage grounds and environs more than suitable for his own purposes—lakeswimming in the mornings, and plenty of neighbors down the road willing to share the spoils of their gardens or vineyards, their new wine and ripe tomatoes and wild rice. The dogs too are content, old Porog loping between rabbit-burrows and Thentetheg sunning herself on the back veranda when she tires of barking at the waterfowl.

The days are quiet, without incident. Celebhîr makes simple meals, leaves them out for Elrond to scavenge when he wakes. They have gone long periods of their life together keeping different hours. It is not so strange a thing to cross paths only in the evenings, when Celebhîr is sitting out on the dock with the dogs—and Elrond emerges, walking across the lawn in a tattered houserobe, blinking suspiciously at the sun setting across the lake’s far shore.

Celebhîr soothes Thentetheg, yapping in his lap. “You look pretty.”

Elrond steps gingerly onto the dock. “Very funny.”

“You do, elig—you’re getting your color back. Down, Thente.”

The sausage-hound grumbles jealously, yet she knows to relinquish her place. Elrond is careful to settle his weight on Celebhîr’s good leg, though it would have made little difference—he’s far too thin. Still, the rest has been curative. Celebhîr knows this had been one of his husband’s key principles as the proprietor of a house of healing. When it comes to his health, it is ironic, if not surprising, how rarely Elrond has abided by own advice.

Now the healer tucks himself beneath his husband’s chin. “Thank you for the leek pie.”

“You’re welcome. You should eat the rest of it.”

Elrond makes a noise of consideration as he looks out on the water.

“It’s a bit like Lake Nenuial here.”

The land of Celebhîr’s birth, where he was a girl; a fraught nostalgia. “Fewer bugs.”

Elrond snorts. “Only the picturesque ones. Dragonflies, honeybees, certainly no spiders…I don’t know what all the birds are supposed to be feeding on, anywhere in this continent.”

“Ivon’s very nectars.”

For a moment Elrond is quiet, his mind still as the mirrored lake, shadows shifting in its depths.

“Arwen brought her children to Nenuial, the twins said.”

Elrohir spoke of this when they first came to Valinor, how the King and Queen of Gondor summered at Evendim, as men name that country. Elrond had wept at the mind-pictures, memories of Silmariën and Tyelperína and Tindómerillë and little Eldarion—and Celebhîr with him, from shared delight, the joy of seeing the mother that their daughter had become. So good a thing—and yet there was grief in it as well, nearly too great to be spoken of.

It is well that Elrond will speak now; of the silence had come strange things. “So she did,” says Celebhîr, with gentle encouragement. “I’m very glad of that.”

Elrond curls into his neck. “I miss her.” He speaks softly, nearly in ósanwë. “I always will.”

Yet there is no anguish in his voice, nor his heart, only a kind of relief that passes between them. Celebhîr holds his husband close, murmuring as he bends to kiss his brow.

“And I with you, until the end of Arda.”

###

Times passes, in the strange manner of Aman.

The season here is ever springtime on the cusp of summer, until it turns to summer on the cusp of fall. Celebhîr plants a garden, humored by neighbors willing to share seedlings with a gentleman farmer, and Elrond sings for growth, as he once did amid the rows of terrace-farms in Imladris.

Their crops fare well, for a first attempt, and at harvest-time the children come to visit from Tirion—where Elrohir has taken on the task of introducing Elladan, in his mortal eminence, to the awestruck extended family. To the twins, working with the earth is thus a great reprieve, or else in the kitchen with their father, bickering over recipes they each remember differently.

It dawns on Elrond that these may be the happiest hours they have passed as a family in many centuries. At the dinner table he finds he does not dwell on Arwen’s absence; if anything her presence seems more apparent with each passing day that Elrohir and Elladan share stories of their sister in her last years of life. Elrond meets his daughter again in the minds of her siblings, as he meets her children, and Aragorn as king.

Elladan, too, is a miraculous reacquaintance, his son who will yet be blessed with a century on these shores, at least by the reckoning of the family physician. So like he is, and yet unalike, his uncle Elros, living all those years humbly with his healer-wife, Golheneb, and her kin who became his own.

The cottage brims with all of these beloved people, though in body they are only four.

The warmth lingers even after the twins have left for the city, to an evening when the woodstove crackles against a rare chill, and Celebhîr stirs post-prandial honey-miruvor into spearmint tea. It smells so good Elrond might swoon, were he not already slung over the arm of the overstuffed loveseat.

“We did well with them, didn’t we?”

His mind holds the twins in their respective choices, and Arwen in hers. Their three gifts, their perfect children.

Celebhîr settles at his husband’s side, looking fondly into the firelight.

“We did indeed.”

A thread is trailing from his thought, half-formed.

We might again.

For a moment Elrond thinks it’s the miruvor. And yet they’re hardly drunk; when he rises to meet Celebhîr’s eyes his gaze is steady, green turned gold by flame, and his scarred palm is open, held forth.

Elrond braids their hands. Do you wish that?

Celebhîr draws him onto his lap with a kiss. Do you?

And Elrond has begun to feel a blossoming, as much in his body as between their entwined souls. Yet he will not fully yield to it, heady possibility, liquid want. Instead he wraps his arms over Celebhîr’s shoulders, holding him as close as he had that morning they had met again on Eressëa, or in the grey fog of Mithlond five long centuries before.

Not as a substitute. He is still parsing his own folly, his hurt and healing. For their own sake, their own brilliance.

Elig-nîn, my darling one. Elrond can feel his husband’s grin, among other evidences of delight. How could a child of ours be anything but singular?

###

A humble scene, the unkempt sheets rippling in candlelit shadow, Celebhîr with the pillow underneath his knee. And yet Elrond feels somehow shy, almost hesitant, as he pins up his hair and lets his robes slip to the floor.

On the bed his husband lies half-hard, stroking himself, as he often does absently. So happy he is, still, to feel the weight of his cock in his hand. He looks down through heavy lashes at Elrond crawling toward him.

“How do you suppose that she prepared them?”

The subject he speaks of is clear enough from emphasis. Still Elrond plays the innocent, gently replacing Celebhîr’s fingers with his own, cradling his heavy stones with idle portent.

“Who prepared whom?”

“Why, fell Ungoliant.” Celebhîr answers between hissed breaths. “When she ensnared her wretched mates, and bred herself of them.”

Elrond was wet well before they made it to the bedroom. Now he brims—so prepared to take his husband that the pressure of Celebhîr’s broad thigh between his legs brings him nearly to the edge.

His mind relishes the contours of a well-trodden myth. And devoured them after.

An apt metaphor for sucking cock, and somehow it’s never gotten old. Celebhîr is beautifully large, in his healed form; in a horizontal arrangement such as this, Elrond has learned the limitations of elegance in attempting to bring him to full mast in his throat alone. On another occasion his husband might like to watch this sloppy and determined struggle, from his comfortable vantage—his poor, darling knee—and yet tonight Elrond is more strategic. He alternates between deeply kissing his husband’s cock-tip and licking it from the root; draws Celebhîr to his own brink, plump and primed.

“Seems you have use for me yet.” Celebhîr’s laugh is low, hitching and breaking into voiceless curses when he glances down to behold Elrond at his task. “Ai, look at you.”

Mouth full, Elrond hums. Insatiable.

Gorgeous. Celebhîr growls with contentment. “Get up here.”

He wants a kiss, the romantic. Elrond relents, with a last and wistful lick, and slides up to straddle his husband’s big belly, his cunt slick and open to the plush expanse. When Celebhîr rolls up to meet him it is another rutting, every motion a featherweight from climax, his hard cock leering at Elrond’s backside, his lips rushing to possess him.

Every kiss is their very first, the moment Celebhîr had laid his claim. Elrond is forever flustered, taken out of time—praiseful of the strange choice he once made to turn towards Elvishness. That hapless boy had not foreseen the marvel of this Elvish marriage, and yet this kiss is his doing, this vast love and knowing.

For his beloved knows him very, very well.

“I wonder.” Celebhîr breaks the kiss, sets coaxing hands to Elrond’s hips. “How many did she whelp at once, before the suitors met their fate?”

With a soft sob, Elrond tips back onto his husband’s waiting cock. Now he is filled utterly, and yet how much fuller—

“A dozen?” Celebhîr leans back against the pillows, bracing both of them. “A hundred? Surely you’ve done the research—”

Elrond trembles. Thousands.

How he teems with it, this inner shadow, which Celebhîr forever meets with silvery light. In body Elrond rocks against him, perfectly filled and fucked; in mind a heady gloom entangles them, a want so terrible it had consumed the very Trees.

Celebhîr does not fear him like this. He rumbles with pleasure, and with need, his thought threaded with every filthy endearment.

Pretty cockslut, greedy thing, you’ll have all you can take, a thousand swarming spawn to stretch your belly—yet you must have my seed—

Elrond cries out, wordless, desperate. When Celebhîr slows and stills beneath him it is as much to soothe as torment.

“Shh.” He brings his hand to Elrond’s cheek. Look at me.

Panting, deeply seated on his husband, Elrond blinks away his petulant tears. Wondrous sights have graced him, in his Age-spanning days, and yet none more so than Celebhîr in this intimate embrace. How beautiful he has become in his imperfect healing; how enduring is the beauty that entranced Elrond from the start.

His beloved’s eyes are not the never-fading hue of Yavanna’s pastures—they hold the green of Middle-earth, the sighing canopy of summer’s height, the season they had wed so long ago.

Slowly, Celebhîr resumes a heady rhythm.

We want this.

And Elrond meets him, graceless, urgent, pleasure darkening the edges of his vision.

We do.

The thought resounds between them, a single stream. Desire cleaves the Theme and makes it branch anew: an incipient variation. How magnificent a thing—how holy, the work of weaving souls.

And yet the work is also of the body, strange webs woven out of limbs and ichor.

In the service of his spilling cock Celebhîr forgets all restraint—as Elrond in bliss takes in the rush of seed, and dreams himself the mother of all spiders, swelling vastly her brood.

###

Yet after a moment, a caught breath—a spark of wondering laughter, ah!—it is quite apparent: but one life form has come forth this hour, a winking presence held within two minds.

Celebhîr shifts down, whispers to Elrond’s belly: “Well-met.”

It is an old ritual, their positions now reversed. And Elrond is laughing still, from joy and from astonishment, protesting the tickle of Celebhîr’s hair against his tender places.

###

Chapter End Notes

“The Gardens proper” - the gardens of Lórien

Ivon - Yavanna, Sindarin

On the off-chance you are reading this without familiarity with the rest of the AU, the entire Ungoliant thing has its own fic.

ripening

Chapter Notes

See the end of the chapter for notes

At the start, Celebhîr thinks that it is not so different from the years that he had been the one with child. Always he has his awareness of the baby’s stirring spirit, and the body gathering matter to itself inside the swirling dark—although during his own pregnancies he had preferred to keep a little mystery. In the first months after the twins’ conception, he’d had to ask Elrond to kindly winnow his hourly blood counts and dimensional estimations to a single weekly update, unless such information was absolutely necessary to share for the health of the fetuses and father.

Yet a pregnant physician cannot be separated from his calling when he is his own patient. There is forever some examination-song murmuring under Elrond’s breath, and a hand to brush the small but growing curve beneath his robes. More often than not it is Celebhîr’s, tugged through the undone sash five or fifty times a day.

“Do I seem any bigger?”

A scientific inquiry, and yet not without the hint of lust, betrayed by the dark peaks of rounding breasts that strain his cotton shift. Celebhîr had found his husband insatiable enough as the supportive player in pregnancy. Now Elrond’s own body is also his most potent aphrodisiac, renewed with every inch and every ounce he grows by—and there are many months of growth to come.

Moreover, unlike their last strange months in Alqualondë, Celebhîr is a participant in this gestation, and knows his beloved’s every burgeoning pleasure.

“No bigger than you were this morning.” He diverts his fingertips towards Elrond’s tits. “Come, now. Have patience for poor Liantë.”

Elrond scolds him: “Don’t say that aloud!”

Yet there’s no one to hear, deep in the orange-groves of Endillos, Gondolin-in-miniature arisen on the slopes of the southern Pélori. Here they lie together tangled on the grass, beside a half-heartedly filled basket, beneath a sky of perfect blue—it is another realm of nearly-endless spring, in spite of the snow-capped peaks on the horizon.

Some weeks ago they bid farewell to the Lórellin cottage, nominally to reunite with Elrond’s cats, who were taken into fostership by their great-grandmother Idril after Celebhîr and Elrond took leave of the Alqualondë house. Already they were facing the question of where to make a home in Aman—now it is coupled to where best to raise a child. Yet after three thousand years of marriage, and near two thousand before of protracted courtship, they are learning how to live without a long-laid plan.

Assured of privacy, Elrond whispers giddily. “The size of a cellar-spider, today.”

“And to think.” Celebhîr rucks up his husband’s undersilks. “Soon we’ll have ourselves a tarantula.”

And Elrond shivers, incapable of any speech but sighing as Celebhîr’s head settles between his hips.

###

“You might build into the western cliffside.” With ink-stained hands, Elenwë sets a coimas-service. “I’ve taken the liberty of a few concepts—Rillë, would you?”

Idril passes over a folio over Elrond’s more sociable cat, who sits purring on her lap. “Very…traditional,” she offers.

“Don’t give them preconceptions!”

“Well!” Elrond props the abundance of sketched buttresses on his belly. “That’s lovely, Great-grandmother, really, it’s only—”

Celebhîr has a cookie halfway to his mouth, yet at his husband’s glance he dutifully takes up the thought. “We’d like to be closer to the ground.”

“The ground!” Elenwë scoffs as she serves the tea. “What about the stars?”

Endillos is truly lovely—a marvel of Ñoldorin engineering married to Vanyarin mysticism, glued together by the art and expertise of elves of every east- and-western realm who’ve made their home here. Glittering, climate-controlled, abundant with orchards and greenhouses—everything is always in season—it leaves its residents with little reason to leave, though unlike Gondolin of yore, the only foe one stands to face outside its walls is shabbiness, or minor inconvenience.

Elrond is dismayed to disappoint the lady of the realm. The only Vanya to set foot on the Ice, her strong conviction is among Elenwë’s admirable qualities, for all the sacrifice it has come with. Yet today she is well and whole in her splendid city, and Elrond misses moss.

“Of course we’ll return as often as possible.” Elrond gladly takes an offered cup. “When Peccuvo is older.”

Squirrel is the baby’s socially permissible code-name, since Spider is not appropriate for public use, certainly with older relatives. Turgon has had enough difficulty comprehending how it is that his great-grandson managed to fall pregnant. (This was not characterized by scandal, but rather scientific interest, and several rounds of inquiry; thankfully none of them involving Elrond.)

The lord of Endillos steps presently into the sunroom. No matter how often one meets him, Turgon is shockingly tall, half a head even on Celeborn. Just the workmanlike braid that falls down his back must be the full length of Elrond, end to end.

“Who’d like to see the trees?”

Idril lets her father take her hand and draw her upright, as the startled cat springs to the floor.

“Do we really have a choice in the matter?”

In fact over the course of their visit the entire entryway has been overtaken by wheeled carts bearing the collection of aldalisalpë. Turgon’s miniature forest encroaches upon his guests in a hundred trays or pots, varietals from all regions of the Aman and Endor—and the house, given varying preferences for temperature, humidity, and morning or evening light. Yet Elrond drags Celebhîr immediately to the clutch of birches, once saplings that took seed on the banks of the Bruinen. Now they are situated among siblings they had grown beside in the Imladris greenhouse: a Númenóean laurinquë, its slender branches spilling yellow blossoms, and a mallorn of Lothlórien, at four feet tall a gargantuan specimen.

“You fixed the root-rot!”

“Re-potted.” Turgon squats before the tray, holding up an eyeglass to a silver leaf. “If you can believe it, your original planter was too large. Now we’re at a better equilibrium, though I must say she’s very demanding of pruning. I have half a dozen cuttings going in the garden, and many prospective enthusiasts keen to adopt.”

When Elrond first met his great-grandfather on Eressëa, Turgon had volunteered to care for his tray-trees while he settled, sight unseen. Only these few had made the crossing, a bit bedraggled by their weeks in the ship’s hold. For a long time Elrond thought melancholically of the aldalisalpë he left behind, withering in empty Imladris. Yet after he was gone, Elrohir and Elladan have said they made a project of returning the trees to the valley’s glades and slopes.

In most ways, his children have always been wiser than him.

Elrond looks to Celebhîr. “That’s your tree, you know.”

The potted mallorn began its life as a sapling in the rhododendron grove outside their family talan in Caras Galadhon. Celebhîr had made new plantings there in the months before his capture. In a strange token of grief, his mother harvested one and had it sent to Elrond.

But his husband knows that story, and they have long since lived past its ending. He admires the mallorn, though Elrond can sense a background tabulation: two dogs, two cats, an incoming infant, and no permanent residence to speak of. They do not have the wherewithal for high-maintenance houseplants.

Celebhîr kisses the point of Elrond’s ear. “I think it’s Turgon’s tree now, elig.”

###

In Tirion, Elrond pops. One day he is still well-concealed, outside of more form-fitting garments; the next even his most voluminous robes have a telltale curvature.

During his own pregnancies, Celebhîr was always thankful to be a large man who had lopped off his tits—eight months in, both times around, his appearance remained relatively unremarkable. Yet at the selfsame stage Elrond’s condition has overtaken his smaller frame, and it is the only topic that the denizens of the Ñoldorin capital seem inclined to remark upon at all.

It is a turnabout from their reclusive years in Alqualondë. And yet Elrond does not seem to mind the attention, nor even the gossip. He floats through court—which Eärwen and Finarfin have whipped into a frenzy over the prospect of a new great-grandchild—and graciously accepts all manner of counsel from the elders, in spite of his own long-practiced midwifery. Anairë insists on procuring salves from her favorite chemist, and Queen Mother Indis dispatches from Taniquetil a long letter than her son delivers, detailing the ancient birth-songs of the Journey. Even Nerdanel, who mislikes the rumor he is her lawful grandson as much as Elrond does, sends a set of durable rattles, and the address of the tailor who made her support garments.

It’s certainly nice to have the resources of the royal family at one’s disposal. Celebhîr avails himself most of all of the generosity of their longest-reigning scion, at least in Middle-earth, who gamely provides him the occasional reprieve from fucking his husband, ever more pregnant and aroused.

“Yes, darling, I know.” Shuffling through blueprints at a worktable, Celebhîr soothes Elrond’s whine from the bed. “You’d like Ereinion to put one in you, too.”

The former High King is still extracting himself from his pants. “That would certainly do a number on the succession.”

“Mmmmmph!” cries Elrond, who insisted on the gag.

He’d insisted, too, on being bound to the bedframe, a task that Ereinion has already undertaken with Ñoldorin craft and diligence, as well as a distinctly Falathrin flair for knotwork. Returning from his morning errands with the dogs, Celebhîr arrived in the middle of preparation and safety negotiations between king and herald, which in characteristic fashion alternated between humor, vitriol, and genuine cooperation; he has let the two of them proceed apace as he reviews Erestor’s redesigns. (After learning the former lords of Imladris entertained an engagement with one of Fingolfin’s favored architects, the former Chief Counsellor has determined to come out of retirement, in at least one of his careers.)

Yet now that the scene is evidently set, Celebhîr supposes he ought to take it in. Elrond garbed only in hithlain is always a fine sight, but the rope that binds his wrists to the headboard is put to even better service when it twines and crosses his torso below, a cradle for his gravidity. His tits have lately swelled up close to the size of his years of active nursing, when their elder children were young—and his belly beneath is the waxing half-moon near-eclipsing them, proud and high-carried.

Framed in Ereinion’s careful ropecraft Elrond is a voluptuous feast, for his own eyes as for his husband’s. Gagged on the bed and unable to touch himself, he casts about a rather helpless glance, as if choosing to forget this entire scenario was entirely of his contrivance.

Celebhîr knows he’s only being impatient. Soon enough, elig.

Indeed Ereinion is already crossing the mattress with his sprung cock—and yet his first act is reassuring that Elrond's back is sufficiently bolstered by pillows at his back and hips.

“Mmph!!!!??? Mmmmph!!!!”

Celebhîr flicks his eye back to a rather convoluted hydraulics concept for a riverfront bathhouse. “He means he’d like you to fuck him, please.”

“Eru above.” Ereinion spits on his palm. “I don’t know which of you is worse.”

And yet Celebhîr smiles at the mutual sighs that follow. They herald an exquisite satisfaction for both parties, as well as the superfluity of any lubricant—and evolve in due order into a more frenzied soundscape, Elrond’s muffled protests rising against Ereinion’s murmuring, erotic rehash of various earlier points of disagreement.

For a time this provides a pleasant background to Celebhîr’s work. His mind drifts to larger concerns. If Ereinion wears Elrond out sufficiently, there may well be a day or two to formulate their response to Erestor’s more egregious proposals. And yet his hand drifts as well, beneath his sash, to the growing concern concealed beneath.

So too is the tug of Elrond’s mind gaining urgency. Please, hîr nîn.

What now? Celebhîr circles a hideous fountain in grease-pencil. Aren’t you getting everything you wanted?

He knows well this is untrue. Elrond keens into the gag, nearly to the point of Ereinion’s concern—as Celebhîr relents, and rises.

“It’s all right, ‘Rein. Let him down.”

Earlier, there was contentious debate about the appropriate length of time for an expectant mother to have his circulation occluded by overhead rope bondage—even when said mother is also a healer of most eminent renown, and acutely aware of his own physical limitations and potential life-threatening impacts to his person, unlike a certain High King one might name.

It is thus with great relief that Ereinion, still rock-hard without his release, pauses the proceedings to untie Elrond’s arms. And yet protests continue, though as Celebhîr unsheathes himself and summons them to the bedside the course of action is apparent enough.

A swift effort is made to rearrange support pillows beneath arms and bellyweight, finally to remove the gag. Elrond gasps before his husband’s arousal; he whimpers the only word he seems to recall.

“Please.”

Yet Celebhîr holds himself a half-step away, stroking his shaft through his parted robes. With an improved knee-brace from Celebrimbor he’s sturdier on his feet. And so he extends the head of his snake-headed cane, watching fondly as Elrond tongues the golden handle in desperation, then takes it deeper, moaning in recovered bliss—ever dutiful, Ereinion has repositioned himself for a rear approach.

A pleasant jealousy overtakes Celebhîr. He withdraws the cane to steady himself, and shoves between his husband’s waiting lips.

This arrangement, at last, is exactly what Elrond wanted, and what even he knows he should not sustain for any particularly enduring interval for the sake of his laden hip-joints. Yet for the moment he is ravenous, speared from both sides and savoring every inch. He sucks Celebhîr with abandon that redoubles with Ereinion’s hastening thrusts, the ropes that cross his back all tangling with spills of inky hair—and he is so beautiful like this, womb bowing full with their sleeping child, and Celebhîr, healed by godly hands, never feels more blessed than in their braided pleasure.

Such a simple creature you are. Celebhîr pets Elrond’s cheek, as he gently fucks his throat. All you truly wish is to be bred by the thickest cock you can find.

With mouth stuffed shut, and tits spilling from their truss, Elrond gazes up in total bliss.

That wish already came true.

Celebhîr comes.

###

“So.” Ereinion heaps sugar into his coffee. “Is it an egg?”

Laswiniel snatches the bowl from him. “Well, that’s a rather invasive question, Rodnor.”

Ereinion looks at the point of saying something about having been rather intimate with the subject already.

“There will be an egg,” Elrond precludes, patting the rounded evidence. He turns up to his husband, whose lap he leans in, but Celebhîr can offer no more reinforcement than a resigned shrug.

“You’ve both known him for longer than I have. Didn’t he turn into a thundercloud, or something?”

“Yes, and try to murder me,” says Ereinion brightly.

Elrond sips his tisane. “That was only the once.”

“How blessed we are by this realm!” declares Laswiniel, heading off this conversation. “For here we assume our true and most stable forms.” She raises her teacup. “Here’s to the bespoke therapeutics of the Gardens of Lórien”—a knowing grin exchanged with Celebhîr—“and of course to being whatever Valarforsaken thing Elrond is. Ah! Baranwen has saved us.”

A waft of yeast and cardamom across the terrace announces Laswiniel’s wife, who appears with a tray of freshly baked buns and crispbread, a variety of pickles and goat cheeses, and approximately nine flavors of jam, all held aloft on muscled sailor’s arms. Elrond could cry, for the fulfillment of various cravings. He settles for splitting open a steaming bun and stacking it with cheese and pickled cabbage.

Baranwen looks pleased. “‘Winiel’s recipe—I couldn’t get enough of them when I was carrying Galdor.”

“Up to my elbows in flour.” Laswiniel reaches for the cheese.

Elrond admires his breakfast sandwich. “How wonderful to have a marriage in which both of you can bake.”

“We’ve failed terribly in that regard,” Celebhîr says, spreading his jam with great solemnity.

“Forgive another technical question.” Everyone glares at Ereinion. “In due course, will there be, how to put this.” He draws a circle on the air. “One hole? Like a bird.”

“We’re eating!” Baranwen groans, as Laswiniel upbraids: “You’re foul, and if I’d married you I’d be pleading Máhanaxar for divorce until the end of Arda.”

Elrond levels his most indulgent gaze across the table. “The ongoing physiological developments to my reproductive system are fascinating and regrettably private.”

Ereinion speculates: “Does that mean your body is going to produce some kind of new, specialized hole?”

“You know you’re very lucky that we use you for sex,” says Celebhîr—as Ereinion mouths, with a particularly rude pantomime: He’s going to make you fuck that hole.

“What a perfectly awful uncle you’ll be.” Elrond licks his fingers. “No matter. Liantë will love you anyway.”

“‘Spider’?” Baranwen laughs uneasily. “Whatever happened to ‘Squirrel’?”

“I don’t think you don’t want to know,” says Ereinion, as he helps himself to yet another bun.

###

Chapter End Notes

Liantë - spider, Quenya. Yes Elrond and Celebhîr are speaking Sindarin with each other 99% of the time but i liked how it looked better than ‘Ungol’ so they’re just using the elf-latinate for fun. What i really wanted was ‘Ungwe’ but apparently that means ‘spiderweb’

Endillos is one of the names of Gondolin, “Flower of the Plain”

Coimas - lembas/waybread, Quenya

Peccuvo - squirrel, Quenya, used before Quenya speakers. Also reference to the Numenorean love of squirrels

Aldalisalpë - tray-trees, bonsai, Quenya. I made this up and it’s probably grammatically incorrect.

that’s your tree | see Stranger in the Valley, ch. 1

Beloved OC Laswiniel returns, and she too has taken advantage of Valar-sanctioned bottom surgery :) If you haven’t read An Education there’s an entire fic’s worth of background drama here, including that Laswiniel and Gil-galad were semi-engaged at one point. Anyway she spent the entire rest of the second and third ages thriving as the Chief Councilor of Mithlond and raising beautiful children with her wife as a transfem dyke. This didn’t make it into Incarnation, but she and Baranwen were on the ship that brought Celebhîr to Valinor. Galdor of the Havens is one of their kids.

Didn’t he turn into a thundercloud, or something // Yes, and try to murder me | see An Education, ch. 16

“How wonderful to have a marriage in which both of you can bake.” | celebhir has baking-related gender trauma as a transmasc guy forced to undergo various sacred elf bread rituals. elrond is just straight up terrible at both baking AND regular cooking, as an all-around gender failure

Máhanaxar - the ring of Doom, the court of the Valar

fullness

Chapter Summary

This is where it starts to get real eggpreggy—if you would prefer just cute baby stuff that’s next chapter

Chapter Notes

See the end of the chapter for notes

In Intavros, the Great Wood where the Hunter has his halls, the dawn light draws westward through a boundless autumn. Elrond, asleep, illumined upon the pallet, is like a great bead of amber. Celebhîr could swear he glows.

Hîr nîn.

The mind stirs with the body, morning ritual. Celebhîr returns to bed and curls behind him, caressing, marveling in their co-creation, the child yet dreaming in darkness. Ten and a half months—the last pregnancy, such that it was, had been short of the full Elvish year. And yet of the peredhel prognosis this time around Elrond will make no predictions, nor admit what Celebhîr senses at the edges of his mind: that he tires of waking each day to ever-greater circumference, skin stretched thin and feet he cannot see and leaking, tumid tits.

But Elrond shakes his head: objection.

Ah. Celebhîr gently strokes his husband’s underside, ribbed with new scars. So you’re happy to keep growing.

Elrond yawns into a stretch; his rounded ass, turned lately lavish, is cupped in Celebhîr’s hips. Still room to grow.

“Hm.” Celebhîr stirs forth, impelled by his own tumidity, as Elrond gasps and shudders. “Not much.”

###

“They’ve absolutely no idea what they’re talking about.” Elrond storms out of the healer’s, as much as he can storm when Elrohir is bracing him through every step.

“A good deal of bedrest does seem advisable at this stage,” concedes Elladan, with a scratch of his beard.

“‘An inherently high-risk proposition—Mannish biology on Elvish equipment!’ That’s how they think about all of us, which is why I went into medicine in the first place—”

“And as a physician, dearest Atya, we know how you value objectivity.” Elrohir steers their mother onto the walkway that weaves between the trees.

Elladan follows on his walking-stick. “Nordhiril has particularly heinous bedside manner, yes, but she did attend to Nimloth. Whose peredhel pregnancies, as she attests, were more analogous to yours than Ada’s—given he’s got twice your body mass.”

“May my grandmother rest peacefully Mandos, and may she return to us soon.” Elrond huffs as he navigates a set of shallow stairs. “But Nimloth was never carrying an egg.”

“Ah, well.” Elladan sighs. “The limitations of the Elvish healing arts.”

Elrohir hovers a step behind their mother, monitoring his ascent. “What fortune, then, that our grandmother is on her way.”

“What fortune indeed,” concedes Elrond.

###

One grandmother is already accounted for. It was Galadriel who asked them to the woods, where Celeborn has been recovering from a brush with fading in the house of his father Galadhon, an ancient and eminent Sinda who, when the child is born, will be both great-grandfather on Celebhîr’s side and great-great on Elrond’s.

It has been a cozy affair, dwelling amid this interwoven family tree—quite literally, for the forested manse is a maze of ancient hollowed trunks and talans tiered on hefty branches. There is a growing contingent in the wood of returned Iathrim, now loosely affiliated with the Silvan settlement Oropher maintains further to the west, though they bow to no king.

Indeed the queen they revere is a rare visitor, and her arrival occasions great rejoicing.

Elwing makes the journey in eagle-form, as is her preference. She countenances a smattering of fanfare—a few songs, a small feast—and then she unfurls her list.

Celebhîr thought he’d endeared himself to his law-mother well enough on the Isle of Seabirds. Yet as delivery approaches he finds himself subject to a scrutiny he supposes is much delayed. The daughter of Dior Eluchíl has very high standards for her son, many to do with paternal responsibility as regards the laying and incubation periods.

“Your last experience was difficult.” Elwing acknowledges as much, standing before a large writing-slate now covered in her scrawling mix of cirth and tengwar. “And yet it was not exactly of the physical realm. This is.” She gently taps Elrond’s protruding belly with the branch she's been using to punctuate her lecture. “Very much so.”

Celebhîr considers the series of disconcerting hand-drawn diagrams. “Can’t he just become a bird and lay it that way?”

Elwing’s grey, unblinking gaze is deeply gull-like. “That’s certainly one possibility to be prepared for.”

“Well! I think we’re quite prepared,” says Elrond, not sounding convincing in the least. He wants to escape, though his size and Celebhîr’s fear prohibit it.

His mother sighs. “You can’t be. Poor dears!” She finally smiles. “Then I suppose you thought you knew what you were getting into. But I got through it thrice, and with very little foreknowledge the first time—you’ll do just fine. So long as this one keeps up his end.”

After an hour of haranguing him Elwing winks and pokes Celebhîr with the stick, which rather recasts her earlier and very technical instruction about ensuring proper lubrication for the passage.

###

“I am happy she’s here,” says Elrond, and believes himself. “I just also wish she wasn’t.”

“Welcome to having a mother.” Celebhîr eases down the handrail to the bath. “And I’m glad, too—we’d be absolutely hopeless without her.”

Elrond lowers his chin beneath the water. Still his tits balloon up, and his belly breaches the surface. In these final days—and surely they must be, for he’s fit to burst—the egg has shifted positions, such that it sticks out even further from his suffering hips, and induced new swelling as preparatory humours gather in his lower abdomen. From a medical perspective, the sudden, additional engorgement has caused Elrond the most alarm of any aspect of his condition thus far, although Elwing told him it was perfectly normal, and to simply prepare for a good deal of mucilage—not to worry, of course the nest will be constructed of absorbent material.

This was not entirely reassuring. He thought—ha, ha—he’d been pregnant before. Now Elrond confronts the full unreality of that interlude, before his burden of proof. He feels lately like a melon unpicked in the garden, left helplessly to overfeed on summer rains—rounder than he ever dreamed, and he has dreamed it, in throes of ardor or of sentiment. Or both, and here is his desire fulfilled, in aching joints and deep exhaustion.

He simply cannot grow any further—still he dreams he will, and dreads it both.

His husband is laughing at his rumination. “Be careful what you wish for.”

“You wished it, too.” Elrond pouts in weak protest. “The oil, darling, would you?”

With effort he lifts himself half from the bath, onto the wide steps. Celebhîr slots behind, makes a cushion of himself as he reaches for the basket of ointments.

The scent of pomegranate and rosehip is a great comfort, spread deliciously over Elrond’s raw-stretched sides, his sore nipples, the crown of his belly where his navel now strives outward.

Celebhîr hums absently as he works, remembering the old lullabies. Soothed by his husband’s hands and song, the bath’s steam and calming fragrance, Elrond nearly drifts asleep.

“I meant to say,” says Celebhîr after a time. “Daerada took me down the river while you went for your nap. A league south is a high bank with cliffs above, and a wide eddy below.”

Elrond’s eyes flit open. “Many of our specifications.”

“He’s been keeping an eye out.”

“How lucky,” Elrond yawns, “that we share so doting and considerate a grandsire. Do you suppose it’s dry enough for Erestor?”

Celebhîr laughs. “What fun would it be if he wasn’t complaining about drainage?”

“Our riverbank,” sighs Elrond, as Celebhîr strokes him, with absent circles that grow wider, seeking the lower curve. “I like your name, by the way.”

Celebhîr kisses his ear-tip. “I like yours, too.”

He bends to meet Elrond’s lips, stroking still as they embrace. They will not speak the names aloud, old superstition. Yet the sense of who the child is grows stronger; the naming-day is near at hand.

Elrond melts into the kiss. Celebhîr replenishes the oil, a final ministration, though when his hand seeks the hidden cleft between his husband’s legs, Elrond stays him. Too easy, an errant fingertip dipped in his folds—since the first stirrings, before he showed the slightest swell, he’s found himself unraveled at a single touch. More interesting to seek an indirect fulfillment— huge as he is now, and burdened, his whole body has turned taut and sensuous, and in passion his belly is responsive as a cock or cunt.

They may as well make the best of the burden while he yet bears it.

Celebhîr knows his mind and his ways. He cradles Elrond and their child, palm circling and circling, stoking pleasure in thought and touch both.

All the world, elig.

Elrond cries, urging his husband’s hand as he feels him harden.

All the world for thy belly.

And Elrond would laugh at his citation, if he only had the breath. For he is subsumed, as if caught beneath a wave—quaking, cresting, at last dissolving in the oceanic pull, the abundance that together they have wrought.

###

Chapter End Notes

Intavros - halls of Orome (aka Araw, in Sindarin)

Nordhiril - oak-lady. (Thank you Chestnut_pod’s names list!)

So the logic here is um hazy at best, but the egg phenomenon only occurs for childbearing peredhil of Melian/Thingol’s descent. Thingol got egg-pregnant with Luthien (as per bawdy legend); and then Luthien with Dior. Nimloth, as an elf, had standard elf pregnancies—same was true for Celebhîr when he was carrying peredhil babies. Elwing, as a peredhil orphan in exile, did not fully understand what was going to happen to her during her first pregnancy — nor did any of the healers who were with her, because they were not around for Thingol’s pregnancy (in the primeval depths of time) or Luthien’s (on Tol Galen); a little more about that in next chap. And now Elrond is going through his second (sort of) such experience, with a lot more help once Elwing gets there, but yes the Iathrin doctors have no idea what is going on with him.

Don’t ask me how Arwen fits into this lmao. After making her choice she had standard humanoid pregnancies. The age of Egg has ended.

In other biology news: like the bandicoot, Elrond is a monotreme with a navel. Re: ‘preparatory humours,’ and ‘mucilage,’ watching videos of snake-egg laying was instructive to this fic. (H/t [redacted] for sharing this important knowledge 🐍.)

As to Elrond's quantum cloaca and other mechanical issues of egg-birth, he will be withholding additional details for personal reasons, and I for purposes of authorial handwaving.

All the world… is a reference both to Melkor upbraiding Ungoliant for wanting to eat the silmarils, but more specifically in this universe to A Mistress of Her Own Lust, where Celebhîr makes the same quote. Standard issue dirty talk for these guys

hatching

Chapter Notes

See the end of the chapter for notes

The bell tolls too early for daybreak, when the sky is sealed over in violet gloaming and the morning star dazzles distantly on the horizon.

Elwing looks up to hail her husband’s return. She shares a murmured prayer with him and with her daughters.

Then she races to her son, singing joyously as she goes.

###

The nesting is a more festive affair this time around. Celebhîr presides over the party, at the center of which Elrond rests, curled beside the egg while he is brought food and tea and trinkets. They are clean now, he and the child, and the nest has been resurfaced with fresh linens, and sung full of moss and soft grasses.

Everyone has had a hand in the proceedings. Galadriel has been at Elwing’s side, and Idril arrived a few days ago; they were her aides in the initial delivery. As Elrond recovers Elladan has been the healer deputy, keeping watch on his condition—while Elrohir has been keeping everyone fed, in addition to managing the enthusiasm of Galadhon’s extended household. All the elders and cousins have been eager and curious as helpers and as revelers, for none have witnessed a childbearing such as this. As Elwing tells it, with her law-mother gone to sea her labor and improvised egg-warming in Sirion had been attended by a horrified Iathrin midwife and a confused Bëorian, who left with unique impressions about the nature of Elvish reproduction.

Celebhîr keeps inquiring if Elrond feels depleted; at his word the celebration would subside. But his husband is glad to share the joy, receiving every blessing, allowing all hands and hearts to assist the incubation. The egg is a wonder, speckled brown and bigger than the last, humming in portent of the life within.

How strange, with the sleepless nights to come, that they should have this interval, a moment to behold all they have done.

And yet the child’s parents also bear a terrible impatience—though they are delicate in their expression of it, not wishing to crowd his newly-waking mind. It is a careful thing, emergence.

Then at last: a flicker of resolve, a sudden knock, as if heralding one soon to cross the threshold.

All gather around, with stirring songs and cries of awe. It is Celeborn, wandering from the margins, who kneels before the shards of shell, and in laughing delight identifies the species.

“Of course—a kestrel-hawk!”

###

Bruinen Celros, when he undergoes his first shapeshifting, has pale green eyes, and a thatch of chestnutty curls shot through with miraculous silver in sunlight. He is unlike any creature that Elrond has ever seen.

When Galadriel holds him she laughs in rare glee. “At last! One of ours.”

“I think you mean ours.” Idril peers over her shoulder. “Ardamírë’s was just like that when he was born, only gold beneath. And the eyes are most assuredly Hadorian.”

“Telerin!”

The baby screams. Bouncing and soothing in lilting Taliska, Elwing brings him back to Elrond.

“He certainly sounds like your brother.”

“Like both of you,” says Celebhîr tiredly, although with winking fondness.

Elladan scoffs, slowly setting out the lunch-dishes. “We were adorable.”

“And we still are!” calls Elrohir from the cookstove.

Elrond looks at Bruinen Celros, who curls to him in sudden, perfect calm. It will not always be so. Yet his son returns his gaze with wordless love, bemused contentment—how strange it all must be.

“He sounds like himself,” says Elrond, for he can feel his wonder, his will to know the world he has been born to. There is so very much to learn.

###

Chapter End Notes

Hi my name is Bruinen Celros Celebrion Elrennion and i have silvery brown hair like sunlight on the rapids of a mountain stream (that’s how i got my name) and sea-green eyes like the tears of Uinen at the Akallabeth and a lot of people tell me I look like Eärendil the Blessed

The end credits song of this fic (and thereby the entire series) is I Like Birds by Eels.

yscdsc dvd extras

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Table of Contents

Preface

quickening

ripening

fullness

hatching

Afterword