Then Boy, Do I Have The Option For You!

The hilarious thing about Sauron is that according to most versions of the legendarium, he was originally, like, a god of planning and logistics, and he initially supported Melkor’s plans for world domination because he regarded the world’s present state of affairs as inefficient and poorly organised. He’s literally what happens when you take the kid who’s fed up at everybody else fucking up their part of the group project and give him phenomenal cosmic power.

Elrond: Why do you look so happy?

Thranduil: Because it's autumn.

Elrond: Yes, and?

Thranduil: Spooktober, Peredhel, Spooktober.

Thranduil: And you know what that means? The wild giant spiders finally have a use! Free decorations!

Thranduil: *shakes Elrond violently*

Before any Finwean family dinner can commence, all seatinging arrangements must be approved by the Councle of Eldest Sons (Maedhros, Fingon, and Finrod). This is a really serious matter of safety. Without them the rate of kinslaying among the Noldor could easily have tripled what it was.

It is told that Curufinwë son of Curufinwë crafted for his brother a magnificent limb of metal to replace that which Fingon their cousin had rent in order to save him. Yet no lesser was the second of his cunning prosthetics: a palantír, small enough to be held between two fingers, a Stone to See by which Maedhros took and used for his own. For while one of his once-sharp eyes, now filmed milky white, lay still whole in its socket, its match had been destroyed and its place was sunken and empty.

Thus so did Curufinwë build his lord anew.

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So my friends and i came up with a sort of AU where people sprout flowers in their hair when they feel any sort of love. So anyways, ahklut crew teases Zuko about how many blue family flowers have been growing in his hair the longer he stays on the ship.

This puts his Season One hair into a whole new perspective.

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Uncle's hair has dried flowers: his wife's panda lily, Lu Ten's dragon ivy. Everyone knows that dead flowers aren't as fragile as they seem, but he has the crewmen carry an umbrella over him when it rains, anyway. Carefully, he combs around them every morning. Leaves from the vine, Zuko hears him crooning sometimes, even though Lu Ten won't ever lose his leaves. He won't grow any new ones, either.

(Tucked away under his greying strands, still too close to the scalp to be easily seen, a bud has been growing for years. Iroh does not pressure it to bloom, but he does look forward to the occasion.)

(And then a storm, and the Dragon of the West realizes there is no way to tell a dead bloom from a live one without prying its petals open, and this he cannot do. A dead bloom can never heal.)

The Akhlut's crew find the Fire Prince's shaved head profane. When he's caught stealing razors, they crack down. Stubble grows around the black ponytail. Flowers don't.

(At thirteen, the Fire Lord set a hand on Zuko's face, and burned Ursa's sheltering rose bramble away. It would have grown back if she was alive.)

("It would have grown back if she still loved you," Azula corrects him, and he's never sure it if was a fever dream that placed her next to his sick bed, or if she really was there, her precise flames as good as any garden shears as she burned his fire lily from above her ear.)

"Whose is that?" Toklo asks, delighted and too loud, when he catches sight of the little sprig of blue flowers that are only visible when the Fire Prince lets his hair down to wash.

"No one," Zuko says, loudly. "My little sister," he says, more quietly.

Uncle's white jade flower is too large, too showy, it sticks out as it curls above his head. He snips it off between his fingers each morning, but it never stops trying to come back.

The crewmen, their own heads in ruckus and unashamed bloom, watch his daily pruning with distaste. No one ever catches what the Fire Lord's flower looks like; they can never catch him pruning it.

(They assume it's there to be pruned.)

(Zuko would like to know what his father's love looks like, too.)

His outrage at Toklo's snowdrops peaking their way through his black fuzz is as hilarious as it is worrying.

("Don't get attached, Toklo," they warn.

"But warm water," says their younger crewmen, who has never seen a reason to be stingy with his love.)

The Fire Prince shouts and steams. The snowdrops shake quite merrily in his rage. He doesn't pluck them.

He doesn't pluck Kustaa's grudging little cloudberry flowers, either.

"Are you loving me to spite me?" the Fire Prince accuses.

"Yes," says Kustaa, who parted his hair specifically to show off the new little bud trying so hard to hide.

They don't give the boy to the Earth Kingdom. They forget to scowl while they teach him how to do new things. They stop threatening him, mostly. That shouldn't be all it takes for those little buds to start spreading among the crew.

(The Wani's crew had them, too. Back when the prince was a shouty little thirteen year old monster, they'd taken it as a sign that things would soon get better. Things did not get better. Most of them forgot about those under-developed buds, except on the odd occasion when their combs would jar against them.)

Then they fight a Fire Navy ship, and find the prince curled up as far as he can get from the man he's killed. Kustaa holds him as he shakes, a fire lily in full bloom on his head. It would look ridiculous, if it didn't look so much like blood.

He's not the prince for long after that.

His hair isn't so barren of flowers for long after that, either. Eventually, he even lets his real uncle's bloom find its place among the rest. It doesn't look so overbearing, when it's not so alone.

"I miss him," The boy admits, as they sit on the main mast (as one does).

Somewhere far, but not too far, a tired old man passes his mirror, and catches the impossible flash of something new. A red fire lily, finally unfurled into bloom.

"Zuko," he says.

This neatly accelerates his plans for active treason.

Thingol had the Silmaril the whole time he fostered Turin, right? Like, it was probably sitting down in his vaults somewhere and maybe sometimes he or Mablung would go have a peep to make sure it was still there.

But like. Turin. Smol baby. Bad luck charm. Walking doom magnet. Imagine if he’d gotten his hands on the shiny shiny jewel. How much chaos he could have started. The Tale of Turin Turambar and the Seven Sons of Feanor.

"Actually in his later writings Tolkien said Maglor died-" *slaps you across the face* fake news I saw him at Dunkin Donuts last night

If anyone wants a fic with this, I liked Drag0nst0rm’s Scion of Somebody, Probably on ffn

best Gil-Galad lineage headcanon is that he’s not descended from any of them, he’s a pretender to the throne and that’s why his story keeps changing

There’s some really disturbing stuff in The Nature of Middle-earth; I’m not sure whether these ideas were some of the ones Tolkien considered for how orcs were created, or if he saw them as something different, but he’s provided plenty of fodder for darkfic writers.

…it is recorded in the histories that Morgoth, and Sauron after him, would druve out the fëa by terror, and then feed the body and make it a beast…it [would become] an animal, seeking nothing more than food by which its corporeal life may be continued, and seeking it only after the manner of beasts, as it may find it by limbs and senses.

Jirt, that’s a zombie. It’s dead, non-sapient, still moving around, and only driven by looking for food. And typically created by an evil power through evil means. You invented Middle-earth zombies.

And worse, [Morgoth or Sauron] would daunt the fëa within the body and reduce it to a stupor of horror, so that it was impotent; and then nourish the body foully, so that it became bestial, to the horror and torment of the fëa.

This does seem like a mechanism for the creation of orcs. Morgoth takes an elf, overpowers the fëa so that it is no longer in control of the body, and then, well, the implication is that he feeds the body the flesh of elves or men to further torment the fëa. In the short term, the hröa is basically a beast under Morgoth’s control; over time, the fëa might become more active, but horrified, sickened, and twisted by the nature of the hröa and the purposes for which it has been used. It is evil because, outside of its control, it has done and been used for horrific things that it can’t process without becoming evil.

Brr.

Fic idea:

There is a hall of waiting for men in Mandos too, right? For them to wait for their loved ones before they go on together? (If I made that up it’s just the fic premise now, but isn’t this where Beren was chilling when Luthien came for him?)

Anyways Elros figures out while he’s waiting for his kids that he can use his Descendant of Luthien powers to pop over to the Elvish side and meet all the dead elvish relatives he wouldn’t get a chance to know until the breaking of the world otherwise.

He realizes most of them are either gonna be there forever cause they demonstrably Can’t Get Over Their Shit, or Valinor will end up a burning pile of rubble as they are released and forced to face their shit whilst alive.

This is a problem because Elros knows his brother craves family, and while they both accept he and his twin cannot be together forever in life or death, he expects these layabout relatives to get off their dead asses and start making up with each other, so when his brother ends up in Valinor, whenever that may be, he has a loving supportive family that isn’t dragging him in a hundred different directions.

Cue dead Elros playing life (death?) coach to a bunch of dead elves. Some of them are conscious enough it’s like having a normal conversation. Some of them are in soothing or disturbing dreamscapes, with various degrees of awareness of where they are, what they’ve done, and what has happened since they died.

Helpful sidekicks include:

- Soon to be released Glorfindel!

- Finwe, cause he’s sick of his family being idiots and sad his BFF Elwe isn’t talking to him.

- Elros’s extremely argumentative wife, who’s a little confused, but she got the spirit.

- Namo very deliberately Not Helping, because they are Breaking Rules, but who keeps giving them hints like “It would be a shame if you dragged this person’s soul by it’s metaphorical ear to talk to that person’s soul, which of course is interfering which is Bad, I hear.”

- A maia representative sent by Nienna (who thinks this is brilliant). It’s a Maia who really loves elves, and is really interested in how to get them to stop self sabotaging with their own stupidity, and yeah. It’s Gandalf.

Pervading questions:

What happened to Dior and the first set of Peredhel twins?

Where are the Feanorians? Did they really get sent to the void?

Why would anyone want to live forever dealing with this nonsense, is Elrond a martyr or just an idiot. It’s just Finwean family drama? forever?!?!Elros is very confident he made the right choice.

I’ll definitely write this outside my head >>