WIP Wednesday
except specifically it’s a section of draft I’ll probably have to delete because I’m begrudgingly coming to admit that the timeline almost certainly doesn’t work. Implicitly tagged by @thelordofgifs!
[at a narrow choke point—sky dark, corpses all around (some honor guard, more orcs). others long-since but not too long-since retreated, more orcs incoming. Fingolfin limping; both arguing who should gtfo and who should stay (risking death and/or capture) and hold the line]
“You will lead and I shall follow, that is what I swore—so go!”
“I shall lead and you will follow—so for once in your life, do as I say!”
“Fine,” Fingolfin huffed, and held out his hand. “Give me the Silmaril, I’ll see it safe.”
Feanor reached for the jewel on his throat, but only to clasp it tight, a sudden tension in his form.
“Are you kidding me,” Fingolfin said flatly.
Another orc tried to leap upon him from the side. He beheaded it mid-air with one savage stroke, barely paying it heed. Fëanor’s lips pursed suspisciously.
“Are you fucking kidding me?!” Fingolfin demanded, nearly as incredulous as he was furious. He raised his sword and shield against more enemies pushing again through the gap. “After all this time? You selfish, jealous, paranoid, egomaniacal—“
“You speak to your king,” Fëanor snapped reflexively, and set their shoulders together against the black flood.
“Some king!” Fingolfin skewered an orc through the neck and planted his foot on its chest to draw his sword back out. “I speak to one I would call brother, if after nearly five hundred years he didn’t still expect my blade in his back—“
“I am being cautious!” Fëanor yelled. “Down!”
Fingolfin was already ducking, shield above his head, as Fëanor used his teeth to rip the protective layer off a pocket bomb and threw it directly into the mouth of a swooping vampire.
“‘Cautious’ would have been retreating four days ago, when I said we should,” Fingolfin said, taking an orc out at the knees before he rose. “‘Cautious’ would have meant turning along the [GEOGRAPHY] rather than the [OTHER GEOGRAPHY]. ‘Cautious’ would be getting your precious, blood-bought Silmaril to safety, even if it means my grubby Vanyarin hands have to touch it!”
Fëanor grabbed an orc by the collar, headbutted it hard, used its stunned body as a shield against the orc behind it, and skewered them both with one thrust of his long blade.
“You make my own argument,” he sneered.
“Because I— ugh!”
Fingolfin grunted with frustration as he leapt atop a corpse to slam his shield into the face of an oncoming troll, while Fëanor struck at its club-arm. For a time, both brothers spent their breath only on the battle.
(It’s also wrong because, given the way their rope works, there’s no way elvish grenades need to be in any way primed—they just go off when and only when their wielder wants them to. But it’s so funny to imagine Fëanor biting one…)
Tagging anyone who wants to, and @finxwrites because I did promise I’d poke them on Wednesday!
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I was meeting a client at a famous museum’s lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx “back when that was nothing to brag about” and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.
What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.
What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.
What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.
The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.
And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.
But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.
I don’t think there’s any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - they’ve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that there’s an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that’s beautiful to you.
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