Work Text:
One of the young apprentice lads interrupts Narvi just as he is just putting the finishing touches on the hinge of a delicate puzzle box. “There’s an elf to see you,” the boy says in a rush. “Master Celebrimbor of Eregion.”
Narvi puts down his tools reluctantly. “An elf” could probably be left waiting, but the master artificer of Eregion, probably not. “Why does he want to see me?” The lad’s expression makes it clear that he hasn’t been enlightened. “Well, bring him in, then, don’t leave him on the doorstep.”
Narvi knows who Celebrimbor is, of course. It’s hard not to hear about the greatest jewelsmith of their age, perhaps the greatest who has ever lived, although that depends on who you ask. But whatever his rank in the pantheon of greats, Celebrimbor is undeniably a master craftsman who could be speaking with the greatest master craftsmen of Moria this very minute in the comfort of his own hall, if he cared to send them an invitation.
“Master Narvi,” Celebrimbor says, coming into the room.
He’s very tall, of course. All the elves are tall, and the Noldor particularly so. His dark hair falls in a cascade of braids to his waist. His clothes are well-made but plain, heavy silks in the colors of the earth, and for a jewelsmith he wears little jewelry himself.
Narvi is aware that Celebrimbor is looking him over with the same frank curiosity. “I expect you know I’m not a jewelsmith,” Narvi says.
“I’m not looking for one. I was told you made interesting things in metal and stone.”
That could describe half of Khazad-dûm, but Narvi exercises patience, aware that this isn’t the moment for an ill-judged quip. He is desperately curious, and some instinct tells him that his curiosity will be more than satisfied if he can only steer the right path in this meeting.
“I’ve been working on puzzle-boxes,” he says, sliding one toward Celebrimbor. Celebrimbor plays with the box for a while, and then sets it down on the workbench, a tacit admission of defeat. “It opens at a word,” Narvi says, and demonstrates, sketching the hidden letters in the tracery of seemingly random lines on the box’s surface to make the box slide smoothly open.
Celebrimbor’s eyes sharpen with interest. “I wouldn’t have thought that was in the nature of a box. To be locked with a key, yes, to hold a treasure inside …" Celebrimbor twists his fingers thoughtfully as if working wire between them, and Narvi has little doubt that any keyed lock would safeguard its secrets long in this man’s presence.
“It’s based on a spell for a door. You make a door for your home, for what you own, and it answers to your name.”
“Is a lid a door, or a box a home?”
“Metaphorically.”
“Metaphorically,” Celebrimbor says with a smile that lights his face. “I knew I'd like you.”
“Not everyone takes to me at first meeting.”
Celebrimbor shrugs as if the fact that he isn’t everyone is too obvious to be worth mentioning. “I’ve been thinking about form and function,” he says. “A sword only wants to be a sword, but it does want to be a sword very clearly. With shapes that are less inherently meaningful, you have to make your intention clear.”
Celebrimbor talks as if he’s picking up a conversation they’ve already been having for some time. Perhaps it’s that anyone would do as a sounding board for his thoughts, but somehow that’s not Narvi’s impression. It’s just that once he’s made up his mind about something, he doesn’t waste time.
“Maybe you should study riddles,” Narvi says. “A lot of things have meanings if you look for them.”
“Maybe I should.”
“I could show you some things,” Narvi says, aware that he’s volunteering to instruct a great craftmaster when he is a young artificer who is only a master because there is no one to instruct him in how to go further down the paths he wants to follow.
“Show me everything,” Celebrimbor says, and Narvi can hear in his voice that he means to show him everything in return.
*****
There's little question that they're going to end up in bed together. Their mutual desire to keep talking through all hours of the day and night would do it, and so would curiosity, but this is more than that. Towering height isn't particularly a fascination of Narvi's, but there are Celebrimbor's clever callused hands and his hard muscles. Some of the elves seem too sleek and delicate to appeal, but Celebrimbor has broad shoulders and proves himself anything but fragile at the forge.
"You don't have to pick up everything that's on fire with your bare hands," Narvi says, investigating Celebrimbor's burned fingers with his own fingertips. He thinks their growing tendency to touch is frankly flirtation at this point, even across the confused divide of elven and dwarven customs.
"I get impatient," Celebrimbor says, shrugging off the sting.
"It seems to me you're being very patient," Narvi says, because it seems like the right moment to go farther. Love is like carving more than smithing, there's only one chance to make some moves, and you have to judge the time and the method right. There's no throwing it all into the forge to start again.
"I don't want to offend by proposing more or less than would be acceptable," Celebrimbor says. They're still standing very close together, Celebrimbor's palm turned over in Narvi's hand. It doesn't feel like they're rushing things.
"I'm not seeking a proposal of marriage," Narvi says. "Nor to be tumbled like a stranger for the sake of curiosity alone. Does that well enough delineate the space between?"
"I want to know everything about you," Celebrimbor says, and that's a place he's happy for them to land.
"Start with this--we're private about our affairs." He doesn't think the heat of the proximity of their bodies is a fragile enough thing to be quenched by the walk to his rooms. "Don't think it's shame. But some things aren't for just anybody's eyes. I'll take you somewhere private."
"Do," Celebrimbor says, and Narvi likes the hint in his voice that he's not entirely patient at the moment.
They strip each other with curiosity as well as desire. They're made much the same, as Narvi expected, though elves have considerably less hair in any of the places Narvi expects to find it. Celebrimbor's strong hand wraps satisfyingly around Narvi's thick shaft, which seems like a good beginning.
They discover quickly in their fascinated mutual exploration that dwarves are faster to reach the urgent climax of the act and faster to be ready to do the same again. Elves take longer about it all, but it's not as if they're in a hurry. It's an entertainingly long journey from Celebrimbor sprawling nonchalently across Narvi's bed while Narvi teases his prick into arousal to Celebrimbor shuddering every time Narvi touches him and demanding in high-handed and increasingly desperate terms to be fucked at once, harder, until he's satisfied.
"It's fortunate when you think about it," Celebrimbor says afterwards, when he can speak at all; Narvi is rather proud of being able to render Celebrimbor even temporarily speechless. "That the anatomy is generally compatible."
"We'd manage," Narvi says. "But I agree it's good fortune." So is having met Celebrimbor, although that's beginning to seem increasingly like it was always going to happen. The question was what they'd make of it, and what they'll make in their time together. That's up to them.
"Men are made much the same as well," Celebrimbor says, now back to lazily sprawling in the tumbled furs. "Do you suppose it's a lack of creativity on the part of our creators, or are we actually intended be interchangeable puzzle pieces?" His accompanying hand gesture is suggestive of either an intricate puzzle box or a complex bedroom activity.
Narvi is aware that the Noldor are less reverent to the powers of creation for having lived among them, but he still feels uncomfortable speculating about whether Mahal created dwarves with pricks that could conceivably fit up elven arses as part of a grand design or because he didn't have any better ideas. It's not the kind of conversation dwarves engage in, as a rule.
"There's one thing we're not likely to find out," he says. "Just as well, you'd be insufferable if you actually knew everything."
"I'm learning all the time," Celebrimbor says, with a sideways smile.
*****
They both learn a great deal, particularly about doors, and about spells, and about rings. Celebrimbor has so many ideas, and Narvi has to remind him that he has to pick and choose. There won't be time for them to make everything, not together.
"I want to try this as a ring," Celebrimbor says, considering their next project, and that feels right, or at least like it was always going to happen. "A ring is a binding, so if you use that to bind the idea of what you want the ring to be to the ring itself--"
"It's like knot-work," Narvi offers, and they embark on a months-long excursion into the properties of knots, and circular poetic forms, and circular poetic forms inscribed on knots while debating in the middle of the night, neither of them fully clothed. They come back eventually to rings, but they've learned a great deal on the way.
"It's going to take time to master this," Celebrimbor says. Narvi suspects he won't see the flowering of this craft into its final form, the great work of Celebrimbor's life. That was never likely. Many of the great works of craft take longer than a dwarven lifespan. The glorious city of Khazad-dûm has slowly grown through generations of the lives of craft masters. All you can do is the piece of work before you.
"Then let's not waste time," Narvi says, and watches as Celebrimbor sketches a simple shape to craft in gold.
*****
It's been a long journey since their beginnings. They haven’t yet reached the end, but Narvi can see the beginning of the end in the white of his own hair and beard and the twisting of his hands, no longer deft with small and fragile things. Celebrimbor acts as his hands now when he needs him, as patiently as if he were an apprentice being set to bring his master’s vision to life. Far more patiently than Narvi’s young apprentices. It’s hard for Narvi to believe that he himself was ever that young.
He examines Celebrimbor’s work now, unable as usual to find a single flaw. It’s a puzzle-box like the ones he made when he was younger, but inlaid with runes that will make it glow in moonlight or starlight. He means for it to sit in Celebrimbor’s rooms as a token when he is not there, and as a more bittersweet reminder in the future that is growing steadily closer, when he will never again be there.
“Here,” he says, and cuts off a white braid to coil within the box. Celebrimbor looks at it coiled there, running one finger down its length before he slides the box closed. “And don’t look so sorrowful when you’re given a love token.”
“I hope the work came out as you imagined it.”
“In every detail. You should know my mind by now.”
“Still, I know it’s hard to be patient with using someone else’s hands.”
Narvi shrugs. “I’m used to yours. And resigned to growing older, as much of an affront to the order of things as I know it must seem to an elf.”
“It seems unfair,” Celebrimbor says bluntly, without attempting to dress the sentiment up in prettier words.
“Not to stay a youth forever? Who’d want to, though?” He doesn’t have the words to say that there’s no particular moment of his long life that he’d prefer to freeze in time rather than moving on to the next thing in its season. Freeze in stone, he almost said, but stone is a living thing, too, moving on its own interminably slow scale. There’s no moment, not in the long history of the mountains above them, or of Moria stretching out around them, or their own long partnership, that he can point to and say “this is how it was always meant to be, and everything before and after is a trick of time.” Love is long work, not a quicksilver moment.
“Come back with me, and see it properly by starlight,” Celebrimbor says.
The road to Ost-in-Edhil seems long these days, and the surface far colder than his own comfortable halls, and Narvi has the honorable weight of a million responsibilities that come with stature and age. He also knows it would been foolish to waste the time they have been given. He’ll make the journey with Celebrimbor at least this one more time, and appreciate whatever beauty the season of winter has to offer.
“I'll come see whatever you would care to show me,” he says, and sets about packing.