Work Text:
One day Nerdanel walks into her father’s forge with a spring in her step, voice pitched higher than usual, almost musical, as she calls out to him in greeting. “Atar! Atar, look!”
It’s Fëanor who hears her first, the unfamiliarly bright lilt of her voice catching in his ears. He looks up from where he’s been standing hunched over an anvil, inspecting one of his future creations, turning it over again and again in his hands. A little further behind him is Mahtan, pounding away at a piece of metal with such intensity that he seems not to have noticed his daughter, who is all but dancing her way down the hall toward them. The other apprentices in the forge seem to pay her no mind, as if there is no difference in her demeanor today than during any of her other visits.
As if the way her skirts sway softly about her is not entirely new, and entirely captivating.
No, something is different, something else.
When he looks at her, Fëanor sees a glowing smile on her face that nearly makes him drop his to-be creation to the floor. Nerdanel, who is always purposeful and composed, as if perpetually in deep concentration or observing others, looks radiant. Not even the fairest of the Eldar could compare to her in that moment, with that smile and that sparkle in her eyes.
“Atar, I have invented something.”
Her voice is insistent, as she passes by Fëanor without even a greeting. Now Mahtan has turned to her, pulling his visor back and revealing a fond smile playing at the corners of his eyes and tugging at the lips beneath his beard. Hooking a finger under his daughter’s chin he turns her head left and right, with loving gentleness, and pride pulls his smile wider. He laughs thunderously and ruffles her hair.
And that is when Fëanor sees it. Her auburn hair, the sides and back of it long, falling freely in waves as it does when she hasn’t tied it for practical purposes - but the front. The tresses that used to frame her face have been cut bluntly across her forehead, well above her eyebrows, as if she has taken a knife to it. It sticks out in every direction, the loose curls cut off abruptly like the unfinished brushstrokes of a quill ripped out of hand mid-sentence.
“What do you think?” She looks up at her father expectantly, holding out her new invention for him to inspect, cradled in her nimble hands.
“I love everything you ever have and ever will create, for it is of you, and of my creations you are the one I love the most.” Nerdanel blushes profusely at her father’s surpassing praise, then recovers quickly, jokingly groaning and rolling her eyes at him.
“Atya, I’ve come to you for constructive criticism! You must think of it no differently than you would one of my sculptures, despite this invention serving a different purpose entirely.” She laughs again, and tilts her head to look behind her father, locking her eyes directly with Fëanor. He thinks he might be spellbound, so much so that he barely registers it when she speaks to him. “What do you think, Fëanáro?”
He’s still staring, wide-eyed, and he knows it. With a cough, he turns away, composes himself and then says in typical fashion, “…I suppose one would have to know the inventor’s process,” cough, “and purpose, before critiquing an invention.” Not that he could offer any critique had he even know her thoughts behind it - he’s barely glanced on whatever she’s holding in her hands, unable to take his eyes off her face.
“Always so technical,” she huffs in jest, waving her hand dismissively at him but with a smile still on her lips. He’s never noticed before how her freckles cluster together near her bottom lip.
“Well… what do you call your invention?” he prods, because suddenly he wants nothing more than to keep her attention. Nerdanel blinks once, twice. Her eyes are as strikingly blue as the jewels in his father’s favorite circlet. (How has he never noticed before?) Then a sudden noise, an instrument falling to the floor with a loud clatter somewhere in the far corner of the forge, takes them all by surprise. Fëanor tries his best not to flinch, and Nerdanel’s eyes, locked again with his, go wide.
“What is this commotion?” Mahtan thunders, and without another word stalks off to inspect the source; this is his forge, and he takes the safety of his apprentices with steely seriousness.
Nerdanel picks up where their conversation left off, a finger to her chin and her lips pursed in thought. “I suppose I would call it…” She stops and hums. Whatever she says next doesn’t quite register with him; Fëanor hears the words but thinks they do nothing to appropriately describe whatever she’s holding. Still, Nerdanel seems pleased with herself.
“What a mouthful,” Fëanor mutters, and as soon as the words leave him he’s back to thinking about the shape of Nerdanel’s mouth, because now his imagination seems to have run completely away from him, freewheeling.
“What do you call this thing you’ve made then?” she challenges, one hand coming up to rest at her hip, the other gesturing at the metal he had been working when she walked in. Now it is Fëanor who stands there, blinking; she’s caught him at unawares for the… thing is unfinished, unshaped, and as yet unnamed.
(He knows what he intends it to be, of course. He’s not one to make something without first outlining its purposes and uses. The thing is… the thing is a set of little wheels and cogs, made to be set at a time in the present with a moment in the future in mind. And when that future moment arrives the thing will remind its owner. It’s… it’s… )
“It’s a down-counter, a down-counting clock,” he says flatly. Nerdanel wrinkles her nose at him.
“And you say mine is a mouthful,” she mumbles and brings a hand up to ruffle the short hair now framing her forehead. Then she looks him square in the eye. “You really are unlike any other, Fëanáro, but at least you are honest. Come,” and she links her arm in his and begins to pull him with her, “I shall need your honest thoughts on my other works.”
( Fëanor has half a mind to protest but the other half wins out, the half that would gladly let this woman pull him across the length and breadth of Aman if she wanted. )