Me: I'm Not One Of Those Autistics Who Needs Noise-canceling Headphones (/nm); Regular Noise Levels Don't

this looks like love

~ This was Beleg’s knife. It was more beautiful than any knife he had seen before, the blade covered with intricate designs of leaves and stars and the crossings of rivers and trees.

‘This looks like love,’ his father would have said. He said that about beautiful things wrought with care: knives and swords, baskets, shawls, quilts, jackets. His broken harp. Túrin still didn’t know what it meant. Not entirely. ~

***

Túrin woke to find himself alone. Beleg’s bed was made up, so were the others'. He got up and washed. He was close enough to Menegroth that there was no real danger if he did not run off alone. He drank sweet water and ate lingonberries and cheese and bread.

Beleg had not woken him early, so he would not study to hunt that day. Beleg had let him rest. Perhaps Beleg had gone to hunt without him. Túrin stepped out onto the small porch of the cabin in his nightshirt.

There Beleg sat, making arrows.

‘You’re awake,’ he said. Túrin nodded. He sat cross legged beside Beleg and stared at the sun. It was midday.

‘I slept a long time.’

‘You were tired.’

Túrin nodded again. He bounced his fingers on the bruises on his knees. He liked how his fingers felt as they bounced off his skin. Beleg did not ask him why he did it or call him strange. Túrin swept his hands up and down, turning his hands in the air, so that his fingers came down first facing his knees and then turned from them, again and again.

‘Do I go back to Menegroth today?’ he asked. He reached for mint leaves from the ground and pressed three into his mouth.

‘No,’ Beleg said. Túrin turned his face up to the sun.

‘When then?’

‘In two days.’

‘And then you will go far afield?’ Túrin said. ‘For all the winter?’ He let his hands fly again, bouncing off his knees. He chewed the mint leaves and swallowed their taste.

‘Not for all the winter, I don’t think,’ Beleg answered. ‘I would miss you.’

Túrin stopped bouncing his hands to pick mint leaves for Beleg. He handed them to him. Beleg took them and nodded his thanks. He ate them and kept making arrows.

‘Do you want to speak of which you dreamt?’ Beleg asked.

‘No,’ Túrin said. He waved his hand, letting it spin at his wrist. ‘I think everyone was dead. I was dead.’

Beleg patted Túrin’s knee gently. Túrin brushed the spot when Beleg had pulled his hair back. He didn’t like the lingering touch that seemed to tingle on his skin, even from those he loved. He tried to do it when Beleg wasn’t looking. He had brushed off his father’s touches and kisses. Sometimes he let his mother’s stay, but it agitated him to have a part of his skin even a little wet or a bit different from the rest. He didn’t know why being touched left an impression of the touch on his skin, but it did. He had asked Beleg if he could feel a touch after it was gone. Beleg had said yes, but he hadn’t been bothered by it.

Túrin looked at the yard. It was green and damp. Mud was spreading though. It must have rained a little when he slept. It was quiet, and it smelt like cold rain. Soon the leaves would change colour.

‘Are we alone?’ Túrin asked.

‘Yes,’ Beleg said. ‘The others left last night. They are needed farther North.’

‘Where you will go.’

‘Yes, where I will go.’

Túrin shoved his bare feet down onto the ground. It was soft enough that they sunk a bit into it. It was cold. The grass tickled his skin. Túrin stood and took a large step into the yard. His foot sunk down again, the ground giving a bit beneath him. He walked the yard around like that, in long strides, watching his feet leave impressions in the wet earth, feeling the cold of it.

He liked that the grass was green and not brown. He liked that the ground was wet and not frozen. He ran back to the porch and stood on it with his muddy feet.

‘Wash up,’ Beleg said. ‘You can’t go inside like that.’

‘I know.’ Túrin stood on his tiptoes to touch the very top of the porch where the two slanted roofs met each other.

Beleg patted his leg. ‘Wash. Then put some clothes on. Thingol and Melian will not be pleased if I bring you home ill.’

Túrin wrinkled his nose but threw some cold water from the rain barrel onto his feet and wiped them clean with a rag. He went back inside and came out dressed and with shoes on.

‘Don’t you look darling,’ Beleg said. Túrin had put this underneath ‘strange things that Elves say to each other and sometimes to you but that don’t need a response’ so he tramped off without a response to pee.

He came back to Beleg after and stared at his muddy footprints on the porch where he had been sitting. Beleg gave him a pointed look. Túrin wiped them up with the same rag and hung it over the side of the rain barrel to dry. He sat down again and took the knife that Beleg gave him.

This was Beleg’s knife. It was more beautiful than any knife he had seen before, the blade covered with intricate designs of leaves and stars and the crossings of rivers and trees.

‘This looks like love,’ his father would have said. He said that about beautiful things wrought with care: knives and swords, baskets, shawls, quilts, jackets. His broken harp. Túrin still didn’t know what it meant. Not entirely.

‘This looks like love,’ he said, for maybe Beleg knew the answer.

Beleg studied him. Beleg’s face was ancient but barely lined. It was his eyes that made it ancient. They were like the night sky and all the stars in it – maybe just as old, or maybe younger, but not enough that it would it matter to Túrin when he thought of the ages of the world.

‘Yes,’ Beleg said. ‘Care is love.’

Túrin said no more.

a tip for when you're looking for something

I, like many autistics (and, from what I've seen, like my friends the ADHDers), absolutely suck at finding things. Set it down on my desk, and poof, it's gone. If I'm looking for something I haven't seen in days? No luck.

But recently, my dad taught me a trick--don't look for the thing. Ask if what you see is what you want to find.

Looking for the pink sticky notes in your drawer? Don't just aimlessly go "where the fuck are my pink sticky notes?"; instead, examine each thing and say "what's that? Tape. What's that? A pen. What's that? A candy wrapper. What's that? OH IT'S MY PINK STICKY NOTES!"

Same concept for finding a certain book on your bookshelf. "Where's Lord of The Rings?" isn't very helpful; going "That's the Hunger Games, that's Cinder, and that's LOTR" is.

Same concept for food in the fridge. "That's milk, that's eggs, that's the cheese I was looking for".

Same concept for basically anything you're looking for. I don't know 100% why it works, but I'd have to guess that by eliminating the general "sweep around" type of searching and forcing yourself to actually look, your brain can't do the weird little "let everything fade into the clutter" thing that a lot of ND brains (and some NT brains!) do.

I hope this can help someone! :D

You're laughing. The royal necromancer just lost their job, and you're laughing

breaking news: local british magician collapses from exhaustion after carrying the entire fantasy genre’s gaslight gatekeep girlboss representation since 2004. “mr norrell is such a #icon,” our sources report. 

tragedy enjoyers when their favourite characters are brutally killed in a completely avoidable scenario of their own creation

[Image description: A gif of a crowd cheering wildly. They throw their hands up and high five each other. /End ID]

oh my goodness, one of dian fossey’s first close up observations with gorillas happened when she was trying to climb a tree to see them better, but so badly that by the time she’d gotten up the entire group had come out of hiding to look at her: “Nearly all members of the group had totally exposed themselves, forgetting about hiding coyly behind foliage screens because it was obvious to them that the observer had been distracted by tree-climbing problems, an activity they could understand.”

[ID: screenshot of tags reading, "and the fact that it was invented by a hobbit who knocked the head of an orc straight off. And the orc's name was Golfimbul." End ID]

sometimes i think about how tolkien said golf exists in middle earth and then just never mentioned it again ever

This is my belated @officialtolkiensecretsanta gift for @arlenianchronicles. Both my laptop and my phone up and died on me (in December... I've got conspiracy theories if anyone wants to hear them), so this was rewritten and posted on a computer loaned to me by a very generous and patient family member. Merry Christmas, y'all!

by Penelope_S

In the midst of a desert, a wanderer comes across a journeyer whose face is hauntingly familiar, though they have never met.

Words: 2320, Chapters: 1/?, Language: English

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

Rating: General Audiences

Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply

Categories: Gen

Characters: Daeron (Tolkien), Aragorn | Estel, OC inhabitants of southeastern Middle Earth

Additional Tags: Daeron’s been mourning Lúthien’s disappearance for ages, I decided that he needs to do something more constructive with his life, Storytelling, deus ex machina-ed culture in an unspecified part of southeastern ME

No offense to people who function properly but I’m different

I like how some of Finwë’s kids possess a gram or two of chill (Finarfin got his as a wedding present) but his grandchildren are all 0 chill nightmare children, all 14+ of them. One or two are chill-passing, The Arafinweans, Turgon, and Maedhros can appear to be grownups in the right light, but then you back them into a corner and it’s Kinslaying, Werewolf Biting, Standing At The Top Of Your Tower As The City Falls time. Even Galadriel mostly manages to be self-aware about her tragic case of congenital Shakespeare villianitis. Her greatest achievement is pulling back from the brink of bad choice central.

The Sindar in particular seem to fall into the narrative trap of, “well Fëanor’s boys are horrible demons but their cousins are surely fine,” and then, whoops, the crazy was right next to them the whole time! Just waiting for a dumb stunt to pull! You can’t escape the belated curse that Finwë’s insatiable lust called down. It just took a generation or so to really kick in.