not to be that guy but there should be kids looking up to anne on jorvik. you're telling me there's a riding camp, it's an island full of horses and riders, people are raised in the saddle, and the only one who talks about anne being an international, well known dressage rider is. her friends.
i can't remember if people talked about her during the equestrian festival but i need there to be more. she's a renowned rider from their island!!!!!!!!! that's hype!!!!! she should have kids admiring her and wanting to be like her. herman should be drowning in parents wanting their kids to be taught by the guy who taught anne von blyssen.
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little hurt/comfort snippet for one of my favourite canon couples, for @nolofinweanweek. cw for disordered food habits, past starvation and past enslavement.
Tuor has been smelling the sweet scent of rot for several minutes, and he cannot figure out where it is coming from.
It's nagging at him. He wants Idril to return from the private washroom that adjoins their rooms in Gondolin and join him in bed so they can fall asleep in one another's arms, but the smell is itching at his nose and he doesn't think he'll be able to sleep until he's located the source. And he thinks it'll be good if he can fix the problem before Idril returns. Idril is a princess — a princess who, inexplicably, married him — and she does not deserve to sleep in a bedroom stinking of rot. So he extricates himself from the blankets, smiling at the soft sounds of Idril washing up, and sets out to search the room.
Opening wardrobes and rifling through chests of drawers brings him no closer to the answer -- in fact, the scent seems fainter the further he gets from the bed. So, frowning, he kneels down and ducks his head underneath the bed.
At first, he can't make sense of what he's seeing. His call of "Idril, what --?" slips out almost without realising, but it summons her back to his side almost instantly, wearing only a towel but rabbit-fast on her silver feet.
When she sees what he's looking at, her face drains of all its colour. She sits back, hard, on her heels.
"Tuor --" she says, voice breaking around the word, "I'm so sorry --"
Under the bed is what was probably once an impressive bounty of fruit and vegetables. Piles of grapes, tomatoes, sheaths of corn, red and silver onions lie in various stages of decay, from furred and bruised to liquid and blurring into one another, juices soaking into the carpet.
"I'm so sorry," Idril mumbles again, and then, "please say something."
The thing is, Tuor is aware of Idril's tendency to be a bit funny about food, even if he's never seen it get this bad. Sometimes he wakes at night to an empty bed, and wanders through the empty city to find her pacing the greenhouses, or thumbing through the ledgers in the great kitchens. It makes sense -- for most of her childhood on the Ice, although her father and aunt did their best, she was hungry. It seems that some wounds never quite close, even after hundreds of years.
When Tuor had first discovered the pouches of nuts and wax-wrapped cheese she kept in her dressing table, soon after they'd married, she had laughed self-consciously, saying "you won't starve with me!" -- and then, upon remembering that Tuor had, in fact, starved in the not-distant past, fallen into profuse and completely unnessesary apologies.
So this new development isn't as shocking as it might otherwise be, is the thing. But Idril clearly thinks he's going to be horrified by what he's found -- one hand is pressed over her mouth, and she's crying quietly.
When the Vala of the Oceans isn't speaking through him, Tuor isn't always very good with words. When Lorgan held him, he never spoke to anybody unless he was forced to, and he thinks that at some point he almost forgot how to. But Idril asked him to say something, and he can't sit in silence while his wife is so distressed. So he tucks her into his chest, and strokes a hand over her hair.
"Please don't cry, love. It's alright. I'll get rid of this. It's alright. There's no need to apologise for anything."
"You must be disgusted," she says quietly. "I know this is hardly what you'd expect from Gondolin's princess."
"I could never, ever, be disgusted by you," he says, and means it.
"I don't know what I was even thinking. Grapes and onions... what was I even hoping to do with them? I think there's something really wrong with me."
Tuor just sighs, shakes his head, and holds her tighter. Breathes in the scent of her hair. They sit silently together on the floor beside the bed for -- he doesn't know how long, but his knees eventually begin to ache.
"I do wish you'd told me earlier," he says, "I could have helped, maybe..."
She makes a small noise in response.
"Do you think you could tell me, if you think it's getting bad again in the future? Hiding the food, I mean. I don't know that I'll be able to be any great help, but I promise I'll always listen, and there's nothing you could say that would disgust me, or turn me away from you."
She manages a nod at that. "Alright. I promise I'll try."
He can't really ask for more that. After all, it's not as though he doesn't have memories of his time as Lorgan's captive that he still can't give voice to.
Then Tuor does get rid of the rotten food. Idril shyly points him to places around the room where he finds various other hidden foodstuffs in varying states of freshness, and he throws them out too. He fetches Idril and himself a mug of tea, because if the evening's conversation has left him feeling wrung out and exhausted, then it must be worse for her. And then he puts them both to bed, wrapping himself around her back as though he's trying to make himself into another blanket for her to cloak herself in. Whatever the morning brings, he promises himself that he'll be by Idril's side to face it with her.
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