kareenvorbarra:

Beren has many memories of life before the war. 

He clutched at the bright scraps of them during the long lonely nights in Taur-nu-Fuin, then started to push them away when he could no longer bear to remember who he had once been. But they never completely left him, and in those fragile spring days in Doriath she began to draw them out of him again. It was to her that he spoke the names of family members, haltingly, for the first time in years. 

Some days in Tol Galen, they torment him. Every scent, every sound, the color of his wife’s hair, the little chirp of his son’s voice, every sense summons bursts of memory that he cannot suppress. They rub him raw, every touch reminding him of all that he has lost – it is too much, too much for one man to face, would that the creatures of Sauron had finished me along with all my kin –

But some days he looks at his son and (though Dior is the very image of his mother) he can see Emeldir in the warm grey of his eyes, or Baragund in the stubborn set of his shoulders, and knows that they would have loved this child as much as he does. And some days Lúthien sings a simple song while she works, a song that Andreth sang to all the children in his family even before they knew what the words meant, a song that had been with them since long before Bëor came west, ancient beyond reckoning.

He remembers singing it to Dior himself when his son was only a baby, even though every word tore at him like a wolf’s claws – but now he can hear it and smile, or weep, or both, and some days that is enough.