Disclaimer: Hear ye, hear ye, Jane claims no ownership of anything that already belongs to Tolkien Estates. That being said, these particular words on the page are hers, not yours. This disclaimer holds for the rest of this tale.

A/N: Recently while rereading my appendices in research, I came across the Lay of Aragorn and Arwen, and once again I felt deeply unsatisfied. As someone who doesn't believe in love at first sight, and especially not the kind of love that makes a person sacrifice her immortality for a (comparatively) scant 6-score years of marriage, I found myself bothered by the story that Tolkien gives us. Arwen remains an enigma at best (at worst, she's just boring), and I started wondering what kind of person she would have to be to inspire such love in Aragorn, and what kind of person she would be to love him back. So here is my attempt to answer such questions, my attempt to find out exactly who Arwen Undómiel is.

Another note: I owe a large part of my understanding of Elves, mortality, and Arwen's perception of the two to Neoinean's amazing short story Arwen. Although I didn't have it specifically in mind when writing, Neoinean's story really captures my sense of mortal versus Elven approaches toward living; it also is a most satisfying portrayal of Arwen and Aragorn's marriage.

This story is written in the first-person. Although I am staying as close to canon as I can, by necessity much of this gapfiller is fiction. If I make any mistakes concerning canon, please tell me. Enjoy.

From Undómiel to Tinúviel

I

I STILL REMEMBER the first time we met clear as if it were yesterday—indeed, in proportion to my many years on Arda, barely any time at all has passed since then. But it feels as though it has been many lifetimes since I first beheld him: my life, my love, my Estel.

Ah, Estel... I did not fully understand the Doom and the despair of the Gift of Men until now. Now that you have left me. But I am nothing without you, dearest. And so I will follow you, wherever it is that one goes in death, for I cannot continue in this world without my anchor and my lifeline.

It sounds selfish that I would not—cannot—live for my children, that they are not enough to hold me to this life a little longer. But the truth is that they do not need me and have not needed me for some time now. Everyone wants to be necessary to at least one other, to matter as much as life to someone. I mattered that way to Estel. I do matter to my children—they love me, and I them—but they can live without me, have done so, in fact, for some time now. I sometimes think I hold them back. My presence always reminds them of past duties, past remembrances, past love: they must look to the future. I cannot. I pull them back into stagnation with me, the last vestige of my Elven heritage coming through. But they are not Elves; however the resemblance, they are Men, through and through; and Men look to the future and live in the present. Not the past. Never the past. To live in the past is not truly living at all. Elves do not live so much as exist, I have learned. Men—mortals—live. My children, if they are to be happy, must live as well.

I used to be able to do that. I did it with Estel. He was my grounder; he tied me to the present and taught me to see the future. But without him, I feel my humanity slowly deserting me. I feel myself moving back to the old Elven ways, of this gradual immersion in the past and a kind of detachment from everyday events. So it is time for me to accept the last bit of humanity I have left and take the Gift of Men, the Gift of death. And I will follow my Estel into the unknown.

I was born in the year 241 of the Third Age, 111 years after the birth of my twin brothers, Elladan and Elrohir; thus they had officially come into adulthood but sixty-one years before my mother bore me. The twins were still young and full of "the energy of youth" (as my mother put it), the perfect brothers to keep up with a curious baby.

They tell me I was curious, yes, always crawling around and finding my way into strange places they would never have thought possible to fit into. It is odd because once I grew up I became a very still creature. I did not like taking risks or going on adventures—oh, I enjoyed the tales when my brothers or others told them, but I never wanted to actually live one of the stories. I was always perfectly content to sit still for hours at an end and embroider, or read, or just sit and think.

My brothers were more active by far, though I do wonder how much of this later can be attributed to what befell my mother. But even before that Elladan and Elrohir were always gallivanting about, mixing with Men and bringing back tales of strange lands and stranger mortals. The more obscure mortal rites were subject of much amusement until my father caught on and attempted to explain things. But death and loss were still alien concepts to us. We were only part-Elven, it is true, but, being blessed with the life of the Eldar and being raised in the Elven settlement of Imladris, death was something that we only heard about in stories. Death happened to far-away mortals in far-away places, not to us. Never to us. We were young, we were Elves, and we were invincible.

At least, that was how it was for me until the year 2509.

Elves reach maturity at the age of fifty. That is how it was for my brothers and me, too, though we were, even then, not truly Elves. (I used to remember my childhood—as I did all my existence—most clearly, although of late it seems fainter than usual. Perhaps it is my human side catching up to me. Or perhaps it is just because I am so very weary. I feel—old.)

But my childhood, yes, my childhood... It was golden. My family was still whole: me, my father, my mother, and my two handsome older brothers who always were ready to whisk me away from lessons to a picnic in the woods. Mother was an ever-present source of soothing kindness and love. I recall her as a beautiful Elleth of great gentleness and loyalty. Her capacity for forgiveness was remarkable. I remember one day—I was only about twenty-eight, I believe, and still only half my brothers' height—when Elrohir and I had went sliding down the handrails of the banister. When I reached the end, my childish weight allowed me to fly quite a distance before descending to the ground. I sailed right through a vase standing in an alcove and smashed it to bits. It had been one of my mother's favorites.

When Mother appeared, she had looked from me to the vase quite horrified. I braced myself, but instead of even commenting on the destruction, she gathered me up into her arms and murmured soothingly, "Dearest, dearest one, I am so glad you are not hurt, I am so very glad;" and instead of turning us over to my father's discipline, she only said sternly, "Next time you must prepare your landing area before you go sliding. Observe;" and she marched me over to another staircase, moved away the furniture, and then covered the open area with a bounty of pillows. "Now try," and I did, and we went sailing down the handrails and plopping into the pillows, the three of us, until Father and Elladan found us for supper.

So I was a happy child—or at least what passes for one amongst Elves. Among human children I believe I would have stood out as morose and introspective. But Elven ways are different, more discreet and deeper—we rejoice and sorrow, but I have never met a "cheery" Elf. Only mortals hold that distinction.

But I grew up soon enough. Even before I reached full adulthood I had begun to attract many compliments on my beauty. It is not vanity—I know I was beautiful. (I suppose I still am, though I have not truly felt it since my Estel passed.) But the joy of good looks was always tempered by what followed—"She has the look of Lúthien." Ah, Lúthien, Lúthien Tinúviel, my long-ago ancestress who gave up her immortality for a mere mortal. (How much sorrow she caused me!) I knew the lore. Lúthien was beautiful, yes, but she paid the price in full (for that is how I saw it then).

I did not give much credence to the talk—indeed I hardly noted it, suppressing the faint unease so swiftly that it was almost as if it had never been—until I heard my parents murmuring one evening when they thought they were alone.

"Everyone has seen it; even Glorfindel commented on it," my father said worriedly.

"Elrond, my love, it may be nothing," came my mother's soothing tones. "So she looks like her ancestress. I myself look like my grandmother, or so my mother always says. We all more or less resemble our forefathers."

"But it is less a resemblance and more as if it were Lúthien born again," my father persisted. "Celebrían, I cannot—what if...?"

"It will not be so. For all her looks, she is not Lúthien. Our daughter is Undómiel, not Tinúviel. She will be her own person and make her own way."

The conversation ended, my father's fears temporarily assuaged; but it stayed with me, always that little nagging speculation in the back of my mind—what if I were Lúthien, what if, what if...

Ironic that I have only come to fully appreciate myself as myself once I followed the path so eerily similar to hers.