Elrond’s grey eyes looked down, wide with astonishment at what he’d just heard. “What did you say?”

The smiling child before him was holding out a grubby hand clutching a few, bedraggled samples of the first Spring wildflowers. “F’you, Ada,” the child repeated, his wide smile wavering slightly as he pushed his little hand a little closer yet to the very tall elf in front of him, his confidence in the reception of his gift not quite crumbling as yet but growing less certain as time went by.

Slowly the majestically tall Elf Lord dropped to one knee before the tyke and put out a hand to accept his gift. “Thank you, Estel,” he said gently in spite of his shock at what the child had called him. “They are very lovely.”

The return of the blazing smile in the cherubic face brought a lump in Elrond’s throat as the memory of two similar toddlers bearing their Ada similar gifts so many centuries ago shone forth like a beacon in his mind. “You we’come,” the boy responded and, now content, tottered back to the blanket where his Naneth gathered him into her arms and congratulated him in soft, loving words for his good deed.

The somber grey gaze of the mortal woman Gilraen then rose and met that of the stately elf over the boy’s curly cap of black curls. In their depths Elrond saw the grief that had welled forth as her son had blithely given away to another the name that rightly belonged to a man now dead, and then at hearing her son addressed by a name not really his own in response. And yet she nodded, wordlessly conceding that her child had not only needed the shelter of a new home and an alias but evidently had also found for himself a living, breathing Ada to fill the hole left by the death of his own.

It was obvious, however, that she shared Elrond’s shock at having new names and relationships so unexpectedly brought into focus by a few words from the toddler. A gently raised eyebrow was all that spoke of her curiosity as to whether or not the near-legendary Elrond of Imladris would allow himself to be called “Ada” by a mortal child he barely knew.

After all, it had been such a short time since her husband had been killed by orcs, leaving her and her infant son without any familial protection save that of a pair of twin elven orc-killing machines who had suddenly decided to honor the bonds of distant family through marriage. It had been even less time since she and her son had arrived wet and tired, herself sickened with fever, into the Imladris household before the orcs could claim any more victims. During the days of her convalescence, the boy had been mostly in the care of Elladan and Elrohir – and by extension, their father – when not with his mother.

Having mortal family at Imladris was nothing out of the ordinary, however. Elrond had nurtured and groomed the heirs of his brother’s line here in his home over the centuries – noble young men all of them – but never, in all that time, had any even thought to lay claim to a more familiar appellation. With very little effort he could bring forth each of their young faces in his mind and name each one. He’d been “hir nin” or “my lord” and considered an honored and concerned but extremely distant relative, but never addressed as “Uncle” or looked to as actual family. Not once had he considered being anything more than a mentor to any of these, his brother’s progeny.

This was as Elros had asked of him and as he himself had planned. Over the years and generations, it had become the expected way to safeguard the lineage of Eärendil and the northern Númenorean kings. The training found in Imladris eventually had become more a privilege of the chieftain’s station and not a family birthright. Of late, Elrond had planned to have input into this new scion’s life at the same point in time as he had all the others – when the son of Arathorn approached maturity as defined by the Secondborn.

It had therefore been the last thing he’d ever expected – to awaken in the middle of a stormy night and discovering that not only was Arathorn dead, but that he would be sheltering the last of his twin brother’s line for virtually that one’s entire childhood. This time, after all the centuries and generations past, he would do more than just educate another Dunedain Chieftain and add to a very long line of remembered faces that departed this world all too quickly. But to find himself claimed by that one as kin as close as a sire… THAT was extraordinary, perhaps even prophetic.

Where he would have been content to be just another “hir nin,” the child had named him “Ada.” With that one word, the child had bridged a chasm that had formed between two sides of the family over the course of millennia. What other matters this child would set aright again could only be guessed at, but this was a good beginning. He would accept the name and all that would come with it.

He nodded to Gilraen as he rose to his full height once more, accepting with as much grace as he could manage all that the child – and his mother – had offered him. “Perhaps you can help me find some water for them, ion nin?” he asked with a hand extended to the boy, who turned in his mother’s lap and smiled even wider.

“Yes,” Estel nodded vigorously and grabbed one of the long fingers in his little hand to pull himself from his mother’s lap once more. “‘Bye, Nana!”

“Be good for your Ada now, Estel,” Gilraen replied with a direct look of gratitude at the Elf lord, whom she now knew would take good care of her son. Aragorn – now to be known as Estel – would have both an Adar and a Naneth in his life again.

After bowing and seeing Gilraen give a deep nod of her head in response, Elrond walked slowly away knowing that his world, as well as that of every other inhabitant of Imladris, had just changed irrevocably. With a heart that was suddenly lighter than it had been for over five centuries, he reached down and swung the toddler up into his arms and settled the now-giggling child on his shoulders before he headed purposefully back toward the house.

His twin sons would need to know that the number of the sons of Elrond had just increased by one. Their grief over the death of their friend and distant kinsman at the hands of orcs had been deep and abiding. They too desperately needed to see a ray of hope in the form of a new brother, just as he had needed to see the light of hope in a new child of the heart. The triumphant laugh of the boy at the view from his perch was potent medicine for aching elven hearts indeed!

But first, he had to find a vase for the tiny bouquet of flowers before they wilted any further from thirst. And he would have his youngest son as his assistant for the very first time. Elrond chuckled and determined that this moment in time – when the best laid plans of men and elves were set aside at a word from a two-year-old – would be engraved in his heart forever.

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