Post by Admin on Mar 2, 2021 4:28:10 GMT
Author: Mirrordance
Challenge: I’m Still Here
Summary: The Lady Celebrian had just been rescued, and she is returned to Imladris utterly broken. The last thing the family needs right now, is the arrival of mercurial Elvenking Thranduil’s messenger son.
Rating: T
Characters: Elrond, Celebrian, Legolas
Warnings: Hints of past torture resulting in trauma, self-harm and thoughts of suicide
Imladris, T.A. 2510
She only ever sleeps in the day, right beneath the light of the sun.
She was not in her usual rooms – or any of the usual living spaces of Rivendell, for that matter. This was a store room in the Healing Halls, converted for her very specific needs. It was one of the few places in the House where there were no balconies, and the windows were set too high to climb out of.
Her bed was situated awkwardly, off-center of the humble space, to get some of the sunlight to cast its rays down upon her beautiful, upturned face. She didn’t care about the glare and heat but her husband, Elrond, did – it was why a gossamer curtain dulled the late afternoon burn of it, and the fabric stirred with a light breeze.
Celebrian was in a deep, drugged doze, the latest iteration of efforts to get her to find some rest. In the first days since she was rescued from orcish captivity, she was insensate – comatose from severe injury. When she finally recovered enough to wake, she was staring and unresponsive with shock at the violence that had been brought upon her. When she finally recovered enough to find her voice... she would spend hours screaming. When she recovered enough to move, she hit things and people. When she recovered enough to walk... they had to confine her to this room.
And Elrond would never bind her with anything, nor lock the doors. She would never be captive again, he vowed. Not even by him.
But he had to admit, many times it was tempting.
Celebrian seemed to have healed just so she could rage – rage at what had been done to her and the now-dead elves she had traveled with. Rage at him, rage at this House, rage at her own self. For she had tried to jump. Several times. And Elrond still did not know if she had meant to end her tormented existence, or if her muddled mind thought she was still captive and she was trying to escape, or if they meant the same thing now: death as escape.
She had moments of lucidity – her eyes were clear and gaze present, and she knew she was now safe but she also understood what had been done to her. But those moments of self-possession were always spent in a deep pit of quiet misery.
Celebrian had been back for many weeks (he thought, but was unsure). The days and nights unfolded before Elrond’s eyes in a dull haze. He couldn’t tell when one day ended and another began. He’d been exhausted before, and he’d been heartbroken too. But he’d never been...
Useless.
He couldn’t heal her.
Elrond kept his seat beside her bed, but kept his distance. She couldn’t suffer touch – not his, nor anyone else’s. He’d held her hand when she was still hovering between life and death upon her return, but as soon as she was aware and strong enough, he did it again and had been dealt a savage cut across the cheek from a small, sleek surgical knife. She had gotten her hands on one of the healing halls’ tools, hid it, and attacked her own husband with it.
The wound had bled, copiously. And she wept in remorse and her mind fled from what she had done and she screamed anew.
How long ago was that, Elrond wondered dully, halfheartedly. He touched his cheek, and there was still a small, barely-discernable scar. The blade had been clean and sharp, and he was tended quickly and sewn impeccably (by whomever that was, he couldn’t for the life of him, remember). It was a clue as to how much time had passed, but he did not care for any further or deeper thought.
The door to the silent room creaked open.
Soft as the sound was, and drugged as Celebrian may have been, her brutal experience had made her hyperaware. She moaned and stirred. Elrond shushed her gently, not yet bothering to lift his head to look upon the new arrival.
The entire Household knew Lady Celebrian was prone to startling now, even in the safety of Imladris. Even in the company of her husband. Everyone knew not to knock on her door, and they knew to disturb Elrond there only in the most severe of circumstances, few of which were deemed important enough to merit any intrusion thus far.
Imladris has had to function without its Lord and Lady.
Celebrian settled. Elrond could see nothing else, hear nothing else, think of nothing else, do nothing else... until she settled. She needed to rest. When night came, after all, she would be raging to hoarseness and exhaustion again. And these fits would be of such magnitude that he was sometimes terrified she would simply just keel over and die if she did not have opportunity to gain any strength beforehand.
He closed his eyes and exhaled slowly, achingly carefully, so as not to ruffle her in any way. Only then did he look up at the intruder. Only then.
It was Lindir, whose wordless apologies screamed from large doe eyes, whose posture was set so low and shrunk into himself that he seemed almost defeated and afraid... afraid to disturb, afraid to offend, afraid he would aggravate the ailing elleth within.
Elrond rose from his seat, soundless and wary. The uncharitable thought could not escape his beleaguered mind – he was treading as carefully around his wife as he would around a wild animal.
He stood with Lindir just outside the door and he kept it slightly open, most of his attention still upon Celebrian sleeping within. He gave Lindir a weary and impatient wave, allowing him to speak.
“Hir-nin,” he said, so softly already but Elrond winced at its relative volume in the silence, and Lindir thus lowered it further. “Your presence is sorely needed at the healing halls.”
Elrond pressed his fingers against the bridge of his nose. “I cannot leave her,” he said testily. “One would think we have enough people of competence - ”
“I come at the behest of Lord Glorfindel himself,” Lindir said urgently. “Please, my lord. The situation is quite desperate, I understand. One of the patrols returned in terrible shape. Some soldiers are practically at Mandos’ feet. It would honor me to sit with my lady Celebrian in your place, if you will allow it.”
Elrond sighed impatiently, and waved Lindir to do as he pleased. The Lord of Imladris would issue his orders to take care of the situation, and return promptly.
# # #
Off the corridor that led to the store room was the main vein of the healing halls – and it was in chaos.
Imladris had expertise, but not numbers – and the healers and their attendants had their hands so full that the floor was slippery with mud and blood with no one to tend it.
Elrond blinked, for his Hidden Valley was never usually subject to this. He also realized the extent to which his people must have insulated him and Celebrian from the madness of it all, until the need for him had become truly dire.
One of his councilors, Erestor, saw him right away and intercepted him. The other ellon’s eyes immediately showed relief, as if Elrond could fix it all.
“This way, my lord,” he said, ushering Elrond forward, presumably to the worst case.
They walked quickly to the surgical hall, where Elrond found three of his finest healers hovering over an unknown elf, and a well-bloodied Lord Glorfindel nearby. The warlord was stubbornly standing in a grim watch, even as a
healer was treating wounds on his fighting arm and side.
Elrond could not see the face of the ailing soldier, but he knew the situation was desperate by the stillness of the body, by the contrasting urgency of those around him, by the copious amounts of bright red blood that have saturated the sheets so much the liquid was dripping lazily to the floor.
An attendant immediately appeared at Elrond’s side with a basin to clean his hands; it was always the first step, and as if walking in a dream, he numbly followed the routine.
“Brief me,” he barked out by similar instinct, and his voice sounded alien to his own ears. But his people knew what to do.
The master healer who had purview of the case responded in devastating terms and a grim tone. The words first danced at the edges of Elrond’s consciousness, where they sounded only familiar. But then they stayed on the surface and started to burrow into him, calling him back into mindfulness, calling him back into becoming the healer he still was beneath all the thick uselessness he’d been feeling over his wife. Beneath the scars, beneath the callouses, into the very healer’s heart of him.
I am still here...
Elrond walked forward, each step emboldening him to return to his old role, his old self, to a place where he could be of use. His people parted for him, until he stood alongside the patient.
Elrond looked down at the surprisingly unmarred and rather fine-featured face.
“Who in all of Arda is this?!”
# # #
The unconscious young ellon was a stranger, but not perhaps completely – he looked like a particularly golden brand Sindarin. Royalty. The kind, perhaps, that had Oropher in the veins somewhere.
That presented Elrond with implications and staggering complications he did not yet have time to contemplate. Elrond turned to the more pertinent concern: the wound.
Jagged and long, it stretched from shoulder to belly, where it was deepest and had partially disemboweled the wretched elf. The healer’s adroit hands started working as if by their own accord, even as his mind raced. He knew the elf before him was likely to perish.
“Tell me his name else I cannot call him back,” Elrond commanded.
“That is Legolas,” Glorfindel replied. Elrond did not need to look up at him to hear the grimace on his face. “Thranduilion.”
Elrond hissed in dismay. He knew there was Oropher in there somewhere, but he did not quite know how much.
“He and some of his soldiers had volunteered to assist us on a patrol in the mountains,” Glorfindel said, “And I dispatched him to the very duty that now brings him before you.”
“Why would you even let a foreign prince – “ Elrond’s voice thundered, until he caught himself. It was unheard of, that soldierly duties of Imladrians should be shared with foreign visitors, volunteers or no! But the time for repercussions would have to be later.
He settled his soul, and reached for the other’s. He sent the grievously injured elf waves of warmth and light, and power... and Elrond called him by his name, and the name of his father, the Elvenking.
It was a hairsbreadth of a lifeline, but a lifeline just the same. It was all that the young ellon’s determined fea needed to hold on.
His soul, Elrond found with some surprise, was potent and luminous, but it was a friendly light. It wasn’t the hot summer glare, it was a soft winter sun - the kind of warmth and light that survived bitter cold.
He – Legolas - held on.
# # #
Elrond took over the most complex case, freeing the hands of many healers. Those who could be spared turned to tending other soldiers, but such was the seriousness of the ernil’s condition that Elrond still finished last. The halls had quieted by then.
The surgery ended and Thranduil’s son emerged alive from it all. But Elrond was bloodied to the elbows, and the liquid was still all over the sheets and the floor, and the prognosis was poor. It was one more light lost in his hands.
Damn it all.
“Will he live?” Glorfindel asked. The renowned warlord had stayed for the duration of the harrowing procedure, and Elrond felt the strings of his fea throughout, reaching for the ailing elven prince as well.
“For now,” Elrond replied as he finished with the patient and washed his hands of the blood. An attendant scurried away with the basin, while another toweled down the Lord of Imladris’ hands. “Perhaps not for very long though, with how things look.”
“He will never wake?”
“He might still,” said Elrond, “But it will be in the kind of pain that would be torture to suffer. We will not want that for him. To help him sleep to the end would be kinder.”
Glorfindel closed his eyes and rubbed his face in profound weariness.
“I will wash and change in my rooms,” Elrond said, “I cannot return to Celebrian reeking of our people’s lifeblood. You will go with me, and then I will have your answers to my questions.”
Elrond had spoken glacially, dangerously, for there would be a price to pay for Thranduil’s son’s impending death on a mission here. Allowing him in the patrol was perhaps in poor judgment. But Glorfindel had his own brand of danger, and he stared at the elven lord squarely, before following him out to the halls.
They had... a complex relationship, to say the least. As Lord of Imladris, Elrond had few friendships on equal footing and this was one of them. The resurrected Glorfindel was beloved by the gods and was himself once a great leader among their people and thus, a peer. But without home nor tribe Glorfindel was also a guest here, subordinate to the House. Elrond could send him on assignments and take him to account... but Glorfindel could also call him a damn fool if the occasion called for it.
The occasion apparently did, and Glorfindel had the kind of stare that made one search the conscience.
They walked in heavy silence, and though they passed many an elf who bowed and parted for them, their stormy expressions left no room for questions or interruption. The two lords spoke only when the doors to Elrond and Celebrian’s private quarters closed behind them.
“Your House,” Glorfindel opened sharply, “needed the help of a foreign prince because it was undermanned after your sons and their warriors left to avenge your wife. Your Warriors, in their mad scramble for revenge, have been turning the land inside-out, scattering flurries of displaced and similarly bloodthirsty orcish elements up and down Arda – for what else would happen when you destroy a hornet’s nest? The effect of these is to make our home and its surrounding environs unprotected precisely at a time of increased danger.
“I cannot regret my acceptance of Legolas’ offer to help,” Glorfindel said. “Because we needed him and his soldiers, yes, but also – he is a gifted warrior the likes of which you will seldom ever see. He held his own. Of this untenable situation I confess to regretting other things. The first is that he had taken a hit meant for me. The second is that I indulged your family in this damaging grief and let your sons run unthinking out those doors. The third – is that I sought your counsel about all of this when you were ill-equipped to give it.”
Elrond took a long, deep breath and searched his mind. Somewhere in there, somewhere in there quashed beneath his torments and caught between Celebrian’s screams, was a conversation. Maybe two, possibly more. About the unexpected arrival of a Woodland messenger-prince sent to initiate diplomatic ties. About how loathe Glorfindel was to give a response without Elrond’s direction, with Thranduil being as unpredictable as he was. About how, as the soldiers of Eryn Galen waited, could they make themselves useful aiding the patrols as they have volunteered to do so?
Elrond hissed out a curse at himself, but stopped short of an apology. He did not have it in his heart to be sorry at the moment. He was already hurting enough, wasn’t he? Could he not be absolved on this one thing –
“I am... sorry,” Elrond found it in himself to say.
Glorfindel shook his head at his friend, and his own tone and posture softened.
“As I said, you were ill-equipped...”
“No,” Elrond interrupted. “We should not have carried on as if we had monopoly on loss, with little regard for our people and this House. You tried your best to shelter us as we grieved, mellon-nin, and I am grateful. But I have placed enough burdens upon you.”
He started peeling off his blood-slick, sticky outer robes and Glorfindel helped him.
“I will ponder the situation with Thranduil carefully,” Elrond said before heading to his bath. The gods knew what a whiff of blood on him could do to Celebrian.
“In the meantime,” he instructed, “I would be grateful if you could arrange for the transfer of the ernil to quarters more befitting his station and his, his situation. Somewhere with rustling trees and birdsong. He may not hear them but if these are to be his final hours, then he must have whatever forest we can provide. Furthermore, his soldiers should be briefed on his situation, and be given opportunity to sit with him until the end. As for my wife, kindly ensure Lindir is handling Celebrian well in my absence – it should be of no issue. She is under medicine, I will not be gone long, and she always had a fondness for his voice.”
Glorfindel nodded. “I will do as you say.” He winced. “Legolas’ soldiers have also taken hurt however, and until they are able to do so, I will sit with their prince in their place.”
# # #
At least, that had been the plan. But nothing was straightforward in that House in those dark days.
Admittedly, Elrond took longer at the baths than he needed to – the distance from Celebrian and some detachment from their situation, it was helping him think. A few moments to himself, for himself... was it really so selfish? And yet, the world had turned upside-down and inside-out in so small a span of time...
Celebrian was missing.
Fondness for Lindir was not enough to spare him Celebrian’s powerful fears, apparently. He was found by Glorfindel unconscious in her makeshift room and the Lady who had assaulted him to escape, missing.
# # #
It made Elrond sick to his stomach, but he knew he had to ask it.
His people, unable to locate his wife even as they frantically mobilized every warm body able to join the search, had to look below the Main House too. If she had exited the bounds of the property in the most, most expedient fashion, they needed to look down at the waters for her, floating. They needed to look at the feet of the jagged rocks for a form finally as broken as her spirit and mind...
But Glorfindel had, thank the gods, beaten him to it.
“I have search parties already deployed to those areas,” he told Elrond, clinically, to the Lord of Imladris’ eternal gratitude.
“Perhaps I should join them,” Elrond murmured.
“No,” Glorfindel said quickly, and definitively. “No, mellon-nin. Let me do this for you and for, for Celebrian. If you are anxious and wish to be of use, perhaps you can look in on young Thraduilion, whom I’d been unable to tend given our crisis.”
Were his only choices, thought Elrond bitterly, between searching for his wife’s body, or easing an ellon towards the end of his own torments?
Is there nothing else to choose but death?
Feeling everything and so, nothing, Elrond nodded absently and made his way toward the now sparsely-peopled healing halls. His feet knew where to go even if his mind was in a daze... to a secluded room lined by wide windows, with rustling trees and birdsong, befitting a prince who could very well be in his final hours.
He opened the doors, and at first glance he could have sworn she was a ghost.
Celebrian...
Her head darted toward his direction, tossing her pale, silvery hair – already in disarray – to a whipping blur that slapped at her face, with clumped strands settling on her cheeks, lips and chin. She looked feral and wild-eyed, capable only of either fight or flight.
Elrond dared not move. He stared at her jewel-eyes and let the silent stillness linger, intent on making her understand that however things progressed from there, it would entirely be on her terms.
I will move if you ask, he thought fervently, I will stay still forever if you prefer. I would be on my knees with a flick of your finger. Anything, everything. All you ask and all you want I will give, just because you are still here and I am – always will be - yours.
Her gaze softened, and he saw himself in her eyes again, no longer a threat, no longer a stranger.
“Husband,” she said quietly. Her posture eased and she looked away from him and down onto the unconscious Woodland prince, beside whose bed she stood sentry. She clutched at the pale hands of the younger elf, tight. Elrond did not understand yet what was happening here. By an instinct that only part-shamed him, he glanced at Thranduilion’s chest and noted its shallow rise and fall. Celebrian could have hurt him after all, as she had poor Lindir.
Relieved to find Thranduil’s son alive, Elrond swallowed before he could find his voice. “If I may come closer-“
“It is your House,” she snapped, for while she was herself – again? still? for now? – beneath her raw, tortured skin, perilously close to the surface, was her consuming, combustible anger.
He stepped forward. She stiffened even if she had allowed it. He re-directed himself. Instead of coming to stand beside her, he moved to the other side of Thranduil’s son’s bed. She was visibly eased, having a body between them.
“How came you to be here?” Elrond asked, even as he knew it was a useless question.
She scoffed but otherwise deigned to reply. She was the Lady of Imladris, knew all its secret ways. She could escape the watch of Lindir, and just as easily she could make her way into any nook and cranny of this place. She answered a different, unspoken question – Why.
“I’d stood by the windows waiting for the stars,” she said with eyes narrowed for memory and calculation, as if she was retreating back on the paths that had been formed by her thoughts at the time. “So that I could fly to them. But then he woke, and called for his naneth.”
Elrond looked down at the slack, white face of the ailing prince beneath and between them, and at the very core of him was a terrified gratitude that somehow, with everything that had happened to all three of them here, he owed his wife’s life – and his own sanity – to Thranduil’s oblivious, dying child.
“She is dead I think,” murmured Celebrian, “from how he had said it. So mournful a sound...” She clutched at their hands tighter, and Elrond almost envied the wretched prince her touch. For all his brokenness, he could envy Thranduil’s son that wondrous, compassionate touch.
Elrond felt a charge in the air - the sharing of Celebrian’s potent energy. It was radiant and still strong, perhaps even more so because she wasn’t merely sharing it, he realized. She was... bequeathing it.
His heart ached in love... Because as lost as she was in her miseries, Celebrian could still return to herself, by her caring for another. He could not have loved her more.
“It seemed rude in a way,” she said, “that I should throw away what he is fighting so hard to keep. Perhaps I should have entered another room, but then here we are.
“I know I am a poor substitute for your naneth,” she turned to Thranduil’s son. “I am sorry. But I am a mother too and you, a son. There is always... a meeting of souls, there. We are fated, even if you do not know me.”
Elrond could swear the air was cackling by her light, her song, her generosity, by the quiet determination of her need to save the elf before them, just because – I am a mother too and you, a son.
Her light receded. It was not enough to soul-save, for the fea was flesh-encased. She looked up at Elrond.
“You will save him, meleth,” she said with gentle certainty.
I cannot, he thought in a panic, not at the thought of losing Thranduil’s child, he did not know him - but at the thought of disappointing her. Celebrian had barely crawled her way past her broken self into caring for another, and now she would hang her hopes on the survival of a brutally injured soldier?
Her eyes bore into him, in earnest expectation. He could never say no to her, and she had never asked him for impossible things... were they both to start doing these now?
“I will save him,” Elrond promised.
She nodded in grim satisfaction, as if she expected nothing else. She took a deep breath, and seemed to deflate at the exhale. She was tiring – her body was not yet fully recovered and her mind, a trembling, uncertain thing. Her hold on herself, already tremulous, was fraying.
“Do not leave me,” he said thickly, desperately. He needed her in the incarnation she was in.
“I need to leave, I think,” she said, voice shaking now. “To stay... I need to leave.”
To stay as herself, his mind supplied. She had to leave, if she were to preserve herself.
“Then let us do it properly,” he said even though it hurt to say it, hurt to think it. “Let me help you.”
She looked at him thoughtfully.
“Perhaps it is not in, in ‘flight’ that you will find relief,” he said, “We can sail.”
“I hoped and feared that you would say that,” she said. “But I prefer... I prefer death than dragging you away with me. There is much for you to do here. I would be of greater use to Arda dead, than to take you from here.”
Elrond shook his head. “No-“
“It will break my heart to tear you from this place now,” she said, and he could see her jewel-eyes turning liquid with her tears, before her resolve hardened them to ice with a few steadying breaths. “You will leave when it is your time and the work is done, not before.”
“Why?” he asked.
He sounded like a child, but perhaps that was better than the raging anger that made his gut twist and his chest feel overfull. He was already without parents and brother-less, was he to be abandoned by his wife as well? Nothing could keep him in these lands if she were to sail away, and There is much for you to do here won’t cut it. He had neither obligation nor desire to help a benighted land that had given him nothing but heartache at every damn turn.
I owe it nothing, he seethed.
“Why?” he asked again.
“Because I ask it,” she said after a long moment, and he realized it was the only thing she could have said to convince him. The only thing.
“I will not bear that burden,” she said, “of being the one to take you from here and from your purpose, and all that it would mean for these lands and its people.”
“Hang them, Celebrian,” he said, agonized, begging. “I cannot care less.”
“I cannot bear it,” she said. “I will not bear it.”
“I need you.”
And this time, he gave word to the only thing that would give her pause. She released Thranduilion’s hands, and carefully walked around his sickbed. She was in bare feet, and the hem of her dress made small, whispering sounds against the floor. She walked to her husband.
Elrond barely let himself breathe, so afraid she would change direction and bolt. He could have sworn his heart had stopped too, and only started anew when she raised her arm and put her hand over his chest.
Of course it would beat for you...
He wanted to hold her, but he only let himself be held, made sure she knew whatever contact came between them would only be according to her purview. She held his face, and her fingers grazed at the healing scar on his cheek. She stepped closer. She leaned into him, partook of his warmth, slid the length of her body against his, even as he kept still and kept his hands to his sides, and was uninvited.
He closed his eyes and settled for the heaven of being so close again, of breathing in the scent of her hair, of feeling her radiance.
“I will always be with you,” she told him softly. “And at the end of it all, we will see each other again someplace better, and you will tell me of how your day has been, and you will speak of all the great things you’ve done.”
He looked down at her upturned, hopeful face. Her control was tremulous, but after all her struggles she was still there – magnificent, giving, beautiful Celebrian. And he was grieving, but he was still and always will be himself: healer, husband, father, and Lord of Imladris, with all that it entailed.
“I will make a bargain with you,” she said, “And we can both make our oaths, and it will be fairer. I swear I will not fly away from you, if you swear you will not sail with me.”
He stared at her jewel eyes, and she was all the wealth he ever needed or desired. He would do whatever it took for her to survive, and thrive. He could even put her on the ship that would take her away from him, if that was what it took. The more he thought of it, the smaller it seemed – so simple an act to do, for someone’s preservation. He could do that. He could even live with the loneliness of it. He could do anything and everything as long as she was alive and healing.
He nodded, and she sealed their bargain with the barest whisper of a kiss.
# # #
They brought home their sons and daughter to bid her goodbye, and though there were initial protestations that she should instead stay, extended time with Celebrian brought even her children to the same conclusion: she had to leave these lands and sail to the Firstborn’s promised havens across the sea.
Celebrian sailed on a bright, beautiful day – as if Arda itself was bidding her farewell, reminding her to miss it, even only sometimes.
Her family saw her off on a ship along with a retinue of elves who had volunteered for the task, and then started on the long trip back from the shores and toward Imladris.
The journey was a somber affair, and while they all ached for home after a physically and mentally harrowing trip, Elrond stepped into the Main House and felt at once, how different it was just because Celebrian was not there.
It was all echoes and hollow halls. He couldn’t even bear the thought of returning to what had once been the rooms he had shared with her. There would be a dresser without her baubles, and closets without her clothes, and a bed without the grooves of her body.
He decided he would not go there, yet.
“Ada?” Arwen called after him, confused, for she and her brothers were headed toward the family’s residences when Elrond stopped. The three young faces looked at him expectantly.
“I will be by soon,” he said, and just because it was the first thing he thought of first he added, “There is something I need to look into at the Healing Halls.”
It was as good an excuse as any, and could be made true. There was someone he really did need to look into – for a promise he intended to keep.
His feet steered him where he needed to go, to the room he frequented in the weeks they prepared for Celebrian’s sail to the West. Her memory was disjointed, and the her Elrond knew, the one that was scrambling around for pieces of herself trying to hold them together to form a coherent person, came and went. Sometimes she forgot the promises she had extracted from her husband, but he did not have that luxury. And he perforce held true to them.
Elrond stood outside the patient’s door, and knocked.
“Enter,” came the melodious voice, stronger than Elrond remembered from before he left, and stronger than he had dared to hope was possible.
He pushed open the door and was greeted by a surprised, shy smile from the occupant of the sickbed. By the grace of the gods and a promise made to Celebrian, somehow they were both still there – Thranduil’s son, alive. Himself... still carrying on. Still the Lord of Imladris, still a father, still a healer.
“How are we doing today, Legolas?” he asked.
THE END
Challenge: I’m Still Here
Summary: The Lady Celebrian had just been rescued, and she is returned to Imladris utterly broken. The last thing the family needs right now, is the arrival of mercurial Elvenking Thranduil’s messenger son.
Rating: T
Characters: Elrond, Celebrian, Legolas
Warnings: Hints of past torture resulting in trauma, self-harm and thoughts of suicide
Imladris, T.A. 2510
She only ever sleeps in the day, right beneath the light of the sun.
She was not in her usual rooms – or any of the usual living spaces of Rivendell, for that matter. This was a store room in the Healing Halls, converted for her very specific needs. It was one of the few places in the House where there were no balconies, and the windows were set too high to climb out of.
Her bed was situated awkwardly, off-center of the humble space, to get some of the sunlight to cast its rays down upon her beautiful, upturned face. She didn’t care about the glare and heat but her husband, Elrond, did – it was why a gossamer curtain dulled the late afternoon burn of it, and the fabric stirred with a light breeze.
Celebrian was in a deep, drugged doze, the latest iteration of efforts to get her to find some rest. In the first days since she was rescued from orcish captivity, she was insensate – comatose from severe injury. When she finally recovered enough to wake, she was staring and unresponsive with shock at the violence that had been brought upon her. When she finally recovered enough to find her voice... she would spend hours screaming. When she recovered enough to move, she hit things and people. When she recovered enough to walk... they had to confine her to this room.
And Elrond would never bind her with anything, nor lock the doors. She would never be captive again, he vowed. Not even by him.
But he had to admit, many times it was tempting.
Celebrian seemed to have healed just so she could rage – rage at what had been done to her and the now-dead elves she had traveled with. Rage at him, rage at this House, rage at her own self. For she had tried to jump. Several times. And Elrond still did not know if she had meant to end her tormented existence, or if her muddled mind thought she was still captive and she was trying to escape, or if they meant the same thing now: death as escape.
She had moments of lucidity – her eyes were clear and gaze present, and she knew she was now safe but she also understood what had been done to her. But those moments of self-possession were always spent in a deep pit of quiet misery.
Celebrian had been back for many weeks (he thought, but was unsure). The days and nights unfolded before Elrond’s eyes in a dull haze. He couldn’t tell when one day ended and another began. He’d been exhausted before, and he’d been heartbroken too. But he’d never been...
Useless.
He couldn’t heal her.
Elrond kept his seat beside her bed, but kept his distance. She couldn’t suffer touch – not his, nor anyone else’s. He’d held her hand when she was still hovering between life and death upon her return, but as soon as she was aware and strong enough, he did it again and had been dealt a savage cut across the cheek from a small, sleek surgical knife. She had gotten her hands on one of the healing halls’ tools, hid it, and attacked her own husband with it.
The wound had bled, copiously. And she wept in remorse and her mind fled from what she had done and she screamed anew.
How long ago was that, Elrond wondered dully, halfheartedly. He touched his cheek, and there was still a small, barely-discernable scar. The blade had been clean and sharp, and he was tended quickly and sewn impeccably (by whomever that was, he couldn’t for the life of him, remember). It was a clue as to how much time had passed, but he did not care for any further or deeper thought.
The door to the silent room creaked open.
Soft as the sound was, and drugged as Celebrian may have been, her brutal experience had made her hyperaware. She moaned and stirred. Elrond shushed her gently, not yet bothering to lift his head to look upon the new arrival.
The entire Household knew Lady Celebrian was prone to startling now, even in the safety of Imladris. Even in the company of her husband. Everyone knew not to knock on her door, and they knew to disturb Elrond there only in the most severe of circumstances, few of which were deemed important enough to merit any intrusion thus far.
Imladris has had to function without its Lord and Lady.
Celebrian settled. Elrond could see nothing else, hear nothing else, think of nothing else, do nothing else... until she settled. She needed to rest. When night came, after all, she would be raging to hoarseness and exhaustion again. And these fits would be of such magnitude that he was sometimes terrified she would simply just keel over and die if she did not have opportunity to gain any strength beforehand.
He closed his eyes and exhaled slowly, achingly carefully, so as not to ruffle her in any way. Only then did he look up at the intruder. Only then.
It was Lindir, whose wordless apologies screamed from large doe eyes, whose posture was set so low and shrunk into himself that he seemed almost defeated and afraid... afraid to disturb, afraid to offend, afraid he would aggravate the ailing elleth within.
Elrond rose from his seat, soundless and wary. The uncharitable thought could not escape his beleaguered mind – he was treading as carefully around his wife as he would around a wild animal.
He stood with Lindir just outside the door and he kept it slightly open, most of his attention still upon Celebrian sleeping within. He gave Lindir a weary and impatient wave, allowing him to speak.
“Hir-nin,” he said, so softly already but Elrond winced at its relative volume in the silence, and Lindir thus lowered it further. “Your presence is sorely needed at the healing halls.”
Elrond pressed his fingers against the bridge of his nose. “I cannot leave her,” he said testily. “One would think we have enough people of competence - ”
“I come at the behest of Lord Glorfindel himself,” Lindir said urgently. “Please, my lord. The situation is quite desperate, I understand. One of the patrols returned in terrible shape. Some soldiers are practically at Mandos’ feet. It would honor me to sit with my lady Celebrian in your place, if you will allow it.”
Elrond sighed impatiently, and waved Lindir to do as he pleased. The Lord of Imladris would issue his orders to take care of the situation, and return promptly.
# # #
Off the corridor that led to the store room was the main vein of the healing halls – and it was in chaos.
Imladris had expertise, but not numbers – and the healers and their attendants had their hands so full that the floor was slippery with mud and blood with no one to tend it.
Elrond blinked, for his Hidden Valley was never usually subject to this. He also realized the extent to which his people must have insulated him and Celebrian from the madness of it all, until the need for him had become truly dire.
One of his councilors, Erestor, saw him right away and intercepted him. The other ellon’s eyes immediately showed relief, as if Elrond could fix it all.
“This way, my lord,” he said, ushering Elrond forward, presumably to the worst case.
They walked quickly to the surgical hall, where Elrond found three of his finest healers hovering over an unknown elf, and a well-bloodied Lord Glorfindel nearby. The warlord was stubbornly standing in a grim watch, even as a
healer was treating wounds on his fighting arm and side.
Elrond could not see the face of the ailing soldier, but he knew the situation was desperate by the stillness of the body, by the contrasting urgency of those around him, by the copious amounts of bright red blood that have saturated the sheets so much the liquid was dripping lazily to the floor.
An attendant immediately appeared at Elrond’s side with a basin to clean his hands; it was always the first step, and as if walking in a dream, he numbly followed the routine.
“Brief me,” he barked out by similar instinct, and his voice sounded alien to his own ears. But his people knew what to do.
The master healer who had purview of the case responded in devastating terms and a grim tone. The words first danced at the edges of Elrond’s consciousness, where they sounded only familiar. But then they stayed on the surface and started to burrow into him, calling him back into mindfulness, calling him back into becoming the healer he still was beneath all the thick uselessness he’d been feeling over his wife. Beneath the scars, beneath the callouses, into the very healer’s heart of him.
I am still here...
Elrond walked forward, each step emboldening him to return to his old role, his old self, to a place where he could be of use. His people parted for him, until he stood alongside the patient.
Elrond looked down at the surprisingly unmarred and rather fine-featured face.
“Who in all of Arda is this?!”
# # #
The unconscious young ellon was a stranger, but not perhaps completely – he looked like a particularly golden brand Sindarin. Royalty. The kind, perhaps, that had Oropher in the veins somewhere.
That presented Elrond with implications and staggering complications he did not yet have time to contemplate. Elrond turned to the more pertinent concern: the wound.
Jagged and long, it stretched from shoulder to belly, where it was deepest and had partially disemboweled the wretched elf. The healer’s adroit hands started working as if by their own accord, even as his mind raced. He knew the elf before him was likely to perish.
“Tell me his name else I cannot call him back,” Elrond commanded.
“That is Legolas,” Glorfindel replied. Elrond did not need to look up at him to hear the grimace on his face. “Thranduilion.”
Elrond hissed in dismay. He knew there was Oropher in there somewhere, but he did not quite know how much.
“He and some of his soldiers had volunteered to assist us on a patrol in the mountains,” Glorfindel said, “And I dispatched him to the very duty that now brings him before you.”
“Why would you even let a foreign prince – “ Elrond’s voice thundered, until he caught himself. It was unheard of, that soldierly duties of Imladrians should be shared with foreign visitors, volunteers or no! But the time for repercussions would have to be later.
He settled his soul, and reached for the other’s. He sent the grievously injured elf waves of warmth and light, and power... and Elrond called him by his name, and the name of his father, the Elvenking.
It was a hairsbreadth of a lifeline, but a lifeline just the same. It was all that the young ellon’s determined fea needed to hold on.
His soul, Elrond found with some surprise, was potent and luminous, but it was a friendly light. It wasn’t the hot summer glare, it was a soft winter sun - the kind of warmth and light that survived bitter cold.
He – Legolas - held on.
# # #
Elrond took over the most complex case, freeing the hands of many healers. Those who could be spared turned to tending other soldiers, but such was the seriousness of the ernil’s condition that Elrond still finished last. The halls had quieted by then.
The surgery ended and Thranduil’s son emerged alive from it all. But Elrond was bloodied to the elbows, and the liquid was still all over the sheets and the floor, and the prognosis was poor. It was one more light lost in his hands.
Damn it all.
“Will he live?” Glorfindel asked. The renowned warlord had stayed for the duration of the harrowing procedure, and Elrond felt the strings of his fea throughout, reaching for the ailing elven prince as well.
“For now,” Elrond replied as he finished with the patient and washed his hands of the blood. An attendant scurried away with the basin, while another toweled down the Lord of Imladris’ hands. “Perhaps not for very long though, with how things look.”
“He will never wake?”
“He might still,” said Elrond, “But it will be in the kind of pain that would be torture to suffer. We will not want that for him. To help him sleep to the end would be kinder.”
Glorfindel closed his eyes and rubbed his face in profound weariness.
“I will wash and change in my rooms,” Elrond said, “I cannot return to Celebrian reeking of our people’s lifeblood. You will go with me, and then I will have your answers to my questions.”
Elrond had spoken glacially, dangerously, for there would be a price to pay for Thranduil’s son’s impending death on a mission here. Allowing him in the patrol was perhaps in poor judgment. But Glorfindel had his own brand of danger, and he stared at the elven lord squarely, before following him out to the halls.
They had... a complex relationship, to say the least. As Lord of Imladris, Elrond had few friendships on equal footing and this was one of them. The resurrected Glorfindel was beloved by the gods and was himself once a great leader among their people and thus, a peer. But without home nor tribe Glorfindel was also a guest here, subordinate to the House. Elrond could send him on assignments and take him to account... but Glorfindel could also call him a damn fool if the occasion called for it.
The occasion apparently did, and Glorfindel had the kind of stare that made one search the conscience.
They walked in heavy silence, and though they passed many an elf who bowed and parted for them, their stormy expressions left no room for questions or interruption. The two lords spoke only when the doors to Elrond and Celebrian’s private quarters closed behind them.
“Your House,” Glorfindel opened sharply, “needed the help of a foreign prince because it was undermanned after your sons and their warriors left to avenge your wife. Your Warriors, in their mad scramble for revenge, have been turning the land inside-out, scattering flurries of displaced and similarly bloodthirsty orcish elements up and down Arda – for what else would happen when you destroy a hornet’s nest? The effect of these is to make our home and its surrounding environs unprotected precisely at a time of increased danger.
“I cannot regret my acceptance of Legolas’ offer to help,” Glorfindel said. “Because we needed him and his soldiers, yes, but also – he is a gifted warrior the likes of which you will seldom ever see. He held his own. Of this untenable situation I confess to regretting other things. The first is that he had taken a hit meant for me. The second is that I indulged your family in this damaging grief and let your sons run unthinking out those doors. The third – is that I sought your counsel about all of this when you were ill-equipped to give it.”
Elrond took a long, deep breath and searched his mind. Somewhere in there, somewhere in there quashed beneath his torments and caught between Celebrian’s screams, was a conversation. Maybe two, possibly more. About the unexpected arrival of a Woodland messenger-prince sent to initiate diplomatic ties. About how loathe Glorfindel was to give a response without Elrond’s direction, with Thranduil being as unpredictable as he was. About how, as the soldiers of Eryn Galen waited, could they make themselves useful aiding the patrols as they have volunteered to do so?
Elrond hissed out a curse at himself, but stopped short of an apology. He did not have it in his heart to be sorry at the moment. He was already hurting enough, wasn’t he? Could he not be absolved on this one thing –
“I am... sorry,” Elrond found it in himself to say.
Glorfindel shook his head at his friend, and his own tone and posture softened.
“As I said, you were ill-equipped...”
“No,” Elrond interrupted. “We should not have carried on as if we had monopoly on loss, with little regard for our people and this House. You tried your best to shelter us as we grieved, mellon-nin, and I am grateful. But I have placed enough burdens upon you.”
He started peeling off his blood-slick, sticky outer robes and Glorfindel helped him.
“I will ponder the situation with Thranduil carefully,” Elrond said before heading to his bath. The gods knew what a whiff of blood on him could do to Celebrian.
“In the meantime,” he instructed, “I would be grateful if you could arrange for the transfer of the ernil to quarters more befitting his station and his, his situation. Somewhere with rustling trees and birdsong. He may not hear them but if these are to be his final hours, then he must have whatever forest we can provide. Furthermore, his soldiers should be briefed on his situation, and be given opportunity to sit with him until the end. As for my wife, kindly ensure Lindir is handling Celebrian well in my absence – it should be of no issue. She is under medicine, I will not be gone long, and she always had a fondness for his voice.”
Glorfindel nodded. “I will do as you say.” He winced. “Legolas’ soldiers have also taken hurt however, and until they are able to do so, I will sit with their prince in their place.”
# # #
At least, that had been the plan. But nothing was straightforward in that House in those dark days.
Admittedly, Elrond took longer at the baths than he needed to – the distance from Celebrian and some detachment from their situation, it was helping him think. A few moments to himself, for himself... was it really so selfish? And yet, the world had turned upside-down and inside-out in so small a span of time...
Celebrian was missing.
Fondness for Lindir was not enough to spare him Celebrian’s powerful fears, apparently. He was found by Glorfindel unconscious in her makeshift room and the Lady who had assaulted him to escape, missing.
# # #
It made Elrond sick to his stomach, but he knew he had to ask it.
His people, unable to locate his wife even as they frantically mobilized every warm body able to join the search, had to look below the Main House too. If she had exited the bounds of the property in the most, most expedient fashion, they needed to look down at the waters for her, floating. They needed to look at the feet of the jagged rocks for a form finally as broken as her spirit and mind...
But Glorfindel had, thank the gods, beaten him to it.
“I have search parties already deployed to those areas,” he told Elrond, clinically, to the Lord of Imladris’ eternal gratitude.
“Perhaps I should join them,” Elrond murmured.
“No,” Glorfindel said quickly, and definitively. “No, mellon-nin. Let me do this for you and for, for Celebrian. If you are anxious and wish to be of use, perhaps you can look in on young Thraduilion, whom I’d been unable to tend given our crisis.”
Were his only choices, thought Elrond bitterly, between searching for his wife’s body, or easing an ellon towards the end of his own torments?
Is there nothing else to choose but death?
Feeling everything and so, nothing, Elrond nodded absently and made his way toward the now sparsely-peopled healing halls. His feet knew where to go even if his mind was in a daze... to a secluded room lined by wide windows, with rustling trees and birdsong, befitting a prince who could very well be in his final hours.
He opened the doors, and at first glance he could have sworn she was a ghost.
Celebrian...
Her head darted toward his direction, tossing her pale, silvery hair – already in disarray – to a whipping blur that slapped at her face, with clumped strands settling on her cheeks, lips and chin. She looked feral and wild-eyed, capable only of either fight or flight.
Elrond dared not move. He stared at her jewel-eyes and let the silent stillness linger, intent on making her understand that however things progressed from there, it would entirely be on her terms.
I will move if you ask, he thought fervently, I will stay still forever if you prefer. I would be on my knees with a flick of your finger. Anything, everything. All you ask and all you want I will give, just because you are still here and I am – always will be - yours.
Her gaze softened, and he saw himself in her eyes again, no longer a threat, no longer a stranger.
“Husband,” she said quietly. Her posture eased and she looked away from him and down onto the unconscious Woodland prince, beside whose bed she stood sentry. She clutched at the pale hands of the younger elf, tight. Elrond did not understand yet what was happening here. By an instinct that only part-shamed him, he glanced at Thranduilion’s chest and noted its shallow rise and fall. Celebrian could have hurt him after all, as she had poor Lindir.
Relieved to find Thranduil’s son alive, Elrond swallowed before he could find his voice. “If I may come closer-“
“It is your House,” she snapped, for while she was herself – again? still? for now? – beneath her raw, tortured skin, perilously close to the surface, was her consuming, combustible anger.
He stepped forward. She stiffened even if she had allowed it. He re-directed himself. Instead of coming to stand beside her, he moved to the other side of Thranduil’s son’s bed. She was visibly eased, having a body between them.
“How came you to be here?” Elrond asked, even as he knew it was a useless question.
She scoffed but otherwise deigned to reply. She was the Lady of Imladris, knew all its secret ways. She could escape the watch of Lindir, and just as easily she could make her way into any nook and cranny of this place. She answered a different, unspoken question – Why.
“I’d stood by the windows waiting for the stars,” she said with eyes narrowed for memory and calculation, as if she was retreating back on the paths that had been formed by her thoughts at the time. “So that I could fly to them. But then he woke, and called for his naneth.”
Elrond looked down at the slack, white face of the ailing prince beneath and between them, and at the very core of him was a terrified gratitude that somehow, with everything that had happened to all three of them here, he owed his wife’s life – and his own sanity – to Thranduil’s oblivious, dying child.
“She is dead I think,” murmured Celebrian, “from how he had said it. So mournful a sound...” She clutched at their hands tighter, and Elrond almost envied the wretched prince her touch. For all his brokenness, he could envy Thranduil’s son that wondrous, compassionate touch.
Elrond felt a charge in the air - the sharing of Celebrian’s potent energy. It was radiant and still strong, perhaps even more so because she wasn’t merely sharing it, he realized. She was... bequeathing it.
His heart ached in love... Because as lost as she was in her miseries, Celebrian could still return to herself, by her caring for another. He could not have loved her more.
“It seemed rude in a way,” she said, “that I should throw away what he is fighting so hard to keep. Perhaps I should have entered another room, but then here we are.
“I know I am a poor substitute for your naneth,” she turned to Thranduil’s son. “I am sorry. But I am a mother too and you, a son. There is always... a meeting of souls, there. We are fated, even if you do not know me.”
Elrond could swear the air was cackling by her light, her song, her generosity, by the quiet determination of her need to save the elf before them, just because – I am a mother too and you, a son.
Her light receded. It was not enough to soul-save, for the fea was flesh-encased. She looked up at Elrond.
“You will save him, meleth,” she said with gentle certainty.
I cannot, he thought in a panic, not at the thought of losing Thranduil’s child, he did not know him - but at the thought of disappointing her. Celebrian had barely crawled her way past her broken self into caring for another, and now she would hang her hopes on the survival of a brutally injured soldier?
Her eyes bore into him, in earnest expectation. He could never say no to her, and she had never asked him for impossible things... were they both to start doing these now?
“I will save him,” Elrond promised.
She nodded in grim satisfaction, as if she expected nothing else. She took a deep breath, and seemed to deflate at the exhale. She was tiring – her body was not yet fully recovered and her mind, a trembling, uncertain thing. Her hold on herself, already tremulous, was fraying.
“Do not leave me,” he said thickly, desperately. He needed her in the incarnation she was in.
“I need to leave, I think,” she said, voice shaking now. “To stay... I need to leave.”
To stay as herself, his mind supplied. She had to leave, if she were to preserve herself.
“Then let us do it properly,” he said even though it hurt to say it, hurt to think it. “Let me help you.”
She looked at him thoughtfully.
“Perhaps it is not in, in ‘flight’ that you will find relief,” he said, “We can sail.”
“I hoped and feared that you would say that,” she said. “But I prefer... I prefer death than dragging you away with me. There is much for you to do here. I would be of greater use to Arda dead, than to take you from here.”
Elrond shook his head. “No-“
“It will break my heart to tear you from this place now,” she said, and he could see her jewel-eyes turning liquid with her tears, before her resolve hardened them to ice with a few steadying breaths. “You will leave when it is your time and the work is done, not before.”
“Why?” he asked.
He sounded like a child, but perhaps that was better than the raging anger that made his gut twist and his chest feel overfull. He was already without parents and brother-less, was he to be abandoned by his wife as well? Nothing could keep him in these lands if she were to sail away, and There is much for you to do here won’t cut it. He had neither obligation nor desire to help a benighted land that had given him nothing but heartache at every damn turn.
I owe it nothing, he seethed.
“Why?” he asked again.
“Because I ask it,” she said after a long moment, and he realized it was the only thing she could have said to convince him. The only thing.
“I will not bear that burden,” she said, “of being the one to take you from here and from your purpose, and all that it would mean for these lands and its people.”
“Hang them, Celebrian,” he said, agonized, begging. “I cannot care less.”
“I cannot bear it,” she said. “I will not bear it.”
“I need you.”
And this time, he gave word to the only thing that would give her pause. She released Thranduilion’s hands, and carefully walked around his sickbed. She was in bare feet, and the hem of her dress made small, whispering sounds against the floor. She walked to her husband.
Elrond barely let himself breathe, so afraid she would change direction and bolt. He could have sworn his heart had stopped too, and only started anew when she raised her arm and put her hand over his chest.
Of course it would beat for you...
He wanted to hold her, but he only let himself be held, made sure she knew whatever contact came between them would only be according to her purview. She held his face, and her fingers grazed at the healing scar on his cheek. She stepped closer. She leaned into him, partook of his warmth, slid the length of her body against his, even as he kept still and kept his hands to his sides, and was uninvited.
He closed his eyes and settled for the heaven of being so close again, of breathing in the scent of her hair, of feeling her radiance.
“I will always be with you,” she told him softly. “And at the end of it all, we will see each other again someplace better, and you will tell me of how your day has been, and you will speak of all the great things you’ve done.”
He looked down at her upturned, hopeful face. Her control was tremulous, but after all her struggles she was still there – magnificent, giving, beautiful Celebrian. And he was grieving, but he was still and always will be himself: healer, husband, father, and Lord of Imladris, with all that it entailed.
“I will make a bargain with you,” she said, “And we can both make our oaths, and it will be fairer. I swear I will not fly away from you, if you swear you will not sail with me.”
He stared at her jewel eyes, and she was all the wealth he ever needed or desired. He would do whatever it took for her to survive, and thrive. He could even put her on the ship that would take her away from him, if that was what it took. The more he thought of it, the smaller it seemed – so simple an act to do, for someone’s preservation. He could do that. He could even live with the loneliness of it. He could do anything and everything as long as she was alive and healing.
He nodded, and she sealed their bargain with the barest whisper of a kiss.
# # #
They brought home their sons and daughter to bid her goodbye, and though there were initial protestations that she should instead stay, extended time with Celebrian brought even her children to the same conclusion: she had to leave these lands and sail to the Firstborn’s promised havens across the sea.
Celebrian sailed on a bright, beautiful day – as if Arda itself was bidding her farewell, reminding her to miss it, even only sometimes.
Her family saw her off on a ship along with a retinue of elves who had volunteered for the task, and then started on the long trip back from the shores and toward Imladris.
The journey was a somber affair, and while they all ached for home after a physically and mentally harrowing trip, Elrond stepped into the Main House and felt at once, how different it was just because Celebrian was not there.
It was all echoes and hollow halls. He couldn’t even bear the thought of returning to what had once been the rooms he had shared with her. There would be a dresser without her baubles, and closets without her clothes, and a bed without the grooves of her body.
He decided he would not go there, yet.
“Ada?” Arwen called after him, confused, for she and her brothers were headed toward the family’s residences when Elrond stopped. The three young faces looked at him expectantly.
“I will be by soon,” he said, and just because it was the first thing he thought of first he added, “There is something I need to look into at the Healing Halls.”
It was as good an excuse as any, and could be made true. There was someone he really did need to look into – for a promise he intended to keep.
His feet steered him where he needed to go, to the room he frequented in the weeks they prepared for Celebrian’s sail to the West. Her memory was disjointed, and the her Elrond knew, the one that was scrambling around for pieces of herself trying to hold them together to form a coherent person, came and went. Sometimes she forgot the promises she had extracted from her husband, but he did not have that luxury. And he perforce held true to them.
Elrond stood outside the patient’s door, and knocked.
“Enter,” came the melodious voice, stronger than Elrond remembered from before he left, and stronger than he had dared to hope was possible.
He pushed open the door and was greeted by a surprised, shy smile from the occupant of the sickbed. By the grace of the gods and a promise made to Celebrian, somehow they were both still there – Thranduil’s son, alive. Himself... still carrying on. Still the Lord of Imladris, still a father, still a healer.
“How are we doing today, Legolas?” he asked.
THE END